My Friend Dave | the Comics Journal
Archived version from NCDOCKS Institutional Repository http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/ Column -- "My Friend Dave" By: Craig Fischer Fischer, C. (2013). “My Friend Dave." The Comics Journal, October 25, 2013. Version of record available at: http:// www.tcj.com/my-friend-dave/ My Friend Dave | The Comics Journal Blog Features Columns Reviews Listings TCJ Archive ← Modern Thinking Morning Becomes Renee → The Spain Interview In this two-part interview, Gary Groth talks to Spain about Catholicism, working in a factory, rebelling against Monsters Eat Critics authority, teaching, the underground comix movement and Zap, and Nightmare Alley. Continue reading → My Friend Dave BY CRAIG FISCHER OCT 25, 2013 Alphabet In his book The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), Robert Ray argues that film studies has fallen into a rut where most writing follows “the routinized procedures of any academic field,” and where the typical title for a publication or conference presentation is “Barthes, Brecht, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, and all those other people, and Robocop” (5). Ray then suggests that we rouse film studies out of stagnation by abandoning traditional scholarship, at least for a while, in favor of playing surrealistic games with our subject. Movies surprise, infuriate, delight us: unconventional forms of criticism might do the same. One of Ray’s games involves the alphabet. Borrowing a method from Roland Barthes’ eponymous biography, Ray suggests writing criticism in a series of short, “alphabetized fragments, including at least one for every letter” (120). These “alphabetized fragments” can be epigrams (à la Nietzsche), metaphors, anecdotes, lyrical descriptions, short bursts of analysis: what they won’t be is a predictable elaboration of an over-determined thesis.
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