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De Dobbeleer, Michel. "Googling ‘Vice-President Ford’ and the ‘Keene Act’: The discovery of watchmen’s uchronical universe, twenty years after publication." Studies in Comics 2.(2011): 159–75. Added by: joachim (11/21/12, 6:30 PM) Last edited by: joachim (12/3/12, 7:54 PM) |
Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1386/stic.2.1.159_1 BibTeX citation key: DeDobbeleer2011a Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Watchmen", Gibbons. Dave, Moore. Alan, Narratology, Reception, Uchronia, United Kingdom Creators: De Dobbeleer Publisher: Collection: Studies in Comics |
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Abstract |
Having grown up entirely within the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, I confess that I read Watchmen for the first time in 2009. On page 2, I realized that I would need to look up several historical facts and names in order to make sense – more than twenty years after publication – of the complex background of gloomy Cold War tensions against which the action takes place. (Vainly) desiring to get the full picture and bridge the cross-cultural gap(s), I Googled terms like ‘Vice-President Ford’, ‘KT-28’ and ‘Keene Act’, which made me realize that Watchmen, to my surprise, has its own ‘Wiki’, and more important, that it displays a uchronia, or alternate history. Different scholars have fruitfully studied Moore’s playing with the narratological levels of story and discourse. While they have focused on the manipulations at the discourse-level, this article divides the story in separate levels to probe the mechanisms of reading ‘uchronical’ comic stories. Partially inspired by Wolf Schmid’s narratological model (2008), I hypothesize the level of ‘uchronical Geschehen’. Comparing Watchmen to some other uchronical works, I try to explain why Alan Moore’s gradual disclosure of the alternate-historical information generates two particular ‘uchronical reading pleasures’.
Added by: joachim Last edited by: joachim |
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