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Paper Tower: Aesthetics, Taste, and the Mind-Body Problem in American Independent Comics

Jones, William Timothy
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395604923

Abstract Details

2014, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, Popular Culture.
Comics studies, as a relatively new field, is still building a canon. However, its criteria for canon-building has been modeled largely after modernist ideas about formal complexity and criteria for disinterested, detached, "objective" aesthetic judgment derived from one of the major philosophical debates in Western thought: the mind-body problem. This thesis analyzes two American independent comics in order to dissect the aspects of a comic work that allow it to be categorized as "art" in the canonical sense. Chris Ware's Building Stories is a sprawling, Byzantine comic that exhibits characteristically modernist ideas about the subordination of the body to the mind and art's relationship to mass culture. Rob Schrab's Scud: The Disposable Assassin provides a counterpoint to Building Stories in its action-heavy stylistic approach, developing ideas about the merging of the mind and the body and the artistic and the commercial. Ultimately, this thesis advocates for a re-evaluation of comics criticism that values the subjective, emotional, and the popular as much as the "objective" areas of formal complexity and logic.
Jeremy Wallach, Ph.D (Advisor)
Esther Clinton, Ph.D (Committee Member)
88 p.
American Literature; American Studies; Gender Studies; Literature
Comics; Chris Ware; Rob Schrab; Building Stories; Scud The Disposable Assassin; Mind-body problem; Aesthetics; Taste; Comics Studies; Canonization; Art; Spectacle; Body; Mind; American Comics; Independent Comics; Media Studies; Technology; Modernism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Jones, W. T. (2014). Paper Tower: Aesthetics, Taste, and the Mind-Body Problem in American Independent Comics [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395604923

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Jones, William. Paper Tower: Aesthetics, Taste, and the Mind-Body Problem in American Independent Comics. 2014. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395604923.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Jones, William. "Paper Tower: Aesthetics, Taste, and the Mind-Body Problem in American Independent Comics." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395604923

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1395604923
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© 2014, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.