[ecrea] CFP: The Comics of Art Spiegelman [edited volume]

    CFP: The Comics of Art Spiegelman [edited volume]

Editors:

Georgiana Banita (University of Bamberg, Germany)

Lee Konstantinou (University of Maryland, College Park)

The importance of Art Spiegelman as a pioneer and theorist of comics is
hard to overstate. His work has not only pushed the boundaries of
comics (both in terms of form and subject matter) but also convinced
many readers and critics of this art form’s inherent aesthetic value.
Indeed, the development of the term “graphic novel” in part signaled a
burgeoning critical appreciation of the power of comics, an appreciation
that Spiegelman’s pen — from his underground comix to his Pulitzer
Prize-winning /MAUS/ to his tireless critical advocacy ofcomics and
cartooning — helped foster.

/The Comics of Art Spiegelman/ will assess the fundamental contribution
ofSpiegelman’s work to the development of graphic literature from the
1970s to the present. It will survey and synthesize his versatile
projects not only as a cartoonist but also as a magazine founder,
editor, comics critic and historian, and mentor to multiple generations
of cartoonists. To do justice to the vast range of Spiegelman’s career,
this volume proposes to examine it from many perspectives: to
demonstrate the centrality of his work to the rise of the graphic novel;
to document how he has self-consciously dealt with his own success and
engaged in a process of auto-canonization following the publication of
his groundbreaking /MAUS/; to analyze how he has drawn on, worked
through, and defied familiar poetic categories ofcomics art; and to
investigate his inventive (sometimes silent) dialogues with other genres
and media, such as music, film, theatre, dance, and installation art.

The book has garnered serious interest from the editor of the new
series, Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, at the University Press
of Mississippi. Accepted abstracts will be used in a formal book
proposal to be submitted to the press. The deadline for full-length
essays will be negotiated shortly thereafter. Essays on a variety of
issues related toSpiegelman’s formative involvement in the rise of
graphic literature are welcome. The collection is especially interested
in exploring how we might contend with Spiegelman in the twenty-first
century, acknowledging but also moving beyond the existing scholarship’s
understandable focus on the achievement of /MAUS/. We are therefore
planning to collect essays that discuss Spiegelman’s underground works;
that offer new and unexpected readings of /MAUS/; that study his later
illustrations and books (such as /In the Shadow of No Towers/); and that
scrutinize Spiegelman’s public persona. Chapters that address the
following questions are particularly welcome:

oWhat can Spiegelman’s collaborative work in the underground comix scene
(at/Arcade/ and later at /RAW/) teach us about how Spiegelman and his
collaborators conceived of comics art, and how did these early
collaborations inform his subsequent experimentation?

oWhat interdisciplinary dialogues does /MAUS/ inaugurate between
comics and political history; comics and Jewish history and culture;
comics and trauma; comicsand narrative theory; comics and memory
architectures; as well as comics and autographics or life writing?

oHow is the evolution of comics — both as form and as a set of cultural
institutions — entwined with Spiegelman’s own biographical trajectory,
from his /MAD/-obsessed childhood to his poignant examination of his
parents’ memories of the Holocaust and his mother’s suicide? What larger
trends in the history of comics and popular culture do Spiegelman’s life
and art participate in?

oHow do Spiegelman’s works incorporate early comic strips, newspapers,
photography, television, and electronic communication technologies? What
might such aesthetic experiments in hybridity reveal more generally
about the arts of the present?

oHow have Spiegelman’s practices of masking, dual identities,
impersonation, ventriloquism, and voice/voiceover devised new forms of
performance in comics and cultivated new languages for articulating
emergent or conflicted identities (disability, queerness), especially in
the comic memoir?

oThough comics has gained legitimacy in the art world, literary culture,
and the wider public arena, a sense of shame productively persists among
cartoonists and raises important questions about the price of mainstream
success. How doesSpiegelman walk the tightrope between the growing
popularity of the comics medium and the possibility of a more
subversive, politically potent grassroots comics-practice designed to
serve and speak to the disenfranchised?

oHow does Spiegelman’s work negotiate the modernist influence of
wordless woodcut novels by Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel on his visual
style, and how do these early sources of inspiration, including the
historical avant-garde, explain his recent wordless engagement with the
comics form?

oAesthetic and political appreciation for Spiegelman’s work around the
world is evidenced by countless accolades garnered over the years. How
does his international success help buttress the global appeal and
historical validity of comics? How doSpiegelman’s achievements intersect
with other graphic art traditions — from Franco-Belgian comics to manga
and beyond? And how does this new global respectability of the medium
affect national discourses, for instance through the role of /MAUS/ in
reshaping Germany’s contemporary struggle with the echoes of the 
Holocaust?

oHow have Spiegelman’s memorable covers for /The New Yorker/ intervened
in controversies around racial profiling and police brutality (March 8,
1999), the aftermath of September 11 (the black-on-black collaboration
with Françoise Mouly of September 14, 2001), and expanded the role of
the political cartoon as a protest vehicle? Moreover, how might
Spiegelman’s political cartoons be understood in relation to — or help
us understand — debates about socially charged iconoclastic cartoons in
Denmark, France, North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere?

oWhat is Spiegelman’s relationship to what may be called the archival
turn in academic and exhibition culture, as evidenced by /MetaMaus/ and
/Co-Mix/, and in what ways does this archival impulse align itself with
the completist, multilayered, navigational experiments of other
cartoonists (such as Chris Ware in /Building Stories/or Joe Sacco in
/The Great War/)? How do these material regimes and nonlinear reading
experiences engender a new haptic quality in comics (fascinated with
B-sides, squiggles, and ephemera)?

oWhat specific critical and theoretical problems does comics — and
Spiegelman’s work in particular — pose for academic inquiry today? How
is comics itself a knowledge-producing medium? What sorts of knowledge —
historiographic, psychological, political, or economic — might comics in
general and Spiegelman’scomics in particular be well-suited to fuse,
construct, or dispute?

Please send a 500-1000 word abstract, CV, and contact information to
Georgiana Banita and Lee Konstantinou at (metaspiegelman /at/ gmail.com)
<mailto:(metaspiegelman /at/ gmail.com)> by June 15.
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