DOCSLIB.ORG

Disaster Drawn : Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form Pdf, Epub, Ebook

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Disaster Drawn : Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form Pdf, Epub, Ebook DISASTER DRAWN : VISUAL WITNESS, COMICS, AND DOCUMENTARY FORM PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Hillary L. Chute | 376 pages | 12 Jan 2016 | HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 9780674504516 | English | Cambridge, Mass., United States Disaster Drawn : Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form PDF Book By betraying the expectations of his characters and Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Gayness used to be a public accusation leveled at comics to discredit the medium: in the s, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman, were suspected to be gay, and therefore a negative influence. Hillary L. Among the artists creating this work, Bechdel has shown most powerfully how comics can be a space for sophisticated storytelling about the complexities and joy of queer life. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced. This interdisciplinary course explores a range of creative forms, including but limited to: comics and graphic novels, film, painting, performance art, theater, photography, propaganda, television, digital projects and videos. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima's Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. The radical black left that played a crucial role in twentieth-century struggles for equality and justice has largely disappeared. Blacks In and Out of the Left. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. A new crop of scholarly books has taken aim at precisely how the comics medium dramatizes and calls into question issues of representation They will be writing in alternating months. We use cookies and similar methods to recognize visitors and remember their preferences. Howard Cruse, cover by Rand Holmes, September 18, Panel Discussion on Politics Authors talked about political engagement and social activism. Book Review March 01 Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. Northeastern University. Bioluminescence: Living Lights, Lights for Living. Exploring the relationship between cultural production and social movements. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war. The underground inspired that kind of creative practice: if you perceived a gap, you could fill it yourself. There was an error processing your purchase. You can do cartoons about your own real life being a gay person. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our privacy policy. Your Tracker Settings We use cookies and similar methods to recognize visitors and remember their preferences. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness. Undergraduate Student Paths. Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints. Flowering Plants: Evolution above the Species Level. Press , was published in Sign in via your Institution Sign In. Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. All rights reserved. Disaster Drawn : Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form Writer Hillary L. Office of the Dean. The Experiential PhD. Home 1 Books 2. In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima's Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Funding Opportunities. Graeme Bird examines a small group of early papyrus manuscripts of Homer's Iliad, known as Black voices matter. Issue Section:. To learn more about these methods, including how to disable them, view our Cookie Policy. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics call attention to themselves as evidence. October 15, Panel Discussion on Industries of the Future Panelists talked about the future of industry. In her examination of polytheistic cultures both ancient and contemporary--those of Greece and Yet a relentless prejudice against polytheism denies legitimacy to some of the world's oldest and richest religious traditions. We are thrilled to announce a new monthly column in the Book Review devoted to the world of graphic novels and comics. Many people worship not just one but many gods. This site uses cookies. Article Navigation. September 18, Panel Discussion on Politics Authors talked about political engagement and social activism. Northeastern University Go to the Northeastern University homepage. Student Communities. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. About blur top to close menu panel About. Book Review March 01 Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. Investigating how hand-drawn comics have come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists document the disasters of war. We use cookies and similar methods to recognize visitors and remember their preferences. Members save with free shipping everyday! Service Learning. A new crop of scholarly books has taken aim at precisely how the comics medium dramatizes and calls into question issues of representation Robert Watson's theory Both Hillary Chute and Ed Park have the authority, critical and curatorial eye, and a true love of the material to write about everything from Black Panther to Raina Telgemeier to Chris Ware. Buy Amazon Bookshop. She was associate professor of English, and an associate faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago before joining the Northeastern faculty. Establishes a critical trajectory by reading historically important works of theory and criticism alongside additional feminist and visual theory. One of the world's leading evolutionary biologists here reexamines the evolutionary history of flowering plants. Read an excerpt of this book! By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness. This provocative study provides a radically new perspective on Ben Jonson's comedies. Disaster Drawn : Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form Reviews College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Press , was published in All rights reserved. Search for:. Volume 89, Issue 1. Cite Icon Cite. First Name. American Literature 1 March ; 89 1 : — Follow Us Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas. On March 24, I submitted the final copyedits for my new book …. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics call attention to themselves as evidence. Hillary L. American Literature 89 1 : — It may have taken longer than other underground titles to coalesce, but its significance has been enormous. This provocative study provides a radically new perspective on Ben Jonson's comedies. There was an error processing your purchase. Black lives matter. Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. Related Topics comic. Add to Basket. Financial Aid and Awards. Service Learning. Graduate Programs Welcome Day. Courses Course catalog. This interdisciplinary course explores a range of creative forms, including but limited to: comics and graphic novels, film, painting, performance art, theater, photography, propaganda, television, digital projects and videos. About blur top to close menu panel About. The comics and graphic novels column will begin appearing in April. However, C-SPAN only receives this revenue if your book purchase is made using the links on this page. Guy Delisle discusses his book 'Hostage'. And marked the creation of the first annual comics convention to focus on queer culture: Flame Con. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Leave this field blank:. Many people worship not just one but many gods. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints. Diane DiMassa, panels from Hothead Paisan , Publishing and Promoting a Book during a Pandemic. Citing articles via Google Scholar. Disaster Drawn : Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form Read Online Comics about gay men were slower
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in Dc Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths
    WORLDS WILL LIVE, WORLDS WILL DIE: MYTH, METATEXT, CONTINUITY AND CATACLYSM IN DC COMICS’ CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS Adam C. Murdough A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2006 Committee: Angela Nelson, Advisor Marilyn Motz Jeremy Wallach ii ABSTRACT Angela Nelson, Advisor In 1985-86, DC Comics launched an extensive campaign to revamp and revise its most important superhero characters for a new era. In many cases, this involved streamlining, retouching, or completely overhauling the characters’ fictional back-stories, while similarly renovating the shared fictional context in which their adventures take place, “the DC Universe.” To accomplish this act of revisionist history, DC resorted to a text-based performative gesture, Crisis on Infinite Earths. This thesis analyzes the impact of this singular text and the phenomena it inspired on the comic-book industry and the DC Comics fan community. The first chapter explains the nature and importance of the convention of “continuity” (i.e., intertextual diegetic storytelling, unfolding progressively over time) in superhero comics, identifying superhero fans’ attachment to continuity as a source of reading pleasure and cultural expressivity as the key factor informing the creation of the Crisis on Infinite Earths text. The second chapter consists of an eschatological reading of the text itself, in which it is argued that Crisis on Infinite Earths combines self-reflexive metafiction with the ideologically inflected symbolic language of apocalypse myth to provide DC Comics fans with a textual "rite of transition," to win their acceptance for DC’s mid-1980s project of self- rehistoricization and renewal.
    [Show full text]
  • Betsy Ross School's Application for the 2012 National Blue Ribbon
    U.S. Department of Education 2012 National Blue Ribbon Schools Program A Public School - 12NJ7 School Type (Public Schools): (Check all that apply, if any) Charter Title 1 Magnet Choice Name of Principal: Mrs. Christine Zimmermann Official School Name: Betsy Ross School School Mailing Address: 20 Malcolm Road Mahwah, NJ 07430-1822 County: Bergen State School Code Number*: 03-2900-060 Telephone: (201) 762-2251 E-mail: [email protected] Fax: (201) 831-0568 Web site/URL: http://www.edline.net/pages/Betsy_Ross I have reviewed the information in this application, including the eligibility requirements on page 2 (Part I - Eligibility Certification), and certify that to the best of my knowledge all information is accurate. _________________________________________________________ Date _____________________ (Principal’s Signature) Name of Superintendent*: Dr. Karen Lake Ed.D. Superintendent e-mail: [email protected] District Name: Mahwah Township Public Schools District Phone: (201) 762-2403 I have reviewed the information in this application, including the eligibility requirements on page 2 (Part I - Eligibility Certification), and certify that to the best of my knowledge it is accurate. _________________________________________________________ Date _____________________ (Superintendent’s Signature) Name of School Board President/Chairperson: Mrs. Patricia Shada I have reviewed the information in this application, including the eligibility requirements on page 2 (Part I - Eligibility Certification), and certify that to the best
    [Show full text]
  • The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 by David Pierce September 2013
    The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 by David Pierce September 2013 COUNCIL ON LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES AND THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929 by David Pierce September 2013 Mr. Pierce has also created a da tabase of location information on the archival film holdings identified in the course of his research. See www.loc.gov/film. Commissioned for and sponsored by the National Film Preservation Board Council on Library and Information Resources and The Library of Congress Washington, D.C. The National Film Preservation Board The National Film Preservation Board was established at the Library of Congress by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, and most recently reauthorized by the U.S. Congress in 2008. Among the provisions of the law is a mandate to “undertake studies and investigations of film preservation activities as needed, including the efficacy of new technologies, and recommend solutions to- im prove these practices.” More information about the National Film Preservation Board can be found at http://www.loc.gov/film/. ISBN 978-1-932326-39-0 CLIR Publication No. 158 Copublished by: Council on Library and Information Resources The Library of Congress 1707 L Street NW, Suite 650 and 101 Independence Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20036 Washington, DC 20540 Web site at http://www.clir.org Web site at http://www.loc.gov Additional copies are available for $30 each. Orders may be placed through CLIR’s Web site. This publication is also available online at no charge at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub158.
    [Show full text]
  • Resistant Vulnerability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America
    Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 2-15-2019 1:00 PM Resistant Vulnerability in The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America Kristen Allison The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Susan Knabe The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Media Studies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Kristen Allison 2019 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Allison, Kristen, "Resistant Vulnerability in The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America" (2019). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 6086. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/6086 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract Established in 2008 with the release of Iron Man, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a ubiquitous transmedia sensation. Its uniquely interwoven narrative provides auspicious grounds for scholarly consideration. The franchise conscientiously presents larger-than-life superheroes as complex and incredibly emotional individuals who form profound interpersonal relationships with one another. This thesis explores Sarah Hagelin’s concept of resistant vulnerability, which she defines as a “shared human experience,” as it manifests in the substantial relationships that Steve Rogers (Captain America) cultivates throughout the Captain America narrative (11). This project focuses on Steve’s relationships with the following characters: Agent Peggy Carter, Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), and Bucky Barnes (The Winter Soldier).
    [Show full text]
  • Bearing Witness to Female Trauma in Comics: An
    BEARING WITNESS TO FEMALE TRAUMA IN COMICS: AN ANALYSIS OF WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS By Lauren C. Watson, B.A. A thesis submitted to the Graduate Council of Texas State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts with a Major in Literature May 2018 Committee Members: Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Chair Rachel Romero Kathleen McClancy COPYRIGHT by Lauren C. Watson 2018 FAIR USE AND AUTHOR’S PERMISSION STATEMENT Fair Use This work is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553, section 107). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgement. Use of this material for financial gain without the author’s express written permission is not allowed. Duplication Permission As the copyright holder of this work I, Lauren C. Watson, refuse permission to copy in excess of the “Fair Use” exemption without my written permission. DEDICATION For my Great Aunt Vida, an artist and teacher, who was the star of her own story in an age when women were supporting characters. She was tough and kind, stingy and giving in equal measures. Vida Esta gave herself a middle name, because she could and always wanted one. Ms. Light was my first superheroine and she didn’t need super powers. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Three years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for research that was daunting. This thesis is the beginning of bringing that idea to life. So many people helped me along the way.
    [Show full text]
  • Dr. Janina Scarlet, Phd Superhero Therapy Licensed Clinical Psychologist PSY26231
    Dr. Janina Scarlet, PhD Superhero Therapy Licensed Clinical Psychologist PSY26231 The Honorable Paul Grewal Department 616 United States District Court, Northern District Robert F. Peckham Federal Bldg, 280 S 1st Street San Jose, CA 95113 Re: U.S. v Barnes James Buchanan Barnes Case Number: 03-1941JK Dear Judge Grewal: This report reviews the case of Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes (Defendant). Sgt. Barnes was accused of multiple charges, among them multiple counts of assassination, murder attempts, acts of terrorism, and treason. In my professional opinion, I believe that Sgt. Barnes did not have the capacity to distinguish right from wrong at the time of the committed crimes. Informed Consent Sgt. Barnes provided both oral and written consent for the evaluation. Sources of Information • Interview with Sgt. James Barnes (Defendant) • Interview with Captain Steve Rogers, aka Captain America • Interviews with eye witness, Jim Hammond • Strategic Scientific Reserve Personnel Record • Incident-Based Event Report from the Metropolitan Police Department • Military psychiatric and education records • National Transportation Safety Board Aircraft/Marine Accident Brief • HYDRA Project Insight Attack After Action Report • fMRI test/medical records • Mental Status Examination • Beck Depression Inventory –II • Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule – DSM V • Mississippi Scale for Combat related PTSD • PTSD Checklist-Military Version Forensic Psychiatric Evaluation Identifying Information The Defendant is James Buchanan Barnes, age 98 at the time of
    [Show full text]
  • Designed by Stephanie Jazmines, Amy Young, Audrey Aronoff Of
    designed by Stephanie Jazmines, Amy Young, Audrey Aronoff of: RECYCLE © MARVEL © Disney layout by Tatiana Cosentino AVENGERS CAMPUS Sheet Numbers: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O © Disney HISTORY INSTRUCTIONS Super Heroes Assemble! Avengers Campus – an entirely new land dedicated to discovering, recruiting and training the next generations of Super Heroes – is opening June 4, 2021 at Disney California Adven- Sheet A Sheet B Sheet C Sheet D Sheet E ture® Park. At this fully immersive land, you will be invited to team up with the Avengers and their allies and live out your Super Hero dreams! Sling webs at WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure. Power up with tiny treats and massive meals at Pym Test Kitchen, an innovating science lab where the food and drinks tell a story. At a nearby Ancient Sanctum, Sheet F Sheet G Sheet H Sheet I Sheet J Doctor Strange will train recruits in the mystic arts while bringing the space to life with powerful spells. Make sure you stop by the WEB Suppli- ers store to stock up on the latest inventions, including interactive Spi- der-Bots! And keep a look out in the sky to witness Spider-Man swinging into action with gravity-defying acrobatic feats. Sheet K Sheet L Sheet M Sheet N Sheet O Welcome to Avengers Campus. MATERIALS GUIDE 1. Color the sheets as you like. 2. Lay out the sheets according to the guide above. This will be where you place each of the buildings on the Campus. You can tape the sheets together or leave them loose for easy storage later.
    [Show full text]
  • Commonwealth V. Captain America ---Law Day 2018
    Commonwealth v. Captain America ---- Law Day 2018 Charges: 1. Hindering Apprehension or prosecution (18 Pa. C.S.A. 5105) 2. Conspiracy - Flight to Avoid Apprehension (18 Pa.C.S.A. 5126) Commonwealth Witnesses: 1. Iron Man 2. Spiderman 3. Vision Defendant’s Witnesses: 1. Captain America 2. Hawkeye 3. Black Widow Plot: The Commonwealth is prosecuting Captain America for his involvement in helping the Winter Soldier avoid being arrested by the police. The Winter Soldier was wanted by the police for his alleged involvement in the murder of Iron Man’s (aka Tony Stark) parents and for the attack at the Sokovia Accords, which led to the death of Black Panther’s father, the King of Wakanda. Right before the bombing Captain America and Iron Man had disagreed on what type of, if any, restrictions should be applied to them in their roles as superheroes. Captain America did not want any oversight and felt that the public should trust them to use their judgment as to when and where they should intervene. Iron Man, however, still upset over what happened in Sokovia and even more recently Wakanda, felt that oversight was needed to protect their image to the public. After the attack occurred at the Sokovia Accords the police had information that the Winter Soldier might have been involved as there was surveillance footage that implicated him. Captain America, who was not originally meant to be attending the Accords, found out about the incident and that Winter Soldier, his former friend from World War II, was a prime suspect, and he decided to investigate the matter himself.
    [Show full text]
  • Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016
    Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 42 Issue 1 A Planetary Republic of Comic Book Letters: Drawing Expansive Narrative Article 33 Boundaries 9-20-2017 Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Julia Watson The Ohio State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons, German Literature Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Spanish Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Watson, Julia (2017) "Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016.," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 42: Iss. 1, Article 33. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1964 This Review Essay is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Abstract Review of Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Keywords comics, women, gender, history, documentary, war, trauma This review essay is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol42/ iss1/33 Watson: Review of Disaster Drawn Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form.
    [Show full text]
  • “Spider-Man: Homecoming” Film Review
    Josephine Parks, per.2 “Spider-man: Homecoming” Film Review We have seen the friendly neighborhood Spider-man on the big screen with three different actors now. Why see another one? Because Tom Holland in Jon Watts’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” truly brings this character to life. Peter Parker is a fifteen year old student at the Midtown School of Science & Technology. This plays a big part in the film, and events from the school are some key factors. In the original films starring Tobey Maguire, and then Andrew Garfield, we see *spoiler alert* Peter get bitten, watch his DNA change, and witness Uncle Ben die. This is brought up, but all of that has already happened. Here Peter is relatable, and we believe he is a young student who gets bullied, rather than in “The Amazing Spider-Man” where we see a hipster skateboarder Peter, who somehow gets made fun of. Now we see a great balance between comedy and seriousness. Robert Downey Jr, who plays Tony Stark/Iron Man, provides us with light humor, while also being a mentor. He does not appear throughout the whole picture, but has his moments. Peter is trying to become an Avenger, ask out a senior at his school named Liz, and not let his classmates down for school events. Sometimes he has to bail from his friend Ned to become Spider-Man. The main villain, Vulture, is very realistic. Unlike many other Marvel films, Vulture is faced with a real problem (and no, it is not from a science experiment gone wrong).
    [Show full text]
  • Phantoms in the Brain.Pdf
    PHANTOMS IN THE BRAIN Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., and Sandra Blakeslee Copyright © 1998 ISBN 0688152473 To my mother, Meenakshi To my father, Subramanian To my brother, Ravi To Diane, Mani and Jayakrishna To all my former teachers in India and England 1 To Saraswathy, the goddess of learning, music and wisdom Foreword The great neurologists and psychiatrists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were masters of description, and some of their case histories provided an almost novelistic richness of detail. Silas Weir Mitchell—who was a novelist as well as a neurologist—provided unforgettable descriptions of the phantom limbs (or "sensory ghosts," as he first called them) in soldiers who had been injured on the battlefields of the Civil War. Joseph Babinski, the great French neurologist, described an even more extraordinary syndrome—anosognosia, the inability to perceive that one side of one's own body is paralyzed and the often−bizarre attribution of the paralyzed side to another person. (Such a patient might say of his or her own left side, "It's my brother's" or "It's yours.") Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, one of the most interesting neuroscientists of our time, has done seminal work on the nature and treatment of phantom limbs—those obdurate and sometimes tormenting ghosts of arms and legs lost years or decades before but not forgotten by the brain. A phantom may at first feel like a normal limb, a part of the normal body image; but, cut off from normal sensation or action, it may assume a pathological character, becoming intrusive, "paralyzed," deformed, or excruciatingly painful—phantom fingers may dig into a phantom palm with an unspeakable, unstoppable intensity.
    [Show full text]
  • Archives of Written and Graphic Testimony in the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Lauren Jean Gantz
    ariel: a review of international english literature Vol. 46 No. 4 Pages 123–153 Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Calgary “Nothing ever ends”: Archives of Written and Graphic Testimony in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Lauren Jean Gantz Abstract: This article reads The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as a critique of metatestimonial fiction and of the tendency to overstate literature’s power to heal cultural trau- mas. Metatestimonio bears figurative witness to historical atroci- ties and interrogates who is or is not allowed to speak of such events. Although Junot Díaz’s narrator Yunior gathers testimony from multiple survivors of the Trujillo regime, he mediates their experiences through his own authorial voice. The novel suggests that in refusing to allow testimony to speak for itself, Yunior (and by extension metatestimonio as a genre) replicates the discursive practices of the regime it denounces. Furthermore, by referencing specific comic book series, the artwork accompanying the 2007 Riverhead edition of the novel generates a counter-narrative cri- tiquing Yunior’s project. This graphic counter-narrative illustrates that ending the Trujillato’s hold on Dominicans is impossible— that certain traumas cannot be healed once and for all. Oscar Wao thus suggests that in claiming literature’s power to heal the past, we (like Yunior) privilege our own desire for resolution over the lived realities of survivors, for whom the working through of trauma is an ongoing and incomplete process. Keywords: testimony, trauma, Dominican Republic, comic books, Caribbean literature­ “I like human endings,” says Junot Díaz.
    [Show full text]