Watchmen: Homework for March 18

Answer either of these questions:

1. In what ways does the opening sequence of Watchmen (cover to p. 6) treat the theme of vigilance / observation, and in what ways does it relate to the detective/crime plot?

2. Comment on one of these characters and on the dark versions of superheroes/ mythological characters they present:

Cinema Shakespeare

Does the Graphic Novel come after "the death of the novel"?

After the heat of the debate over "the death of the novel" (1960s and 1970s), the 1980s saw the birth and flourishment of the graphic novel (not really a genre, but a format, which, like comics, uses sequential art, but can be read - either in collected issues or in a single volume - as a stand-alone story. Many are personal narratives and quite as many are superhero stories).

Art Spiegelman, Maus (1980-1991)

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986/1987)

Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, The Killing Joke (1988)

HW for Oct 26/31 - Art Spiegelman, Maus II (1991)

Reflect on these aspects and comment on one of them:

1. the implications and premises of the implied storyteller

2. Linguistic virtuosity: puns, metaphor and clichés, intertextuality with the discourse(s) of the social sciences, uses of varieties of English (or broken English)

3. Striking effects of anthropomorfization (or animalization)

4. Picture details / "echoes" between sequences of images.

Asian Americans in the US

- Filippinos have been in the US since he 16th century

- 1790: Naturalization Act: only "free white persons" could be citizens.

- Chinese, Korean and Japanese Immigrants arrived to the Hawai in the 19th century

- Chinese immigrants arrived on the West Coast in the mid-19th century. Forming part of the California gold rush, these early Chinese immigrants participated intensively in the mining business and later in the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

- 1848: first European Chinatown

- Although the absolute numbers of Asian immigrants were small compared to that of immigrants from other regions, much of it was concentrated in the West, and the increase of wealth among the Chinese community (while earning lower wages) caused some nativist sentiment known as the "yellow peril".

- Congress passed restrictive legislation prohibiting nearly all Chinese immigration in the 1880s

- 1917: Asiatic Barred Immigration Act

- After Japan attacked the U.S in 1941 and China formally become an American ally, some within the American media began to criticize the various discriminatory laws against the Chinese and Chinese-Americans. However, the prejudice towards Japanese grew, which didn't help against the yellow peril mania.

- Internment: During World War II, an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals or citizens residing in the United States were forcibly interned in ten different camps across the US, mostly in the west. The internments were based on the race or ancestry rather than activities of the interned.

Homework for October 24

Observe Dr. Seuss's Political Cartoons  (in the anthology) and comment on the symbolism attached to animal or anthopormofized figures

Homework for October 19 - Text Analyis

in the comments box, produce a text analysis of the following excerpt.
Suggested topics: theme(s) and structure; importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descriptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers, collocations, or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class or others. 

"She came into the room and into the cicle of light from the tall lamp; a girl in her early twenties, slender and lithe, and dressed for the street, except that she carried her hat in one hand. A white face beneath a bobbed mass of flame-colored hair. Smoke-gray eyes that were set too far apart for trustworthiness — though not for beauty — laughed at me; and her red mouth laughed at me, exposing the edges of little sharp animal-teeth. She was as beautiful as the devil, and twice as dangerous.

She laughed at me — a fat man, all trussed up with red plush rope, and with the corner of a green cushion in my mouth — and she turned to the ugly man. "What do you want?"

He spoke in an undertone, with a furtive glance at the ceiling, above which soft steps still padded back and forth.
"What say we shake him?"
Her smoke-gray eyes lost their merriment and became calculating.
"There's a hundred thousand he's holding - a third of it's mine. You don't think I'm going to take a Mickey Finn on that, do you?"

Excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846)

[T]he extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit — in other words, to the excitement or elevation — again in other words, to the degree of the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect: — this, with one proviso — that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all.

Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical, taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem — a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight.

My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable. I should be carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and which, with the poetical, stands not in the slightest need of demonstration — the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect — they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul — not of intellect, or of heart — upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful."
...
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would — that is to say, who could — detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such  a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say — but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought — at the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — the step-ladders and demon-traps — the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

Debate #2: For Buffalo Bill (Filipe Ribeiro, Francisco Cardoso, Madalena Vieira, Mandala de la Rivière)

First of all, as we are defending Buffalo Bill, we would like to remind all of you to contextualise Buffalo Bill, the wild shows, the buffalo slaughters, in order to understand the natural course or “flow” of change and evolution America was going through. Place yourselves in the 19th century, place yourselves in an America where places like New York, Chicago, Illinois, and California were bursting with life and new sensations, and where the so well-known Wild West shows would attract more than 20 000 people. Buffalo Bill helped the development of this America, where railroads were systematically being constructed, where the economy was growing and expanding, so naturally the culture was undergoing remarkable changes while the identity of the American hero as a frontier man was a substantial idea and notion being formed in the back of their thinkers’ minds. We defend this person as one of the co-founders of this new culture. Buffalo Bill was in fact the man who slaughtered thousands of buffalos but he was certainly the man who would provide the railway workers (and southern impoverished communities) with their meat, which became one of the pillars of the American economy. 
According to the famous Wild West shows and contrary to what is commonly believed, Buffalo Bill was never in favour of opressing the Native American communities, instead, he always endeavoured to convey their true nature. Admitting the fact he personally benefited from his shows, we also believe he genuinely wanted to create a bridge between these “two Americas”. We also have to place ourselves in the shoes of these millions of curious people who knew so little about the "real" Wild West, which was by then officially conquered.

First and foremost, the Native Americans in West shows were considered true actors, they were contracted performers, with a number of conditions.

Furthermore, he actively defended women’s rights, in and out of his wild west shows, he was therefore one of the early generators of gender equality.

He was one of the very few to get a legal permission by the American government for the existence of his show, and certainly one of the only who did not criticize nor caricature the native Americans.

Although he did not contribute consciously at the time, he created a genre which would become very popular in the artistic and cultural areas as cinema, literature and visual arts: the western genre, which is traceable in uncountable films series or books.

Last but not least, Buffalo Bill’s spectacle and legend was a crucial event for the perpetuation of the frontier myth in Western identity.

Debate #1: Against Buffalo Bill (Matilde Gouveia, Inês Damas, Mariana Silva)

We believe that the character of Buffalo Bill, based on William Cody, was not a hero and that his fame and stories contributed to the discrimination of Native Americans and negatively impacted their stand in society.

The reasons why we believe he had this destructive influence are due to the fact that Buffalo Bill served as an example of the ideal of the American hero. He was someone to look up to as a model citizen. And yet he was known since very young as an “Indian Killer”, which was an image perpetuated primarily by Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill: King of the Bordermen. Besides, his persona was constructed from exaggeration and warping of facts, to the point where we today can’t know what the real Buffalo Bill was really like. 

The Native characters in his stage shows were only there to be portrayed as violent savages and to display their mistreatment and genocide as entertainment. The popularity of his stories and shows and, again, the regarding of the character of Buffalo Bill as a hero and as someone to admire, perpetuated the idea of Native Americans as being lesser than the violent colonizers that took their land and their lives. Simultaneously, Cody and the crew of the shows were profiting from this parody of the destruction of so many cultures. Regardless of the small positive impact that they may have had on the actors’ lives, the reasoning behind it was to be able to have better publicity and to attempt to further “civilize” them, again perpetuating the idea of them as savages. Buffalo Bill was also famous for killing bulls, and such a large number of them that it becomes significant enough to impact Native lives, as he and other white Americans took away one of their sources of sustenance. 

Not only this, but this Buffalo Bill persona was, above all, a character. It was built on Cody’s life and constructed with added heroics and altered stories that painted him as a hero, and this started to bleed into the many biographies written about him. Cody himself began this process of blurring the character with himself, thus making it so that the real man was and is remembered as a hero for a multitude of things he never actually did, and most likely hiding a lot of unsavory details. In fact, he sued his wife for attempted poisoning and tried to divorce her, and this event brought to light allegations about his repeated infidelity that at least temporarily tarnished his carefully built reputation. This certainly casts doubt on the idea of Cody being an advocate for women’s rights in any significant way, if this is how he behaved with his own wife.

In the end he was a man who profited from lies and created a public image that did not correspond with reality, and depended on the suffering of others to build up his own fame as a hero.