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winter 2006 transverse 1 2 transverse winter 2006 winter 2006 transverse 3 transverse: a comparative studies journal copyright contributors 2006 centre for comparative literature university of toronto all rights reserved the use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the contributors, is an infringement of the copyright law the national library of canada has catalogued this publication as follows: transverse: a comparative studies journal editor: andrés pérez simón new books: jena habegger copyeditor: laurel damashek cover design: bao nguyen 2005 conference organizers: adriana dragomir, annarita primier, ioana sion, martin zeilinger to contact the editor, please send an email to [email protected] www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/journal.htm 4 transverse winter 2006 transverse: a comparative studies journal issue 6, winter 2006 eyedeologies editor’s preface andrés pérez simón 7 visual minorities: self/other encounters in visual literature j. andrew deman 9 “when new york was really wicked”: urban spectatorship and early constructions of urban fear rory mclellan 19 distorting the image: photography and narrative in calvino’s mr. palomar amy hondronicols 31 subjectivity and mechanical reproduction in bioy casares’ morel’s invention irmgard emmelhainz 40 amused to death? roger waters and the thought of neil postman phil rose 53 inter-medial adaptation: the transformation of virgil’s the aeneid into purcell’s opera dido and aeneas sarah jefferies 76 purgatorio xii’s ‘hermeneutic circle’ jenna sunkenberg 86 winter 2006 transverse 5 the coctorphic self in words and images: infernal descent, ghost language and visual poetry in the orphic trilogy ioana sion 96 animating the dead - narrative and 19th century photography christiane arndt 122 arte povera: words as image and experience laura petican 140 mathematics, music, and modernism: modelling the spatial and temporal parameters of frye’s cultural envelope yves saint-cyr 150 new books miguel de cervantes, don quijote de la mancha. regina galasso 172 paul auster, city of glass. maría laura arce 173 contributors 175 6 transverse winter 2006 editor’s preface Critical writings in this issue were selected from the proceedings of the 2005 Graduate Student Colloquium Eyedeologies. Across Disciplines: En-visioning the Readable / Reading the Visual. This Colloquium was held at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto on 7-8 April, 2005. Four graduate students acted as organizers of the conferences and also edited essays for Transverse: Adriana Dragomir, Annarita Primier, Ioana Sion, and Martin Zeilinger. In Fall 2006, after becoming the new general editor of Transverse, I further revised the essays that appear in this issue. Although the previous work by my fellow partners was excellent, I thought it necessary to make some formal/content changes in order to achieve a homogeneous outcome. I also wanted to incorporate a new section into the journal, one including reviews of recent books, a project that was eventually possible thanks to the help of Jena Habegger. In this issue of Transverse, we have included reviews of recent editions of M. de Cervantes’ Don Quixote – illustrated by S. Dalí – as well as a comic adaptation of P. Auster’s City of Glass. There is no doubt that both editions constitute an interesting case of the dialectic between word and image. The fi rst issue of Transverse was released in March 2004, with Annarita Primier in charge of an ambitious project that encompassed theoretical articles, creative writing, and visual arts. In words of Roland Le Huenen, director of the Centre for Comparative Literature, the journal was conceived as “an interdisciplinary approach linking literature, linguistics, the visual arts, music among other fi elds in the Humanities, as well as works of original fi ction, poetry and art.” Primier did not claim defi nitive answers in the fi eld of literary studies but tried – and, in my view, she succeeded – to incorporate emergent voices into a discussion that is constantly redefi ning itself through the interaction of languages and disciplines. In this second era of Transverse, I will attempt to continue Primier’s path with the help of Adil D’Sousa (Creative Writing), Jena Habegger (New Books), and Laurel Damashek (Copyediting). Other graduate students are also working with us in the process of selecting and editing texts, and we plan to publish the next issue of Transverse in Spring, 2007. As indicated previously, the present issue includes a selection of proceedings from the 2005 colloquium. Contributors to the colloquim were graduate students from North American universities, originally from fi ve different countries, and they all approached the relation text/image from different and enriching angles. It is worth noting that essays from three students in the Centre for Comparative Literature can be winter 2006 transverse 7 found in this issue of Transverse: Yves Saint-Cyr, Ioana Sion, and Jenna Sunkenberg. It is my conviction that new graduate students from Toronto will be published in future issues, and I publicly invite them to submit papers that could be of interest. To conclude, I wish to emphasize once more the excellent job done by the four organizers of the colloquium. I am also grateful to Annarita Primier for her kind assistance in the editing process of the present issue of Transverse. Andrés Pérez Simón 8 transverse winter 2006 visual minorities: self/other encounters in visual literature j. andrew deman The recent past has seen fantastic gains in the depth and volume of literary criticism devoted to considerations of race, and encounters between a reader’s concept of Selfness and Otherness. The recent past, though, has also seen the development of a radical new form of literature: comics, a hybrid form building narrative through the combining forces of language and sequential images. The unique nature of this new form necessitates the creation of an alternative literary semiotics of race, one that accommodates the visual and hybrid modes of storytelling in the comics form. Historically, comics have not been commonly utilized as a space for the expression of progressive views on race and ethnicity. In fact, many of the early American comics derived their visual punch-lines from ridicule of racial minorities through caricature. For example, comics played a powerful role in developing and disseminating the iconic visual style of minstrelsy. This ‘tradition,’ if you will, holds a strong place in the history of the form. It can be as overt as ‘The Slumberland Savages’ or it can be as subversive (not to mention pervasive) as Mickey Mouse. As comics artist Chris Ware points out: “What is he doing with white gloves? Gee, I wonder where that comes from? The simplifi cation of the face comes out of an effort to distill a particular identity down to a few simple features, and that includes racial identity. It’s Creepy when you think about it” (qtd. in Juno, 41). Though often its most common victim, African-Americans are not, surely, the only victims of racism in the comics form, which again helped to build and distribute globally common visual stereotypes for nearly all ethnic groups with a place in American society, from the Irish, to the Mexican, to the Jew. Ware points to Abie the Agent as an obvious Jewish stereotype, and Happy Hooligan as an obvious Irish stereotype. He concludes that “If you look at many early comic strips, they’re endemically ‘ethnic’” (49). Even on the superhero side of things, visual caricature can be said to be ethnically marked. For example, in 1975 Marvel comics turned a dying franchise into the best-selling comic in the world by replacing their existing all-American X-men with a globally assembled team, each member embodying some stereotypical perception of their respective nationality, be they an overly-muscled, block-headed Russian, a hypersexed African tribal princess (topless, of course), or a squinting Japanese with a pompous smirk on his face in each and every panel. These renditions are complicated as they do draw winter 2006 transverse 9 upon realistic ethnic visual traits (just as most stereotypes have some fl imsy attachment to reality), but predominantly draw upon the American public’s popular imagination of ethnic visual traits, the collective consciousness of Otherness, and therefore Selfness as well. This same imagination, of course, is one that prior works of American comics art had spent three quarters of a century constructing. Furthermore, it is important to note that these racial depictions are not silent redundancies, ineffective upon a broader culture. Even from its infancy, the comics form has had a powerful effect on society in general, and American society in particular. In his 1989 book No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Andrew Ross calls attention to the manner in which pop culture operates as a form of immigrant instruction in American society, or as a substitute for a lacking American mythology. This idea is echoed and focused upon the comics form by such comics critics and historians as Ian Gordon, M. Thomas Inge, and Martin Barker. Each of these writers points to the visual aspects of the form, which defi ed language barriers and provided instant access to a form of American culture. There is a reason, after all, why the in-fl ight safety guides on any given airplane will be written in the comics form. At the same time, the power (and danger) of mass-marketing racism through visual media is explored by postcolonial theorists such as bell hooks and Anne McClintock. Hooks acknowledges the capacity of racially marked imagery to construct the audience, while McClintock exposes how the commodity of racially marked imagery can enforce/ reinforce colonial hierarchies. Combined, this body of critical knowledge points to a highly infl uential tradition of stereotype-construction in 20th century American comics.

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