School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item“Revolting Developments”: productive shame in the graphic narratives of Phoebe Gloeckner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb( 2019)“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.
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ItemHow can we lose when we're so sincere?: A study of sincerity in autobiographical comics( 2016)In the last twenty to thirty years there has been an increased emphasis on sincerity, in both critical writing and art practices across a variety of media. This thesis looks at how this emphasis on sincerity can be seen manifesting in autobiographical comics. Critical writing on autobiographical comics has tended to focus on authenticity or irony, and this thesis seeks to find out how sincerity is related to or differs from authenticity and irony in tone and register. It looks at how sincerity in autobiographic truth telling manifests in openness and intimacy, in a kinder, gentler tone (than irony or authenticity) and in providing comfort through both language and gesture; through not only the cartoonist’s words but through the cartoonist’s hand, and handwriting, on the comics page. The creative component of this thesis, Raw Feels, is a practical inquiry into how sincerity is written and drawn into autobiographical comics, and our lives in general. Being sincere can include being ironic and serious at the same time; Raw Feels attempts to inhabit this space and to take conventions of comics (such as the thought balloon) as seriously as possible in order to work through new ways of thinking about thinking and our bodies.
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ItemAnother world: an argument for the primacy of space( 2013)The critical component of this thesis, “Art in Space”, explores the role played by space in structuring comics. It argues that comics is an art of space, and as such, it works towards a theory of understanding comics that accounts for the dimensions of space as much as the dimension of time. Primarily, it does so through close-reading examples of recent comics both ‘conventional’ and not, with a focus on redefining two fundamental elements: the panel and the gutter. The thesis informs these close-readings through adaptations of existing comics theory, alongside secondary readings of narrative theory, particularly that relating to space and time. It does so in the hope of expanding the possibilities for understanding comics, showing that temporal readings of the form are insufficient to explain important innovations made by comics creators working today. Following this, the creative component, “Life in Space”, explores the role played by space in structuring experience. This component is fictionalised memoir that focuses on twentysomething experiences particular to this century, mainly the web 1.0 to 2.0 shift and the mixing of high and low culture often associated with this phenomenon. It traces several years in the lives of a group of young people who are responding to these cultural shifts: learning to navigate seemingly unnavigable worlds. Together, the components argue that focusing more closely on space can open possibilities for understanding art and life.