Daniel Worden’s essay “The Politics of Comics: Popular
Modernism, Abstraction, and Experimentation” has just been published in the
February 2015 issue of the academic journal Literature Compass. The
essay is available at the Wiley Online Library,
and the essay’s abstract follows.
Comics and graphic novels are now widely accepted to be
legitimate aesthetic and literary texts, suitable for study in all manner of
university classrooms and scholarly projects. Comics studies scholarship was
often preoccupied with arguing for the aesthetic legitimacy and literary
complexity of comics and graphic novels, and now that this debate is more or
less over, comics studies scholarship has begun to consider not just why and
how we should read comics but what comics might mean. The question of meaning
is an inherently political question, as it asks us to think of comics in
relation to our social world. This essay traces two ways that comics can be
read politically: as part of popular modernism, and as a medium for
experimentation with genre, narrative, and visual conventions.
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