Title

Comics Against Themselves: Chris Ware's Graphic Narratives as Literature

Authors

David M. Ball, Dickinson College

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2010

Department

English

Language

English

Publication Title

The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts

Abstract

The recent rise in scholarly interest regarding graphic narratives has been precipitous and remarkable. This intellectual ferment is evidenced both by the strength, volume, and range of the comics produced, as well as an attendant enthusiasm and productivity in comics criticism and theory. Graphic narratives' ability to reinvigorate literary theoretical questions of temporality, narrative, and periodization, among others, points toward the catalytic effect that studies of comics are beginning to provide for conventional literary scholarship (for examples, see Chute and DeKoven 2006; Chute 2008; Baetens and Blatt 2008).
In this essay I will concentrate in particular on periodization and explore the ways comics complicate most conventional notions of modernism and postmodernism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. Namely, the development of comics can be seen as an inverted history of an admittedly caricatural, but nonetheless widely held trajectory of twentieth-century literary history, one that moves from the formal experimentation and putative disdain for mass culture in modernist texts to the playful self-referentiality and celebration of consumption in postmodern fiction. Using the recent work of Chris Ware as a paradigm, I argue that contemporary graphic narratives' characteristic ambivalence about their status as popular cultural productions repeats modernist anxieties about literary value that reemerge precisely at the moment graphic narratives are bidding for literary respectability.

Comments

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit The University of Mississippi Press's Website.

© 2010 by University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved

The images contained in the published version of this publication are not available to download due to copyright.

Recommended Citation

Ball, David M. "Comics Against Themselves: Chris Ware's Graphic Narratives as Literature." In The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, edited by Paul Williams and James Lyons, 103-123. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.