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Heer, Jeet and Kent Worcester, eds. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Studies in Popular Culture. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2004. 
Added by: joachim (7/20/09, 1:34 AM)   Last edited by: joachim (3/29/10, 10:39 AM)
Resource type: Book
Language: en: English
ID no. (ISBN etc.): 1578066867
BibTeX citation key: Heer2004a
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Categories: General
Keywords: Collection of essays, Popular culture
Creators: Heer, Worcester
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi (Jackson)
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Abstract
When Art Spiegelman's “Maus”—a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust—won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of “serious” comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium.
Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. “Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium” brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e.e. cummings, who championed George Herriman's “Krazy Kat,” to Irving Howe, who fretted about Harold Gray's “Little Orphan Annie,” this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century.
With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, and others, this anthology shows how all of these writers took up comics-related topics as a point of entry into wider debates over modern art, cultural standards, daily life, and mass communications.
“Arguing Comics” shows how prominent writers from the Jazz Age and the Depression era to the heyday of the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s thought about comics and, by extension, popular culture as a whole.

Table of Contents

Sidney Fairfield: From The tyranny of the pictorial
Annie Russell Marble: From The reign of the spectacular
Ralph Bergengren: From The humor of the colored supplement
Thomas Mann: Introduction to Frans Masereel, Passionate journey: a novel told in 165 woodcuts
Gilbert Seldes: The Krazy Kat that walks by himself
e. e. cummings: A foreword to Krazy
Dorothy Parker: A mash note to Crockett Johnson
Clement Greenberg: Steig's cartoons: review of All embarrassed by William Steig
Clement Greenberg: Limits of common sense: review of Years of wrath: A cartoon history, 1931–1945 by David Low
Irving Howe: Notes on mass culture
Delmore Schwartz: Masterpieces as cartoons
Robert Warshow: Woofed with dreams
Robert Warshow: Paul, the horror comics, and Dr. Wertham
Harold Rosenberg: The labyrinth of Saul Steinberg
Manny Farber: Comic strips
Walter J. Ong: Mickey Mouse and Americanism
Walter J. Ong: Bogey sticks for pogo men
Marshall McLuhan: From The mechanical bride: folklore of industrial man
Marshall McLuhan: Comics: Mad vestibule to TV
Gershon Legman: From Love and death: A study in censorship
Leslie Fiedler: The middle against both ends
Donald Phelps: Over the cliff
Donald Phelps: Reprise: ‘Love and death’
C.L.R. James: C.L.R. James on comic strips
C.L.R. James: Letter to Daniel Bell
Umberto Eco: The myth of superman
Added by: joachim  Last edited by: joachim
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