Think I finally got it.
Rough Draft
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Rachel's Final Attempt to Post Rough Draft!
| Here's my rough draft, hopefully it'll work. If so, thanks again Buddy! You ROCK!!! Here's the link: http://www.ilstu.edu/~cppohlm/FINALROUGHDRAFT.doc ~Rachel Forbes~ |
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Rachel's Rough Draft Take Two!
| I'm going to try this again...I don't know what I did wrong the first time. I did everything Buddy's instructions said, but here goes again. This might be the correct link: https://webvpn.ilstu.edu/dana/fb/smb/wfb.cgi?t=p&v=resource_1173901885.812740.2&si=0&ri=0&pi=0 ~Rachel Forbes~ |
Rachel's Final Rough Draft!
| I forgot to post this earlier, but hopefully this W: Drive link will work. If so, thanks Buddy!! Here's the link to my paper: http://www.ilstu.edu/~rlforbe/FINAL ROUGH DRAFT.doc ~Rachel Forbes~ |
Rough Draft
I've been trying to upload my paper to datastore01, but when I try to go to the link the file isn't there. Don't want to copy and past the entire paper on to the blog. Trying to figure something else out, will post as soon as I do!
It's a ROUGH draft
Nora Elizabeth Heneghan
Senior Seminar
Dr. Kalter
March 24, 2008
The Pedagogical Uses of the Graphic Novel in a Reading Reluctant Society
The graphic novel is the newest form in the evolving cycle of the written word.
It first made its debut toward the end of the nineteenth century. Originally, the “graphic novel” was just a simple comic that could be found in the daily or weekly newspaper. However, it quickly became clear that comics drew a crowd from children more than adults. This led to the “golden age” of comics. Between the 1940’s and 1950’s distribution of what became known as “comic magazines” skyrocketed from 500,000 to 7.5 million. Not to mention, the mass quantities were read on average by five people per magazine. During this “golden age” the pedagogical value was questioned by educators across the United States. Some viewed the graphic novel as an evil form of literature for a generation of illiterates. Others took the opportunity to seize the value. Since then comic books have been marketed toward children and frowned upon in the classroom. That is, until lately. Comic books, now known as “graphic novels” have found their way back to their original audience, the adult, and snuck back into the classroom.
The graphic novel is a term that was first coined between 1985-1990. It is a “novel whose narrative is related through a combination of text and art, often in comic-strip form” (dictionary.com). The value of the graphic novel has been a heated soapbox debate since its introduction. However, in 1992 Maus, a graphic novel memoir, won the Pulitzer Prize. The anthropomorphized scheme of the Holocaust initiated a new look at an old form. In Peter Schjeldahl’s article, “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Coming of Age”, he states that as the audience for comic books grow, so does the market. He argues that graphic novels are not just glorified comic books but they have become, for today, what poetry was for the generation in the 1960’s.
Ivan Brunetti, author of “The Cartoonist’s Eye”, stated at a lecture on March 19, 2008 for Illinois State University students that the influence of the graphic novel is gained through the pictures as much as the words. Looking back, the human being is first introduced to words through pictures. In Picture This: How Pictures Work, Molly Bang insists on the importance of the visual. In a correspondence with the Dean of Psychology of the United States, Rudolf Arnheim, she discusses the emotions that play into a picture. While reading words can be considered a reflective act, reading a picture is active. As the Arnheim states, “Molly [is] talking about a play of dramatic visual forces, presenting such features as size or direction or contrast as the actions of which natural and human behavior is constituted” (7). It is the artwork that makes the pages come alive.
Through debates waged academically, as well as socially, throughout the genre’s followers, it is clear that the graphic novel has developed and come into its own. The uses and purpose of this specific form are still being discussed. Take for example, Teresa Méndez who states that in 1992 40% of high school seniors were proficient readers. This percentage dropped to one third ten years later. Diana Tavitch, a professor of education at NYU looks at the graphic novel as a stepping stone, not a permanent solution but an opportunity for change in America’s pedagogical priorities. In the 1940’s the same tactic was used, take what is known and loved by children, and use it toward their academic advantage. In 1944 comics were even used to keep children in school. General Arnold McNutt appeared in 150 comics (20 million copies) stating it was their patriotic duty to return to school. The same year the Director of the Child Study Association stated that teachers who tore up comic books were doing a disservice to the student. Today, teachers may use Maus to introduce the Holocaust as easily as they may use Persepolis or American Born Chinese to talk about diversity and segregation.
However, the issue for educators then becomes the replacement factor. If students are going to read Black Hole, a satire on the 1970’s AID’s epidemic in America, are they not going to be interested the facts and statistics? Will graphic novels replace mainstream novels, or can there be a cohesion? In David Twiddy’s article, “Library Patrons Object to Some Graphic Novels” be discusses the potential problems with the growing genre. Because graphic novels are basically picture books for adults, children are drawn to the sometimes mature content. The Chicago-based American Library Association states that the graphic novel has been challenged at least fourteen times in the past three years. These problems include offensive language, violence, and nudity.
The issue of a declining literacy rate is an epidemic that is particularly alarming for young men. Research shows that by the time a boy is two and a half he has already decided the type of literature he prefers. While young ladies are drawn to romantic stories, boys request fast paced adventure stories. In Debby Zambo’s article “Using Picture Books to Provide Archetypes to Young Boys: Extending the Ideas” she suggests the use of picture books for developing a young boy into his masculine role. After all, in a society where “an alarming number of boys are becoming distant from reading, being diagnosed with learning and emotional problems, and dropping out of school”, it may not be a bad idea to explore other options. Though Zambo does not include one graphic novel in her list of picture books to strengthen the male persona and entice young male readers, there are many what introduce powerful men that would be useful in the classroom. Take for instance Frank Miller’s depiction of the male superhero Bruce Wayne in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns or Dwight in Sin City: Family Values. The issues presented by Zambo are that most “picture books” are made for young children. If the young readers issue lies in his illiteracy the embarrasment of reading a children’s book for the ages Zambo suggests, sixth grade through high school, may inhibit the child’s enthusiasm further. The visual literacy that she refers to in her article is the idea of learning from pictures as well as from print helping to “move beyond the concrete, literal interpretation of what they see to deeper understanding of the complexities that exist” (127). While the two graphic novels listed above do not “lead boys away from violence and toward the actions of noble men” there are plenty of graphic novels that follow the path of the righteous man. For example, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is heavy on symbolism and visual conceptualization. Though he may not come off as the archetypal male, he is identifiable as an alienated youth wise beyond his years which could be equally helpful to a young reader. Or even Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm a memoir about overcoming the odds, Barefoot Gen an autobiographical story of living through the bombing of Hiroshima, or again Maus. A main section of Zambo’s article is “A Boy Who Could Be King”. She uses her own experience as a teacher to show the importance of tapping into a child’s potential after reading Mr. Lincolns Way to one of her students she told the young man that he himself could be a leader, a King (128). To the same extent a young boy could read The Adventures of Superman and get just as much encouragement that they can be something more, a hero.
According to Zambo, “Literacy is related to academic success, and academic success offers boys more career and life opportunities” (124). It is with this declaration that educators must start down a new path of understanding and pedagogy. To fully understand the importance of the word and image relationship we must recognize the degree to which they work together. In Maria Nikolajva and Carole Scott’s article “The Dynamics of Picturebook Communication” the address how it takes both words and pictures to adequately display meaning. Kristin Hallberg’s term “iconotext” defines a picture book as having at least one picture on each spread, this is different from an illustrated book and can easy apply to the graphic novel (226). The thread between the pictures provides a backdrop for the narrative only furthering it’s discourse and appeal. In many ways the illustrations present more questions than answers. Ronald Schmitt states that an obstacle that the illustrator has to overcome is that the readers eye takes in the whole page first. He says, “Signification and stable meaning [are] continually deferred as the eye… jumps between words and pictures, spiraling, zigzagging and often interrupting the entire process to rescan the information in a new way” (Perret 74).
In “Graphic Novels for Multiple Literacies” by Gretchen E. Schwarz, she assures educatrs that the images in graphic novels do not discourage text reading. Rather the text and the illustrations work together to promote literacy. To the contrary, she states that M.R. Lavin author of “Comic books and graphic novels for libraries: What to buy” suggests that graphic novels may require more complex cognitive skills than just reading a regular book. It can be used to teach techniques such as dialog. It can also be used, as previously suggested as a bridge to other forms of literature.
Not only can the graphic novel be brought into the classroom to teach a new form of literature, it can easily cross barriers into other subjects such as history. Schwarz suggests that The Cartoon Hisotry of the Universe II which explains the history of China and India up until the fall of Rome could be easily used in a history class, of coarse it carries with it the stigma of irony and humor. The 9-11 Commission Report is available online to download for students, it contains 585 pages of facts, actions, and statistics. However, the graphic novel version, The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation, which includes the same truth of that tragic day in American history is available. When discussing their intentions on making the adaptation on National Public Radio, they stated “We are in the business of clarification and this is the perfect way to do it.” They insist on the fact that it is neither a comic book nor a graphic novel, it is a graphic journal. They thought it should be translated for the adult and the child that would think the 580 page report would be too overwhelming for. The two authors, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, insist that it is not at all simplified. It gives all the facts faster and could be paired with the graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers. In the classroom setting, not only do these novels present information faster but also equally accurate. These historical graphic novels can include, again, Maus, Barefoot Gen, Persepolis, Facts From Sarajevo and Palestine.
The benefits of the graphic novel in the classroom are endless and can be used for any subject. It opens up ideas of images effecting emotion, as expressed by Molly Bang, not only with colors but also with stereotyping. The bridge that comic books provide links the gap between low and high culture. Long before sparknotes.com and cliff notes, comic books reigned as the supreme force of condensed literature. Martin D. Perret, author of “Not Just Condenastion: How Comic Books Interpret Shakespeare”, states that in the 1950’s and 60’s Gilberton’s original Classic Illustrated produced comics that concentrated the most complex of Shakesperian text to words and pictures. When First Publishing took over Classics Illustrated the new prime audience was at the collegiate level. It is with both the pictures and the words, which are summarizations of Shakespeare’s, that the whole story comes together. The tradgedy of Hamlet is taken down from 40,000 lines down to 48 pages. His famous “To be or not to be” is taken down from 222 words to 14. Again, it is the images that carry the story, even the cover which is Hamlet’s father’s ghost summoning him presents the conflict of the story in a nutshell.
According to the National Institute for Literacy the “average composite literacy score or a native-born adult in the U.S. was 284 (Level 3); the U.S. ranked 10th out of 17 high-income countries”. It also states that by age seventeen 1 in 12 white, 1 in 50 latino and 1 in 100 African Americans can read and gain information from specialized text. Other statistics include the fact that reading scores for 9 year olds increased during the 1970;s but since 1980 have shown no improvement. The National Assessment of Education Progess found that reading for fun had a “positive relationship to average scores”, the more reading materials a child is introduced to has a direct correlation with their literacy scores. However, between 1971 and 1999 the average number of reading materials found in the home has decreased, less students read for fun, and more television was watched. It is due to these dire statistics that it is no surprise that in 2002, the theme of the annual Teen Read Week, sponsored by the youth branch of the American Library Association’s theme was “Get Graphic”. In July of that year the “New York Times’” cover story stated that “the comic book could become the next ‘new literary form’” (Mé ndez). Though, the graphic novel is not a band-aid for the crippled literacy rate, rather it is a temporary crutch to help reluctant readers read again. In that same article Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University states, “Once kids know how to read, there is no good reason to continue to use dumbed-down materials. They should be able to read powems, novels, essays, books that inform them, enlighten them, broaden their horizons.”
Yet, it is the stigma of the graphic novel’s past that makes it hard to produce an audience in the classroom. In Jonathan Culler’s article “Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature” he discusses the issues of contemporary literature by quoting Philippe Sollers, one of the leading theorists and practitioners of “residual” literature:
Perhaps the most striking feature of modern literature is the appearance of a new monolithic, comprehensive mode of writing, in which the distinctions among genres, which have been completely abandoned, give way to what are admittedly “books,” but books for which, we might say, no method of reading has yet been worked out. 52
Yet he gives credit to the nexus of discourse by stating that “our most crucial and tantalizing experiences of literature [are] located at the interstices of genre” (53). Theorists such as Janice Radway look beyond the ideals of “high art” and focus on the needs of the audience.
In classrooms across the country educators introduce electives such as jewelry making, woods class, and film. None of which introduce nor enforce literacy. The graphic novel has been used by Hollywood to create a new genre for film. To use novels such as V For Vendetta by Alan Moore, the Sin City collection by Frank Miller, Road to Perdition, Persepolis, Batman, Superman, From Hell, Ghost World, 300, X-Men, or A History of Violence paired with their film counterparts would be a productive way to show the process of film making and adaptation of the novel to the screen: the similarities and the differences.
It may be discussed that the graphic novel is in fact not a novel of “high art“. To dispute this, take Ian Watt’s article “From The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding” where he discusses the works of the authors that created classic “novels”. Watt simplifies the elements of a novel into the “lowest common denominator”. First, a novel must be realistic, not real necessarily but it has to give us a “true report of it” (365). It must show an individual experience which is unique and original. Watt states that Defoe and Richardson “are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or pervious literature” (366). Frank Miller and Alan Moore could very well be the Defoe and Richardson of the graphic novel genre. The second aspect of the novel is the idea of the individual. They are a verbal, and in the case of the artistic aspect of the graphic novel visual, expression of any one persons identity. Each person is given a name that is their proper name, not a type of label. For instance, in American Born Chinese “Danny” is the name of the main character. For every rule however there is an exception; “Superman” is a type, but then again in Melville’s Moby Dick “Ishmael” is a type, or at least holds a meaning derived from the Bible. The third part to a novel, according to Watt, is the time factor. There has to be a continuous flow of time throughout the novel. This helps shape the characters and their history. There has to be a history of the past to help explain the actions of the present and future. Lastly, there must be a setting. The author has the power of “putting man wholly into his physical setting”, which according to Allen Tate is the “distinctive capacity of the novel form” (375). One thing that the graphic novel can absolutely avoid that other novels such as Robinson Crusoe can not is what Locke calls “abuses of language” or figurative language. The visual literacy aspect of the graphic novel denies any figurative language to fully take place. Watt states that the popularity of the novel in the past two hundred years is based on the correspondence between life and art. The graphic novel can only further this connection.
Persepolis is a graphic novel depicting the Iran Revolution through the eyes of a little girl which happens to be a true story. This particular novel is aimed toward the young adult market. However, according to WRCB TV, for Eastbrook Middle School Persepolis is off the shelves due to “offensive language an images”. Johnny Bishop, a parent of a middle schooler at Eastbrook, claims the book is full of filth, “… the more you read, the worse it gets”. It is Bishops fear that if they read enough of this perception of the truth, they will think it is okay to treat women the way they do in Iran. Though the book got pulled, is being reviewed, and the teacher apologized, Bishop claims “too little too late” (Johnson). However, in the article “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis” Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley argue that Persepolis crosses all barriers in genre. They state it can be found in autobiography, children’s or young adult’s literature, graphic novel, middle east history, and women’s studies. Though Satrapi’s work is Westernized through the “comic book” form, its universality lies in the ideals of a childhood experience. Throughout the novel as her experiences grow and her perception of the world changes, the reader is able to see her physically change, grow and alter. She begins to get weighed down by the realities of revolution. Realities, according to Bishop, that are “not suitable for anybody in the middle school on down” (Johnson).
Watchmen, which is one of “Time” Magazines 2005’s 100 best novels, and that includes all novels, not just graphic, is one of the most influential graphic novels of all time. It is a compilation of twelve separate comic books put together which ran from 1986-1987. The plot consists of one former superheroes getting murdered. The novel opens with Edward Blake being found on the street below his appartment, having been thrown from the window. The investigation turns up nothing. In the history of the United States in Watchmen the Soviet Union and America have been waging a nuclear arms race. The plot of the story is not as important and the idea behind it. The last page of the novel states, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies” or “Who watches the watchmen”, it is a quote taken from the epigraph of the Tower Commission Report in 1987. The whole idea of constantly being watched. In Michel Foucault’s article “Disciple and Punish” he talks about the internalization of social control in western society. He also talks about the body itself being a mode for social discipline. Watchmen deals with the perception of authority surveillance being constant yet allusive. Foucault believes that the body is only useful if it is both productive and subjected. The power that ones body holds is the power that is expressed, not innately within. Foucault argues that power and knowledge fall hand in hand. However, the last thing that Rorschach states to his subordinate, who is a dense comical character, is “I leave this entirely in your hands” (32).
It is not the power-knowledge relationship that should be studied, it is the transformation of this relationship. Foucault uses the measures that the hierarchy had in place when the plague had entered a town. The powerful were there to lead, to take role and to segregate much like the retired superheroes must do to save New York. However, this form of discipline restricts citizens to their homes, treated like caged animals where they were only worth the paper they were written on if they could show their face upon role call. Everyone has someone to answer to. In Foucault’s preparations for the plague there was the man who locked the doors, there was the man that took the key, there was the man that supervised both men. In a system of power there is always someone hire on the chain of command. No one was given the leisure of stepping out or into a house without the permission on someone in charge. All of humanity, even today is divided up into the normal and the abnormal the only difference is how we deal with it. Panopticon is the idea that every human being who has a superior is only seen as a source of information not communication with one another. The subordinates are kept separate from one another but visual for the guardian, this visibility is a trap for the inmates. The big brother aspect of Bentham’s Panopticon is so that the inmate knows that he is always visible, maybe not always watched, but he could be at any moment. Foucault goes on to say that power does not lie in an individual but in the dispersion of power. He insists that the makeup of the panopticon is the relation of discipline not the relations of power. The processes that make up the discipline relations are as follows. One: The functional inversion of the disciplines. This means that the output of aptitude and speed is more than the input. Two: The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. This means that the hierarchy must analyze and survey the people constantly from any side at any time. Three: The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. Foucault says that the government must rule the punishment and control of the people under an unbiased rule. These techniques are all used to form a society based on rules and structure. People are surveyed in the panopticon the same way they were quarantined during the plague. There is a function to every part of the form. As a mass society is unstructured. It is the development of roles that keeps order. All of these disciplines recognize and must bring in power relations. The breakdown of this power forms the machine which keeps society running. The acceptance of the rules of discipline make a functioning society possible. This period, the “Enlightenment”, which created the liberties of the people also created the disciplines for them to follow. The function that Watchmen and Foucault provide together is that every graphic novel has it’s root in theory.
Black Hole by Charles Burns, as stated earlier, is a graphic novel satire of the AIDS epidemic in the 1970s. It introduces the sexually transmitted disease as a deformity that effects the students of one high school. It ruins the lives of everyone it comes in contact with. Though, the original outbreak was unexpected therefore the adolescence were careless about sex. It depicts the prevalence of alcohol and drugs in the society, therefore inhibiting the judgement of the teenagers. One such student, Chris Rhodes states, “We’d both been drinking a lot, so I guess I could blame it all on the booze, but it was more than that…” The lack of page numbers gives the book a sense of chaos, just like the virus itself. Chris loses her virginity to an infected boy. His infection had taken the form of a tiny mouth on his neck which, in fact, talked. However, Chris was unable to hear the muttering of the subconscious, which is what the tiny mouth expelled, due to the fact that she had lost her inhibitions.
Burns’ entire novel is black and white. The lack of color introduces the disease of deformity they are spreading as a black and white entity. Just like the AIDS outbreak, the students didn’t see it coming, they fell into a black hole of ruining their entire lives based on the bad decisions of one night. Though AIDS was a generally new virus to the United States, it was the threat of it that scared the nation. At one point in the story, the character of Dave, who has a facial deformity due to the virus, attempts to purchase chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The man behind him torments him saying, “Why don’t you just leave? Nobody wanted you here.” In response, Dave pulls out a gun, hits the man in the face, spits in his mouth and says, “See how easy that was? That’s all it takes… a little spit. Some saliva… and now you’re one of us.” Though, the American Red Cross states that there are no known cases of saliva by itself spreading HIV, the threat is still there. Another graphic novel that can be used to help as a cautionary tool is Pedro and Me. It is the true story of Pedro Zamora, from MTV’s “The Real World”, fight with AIDS. This novel has won the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book, 200 Publisher’s Weekly Best Book, 2000 Bay Area Book Reviewes Award for Best in Children’s Literature, 200 Eisner Nomination for Best Original Graphic Novel and YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, to name a few. Illnois Senator Lightford states in the Illinois Government News Network, “Knowledge and education are important to fighting the battle with HIV.” Yet, little information is produced in the classroom to introduce the problem to students. People aged 13-24 account for 13% of HIV cases. Three million cases of STDs and 870,000 teenagers become pregnant each year, in the state of Illinois alone (CCSSO). While the sentiment is there to resolve the issue, nothing is currently being done in the classroom to raise awareness.
The graphic novel as a learning device is by no means a new concept, however, as shelves are beginning to overflow with new novels, it is important to categorize. Barefoot Gen and American Born Chinese are both graphic novels that depict life within racial boundaries. Barefoot Gen: a Cartoon Story of Hiroshima is based on the Keiji Nakazawa’s true life experience of the atomic bomb being dropped on his hometown of Hiroshima when he was just a child. Though his story is blended in with the stories of others to create the 284 page piece. The story begins during World War II. Gen, Nakazawa’s alter ego, is just a child working with his family on the field of wheat that they leased. During this period of time his family is poor and food is hard to come by, mostly given to the soldiers. Though, their pots and pans used for cooking have been taken anyway to be made into ships. Gen’s father strongly opposes the war. He finds it to be wasteful of resources and lives. Because of this traitorous point of view his family is ridiculed and segregated from everyone else which only cuts off their means of living further. Their family is torn apart as one child goes to flight school where he attempts to change the worlds perception of his family, the younger children are sent to work in factories instead of school. The majority of the book leads up to the horror of the bomb but it, “Little Boy”, isn’t dropped until the last thirty pages. After the blast Gen sees the melting faces of people he knows, people he was just talking to. Clothes were burned or blasted off people die right in front of him as he runs through remains to help his family and enemies alike. The book concludes with the introduction of Gen’s little sister after the war had already claimed his siblings and his father.
American Born Chinese is not nearly as emotional or dark. It incorporates both the historical content of the famed Monkey King and the trials and tribulations of growing up as an American born Chinese boy. The Monkey King aspect of the novel is an ancient myth passed down from generation to generation, celebrated in China, lesser known in the United States. He is basically a heroic monkey born out of rock where when he first opened his eyes “rays of light” poured into the sky to which heaven took notice. However, throughout the novel the Monkey king becomes mad with the power he obtains by mastering “four major heavenly disciplines” then later the “four major disciplines of invulnerability”. Tse-Yo-Tzuh buries the Monkey king in a mountain of rock where he remains for five hundred years when he is finally able to relinquish himself from the fortress of his own self-importance and become what he was originally made into, a monkey. Jin, the young boy in the novel also struggles with issues of esteem, however, he finds himself an outcast in a society where the majority reject the minorities. The minorities are he and his friend Wei-Chen (who we later find out is the Monkey King’s son living as a human for forty years attempting not to implement a human vice). The novel recognizes those outside of the norm. Jin realizes in the end that who he is is who he is supposed to be. Both novels show life outside of the comfort level of the typical young adult reader, which is what they are meant for. Gen teaches the reader the horrors of war. The pictures illustrate a world that no American can imagine. They remain a helpful, yet disturbing guide to the hell Hiroshima had caused. American Born Chinese is more upbeat, Jin carries with him the weight of his race, which eventually is lifted off him when he realizes that Jin is a cool guy to be. Both novels can be used in either an English or a history class. Neither novel is remotely useless.
Ghost World is a graphic novel based on the awkwardness of life after high school. It was made into a movie starring Steve Bucemi, Thora Birch, and Scarlett Johanson. The problem with the education that adolescence are receiving is that they are accustomed to the movie version of life. They could read, but they could get the same information faster and less actively. The idea of Ghost World is to find one’s own identity, to be creative. Mikhail Bakhtin defines the novel as “a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (674). The graphic novel finds it’s own “social significance” by “Characteristic intentions and accents” (675). Ghost World uses “specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones; thus it can create slogan-words, curse-words, [and] praise-words.” The characters Enid and Rebecca at times make up their own version of the English language. Daniel Clowe’s makes an appearance in his own graphic novel as a nerdy comic book writer who is shunned by Enid, introducing the metafictional aspect of the novel. The book itself covers taboo subjects such as sex, pedophilia, molestation, Satanism, rape, cancer and STDs yet, the characters are complex and true. It definatly situates itself far from the “generic and professional stratification of the common literary language” as Bakhtin would say. “Discourse in the Novel”, Bakhtin’s essay he states, “In the English comic novel we find a comic-parodic reprocessing of almost all the levels of literary language, both conversational and written, that were current at the time” (678).
Art Spiegelman’s Maus: My Father Bleeds History is the most complex yet pedagogically useful graphic novel thus far. In his six chapters, originally published in Raw magazine from 1980-1985, he openly discusses the brutality of the Holocaust. The artistic depiction of the Holocaust anthropomorphizes the Jewish population as mice, the Nazis as cats, and the police as pigs. This representation shows that people, in situations as disturbing as war, become nothing but animals. The only part of the novel that humanizes the characters is in the section titled “Mouse Holes” where a comic is found that talks about the suicide of Anja, Art’s mother. The history of the Holocaust is given through Spiegelman’s memories of his father’s stories. Maus covers the mutilation and genecide of the Jews through pictures of hangings, slave labor and death. Spiegelman’s Maus puts emphasis on both the drawings and the words. For instance, the style that he uses is straight forward, pictures side by side, however in cases of extreme suffering or severely important information, the pictures turn and the frames darken. The realities of Maus are shown through maps and the timeline that his father presents while “telling” the story. These realities are personal to Spiegelman as well as universal in Holocaust survivor stories. Though the story shows the struggle of one man, the pictures make it clear that it could be the story of any person, the animals look similar. The story, however, is not just about World War Two. Maus also shows the relationship between Speigelman and his father, it depicts the complex nature of a survivor and the generations that follow. This novel is timeless and a powerful tool to introduce to Holocaust and World War Two.
The hesitation that teachers show when approaching graphic novels is completely valid. Not only do they face complaints from parents, but they also have to deal with the uncomfortable nature of the, sometimes pornographic, image before them. Though this form opens the door to discourse about the word and image relationship as well as the image to person relationship. In high school, the majority of students were asked to read The Catcher in the Rye. Throughout the novel Holden fantasizes about sex, he gets upset at the thought of his buddy Stradlater having sex with Jane, and he gets gets aroused by the idea of spitting on a girls face during sex. If these thoughts and actions we depicted pictorially, The Catcher in the Rye would be banned from the cannon. Even the worst graphic novel seems to have less swears that what Holden Caulfield comes up with. Picture Holden Caulfield smoking a cigarette, walking through the subway with a huge “Fuck you” in red ink in the background on a black and white picture (Salinger 204). That image would be enough to bad it with the rest of the graphic novels.
The problem becomes what Louis Althusser classifies as the ideological state apparatus’ that inhibit us from truly discovering the arts. Even in the simplist form, men do not see the world around them for how it truly is, they attempt to mold the experience to fit their personal ideologies. It is when a group of people with the same ideologies come together to form a school board that censors art like the graphic novel that can only improve literacy and a child’s range of experience that ideology becomes a barrier. Ideology has a material existence, it is found all around us. Take for instance the Bible, which is also being made into a graphic novel, it represents the views that people instill into generations to conform to the written word of a “higher power” the book itself holds material form, the same material form that Black Hole has, yet the Bible is used to exhibit a way of life rather than a form of entertainment and pure, uncorrupted education. Altheusser states that the term “ideas” has disappeared, while the terms “practices, rituals, and ideological apparatus” have appeared. The words that have survived are “subject, conscious, belief and action”. In this world that Altheusser proposes ideas have halted, he states “there is no practice except by and in an ideology; there is no ideology expect by the subject and for subjects”. With this type of reasoning, the proposal of a graphic novel into a system of ideologies becomes a ridiculous notion. However, it is the idea of the subject that might change the system of ideology. There are two types of subjects, the subject that is submissive and gives up all freedoms except the freedom to accept their submission or subject two who is an author of and responsible for their actions. In a world of set ideologies, with the slightest hope for “idea” to reappear, subject two is our only hope.
Graphic Novels are not only meant to be taught to observe but it is also an active art. Savannah College of Art and Design offers a graduate program in cartoon/comics. In James Sturm’s “Comics in the Classroom” he discussed the steps forward that the genre as an major have taken. Sturm, a teacher at Savannah College of Art and Design has built a curriculum around the idea that comics can not only influence your art, but you can also go into the field. Just as it takes visual literacy to read a graphic novel, it takes a vast array of skill to familiarize oneself with the ability to write through pictures. Research skills are also taught so their stories are convincing and realistic. The field of graphic art can also lead to a career in animation, illustration, storyboards for marketing, and journalism. Just like any other subject taught a collegiate level, there are aspects to the graphic novel that surpass the simplicity of simple comics. On March 19th, 2008 Ivan Brunetti presented “The Cartoonist’s Eye” for the Illinois State University English Department Lecture Series. He is an instructor at Columbia College in Chicago. He had put together An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Caroons, and True Stories which was published in 2006 as well other works. He started his lecture by stating the importance of the doodle. He said, “Comics are not just a series of pictures they are a sequence.” This is the aspect of the graphic novel that some readers take for granted, much like a movie, the frames have to be edited to show only the most important aspects of the story. Brunetti stressed that words and pictures not only work together but are an emulsion of writing. In Sturm’s piece he states that “if academe begins to recognize an encourage the talented students who have chosen this medium, institutions can not only duplicate the growth of the sequential-art department […] but also play a crucial role in advancing an important new art form”. In Universities across the nation, young artists are encouraged in the “high arts” of painting, sculpting, dance, and poetry, the same should be done for the sequential art.
There is no time like the present to increase the awareness of this coming of age art form. In Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” she takes a psychoanalytic approach to the fascination with film . Much like film a graphic novel is the combination of dialog and images. One of the main issues that educators have with the graphic novel is the stereotypical depiction of women and the blatant racism of white masks equal good and black masks equaling evil. Through film she states that women represent the lack of phallus in a heliocentric society. Women in general are not made to make meaning but represent meaning. She states that film, much like the sequential art form of the graphic novel, takes people as objects and subjects them to a controlling and curious gaze, though part of the magnitude of the graphic novel is the illustrator wants that gaze to be met with intrigue and a curiosity of why that image is the way it is. Mulvey states that the “I” is split between the active male and the submissive female. However, this seems to be an over-exaggeration of the age old fairytale, women as victims, argument. She states that women are sexualized, fall in love with a man, and then become the property of them and that full plots revolve around this system of differences. Mulvey’s argument fails in the fact that it lumps all stories together. That is to say, if a theorist claimed that all women in novels are subject to the rule of the male ego. Her assertions are too vague. Though, in any form of art the reader, viewer, audience is the “invisible guest” it remains to be the power of that guest to assert their own assumptions onto the media. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s article “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception” states that culture ultimately defines us, yet culture is defined by the capitalistic society in which we live. Mulvey directs her angst toward the film industry for over sexualizing women, yet Horkheimer and Adorno insist that the population gets what the population wants, or at least what the culture consumes. The relationship between film and comic art has been a tumultuous one.
The fear of graphic novels replacing the predecessors is irrational. There have always been shorter versions of the classics and yet there they still sit on the shelf. Not only are graphic novels being made into movies and visa versa, but novels much like the Shakespearian Hamlet, are also being made, or have been made, into condensed versions. This includes Frankenstein, The Bible, Murder on the Orient Express, The Odyssey, I Am Legend, and Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol. To assume that the graphic version of The Odyssey will replace the original, which has been around since ancient Greece, is an uninformed idea considering that sparknotes.com, cliff notes, and the internet have been around long enough to crush that theory.
Matthew P. McAllister, Ian Gordon, and Mark Jancovich’s essay “Buster Meets Superhero Comic, or Art House Meets Graphic Novel? The Contradictory Relationship Between Film and Comic Art” exemplifies the relationship that the two have. It is this close relationship that makes graphic novels hard to put into the classroom, they become to closely identifiable with movies and television and less identifiable with education. Due to the overwhelming success of graphic novels made into movies, it is simple to say the trend will continue as long as consumers keep buying tickets. It is a double-edged sword. While the movies that come out of the genre may be appealing to audiences, it is only if they are properly adapted and paired with their counterpart that they are useful, in any way, pedagogically.
The pedagogical use for the graphic novel is currently limited, for every two steps the genre takes forward, something or someone pushes it one step back. After the success of V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novelist all-star Alan Moore is working on his next novel Lost Girls which is blatantly pornographic. The characters are named Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy, depicted the adventures of lost women in earlier tales. This novel follows Moore’s huge successes, however the audience is limited and will by no means make it into a school or a library due to pedophilia, bestiality, and homosexuality. Though Moore states his reasoning behind doing the book is as follows:
Lost Girls originally came about because it struck me that there really isn’t any good, serious artwork dedicated to sex, given that it’s a human activity in which most of us have some interest. There are whole genres of books dedicated to the fields of, say, being a detective, or being a space patrolman, or being a zombie back form the dead, which are fairly rarefied in terms of their actual human application. But he only genre that is actually dealing the sexual material is this gritty, unpleasant, under-the-counter kind of genre, where there are absolutely no standards.
This, according to “Publisher Weekly” is why Top Shelf Publishers is willing to stake it’s entire business, literally, on this publication. However, with this step forward artistically, Moore is creating a chasm around the genre in general. There are standards for graphic novels. Just as there are for novels. In this period of transition, Lost Girls seems to put a crack in the fragile framework for the pedagogical use of the form. But then again, in George Gustine’s article “For Graphic Novels, a New Frontier: Teenage Girls” he discusses DC Comics attempt to draw teenage girls into the male dominated genre. Like any other work of literature aimed toward teen girls in the 21st century they push individuality. DC Comics will promote the girl emphasized comics with $250,000. Cecil Castellucci, author of PLAIN Jane graphic novels explains that the experiences of her characters comes from the real experiences of her youth making the work accessible to anyone who lives in this world. The atypical demographic makes the minx series of comics, including PLAIN Jane, a source for growth, trial and error. Not only is the genre growing across demographics, but across continents. Tara Mulholland’s article “Britain Embraces the Graphic Novel” she begins by explaining the original opinion that Britian had on the subject: juvenile. The graphic novels that began to change it all across the pond were Ethel and Ernest and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Manga, Japanese comics, are also making their way into British culture. HarperCollins introduced its first series in summer 2007: the “Agatha Christie Comic Strip Editions”. Sales have increased 41% in one year for graphic novels in Britian. The new popularity, again, gives partial credit to the term “graphic novel” considering “comic” stigmatized the genre previously. One step backward, two steps forward.
However, once again in a society that is overwrought with illiteracy, incompetence and ignorance, any step that could lead to a child picking up a book, is a step in the right direction. While society perpetuates generation after generation whose personal goals it is to avoid reading as much as possible, it is important to look back at the potential of what is right in front of us. There is more to the graphic novel than “BAM! ZOOT! WHACK!” As stated, literacy is directly related with the options that are given to children. If the reluctant reader refuses to sit down and read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the graphic novel is there to aid in the discovery of knowledge and the introduction to a media source that includes both visual literacy and competence of language. This leads to the connection that links interest and knowledge. Since its arival in newspapers across America in the late 1800’s people have grown to accept and appreciate comics, then graphic novels, as part of the American culture. The industry will continue to grow if educators and parents alike take the right steps to furthering the literacy of their children and students; because it is the right thing to do. The Department of Education’s website asserts the “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001”. President George W. Bush stated, “Our children… deserve an education worthy of this great nation. Thoegther we will make sure that every child learns that that no child is left behind.” It is with this notion that educators must engage students in whatever form of literature that will provide them with the tools to expand their vocabulary and general understanding. As children we grow up on the keen idea of words and pictures forming our collective unconscious, as adolescence images and language are an emulsion of our perception of the world. Graphic novels help bridge the gap between now and tomorrow.
Senior Seminar
Dr. Kalter
March 24, 2008
The Pedagogical Uses of the Graphic Novel in a Reading Reluctant Society
The graphic novel is the newest form in the evolving cycle of the written word.
It first made its debut toward the end of the nineteenth century. Originally, the “graphic novel” was just a simple comic that could be found in the daily or weekly newspaper. However, it quickly became clear that comics drew a crowd from children more than adults. This led to the “golden age” of comics. Between the 1940’s and 1950’s distribution of what became known as “comic magazines” skyrocketed from 500,000 to 7.5 million. Not to mention, the mass quantities were read on average by five people per magazine. During this “golden age” the pedagogical value was questioned by educators across the United States. Some viewed the graphic novel as an evil form of literature for a generation of illiterates. Others took the opportunity to seize the value. Since then comic books have been marketed toward children and frowned upon in the classroom. That is, until lately. Comic books, now known as “graphic novels” have found their way back to their original audience, the adult, and snuck back into the classroom.
The graphic novel is a term that was first coined between 1985-1990. It is a “novel whose narrative is related through a combination of text and art, often in comic-strip form” (dictionary.com). The value of the graphic novel has been a heated soapbox debate since its introduction. However, in 1992 Maus, a graphic novel memoir, won the Pulitzer Prize. The anthropomorphized scheme of the Holocaust initiated a new look at an old form. In Peter Schjeldahl’s article, “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Coming of Age”, he states that as the audience for comic books grow, so does the market. He argues that graphic novels are not just glorified comic books but they have become, for today, what poetry was for the generation in the 1960’s.
Ivan Brunetti, author of “The Cartoonist’s Eye”, stated at a lecture on March 19, 2008 for Illinois State University students that the influence of the graphic novel is gained through the pictures as much as the words. Looking back, the human being is first introduced to words through pictures. In Picture This: How Pictures Work, Molly Bang insists on the importance of the visual. In a correspondence with the Dean of Psychology of the United States, Rudolf Arnheim, she discusses the emotions that play into a picture. While reading words can be considered a reflective act, reading a picture is active. As the Arnheim states, “Molly [is] talking about a play of dramatic visual forces, presenting such features as size or direction or contrast as the actions of which natural and human behavior is constituted” (7). It is the artwork that makes the pages come alive.
Through debates waged academically, as well as socially, throughout the genre’s followers, it is clear that the graphic novel has developed and come into its own. The uses and purpose of this specific form are still being discussed. Take for example, Teresa Méndez who states that in 1992 40% of high school seniors were proficient readers. This percentage dropped to one third ten years later. Diana Tavitch, a professor of education at NYU looks at the graphic novel as a stepping stone, not a permanent solution but an opportunity for change in America’s pedagogical priorities. In the 1940’s the same tactic was used, take what is known and loved by children, and use it toward their academic advantage. In 1944 comics were even used to keep children in school. General Arnold McNutt appeared in 150 comics (20 million copies) stating it was their patriotic duty to return to school. The same year the Director of the Child Study Association stated that teachers who tore up comic books were doing a disservice to the student. Today, teachers may use Maus to introduce the Holocaust as easily as they may use Persepolis or American Born Chinese to talk about diversity and segregation.
However, the issue for educators then becomes the replacement factor. If students are going to read Black Hole, a satire on the 1970’s AID’s epidemic in America, are they not going to be interested the facts and statistics? Will graphic novels replace mainstream novels, or can there be a cohesion? In David Twiddy’s article, “Library Patrons Object to Some Graphic Novels” be discusses the potential problems with the growing genre. Because graphic novels are basically picture books for adults, children are drawn to the sometimes mature content. The Chicago-based American Library Association states that the graphic novel has been challenged at least fourteen times in the past three years. These problems include offensive language, violence, and nudity.
The issue of a declining literacy rate is an epidemic that is particularly alarming for young men. Research shows that by the time a boy is two and a half he has already decided the type of literature he prefers. While young ladies are drawn to romantic stories, boys request fast paced adventure stories. In Debby Zambo’s article “Using Picture Books to Provide Archetypes to Young Boys: Extending the Ideas” she suggests the use of picture books for developing a young boy into his masculine role. After all, in a society where “an alarming number of boys are becoming distant from reading, being diagnosed with learning and emotional problems, and dropping out of school”, it may not be a bad idea to explore other options. Though Zambo does not include one graphic novel in her list of picture books to strengthen the male persona and entice young male readers, there are many what introduce powerful men that would be useful in the classroom. Take for instance Frank Miller’s depiction of the male superhero Bruce Wayne in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns or Dwight in Sin City: Family Values. The issues presented by Zambo are that most “picture books” are made for young children. If the young readers issue lies in his illiteracy the embarrasment of reading a children’s book for the ages Zambo suggests, sixth grade through high school, may inhibit the child’s enthusiasm further. The visual literacy that she refers to in her article is the idea of learning from pictures as well as from print helping to “move beyond the concrete, literal interpretation of what they see to deeper understanding of the complexities that exist” (127). While the two graphic novels listed above do not “lead boys away from violence and toward the actions of noble men” there are plenty of graphic novels that follow the path of the righteous man. For example, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is heavy on symbolism and visual conceptualization. Though he may not come off as the archetypal male, he is identifiable as an alienated youth wise beyond his years which could be equally helpful to a young reader. Or even Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm a memoir about overcoming the odds, Barefoot Gen an autobiographical story of living through the bombing of Hiroshima, or again Maus. A main section of Zambo’s article is “A Boy Who Could Be King”. She uses her own experience as a teacher to show the importance of tapping into a child’s potential after reading Mr. Lincolns Way to one of her students she told the young man that he himself could be a leader, a King (128). To the same extent a young boy could read The Adventures of Superman and get just as much encouragement that they can be something more, a hero.
According to Zambo, “Literacy is related to academic success, and academic success offers boys more career and life opportunities” (124). It is with this declaration that educators must start down a new path of understanding and pedagogy. To fully understand the importance of the word and image relationship we must recognize the degree to which they work together. In Maria Nikolajva and Carole Scott’s article “The Dynamics of Picturebook Communication” the address how it takes both words and pictures to adequately display meaning. Kristin Hallberg’s term “iconotext” defines a picture book as having at least one picture on each spread, this is different from an illustrated book and can easy apply to the graphic novel (226). The thread between the pictures provides a backdrop for the narrative only furthering it’s discourse and appeal. In many ways the illustrations present more questions than answers. Ronald Schmitt states that an obstacle that the illustrator has to overcome is that the readers eye takes in the whole page first. He says, “Signification and stable meaning [are] continually deferred as the eye… jumps between words and pictures, spiraling, zigzagging and often interrupting the entire process to rescan the information in a new way” (Perret 74).
In “Graphic Novels for Multiple Literacies” by Gretchen E. Schwarz, she assures educatrs that the images in graphic novels do not discourage text reading. Rather the text and the illustrations work together to promote literacy. To the contrary, she states that M.R. Lavin author of “Comic books and graphic novels for libraries: What to buy” suggests that graphic novels may require more complex cognitive skills than just reading a regular book. It can be used to teach techniques such as dialog. It can also be used, as previously suggested as a bridge to other forms of literature.
Not only can the graphic novel be brought into the classroom to teach a new form of literature, it can easily cross barriers into other subjects such as history. Schwarz suggests that The Cartoon Hisotry of the Universe II which explains the history of China and India up until the fall of Rome could be easily used in a history class, of coarse it carries with it the stigma of irony and humor. The 9-11 Commission Report is available online to download for students, it contains 585 pages of facts, actions, and statistics. However, the graphic novel version, The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation, which includes the same truth of that tragic day in American history is available. When discussing their intentions on making the adaptation on National Public Radio, they stated “We are in the business of clarification and this is the perfect way to do it.” They insist on the fact that it is neither a comic book nor a graphic novel, it is a graphic journal. They thought it should be translated for the adult and the child that would think the 580 page report would be too overwhelming for. The two authors, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, insist that it is not at all simplified. It gives all the facts faster and could be paired with the graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers. In the classroom setting, not only do these novels present information faster but also equally accurate. These historical graphic novels can include, again, Maus, Barefoot Gen, Persepolis, Facts From Sarajevo and Palestine.
The benefits of the graphic novel in the classroom are endless and can be used for any subject. It opens up ideas of images effecting emotion, as expressed by Molly Bang, not only with colors but also with stereotyping. The bridge that comic books provide links the gap between low and high culture. Long before sparknotes.com and cliff notes, comic books reigned as the supreme force of condensed literature. Martin D. Perret, author of “Not Just Condenastion: How Comic Books Interpret Shakespeare”, states that in the 1950’s and 60’s Gilberton’s original Classic Illustrated produced comics that concentrated the most complex of Shakesperian text to words and pictures. When First Publishing took over Classics Illustrated the new prime audience was at the collegiate level. It is with both the pictures and the words, which are summarizations of Shakespeare’s, that the whole story comes together. The tradgedy of Hamlet is taken down from 40,000 lines down to 48 pages. His famous “To be or not to be” is taken down from 222 words to 14. Again, it is the images that carry the story, even the cover which is Hamlet’s father’s ghost summoning him presents the conflict of the story in a nutshell.
According to the National Institute for Literacy the “average composite literacy score or a native-born adult in the U.S. was 284 (Level 3); the U.S. ranked 10th out of 17 high-income countries”. It also states that by age seventeen 1 in 12 white, 1 in 50 latino and 1 in 100 African Americans can read and gain information from specialized text. Other statistics include the fact that reading scores for 9 year olds increased during the 1970;s but since 1980 have shown no improvement. The National Assessment of Education Progess found that reading for fun had a “positive relationship to average scores”, the more reading materials a child is introduced to has a direct correlation with their literacy scores. However, between 1971 and 1999 the average number of reading materials found in the home has decreased, less students read for fun, and more television was watched. It is due to these dire statistics that it is no surprise that in 2002, the theme of the annual Teen Read Week, sponsored by the youth branch of the American Library Association’s theme was “Get Graphic”. In July of that year the “New York Times’” cover story stated that “the comic book could become the next ‘new literary form’” (Mé ndez). Though, the graphic novel is not a band-aid for the crippled literacy rate, rather it is a temporary crutch to help reluctant readers read again. In that same article Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University states, “Once kids know how to read, there is no good reason to continue to use dumbed-down materials. They should be able to read powems, novels, essays, books that inform them, enlighten them, broaden their horizons.”
Yet, it is the stigma of the graphic novel’s past that makes it hard to produce an audience in the classroom. In Jonathan Culler’s article “Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature” he discusses the issues of contemporary literature by quoting Philippe Sollers, one of the leading theorists and practitioners of “residual” literature:
Perhaps the most striking feature of modern literature is the appearance of a new monolithic, comprehensive mode of writing, in which the distinctions among genres, which have been completely abandoned, give way to what are admittedly “books,” but books for which, we might say, no method of reading has yet been worked out. 52
Yet he gives credit to the nexus of discourse by stating that “our most crucial and tantalizing experiences of literature [are] located at the interstices of genre” (53). Theorists such as Janice Radway look beyond the ideals of “high art” and focus on the needs of the audience.
In classrooms across the country educators introduce electives such as jewelry making, woods class, and film. None of which introduce nor enforce literacy. The graphic novel has been used by Hollywood to create a new genre for film. To use novels such as V For Vendetta by Alan Moore, the Sin City collection by Frank Miller, Road to Perdition, Persepolis, Batman, Superman, From Hell, Ghost World, 300, X-Men, or A History of Violence paired with their film counterparts would be a productive way to show the process of film making and adaptation of the novel to the screen: the similarities and the differences.
It may be discussed that the graphic novel is in fact not a novel of “high art“. To dispute this, take Ian Watt’s article “From The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding” where he discusses the works of the authors that created classic “novels”. Watt simplifies the elements of a novel into the “lowest common denominator”. First, a novel must be realistic, not real necessarily but it has to give us a “true report of it” (365). It must show an individual experience which is unique and original. Watt states that Defoe and Richardson “are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or pervious literature” (366). Frank Miller and Alan Moore could very well be the Defoe and Richardson of the graphic novel genre. The second aspect of the novel is the idea of the individual. They are a verbal, and in the case of the artistic aspect of the graphic novel visual, expression of any one persons identity. Each person is given a name that is their proper name, not a type of label. For instance, in American Born Chinese “Danny” is the name of the main character. For every rule however there is an exception; “Superman” is a type, but then again in Melville’s Moby Dick “Ishmael” is a type, or at least holds a meaning derived from the Bible. The third part to a novel, according to Watt, is the time factor. There has to be a continuous flow of time throughout the novel. This helps shape the characters and their history. There has to be a history of the past to help explain the actions of the present and future. Lastly, there must be a setting. The author has the power of “putting man wholly into his physical setting”, which according to Allen Tate is the “distinctive capacity of the novel form” (375). One thing that the graphic novel can absolutely avoid that other novels such as Robinson Crusoe can not is what Locke calls “abuses of language” or figurative language. The visual literacy aspect of the graphic novel denies any figurative language to fully take place. Watt states that the popularity of the novel in the past two hundred years is based on the correspondence between life and art. The graphic novel can only further this connection.
Persepolis is a graphic novel depicting the Iran Revolution through the eyes of a little girl which happens to be a true story. This particular novel is aimed toward the young adult market. However, according to WRCB TV, for Eastbrook Middle School Persepolis is off the shelves due to “offensive language an images”. Johnny Bishop, a parent of a middle schooler at Eastbrook, claims the book is full of filth, “… the more you read, the worse it gets”. It is Bishops fear that if they read enough of this perception of the truth, they will think it is okay to treat women the way they do in Iran. Though the book got pulled, is being reviewed, and the teacher apologized, Bishop claims “too little too late” (Johnson). However, in the article “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis” Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley argue that Persepolis crosses all barriers in genre. They state it can be found in autobiography, children’s or young adult’s literature, graphic novel, middle east history, and women’s studies. Though Satrapi’s work is Westernized through the “comic book” form, its universality lies in the ideals of a childhood experience. Throughout the novel as her experiences grow and her perception of the world changes, the reader is able to see her physically change, grow and alter. She begins to get weighed down by the realities of revolution. Realities, according to Bishop, that are “not suitable for anybody in the middle school on down” (Johnson).
Watchmen, which is one of “Time” Magazines 2005’s 100 best novels, and that includes all novels, not just graphic, is one of the most influential graphic novels of all time. It is a compilation of twelve separate comic books put together which ran from 1986-1987. The plot consists of one former superheroes getting murdered. The novel opens with Edward Blake being found on the street below his appartment, having been thrown from the window. The investigation turns up nothing. In the history of the United States in Watchmen the Soviet Union and America have been waging a nuclear arms race. The plot of the story is not as important and the idea behind it. The last page of the novel states, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies” or “Who watches the watchmen”, it is a quote taken from the epigraph of the Tower Commission Report in 1987. The whole idea of constantly being watched. In Michel Foucault’s article “Disciple and Punish” he talks about the internalization of social control in western society. He also talks about the body itself being a mode for social discipline. Watchmen deals with the perception of authority surveillance being constant yet allusive. Foucault believes that the body is only useful if it is both productive and subjected. The power that ones body holds is the power that is expressed, not innately within. Foucault argues that power and knowledge fall hand in hand. However, the last thing that Rorschach states to his subordinate, who is a dense comical character, is “I leave this entirely in your hands” (32).
It is not the power-knowledge relationship that should be studied, it is the transformation of this relationship. Foucault uses the measures that the hierarchy had in place when the plague had entered a town. The powerful were there to lead, to take role and to segregate much like the retired superheroes must do to save New York. However, this form of discipline restricts citizens to their homes, treated like caged animals where they were only worth the paper they were written on if they could show their face upon role call. Everyone has someone to answer to. In Foucault’s preparations for the plague there was the man who locked the doors, there was the man that took the key, there was the man that supervised both men. In a system of power there is always someone hire on the chain of command. No one was given the leisure of stepping out or into a house without the permission on someone in charge. All of humanity, even today is divided up into the normal and the abnormal the only difference is how we deal with it. Panopticon is the idea that every human being who has a superior is only seen as a source of information not communication with one another. The subordinates are kept separate from one another but visual for the guardian, this visibility is a trap for the inmates. The big brother aspect of Bentham’s Panopticon is so that the inmate knows that he is always visible, maybe not always watched, but he could be at any moment. Foucault goes on to say that power does not lie in an individual but in the dispersion of power. He insists that the makeup of the panopticon is the relation of discipline not the relations of power. The processes that make up the discipline relations are as follows. One: The functional inversion of the disciplines. This means that the output of aptitude and speed is more than the input. Two: The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. This means that the hierarchy must analyze and survey the people constantly from any side at any time. Three: The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. Foucault says that the government must rule the punishment and control of the people under an unbiased rule. These techniques are all used to form a society based on rules and structure. People are surveyed in the panopticon the same way they were quarantined during the plague. There is a function to every part of the form. As a mass society is unstructured. It is the development of roles that keeps order. All of these disciplines recognize and must bring in power relations. The breakdown of this power forms the machine which keeps society running. The acceptance of the rules of discipline make a functioning society possible. This period, the “Enlightenment”, which created the liberties of the people also created the disciplines for them to follow. The function that Watchmen and Foucault provide together is that every graphic novel has it’s root in theory.
Black Hole by Charles Burns, as stated earlier, is a graphic novel satire of the AIDS epidemic in the 1970s. It introduces the sexually transmitted disease as a deformity that effects the students of one high school. It ruins the lives of everyone it comes in contact with. Though, the original outbreak was unexpected therefore the adolescence were careless about sex. It depicts the prevalence of alcohol and drugs in the society, therefore inhibiting the judgement of the teenagers. One such student, Chris Rhodes states, “We’d both been drinking a lot, so I guess I could blame it all on the booze, but it was more than that…” The lack of page numbers gives the book a sense of chaos, just like the virus itself. Chris loses her virginity to an infected boy. His infection had taken the form of a tiny mouth on his neck which, in fact, talked. However, Chris was unable to hear the muttering of the subconscious, which is what the tiny mouth expelled, due to the fact that she had lost her inhibitions.
Burns’ entire novel is black and white. The lack of color introduces the disease of deformity they are spreading as a black and white entity. Just like the AIDS outbreak, the students didn’t see it coming, they fell into a black hole of ruining their entire lives based on the bad decisions of one night. Though AIDS was a generally new virus to the United States, it was the threat of it that scared the nation. At one point in the story, the character of Dave, who has a facial deformity due to the virus, attempts to purchase chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The man behind him torments him saying, “Why don’t you just leave? Nobody wanted you here.” In response, Dave pulls out a gun, hits the man in the face, spits in his mouth and says, “See how easy that was? That’s all it takes… a little spit. Some saliva… and now you’re one of us.” Though, the American Red Cross states that there are no known cases of saliva by itself spreading HIV, the threat is still there. Another graphic novel that can be used to help as a cautionary tool is Pedro and Me. It is the true story of Pedro Zamora, from MTV’s “The Real World”, fight with AIDS. This novel has won the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book, 200 Publisher’s Weekly Best Book, 2000 Bay Area Book Reviewes Award for Best in Children’s Literature, 200 Eisner Nomination for Best Original Graphic Novel and YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, to name a few. Illnois Senator Lightford states in the Illinois Government News Network, “Knowledge and education are important to fighting the battle with HIV.” Yet, little information is produced in the classroom to introduce the problem to students. People aged 13-24 account for 13% of HIV cases. Three million cases of STDs and 870,000 teenagers become pregnant each year, in the state of Illinois alone (CCSSO). While the sentiment is there to resolve the issue, nothing is currently being done in the classroom to raise awareness.
The graphic novel as a learning device is by no means a new concept, however, as shelves are beginning to overflow with new novels, it is important to categorize. Barefoot Gen and American Born Chinese are both graphic novels that depict life within racial boundaries. Barefoot Gen: a Cartoon Story of Hiroshima is based on the Keiji Nakazawa’s true life experience of the atomic bomb being dropped on his hometown of Hiroshima when he was just a child. Though his story is blended in with the stories of others to create the 284 page piece. The story begins during World War II. Gen, Nakazawa’s alter ego, is just a child working with his family on the field of wheat that they leased. During this period of time his family is poor and food is hard to come by, mostly given to the soldiers. Though, their pots and pans used for cooking have been taken anyway to be made into ships. Gen’s father strongly opposes the war. He finds it to be wasteful of resources and lives. Because of this traitorous point of view his family is ridiculed and segregated from everyone else which only cuts off their means of living further. Their family is torn apart as one child goes to flight school where he attempts to change the worlds perception of his family, the younger children are sent to work in factories instead of school. The majority of the book leads up to the horror of the bomb but it, “Little Boy”, isn’t dropped until the last thirty pages. After the blast Gen sees the melting faces of people he knows, people he was just talking to. Clothes were burned or blasted off people die right in front of him as he runs through remains to help his family and enemies alike. The book concludes with the introduction of Gen’s little sister after the war had already claimed his siblings and his father.
American Born Chinese is not nearly as emotional or dark. It incorporates both the historical content of the famed Monkey King and the trials and tribulations of growing up as an American born Chinese boy. The Monkey King aspect of the novel is an ancient myth passed down from generation to generation, celebrated in China, lesser known in the United States. He is basically a heroic monkey born out of rock where when he first opened his eyes “rays of light” poured into the sky to which heaven took notice. However, throughout the novel the Monkey king becomes mad with the power he obtains by mastering “four major heavenly disciplines” then later the “four major disciplines of invulnerability”. Tse-Yo-Tzuh buries the Monkey king in a mountain of rock where he remains for five hundred years when he is finally able to relinquish himself from the fortress of his own self-importance and become what he was originally made into, a monkey. Jin, the young boy in the novel also struggles with issues of esteem, however, he finds himself an outcast in a society where the majority reject the minorities. The minorities are he and his friend Wei-Chen (who we later find out is the Monkey King’s son living as a human for forty years attempting not to implement a human vice). The novel recognizes those outside of the norm. Jin realizes in the end that who he is is who he is supposed to be. Both novels show life outside of the comfort level of the typical young adult reader, which is what they are meant for. Gen teaches the reader the horrors of war. The pictures illustrate a world that no American can imagine. They remain a helpful, yet disturbing guide to the hell Hiroshima had caused. American Born Chinese is more upbeat, Jin carries with him the weight of his race, which eventually is lifted off him when he realizes that Jin is a cool guy to be. Both novels can be used in either an English or a history class. Neither novel is remotely useless.
Ghost World is a graphic novel based on the awkwardness of life after high school. It was made into a movie starring Steve Bucemi, Thora Birch, and Scarlett Johanson. The problem with the education that adolescence are receiving is that they are accustomed to the movie version of life. They could read, but they could get the same information faster and less actively. The idea of Ghost World is to find one’s own identity, to be creative. Mikhail Bakhtin defines the novel as “a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (674). The graphic novel finds it’s own “social significance” by “Characteristic intentions and accents” (675). Ghost World uses “specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones; thus it can create slogan-words, curse-words, [and] praise-words.” The characters Enid and Rebecca at times make up their own version of the English language. Daniel Clowe’s makes an appearance in his own graphic novel as a nerdy comic book writer who is shunned by Enid, introducing the metafictional aspect of the novel. The book itself covers taboo subjects such as sex, pedophilia, molestation, Satanism, rape, cancer and STDs yet, the characters are complex and true. It definatly situates itself far from the “generic and professional stratification of the common literary language” as Bakhtin would say. “Discourse in the Novel”, Bakhtin’s essay he states, “In the English comic novel we find a comic-parodic reprocessing of almost all the levels of literary language, both conversational and written, that were current at the time” (678).
Art Spiegelman’s Maus: My Father Bleeds History is the most complex yet pedagogically useful graphic novel thus far. In his six chapters, originally published in Raw magazine from 1980-1985, he openly discusses the brutality of the Holocaust. The artistic depiction of the Holocaust anthropomorphizes the Jewish population as mice, the Nazis as cats, and the police as pigs. This representation shows that people, in situations as disturbing as war, become nothing but animals. The only part of the novel that humanizes the characters is in the section titled “Mouse Holes” where a comic is found that talks about the suicide of Anja, Art’s mother. The history of the Holocaust is given through Spiegelman’s memories of his father’s stories. Maus covers the mutilation and genecide of the Jews through pictures of hangings, slave labor and death. Spiegelman’s Maus puts emphasis on both the drawings and the words. For instance, the style that he uses is straight forward, pictures side by side, however in cases of extreme suffering or severely important information, the pictures turn and the frames darken. The realities of Maus are shown through maps and the timeline that his father presents while “telling” the story. These realities are personal to Spiegelman as well as universal in Holocaust survivor stories. Though the story shows the struggle of one man, the pictures make it clear that it could be the story of any person, the animals look similar. The story, however, is not just about World War Two. Maus also shows the relationship between Speigelman and his father, it depicts the complex nature of a survivor and the generations that follow. This novel is timeless and a powerful tool to introduce to Holocaust and World War Two.
The hesitation that teachers show when approaching graphic novels is completely valid. Not only do they face complaints from parents, but they also have to deal with the uncomfortable nature of the, sometimes pornographic, image before them. Though this form opens the door to discourse about the word and image relationship as well as the image to person relationship. In high school, the majority of students were asked to read The Catcher in the Rye. Throughout the novel Holden fantasizes about sex, he gets upset at the thought of his buddy Stradlater having sex with Jane, and he gets gets aroused by the idea of spitting on a girls face during sex. If these thoughts and actions we depicted pictorially, The Catcher in the Rye would be banned from the cannon. Even the worst graphic novel seems to have less swears that what Holden Caulfield comes up with. Picture Holden Caulfield smoking a cigarette, walking through the subway with a huge “Fuck you” in red ink in the background on a black and white picture (Salinger 204). That image would be enough to bad it with the rest of the graphic novels.
The problem becomes what Louis Althusser classifies as the ideological state apparatus’ that inhibit us from truly discovering the arts. Even in the simplist form, men do not see the world around them for how it truly is, they attempt to mold the experience to fit their personal ideologies. It is when a group of people with the same ideologies come together to form a school board that censors art like the graphic novel that can only improve literacy and a child’s range of experience that ideology becomes a barrier. Ideology has a material existence, it is found all around us. Take for instance the Bible, which is also being made into a graphic novel, it represents the views that people instill into generations to conform to the written word of a “higher power” the book itself holds material form, the same material form that Black Hole has, yet the Bible is used to exhibit a way of life rather than a form of entertainment and pure, uncorrupted education. Altheusser states that the term “ideas” has disappeared, while the terms “practices, rituals, and ideological apparatus” have appeared. The words that have survived are “subject, conscious, belief and action”. In this world that Altheusser proposes ideas have halted, he states “there is no practice except by and in an ideology; there is no ideology expect by the subject and for subjects”. With this type of reasoning, the proposal of a graphic novel into a system of ideologies becomes a ridiculous notion. However, it is the idea of the subject that might change the system of ideology. There are two types of subjects, the subject that is submissive and gives up all freedoms except the freedom to accept their submission or subject two who is an author of and responsible for their actions. In a world of set ideologies, with the slightest hope for “idea” to reappear, subject two is our only hope.
Graphic Novels are not only meant to be taught to observe but it is also an active art. Savannah College of Art and Design offers a graduate program in cartoon/comics. In James Sturm’s “Comics in the Classroom” he discussed the steps forward that the genre as an major have taken. Sturm, a teacher at Savannah College of Art and Design has built a curriculum around the idea that comics can not only influence your art, but you can also go into the field. Just as it takes visual literacy to read a graphic novel, it takes a vast array of skill to familiarize oneself with the ability to write through pictures. Research skills are also taught so their stories are convincing and realistic. The field of graphic art can also lead to a career in animation, illustration, storyboards for marketing, and journalism. Just like any other subject taught a collegiate level, there are aspects to the graphic novel that surpass the simplicity of simple comics. On March 19th, 2008 Ivan Brunetti presented “The Cartoonist’s Eye” for the Illinois State University English Department Lecture Series. He is an instructor at Columbia College in Chicago. He had put together An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Caroons, and True Stories which was published in 2006 as well other works. He started his lecture by stating the importance of the doodle. He said, “Comics are not just a series of pictures they are a sequence.” This is the aspect of the graphic novel that some readers take for granted, much like a movie, the frames have to be edited to show only the most important aspects of the story. Brunetti stressed that words and pictures not only work together but are an emulsion of writing. In Sturm’s piece he states that “if academe begins to recognize an encourage the talented students who have chosen this medium, institutions can not only duplicate the growth of the sequential-art department […] but also play a crucial role in advancing an important new art form”. In Universities across the nation, young artists are encouraged in the “high arts” of painting, sculpting, dance, and poetry, the same should be done for the sequential art.
There is no time like the present to increase the awareness of this coming of age art form. In Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” she takes a psychoanalytic approach to the fascination with film . Much like film a graphic novel is the combination of dialog and images. One of the main issues that educators have with the graphic novel is the stereotypical depiction of women and the blatant racism of white masks equal good and black masks equaling evil. Through film she states that women represent the lack of phallus in a heliocentric society. Women in general are not made to make meaning but represent meaning. She states that film, much like the sequential art form of the graphic novel, takes people as objects and subjects them to a controlling and curious gaze, though part of the magnitude of the graphic novel is the illustrator wants that gaze to be met with intrigue and a curiosity of why that image is the way it is. Mulvey states that the “I” is split between the active male and the submissive female. However, this seems to be an over-exaggeration of the age old fairytale, women as victims, argument. She states that women are sexualized, fall in love with a man, and then become the property of them and that full plots revolve around this system of differences. Mulvey’s argument fails in the fact that it lumps all stories together. That is to say, if a theorist claimed that all women in novels are subject to the rule of the male ego. Her assertions are too vague. Though, in any form of art the reader, viewer, audience is the “invisible guest” it remains to be the power of that guest to assert their own assumptions onto the media. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s article “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception” states that culture ultimately defines us, yet culture is defined by the capitalistic society in which we live. Mulvey directs her angst toward the film industry for over sexualizing women, yet Horkheimer and Adorno insist that the population gets what the population wants, or at least what the culture consumes. The relationship between film and comic art has been a tumultuous one.
The fear of graphic novels replacing the predecessors is irrational. There have always been shorter versions of the classics and yet there they still sit on the shelf. Not only are graphic novels being made into movies and visa versa, but novels much like the Shakespearian Hamlet, are also being made, or have been made, into condensed versions. This includes Frankenstein, The Bible, Murder on the Orient Express, The Odyssey, I Am Legend, and Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol. To assume that the graphic version of The Odyssey will replace the original, which has been around since ancient Greece, is an uninformed idea considering that sparknotes.com, cliff notes, and the internet have been around long enough to crush that theory.
Matthew P. McAllister, Ian Gordon, and Mark Jancovich’s essay “Buster Meets Superhero Comic, or Art House Meets Graphic Novel? The Contradictory Relationship Between Film and Comic Art” exemplifies the relationship that the two have. It is this close relationship that makes graphic novels hard to put into the classroom, they become to closely identifiable with movies and television and less identifiable with education. Due to the overwhelming success of graphic novels made into movies, it is simple to say the trend will continue as long as consumers keep buying tickets. It is a double-edged sword. While the movies that come out of the genre may be appealing to audiences, it is only if they are properly adapted and paired with their counterpart that they are useful, in any way, pedagogically.
The pedagogical use for the graphic novel is currently limited, for every two steps the genre takes forward, something or someone pushes it one step back. After the success of V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novelist all-star Alan Moore is working on his next novel Lost Girls which is blatantly pornographic. The characters are named Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy, depicted the adventures of lost women in earlier tales. This novel follows Moore’s huge successes, however the audience is limited and will by no means make it into a school or a library due to pedophilia, bestiality, and homosexuality. Though Moore states his reasoning behind doing the book is as follows:
Lost Girls originally came about because it struck me that there really isn’t any good, serious artwork dedicated to sex, given that it’s a human activity in which most of us have some interest. There are whole genres of books dedicated to the fields of, say, being a detective, or being a space patrolman, or being a zombie back form the dead, which are fairly rarefied in terms of their actual human application. But he only genre that is actually dealing the sexual material is this gritty, unpleasant, under-the-counter kind of genre, where there are absolutely no standards.
This, according to “Publisher Weekly” is why Top Shelf Publishers is willing to stake it’s entire business, literally, on this publication. However, with this step forward artistically, Moore is creating a chasm around the genre in general. There are standards for graphic novels. Just as there are for novels. In this period of transition, Lost Girls seems to put a crack in the fragile framework for the pedagogical use of the form. But then again, in George Gustine’s article “For Graphic Novels, a New Frontier: Teenage Girls” he discusses DC Comics attempt to draw teenage girls into the male dominated genre. Like any other work of literature aimed toward teen girls in the 21st century they push individuality. DC Comics will promote the girl emphasized comics with $250,000. Cecil Castellucci, author of PLAIN Jane graphic novels explains that the experiences of her characters comes from the real experiences of her youth making the work accessible to anyone who lives in this world. The atypical demographic makes the minx series of comics, including PLAIN Jane, a source for growth, trial and error. Not only is the genre growing across demographics, but across continents. Tara Mulholland’s article “Britain Embraces the Graphic Novel” she begins by explaining the original opinion that Britian had on the subject: juvenile. The graphic novels that began to change it all across the pond were Ethel and Ernest and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Manga, Japanese comics, are also making their way into British culture. HarperCollins introduced its first series in summer 2007: the “Agatha Christie Comic Strip Editions”. Sales have increased 41% in one year for graphic novels in Britian. The new popularity, again, gives partial credit to the term “graphic novel” considering “comic” stigmatized the genre previously. One step backward, two steps forward.
However, once again in a society that is overwrought with illiteracy, incompetence and ignorance, any step that could lead to a child picking up a book, is a step in the right direction. While society perpetuates generation after generation whose personal goals it is to avoid reading as much as possible, it is important to look back at the potential of what is right in front of us. There is more to the graphic novel than “BAM! ZOOT! WHACK!” As stated, literacy is directly related with the options that are given to children. If the reluctant reader refuses to sit down and read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the graphic novel is there to aid in the discovery of knowledge and the introduction to a media source that includes both visual literacy and competence of language. This leads to the connection that links interest and knowledge. Since its arival in newspapers across America in the late 1800’s people have grown to accept and appreciate comics, then graphic novels, as part of the American culture. The industry will continue to grow if educators and parents alike take the right steps to furthering the literacy of their children and students; because it is the right thing to do. The Department of Education’s website asserts the “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001”. President George W. Bush stated, “Our children… deserve an education worthy of this great nation. Thoegther we will make sure that every child learns that that no child is left behind.” It is with this notion that educators must engage students in whatever form of literature that will provide them with the tools to expand their vocabulary and general understanding. As children we grow up on the keen idea of words and pictures forming our collective unconscious, as adolescence images and language are an emulsion of our perception of the world. Graphic novels help bridge the gap between now and tomorrow.
Ok, so I spent a half hour trying to link. Didn't work. Here's the copy and paste version.
Language’s effect on Society
The language mavens always say, "Oh, they're wrecking the language." And it's always girls and
working people. But languages change because they need to change. There are so many more girls and working people than there are language mavens.
—Muffy Siegel, American linguist, [On teenagers and others who make frequent use of the word like.] The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 2002
Language changes. Imagine ivy on a brick wall. The deep shades of green leaves, strong tube stems that reach out, grab the wall. Each arm moving up higher and higher and outward, trying to wrap around obstacles and intertwine within one another. Some limbs dying off, others just sprouting, all trying to expand, change, grow and live forever. This is language. This is how language works. As an organic metaphor, language is a living thing. It is an organism that grows, changes, and dies across time. While some languages may seem to die off into history, others mix together, combine, and tangle with one another in the hopes of growing. This is an accurate depiction of language.
Without question or hesitation, one can say that the influence of language on society and culture is monumental. Language is used in all aspects of society and in all stages of a culture's growth. Although “The Linguistic Foundation” is an article by Jonathan Culler that explains the basics of what linguistics is, it is very useful when determining what the relationship is between language and society.
The notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena is based on two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events with meaning, and hence signs; and second, that they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations. Culler 56
Basically, what happens in our culture is caused by and at the same time, effects what happens when we speak. If we want to take a closer look at the society of a given time period, we can look at how that time period used language and get some insight on its social structure. “The linguist’s task is not to study utterances for their own sake; they are of interest to him only in so far as they provide evidence about the nature of the underlying system, the English language” (Culler 57). I think this can be taken a bit further; the linguist has a second task for studying utterances, to see how that particular time in that particular culture acted. Language defines time periods. This can be seen in the breakdown of the English language; Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English.
However, there are consequences. By looking closely at language, we are able to see how language shifts and morphs over time. By this, I mean that the meanings behind words grow loose; meanings start to fall into that grey area and are not so distinctly defined. Michael Foucault did a good job of phrasing this concept:
I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language, the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, on e sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. Foucault 96.
In his article, "The Archaeology of Knowledge," Foucault describe's language's role in the overall society. He describes languages as systems that "embody the ideas, values, and shared vocabularies of communities of knowledge" (Rivkin and Ryan 90).
Foucault does outline the obvious opposing side in another one of his articles, "The Discourse on Language," that shows how our society impacts our language.
In a society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar of these concerns what is prohibited. We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, can speak of anything. Foucault 216.
We inherently know that society puts restrictions on what we can say, where, and when. Even in a society as sturdy on "free speech" as ours, we still know that we cannot walk into an airport and yell "bomb" as loud as we can without serious repercussions. However, just as time changed the impact of society on language (yelling "bomb" in an airport wasn't as much of a problem a hundred years ago as it is now), time creates a similar impact with language on society. The word like is an excellent starting point. Like is the definitive example of how language changes through time and how society can impact language, and how language can impact society. And this perfect example is happening right now.
History of Like
Like as a Verb
The word like has taken dozens of forms throughout the years, all of which stemming from the time period that used the word. Like was used as a verb with the definition meaning to be pleasing as early as c. 888 but was spelled “licode;” I interpret this spelling as our modern version “liked.” Moving into later years, like took on another definition, still in the verb case, as meaning to please, or be pleasing to a person. This occurred in 971, spelled “lician.” Years later in 1250 the definition of the word changed slightly to be pleasing to someone. Just a short period after that, the definition took a reverse, meaning that a sentence may be translated as saying “to like ill,” meaning to be displeased. This turn-around occurred in 1320.
Five years later, the word grew a little more with the definition now extending to mean someone who is in good condition or doing well. Like was used to imply a kind of pretending or imitation in 1426. Of course the spelling of the word varied slightly than how we would recognize it today, during that time the word was spelled “lyke.” Soon after, we run into a new stem of the definition as it reaches to include someone taking pleasure out of something or someone; a person approving of something. It was with this definition that in 1430 we find the word visually recognizable as our modern version, “liked.” Also as a verb, like was used as a verb meaning to fashion a certain likeness, or comparing to something as early as 1450. Using like to mean finding something agreeable was first used in 1200, though made popular by Chaucer in 1385 and even popular still by Shakespeare in 1590 when Shakespeare found a new phrase to put the word into; “if you like” became public.
Like as a Noun
Like took the form of a noun later than it did as a verb, but it was used as a noun in respect as something was considered to have a “likeness” to something else, to have a resemblance, and was used mainly in proverbial expressions. Some of these expressions may include early versions of like to like, like draws like, like begets like, like cures like, etc. These usages began in 1375. However in 1425 the noun version of like was introduced to mean “at one’s own pleasure.” Using like to mean something similar, or the same kind of thing, came about in 1553. The notion that someone has a “liking” for someone else was first introduced in 1589. In 1592, the word was used in a way that included numbers; “and the like” was used as a formula to avoid further enumeration. Like was used to make another comparison, but this time as a negative one in 1637. This usage translates into “the likes of” someone. Yet it wasn’t until 1851 that we see the earliest evidence of the word like meaning to have affection for or preference to something.
Like as an Adjective
When describing something that is similar in shape, size, color, or any other trait, like can be used. The earliest examples of this are found in the year 1200. If two or more things were being described, and they had similar characteristics, an author can use like to compare them as an adjective. A modern example of this would be the sentence: They were as like as two peas. This usage didn’t occur until 1375. Much later, like took on the new meaning as an adjective to mean alike in a pair. The phrase “share and share alike” would be an example of this, and made its introductory appearance in 1540. Although another formula type definition came about in 1548 but this time numbers were not the subject of the sentence; people were. The phrase “like master like man” (as the master, so do the man), would be a modern example. Around this time, like was beginning to be used in mathematics as well. When studying “like signs” or “like quantities,” a mathematician can credit the year 1557 with this usage.
Between the years 1654 and 1666, like was being used with the sensory words feel, look, and sound to create the notion of “feeling like something.” We may use the word like in a question or a phrase meaning roughly “what is she like?” This is a way to use like as an adjective and was used much later than the first example and didn’t arrive until 1684. Like can be used to signify a particular class, or group as well. In 1886 we see an example of this with the subject of the sentence being grouped into a particular kind of profession.
Like as a Suffix
Like took its suffix form as early as 1470. This usage essentially meant “like one who is something,” referring to comparing two or more people. However, around 1598 the word turned to a slightly different meaning. This form carried the definition of something that is similar to something else (not necessarily people), the same kind of definition we would apply to our modern usage and still use today. However, between 1564 and 1578 a new definition of the like suffix surfaced. This new definition covered something that was done in the manner of something else. Interestingly enough, we still carry the like suffix usage today even if we may not recognize it. The –ly suffix that can be applied to the base form of a word is a form of like, as a shortening of the word.
Uses of Like
Like as a discourse particle
I, like, don't know what to do.
Georgia M. Green wrote an article for the University of Illinois that focused specifically on discourse particles1. Although she described that discourse particles, such as like, are not meaningless, she does portray them in a negative light. When she discusses like specifically, she makes it clear that the use of the word like as an adverbial discourse marker, the speaker comes off as being "too lazy." She claims that when adolescents and some adults use like too much they are becoming predictable in speech. This predictability leads into a lazy or "intellectually challenged" kind of speech.
She relates this also to "adolescent 'uptalk'." This, she defines, as being speech with an abundance of declarative sentences where there is a question intonation. The result, a view that the speaker needs conformation or assurance on something. These are traits she targets to adolescents, due to the facts that adolescents use this kind of speech much more frequently than adults do; although she does admit that adults are guilty as well.
Green goes on to describe how like is able to carry some responsibility for the expression that follows it. An example of this would be if the word like carried the same meaning as the words approximately, around, or about, in the following expression:
"He's like maybe, what? Ten or something?"
However, Green makes it clear that there are quotations that are often used where like does not follow that example, and can even carry the meaning that "there is a minor nonequivalence between that I'm saying and what I mean." This outlines that there has to be meaning in where like fits into the sentence and cannot be just 'thrown in anywhere.' She gives us the following scenario:
Mother: Mrs. Kramer told me you were at the mall at 5:30 yesterday afternoon.
Teenager: But Mom, I couldn't have been, because I was at, like, basketball practice then.
Green points out that if the teenager uses like in this manner, the mother will most likely suspect that the teenager was not really at practice.
Like as a hedge
I have, like, no money.
The restaurant is, like, five miles from here.
When like is used as a hedge, it is used to mean that the phrase that follows it is an approximation, an exaggeration, or that the following phrases are not quite accurate, but close enough.
1. Green, Georgia M. "Discourse Particles in Natural Language Processing." Talk presented at Ohio State
University. (November 2000).
Like as a quotative
Like is sometimes used to introduce a quotation or paraphrase, especially if the quote is being recited from short-term memory and therefore may or may not be exact. If the speaker changes his or her voice to impersonate the person who said the quotation, it is probably in exact words. As in the examples below, Like for this usage is always joined with a "to be" verb (was, were, is etc).
Examples:
Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said 'Goodbye' and you were like 'NO WAY!' and then I was all 'We pretended we were going to murder you'? That was great.
He was like, I'll be there in five minutes.
He was like [speaker's voice deepens], "you need to leave the room right now!"
Like can also be used to communicate a pantomime, or to paraphrase an explicitly unspoken idea or sentiment:
I was like [speaker rolls eyes].
I was like, who does she think she is?
Like as an adverb
Like can be used as an adverb meaning "nearly" or to indicate that the phrase in which it appears is to be taken metaphorically. This is normally considered to be 'lazy' speech. Examples:
I, like, died.
They, like, hate it!
Grammaticalization of Like
Teresa Meehan wrote an article in 1991 (entitled “It’s Like, ‘What’s Happening in the Evolution of Like?’: A theory of Grammatcalization”), explaining the changes like is going through in Modern English2. She claims that like changes forms from a content word to a function word. Content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; although some adverbs can function like function words.
2. Meehan, Teresa. “It’s Like, ‘What’s Happening in the Evolution of Like?’: A theory of Grammatcalization.” Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics. 1991. V. 16 (37-51).
The purpose of a content word is to provide a stable meaning, a concrete example of something. A function word, on the other hand, is a word that provides a meaning as more of a syntactic function. These words have more of an ambiguous meaning and serve to show the relationships between other words in the sentence. Articles, pronouns, and conjunctions are prime examples of function words.
Meehan draws up a table in which she gives her readers a brief outline of the history of the word. She explains that in this table we can see that the different meanings of like have changed in their focus of definition. She claims that the older meanings of the word, meanings like “similar to” and “approximately,” have a more focused definition and a more limited scope of meaning than newer definitions of like such as “as if” and “for example.”
She even shows on her table how like has undergone changes where there is no lexical definition of the word, these are the changes that transform like into a function word. The new functions that like is able to take on is to create more focus on other parts of the sentence, and to quote another source. Her example of a focus sentence would be
She’s like really pregnant.
In this sentence like is creating more focus on the state of being, “pregnant,” whereas if like is removed, the focus of the sentence shifts to the subject, “she.” The second function that like takes on is that of a quotative.
Although Meehan does express her ideas on like changing grammatical forms from a content word into a function word, she does point out that all of these meanings and functions are currently coexisting. Even though there is a shift and change in meaning, no meaning has been lost at this point in Modern English.
Alexandra D’Arcy would agree with Meehan. In her article, “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact from Fiction,” she too remarks on the grammaticalization changes of like.3 However, D’Arcy’s argument comes from the perspective that the different uses of like by adolescents can be seen as commentary on the intelligence level of the speakers. She also addresses other myths surrounding the use of like such as like is meaningless, women say like more than men do, and that like is an Americanism first introduced by Valley Girls and Valspeak. D’Arcy takes these myths and like’s meaning change head on.
She began by first outlining what the different myths surrounding like are:
Like is just like, that is, there is one like that is recycled repeatedly.
Like is meaningless; it simply signals a lack of articulacy.
Women say like more than men do.
Like began with the Valley Girls.
Only young people, and adolescents in particular, use like.
Like can be used anywhere in a sentence.
3. D’Arcy, Alexandra. “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact from Fiction.” American Speech. 2007. V. 82, No. 4 (386-419)
In her article, D’Arcy relied on the data that was compiled by the Toronto English Archive, where they gathered “over 350 hours of casual conversational data with speakers between the ages of 9 and 92, all of whom were born and raised in the city” (D’Arcy 389). D’Arcy uses this data to attack the myths that surround like and to build her overall case that like has grammatically changed over time. She begins with each myth, one at a time.
Myth Number One: Like is Meaningless
This is where D’Arcy’s argument sounds the most like Meehan’s. She begins by first explaining that there are five prescriptive functions of like in a given written or spoken sentence;
Verb: I don’t really like her that much.
Noun: He grew up with the likes of all great fighters.
Adverb: It looks like a snail; it just is a snail.
Conjunction: It felt like everything had dropped away.
Suffix: I went, “[groan]” or something stroke-like.
These are the forms that Meehan, and ultimately D’Arcy as well, would describe as grammatical content words.
There are however, D’Arcy claims, other forms of like. These she describes as Vernacular Uses/Functions of Like;
Quotative Complementizer: I was like, “Where do you find these people?” (f/19)
Approximate Adverb: You know, it was like a hundred and four [degrees], but it lasted for about two weeks.(m/84)
Discourse Marker: Nobody said a word. Like my first experience with death was this family. (f/82)
Discourse Particle: She’s like dumb or something. Like I love her but she’s like dumb. (f/18)
Through these examples and differences in meanings between the forms of like, D’Arcy was about to outline how like can’t be meaningless within a sentence. In fact, the particular kind of use of like can help to describe the event or the speaker with more clarity depending on how like is used.
Myth Number Two: Only Women Say Like
A common belief surrounding like is that both men and women use the word, but women have a tendency to use it more often than men. Again, D’Arcy used the data collected from the Toronto English Archive and broke down the uses of like and organized them by gender. What she found was that the question of who uses like more, men or women, is greatly dependant on what form of the vernacular is being looked at. Her table looks as follows:
Clearly, we can see that although women use like more than men as a quotative, adverb, and discourse marker. However, men use like more often than women as a particle, a functional projection (where like is located hierarchically between the tense phrase and the verb), and as a predicate adjective. The greatest margin of difference in usage between men and women is with the quotative form, which also has the greatest usage of all other forms.
Myth Number Three: Like Originated with Valley Girls and Adolescents
It is a fairly common belief that the introduction of the different forms and functions of like originated from California and the West coast. In particular, teenagers were attributed with the various functions and uses that identified their status in society. Many felt and still feel that these uses were appropriate during these particular periods in a person’s life, yet when the person matures and grows more sophisticated, these uses are dropped and become “shrugged off when its suitability wanes” (D’Arcy 398). Many linguists however, may see a differentiation between the individual uses and the locale where it originated. Many people see these uses of like as Americanisms, but linguists see like more detailed than that.
For example, the marker form, the adverb, and the particle forms developed among counterculture groups in New York during the 1950’s and 1960’s, such as the jazz, cool, and Beat groups. The quotative complementizer formed much later in California, during the 1970’s and hitting its peak during the 1980’s. Therefore, the only form of like that truly has Valley Girl origins is the quotative form of be like; whereas the discourse marker and particle have much longer histories and have been influential in language long before hand.
D’Arcy also finds in her data that the use of like as a quotative is not limited to just adolescents and teenagers. Although the peak of those who use like as a quotative are between the ages of 17-19, the percentage declines yet is still apparent in speakers aged up into their 60’s. Her findings conclude that with speakers in their thirties, be like accounts for 26% of their quotative verbs overall. This would be the generation born in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, who would have been teenagers during the 1980’s. D’Arcy was able to find older data, from 1995, that recorded that speakers between the ages of 18 and 27 use the form be like at 13%. Currently, ten years later, the use of the same form for speakers between the ages of 25 and 29 has grown to 58%. This presents a dramatic increase in the same form and use of like for speakers at the same age; which is growing.
Myth Number Four: Like can be used Anywhere
The media and language commentators are to blame, according to D'Arcy, for the myth that like can be inserted anywhere in a given sentence. She even states that there are some linguistic sources that claim like can "occur grammatically anywhere in a sentence" (D'Arcy 408). D'Arcy addresses this issue right away and with strength; "While it is true that the combined functions of marker and particle account for a wide range of contexts across clause structure, it is also the case that these positions are not random" (D'Arcy 408). By looking at the data collected from the Toronto set, D'Arcy sees two distinct patterns of how like is used. First, the pattern of adverb + like and the second, like + adverb. The first pattern can be seen in the sample sentences she observed:
Speaker Oriented
I don't really like judge people on what music they listen to. (m/15)
We literally like cooked all the food. (m/26)
He actually like stood up. (m/21)
They honestly like threatened me. (m/21)
Subject Oriented
Andrea still like comes to lunch with us. (f/16)
Me and my friends, we always like took rulers. (m/11)
They like it but they never like played. (f/17)
The second pattern can be seen in these sample sentences:
Degree
A trade that I like really like was the one they had got from Jersey. (m/12)
Some people like totally fell into the mold. (f/19)
The glue like slightly falls off your hair. (f/11)
Manner
But people will like slowly get into it. (f/19)
And then he like slowly added more and more things. (m/15)
And then they like gradually changed like how they looked. (m/15).
These brief examples show that modern usages of like are not randomly placed within a sentence. They do follow a specific pattern and speech structure. D'Arcy gives a reason for why like seems as if it can go anywhere in the sentence: due to the ability of like to appear as many different forms (i.e lexical verb, noun, preposition, conjunction, suffix, quotative, discourse marker, etc), and due to the fact that many of these forms sound like one another, the illusion is created that like is versatile enough to go anywhere in the sentence. This also leads back to the first myth that like is completely meaningless, which it is not.
Of course, all of these are examples of like being used in the colloquial spoken English. In her article, "An Alternative View of Like: Its Grammaticalisation in Conversational American English and Beyond," Isabelle Buchstaller takes on the use of like in a more direct way.4 She lays out each use, then briefly describes those uses in clear examples. In a way, Buchstaller picks up where D'Arcy's article left off.
Like is a discourse sensitive item with multiple functions and ambiguous scope. I will show that even though its different uses are often highly ambiguous and overlapping, and therefore hard to pin down, it is nevertheless not justified to claim that like can have all functions in all contexts. Rather, the function it assumes is a given utterance depends on the intra- and extralinguistic context. (Buchstaller 23)
What Buschstaller is saying here, is like D'Arcy, she is recognizing that like can have multiple functions in modern colloquial English. However, Buschstaller goes a bit further than D'Arcy by saying that the functions of like depend on the rest of the sentence. Buschstaller takes D'Arcy's Myth Number Four, and takes it to the rest of the sentence.
Buschstaller begins by focusing on how like is used in non-quotative forms. "Like as a preposition or as a conjunction has a clearly comparative function with identity between the compared and the comparer" (Buschstaller 23). This is important to keep in mind because the following two functions are based off of like as a comparative meaning. The first that Buschstaller explains is the comparative to hedge meaning. She describes how like moves from a comparative to a hedge when the speaker inserts it in a sentence where the speaker doesn't want the audience, or receiver, to take the sentence too literally. A simple example sentence:
He ran like, sixty miles an hour!
It is understood by the receiver that the subject ran fast, but not at the sixty mile an hour rate. In this example, like hedges itself into the middle of the sentence and directs the irony to the receiver.
She discovered, like, a million stars.
Again, like is used in the middle of a sentence to exaggerate how many discoveries the subject has made. The receiver is expected to understand this exaggeration.
Buschstaller also discusses how like moves from a comparative to a filler. A filler is a word that is not given much meaning in a sentence but rather used as a hesatative sound. Other common fillers are oh, um, and well. However, unlike those other fillers, like "typically precedes afterthought modifications by speakers who want to continue their utterance but have difficulties formulating it" (Buschstaller 24). What she means by this is that a speaker will often times "jump into" the middle of a conversation and not have their utterance planned out. This impulsive move results in more needed time to complete their thoughts, leading to like being used as a filler in the middle of a sentence.
I'm taking math and it's like called Sequential Bias.
Here, the speaker hesitates because they forgot the name of their math class, and needed the extra time and space in discourse to remember it.
4. Buschstaller, Isabelle. "An Alternative View of Like: Its Grammaticalisation in Conversational American English and Beyond." Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics. 2001. No. 11 (21-41).
The article “I’m Like, “Say What?!’: A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative,” the issue of like as a quotative is broadened into the form of like + to be.5 The authors, Blyth, Recktenwald, and Wang, all focus their article on the use of like with the verb be. An example conversation may help make this formulation clearer:
When she said that, I said, “Well, is that in California?” ‘cause I wasn’t sure if it was in
California.
And she goes, “Yes.”
And I’m like, “Oh.” And I go, “Is that where the redwoods are?”
And she goes, “No.”
And I’m like, “Oh.”
This article was a case study with thirty participants. By listening to the way the participants used like, the authors were able to determine what significant factors lead to the use of be + like in spoken narrative English. What they found was that tense was the most significant factor for this specific use, while age was the second most significant factor. For tense, the participants were seventy-one percent more likely to use be + like in the present tense and twenty-eight percent likely in the past tense. For the aspect of age, sixty-eight percent of the participants within the ages of twenty to twenty-four used the combination, thirty-one percent of participants aged twenty-seven to thirty-two, and those aged thirty-eight to seventy-two didn’t use the combination together at all.
These authors did, however, come across findings that were slightly different than D’Arcy’s. They found that fifty-four percent of the participants who used be + like were male speakers, while only forty-six percent were females. This means that males are more likely to use be + like more than women, which is different than the data D’Arcy observed that outlined that females used the quotative more than men did. It is important to keep in mind that these are two different kinds of quotative that are being analyzed. D’Arcy’s quotative is like alone as the quotative form, while Blyth, Recktenwald, and Wang all look at the verb to be + like as a quotative combination.
Like can also be used and viewed in the academic settings. In his article, “Gender, Power, Discipline, and Context: On the Sociolinguistic Variation of okay, right, like, and you know in English Academic Discourse,” Erik Schleef describes how these tag words are used within a lecture and seminar context within different disciplines.6 Just looking at like, Schleef points out that within the humanities departments men and women use like fairly equally, while within the natural sciences departments, women use like much more often. Women also use like more often in seminar and lecture presentations.
5. Blyth, Carl, Jr.; Recktenwald, Sigrid.; Wang, Jenny. "I'm like, 'Say What?': A new quotative in American oral narrative." American Speech v. 65 (Fall '90): p. 215-7.
6. Schleef, Erik. “Gender, Power, Discipline, and Context: On the sociolinguistic Variation of okay, right, like, and you know in English Academic Discourse.” Texas Linguistic Forum. Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual symposium about Language and Society. April 16-18, 2004. 177-186.
However, the forms of like vary by discipline. “Like was used by all humanities instructors at least three times, by less than half of the natural sciences instructors, so that humanists used the discourse marker like 7.57 times more often in lectures and seminars than natural scientists do” (Schleef 180). Schleef gives an explanation of why the difference in disciplines; “The difference between the humanities and the natural sciences in the use of like…is primarily due to different traditions of discourse and the contexts which like is used. Humanities instructors and students express more opinions, views, values, and approximations than natural scientists, who give reports, descriptions, and present factual information.
The language mavens always say, "Oh, they're wrecking the language." And it's always girls and
working people. But languages change because they need to change. There are so many more girls and working people than there are language mavens.
—Muffy Siegel, American linguist, [On teenagers and others who make frequent use of the word like.] The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 2002
Language changes. Imagine ivy on a brick wall. The deep shades of green leaves, strong tube stems that reach out, grab the wall. Each arm moving up higher and higher and outward, trying to wrap around obstacles and intertwine within one another. Some limbs dying off, others just sprouting, all trying to expand, change, grow and live forever. This is language. This is how language works. As an organic metaphor, language is a living thing. It is an organism that grows, changes, and dies across time. While some languages may seem to die off into history, others mix together, combine, and tangle with one another in the hopes of growing. This is an accurate depiction of language.
Without question or hesitation, one can say that the influence of language on society and culture is monumental. Language is used in all aspects of society and in all stages of a culture's growth. Although “The Linguistic Foundation” is an article by Jonathan Culler that explains the basics of what linguistics is, it is very useful when determining what the relationship is between language and society.
The notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena is based on two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events with meaning, and hence signs; and second, that they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations. Culler 56
Basically, what happens in our culture is caused by and at the same time, effects what happens when we speak. If we want to take a closer look at the society of a given time period, we can look at how that time period used language and get some insight on its social structure. “The linguist’s task is not to study utterances for their own sake; they are of interest to him only in so far as they provide evidence about the nature of the underlying system, the English language” (Culler 57). I think this can be taken a bit further; the linguist has a second task for studying utterances, to see how that particular time in that particular culture acted. Language defines time periods. This can be seen in the breakdown of the English language; Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English.
However, there are consequences. By looking closely at language, we are able to see how language shifts and morphs over time. By this, I mean that the meanings behind words grow loose; meanings start to fall into that grey area and are not so distinctly defined. Michael Foucault did a good job of phrasing this concept:
I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language, the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, on e sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. Foucault 96.
In his article, "The Archaeology of Knowledge," Foucault describe's language's role in the overall society. He describes languages as systems that "embody the ideas, values, and shared vocabularies of communities of knowledge" (Rivkin and Ryan 90).
Foucault does outline the obvious opposing side in another one of his articles, "The Discourse on Language," that shows how our society impacts our language.
In a society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar of these concerns what is prohibited. We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, can speak of anything. Foucault 216.
We inherently know that society puts restrictions on what we can say, where, and when. Even in a society as sturdy on "free speech" as ours, we still know that we cannot walk into an airport and yell "bomb" as loud as we can without serious repercussions. However, just as time changed the impact of society on language (yelling "bomb" in an airport wasn't as much of a problem a hundred years ago as it is now), time creates a similar impact with language on society. The word like is an excellent starting point. Like is the definitive example of how language changes through time and how society can impact language, and how language can impact society. And this perfect example is happening right now.
History of Like
Like as a Verb
The word like has taken dozens of forms throughout the years, all of which stemming from the time period that used the word. Like was used as a verb with the definition meaning to be pleasing as early as c. 888 but was spelled “licode;” I interpret this spelling as our modern version “liked.” Moving into later years, like took on another definition, still in the verb case, as meaning to please, or be pleasing to a person. This occurred in 971, spelled “lician.” Years later in 1250 the definition of the word changed slightly to be pleasing to someone. Just a short period after that, the definition took a reverse, meaning that a sentence may be translated as saying “to like ill,” meaning to be displeased. This turn-around occurred in 1320.
Five years later, the word grew a little more with the definition now extending to mean someone who is in good condition or doing well. Like was used to imply a kind of pretending or imitation in 1426. Of course the spelling of the word varied slightly than how we would recognize it today, during that time the word was spelled “lyke.” Soon after, we run into a new stem of the definition as it reaches to include someone taking pleasure out of something or someone; a person approving of something. It was with this definition that in 1430 we find the word visually recognizable as our modern version, “liked.” Also as a verb, like was used as a verb meaning to fashion a certain likeness, or comparing to something as early as 1450. Using like to mean finding something agreeable was first used in 1200, though made popular by Chaucer in 1385 and even popular still by Shakespeare in 1590 when Shakespeare found a new phrase to put the word into; “if you like” became public.
Like as a Noun
Like took the form of a noun later than it did as a verb, but it was used as a noun in respect as something was considered to have a “likeness” to something else, to have a resemblance, and was used mainly in proverbial expressions. Some of these expressions may include early versions of like to like, like draws like, like begets like, like cures like, etc. These usages began in 1375. However in 1425 the noun version of like was introduced to mean “at one’s own pleasure.” Using like to mean something similar, or the same kind of thing, came about in 1553. The notion that someone has a “liking” for someone else was first introduced in 1589. In 1592, the word was used in a way that included numbers; “and the like” was used as a formula to avoid further enumeration. Like was used to make another comparison, but this time as a negative one in 1637. This usage translates into “the likes of” someone. Yet it wasn’t until 1851 that we see the earliest evidence of the word like meaning to have affection for or preference to something.
Like as an Adjective
When describing something that is similar in shape, size, color, or any other trait, like can be used. The earliest examples of this are found in the year 1200. If two or more things were being described, and they had similar characteristics, an author can use like to compare them as an adjective. A modern example of this would be the sentence: They were as like as two peas. This usage didn’t occur until 1375. Much later, like took on the new meaning as an adjective to mean alike in a pair. The phrase “share and share alike” would be an example of this, and made its introductory appearance in 1540. Although another formula type definition came about in 1548 but this time numbers were not the subject of the sentence; people were. The phrase “like master like man” (as the master, so do the man), would be a modern example. Around this time, like was beginning to be used in mathematics as well. When studying “like signs” or “like quantities,” a mathematician can credit the year 1557 with this usage.
Between the years 1654 and 1666, like was being used with the sensory words feel, look, and sound to create the notion of “feeling like something.” We may use the word like in a question or a phrase meaning roughly “what is she like?” This is a way to use like as an adjective and was used much later than the first example and didn’t arrive until 1684. Like can be used to signify a particular class, or group as well. In 1886 we see an example of this with the subject of the sentence being grouped into a particular kind of profession.
Like as a Suffix
Like took its suffix form as early as 1470. This usage essentially meant “like one who is something,” referring to comparing two or more people. However, around 1598 the word turned to a slightly different meaning. This form carried the definition of something that is similar to something else (not necessarily people), the same kind of definition we would apply to our modern usage and still use today. However, between 1564 and 1578 a new definition of the like suffix surfaced. This new definition covered something that was done in the manner of something else. Interestingly enough, we still carry the like suffix usage today even if we may not recognize it. The –ly suffix that can be applied to the base form of a word is a form of like, as a shortening of the word.
Uses of Like
Like as a discourse particle
I, like, don't know what to do.
Georgia M. Green wrote an article for the University of Illinois that focused specifically on discourse particles1. Although she described that discourse particles, such as like, are not meaningless, she does portray them in a negative light. When she discusses like specifically, she makes it clear that the use of the word like as an adverbial discourse marker, the speaker comes off as being "too lazy." She claims that when adolescents and some adults use like too much they are becoming predictable in speech. This predictability leads into a lazy or "intellectually challenged" kind of speech.
She relates this also to "adolescent 'uptalk'." This, she defines, as being speech with an abundance of declarative sentences where there is a question intonation. The result, a view that the speaker needs conformation or assurance on something. These are traits she targets to adolescents, due to the facts that adolescents use this kind of speech much more frequently than adults do; although she does admit that adults are guilty as well.
Green goes on to describe how like is able to carry some responsibility for the expression that follows it. An example of this would be if the word like carried the same meaning as the words approximately, around, or about, in the following expression:
"He's like maybe, what? Ten or something?"
However, Green makes it clear that there are quotations that are often used where like does not follow that example, and can even carry the meaning that "there is a minor nonequivalence between that I'm saying and what I mean." This outlines that there has to be meaning in where like fits into the sentence and cannot be just 'thrown in anywhere.' She gives us the following scenario:
Mother: Mrs. Kramer told me you were at the mall at 5:30 yesterday afternoon.
Teenager: But Mom, I couldn't have been, because I was at, like, basketball practice then.
Green points out that if the teenager uses like in this manner, the mother will most likely suspect that the teenager was not really at practice.
Like as a hedge
I have, like, no money.
The restaurant is, like, five miles from here.
When like is used as a hedge, it is used to mean that the phrase that follows it is an approximation, an exaggeration, or that the following phrases are not quite accurate, but close enough.
1. Green, Georgia M. "Discourse Particles in Natural Language Processing." Talk presented at Ohio State
University. (November 2000).
Like as a quotative
Like is sometimes used to introduce a quotation or paraphrase, especially if the quote is being recited from short-term memory and therefore may or may not be exact. If the speaker changes his or her voice to impersonate the person who said the quotation, it is probably in exact words. As in the examples below, Like for this usage is always joined with a "to be" verb (was, were, is etc).
Examples:
Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said 'Goodbye' and you were like 'NO WAY!' and then I was all 'We pretended we were going to murder you'? That was great.
He was like, I'll be there in five minutes.
He was like [speaker's voice deepens], "you need to leave the room right now!"
Like can also be used to communicate a pantomime, or to paraphrase an explicitly unspoken idea or sentiment:
I was like [speaker rolls eyes].
I was like, who does she think she is?
Like as an adverb
Like can be used as an adverb meaning "nearly" or to indicate that the phrase in which it appears is to be taken metaphorically. This is normally considered to be 'lazy' speech. Examples:
I, like, died.
They, like, hate it!
Grammaticalization of Like
Teresa Meehan wrote an article in 1991 (entitled “It’s Like, ‘What’s Happening in the Evolution of Like?’: A theory of Grammatcalization”), explaining the changes like is going through in Modern English2. She claims that like changes forms from a content word to a function word. Content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; although some adverbs can function like function words.
2. Meehan, Teresa. “It’s Like, ‘What’s Happening in the Evolution of Like?’: A theory of Grammatcalization.” Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics. 1991. V. 16 (37-51).
The purpose of a content word is to provide a stable meaning, a concrete example of something. A function word, on the other hand, is a word that provides a meaning as more of a syntactic function. These words have more of an ambiguous meaning and serve to show the relationships between other words in the sentence. Articles, pronouns, and conjunctions are prime examples of function words.
Meehan draws up a table in which she gives her readers a brief outline of the history of the word. She explains that in this table we can see that the different meanings of like have changed in their focus of definition. She claims that the older meanings of the word, meanings like “similar to” and “approximately,” have a more focused definition and a more limited scope of meaning than newer definitions of like such as “as if” and “for example.”
She even shows on her table how like has undergone changes where there is no lexical definition of the word, these are the changes that transform like into a function word. The new functions that like is able to take on is to create more focus on other parts of the sentence, and to quote another source. Her example of a focus sentence would be
She’s like really pregnant.
In this sentence like is creating more focus on the state of being, “pregnant,” whereas if like is removed, the focus of the sentence shifts to the subject, “she.” The second function that like takes on is that of a quotative.
Although Meehan does express her ideas on like changing grammatical forms from a content word into a function word, she does point out that all of these meanings and functions are currently coexisting. Even though there is a shift and change in meaning, no meaning has been lost at this point in Modern English.
Alexandra D’Arcy would agree with Meehan. In her article, “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact from Fiction,” she too remarks on the grammaticalization changes of like.3 However, D’Arcy’s argument comes from the perspective that the different uses of like by adolescents can be seen as commentary on the intelligence level of the speakers. She also addresses other myths surrounding the use of like such as like is meaningless, women say like more than men do, and that like is an Americanism first introduced by Valley Girls and Valspeak. D’Arcy takes these myths and like’s meaning change head on.
She began by first outlining what the different myths surrounding like are:
Like is just like, that is, there is one like that is recycled repeatedly.
Like is meaningless; it simply signals a lack of articulacy.
Women say like more than men do.
Like began with the Valley Girls.
Only young people, and adolescents in particular, use like.
Like can be used anywhere in a sentence.
3. D’Arcy, Alexandra. “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact from Fiction.” American Speech. 2007. V. 82, No. 4 (386-419)
In her article, D’Arcy relied on the data that was compiled by the Toronto English Archive, where they gathered “over 350 hours of casual conversational data with speakers between the ages of 9 and 92, all of whom were born and raised in the city” (D’Arcy 389). D’Arcy uses this data to attack the myths that surround like and to build her overall case that like has grammatically changed over time. She begins with each myth, one at a time.
Myth Number One: Like is Meaningless
This is where D’Arcy’s argument sounds the most like Meehan’s. She begins by first explaining that there are five prescriptive functions of like in a given written or spoken sentence;
Verb: I don’t really like her that much.
Noun: He grew up with the likes of all great fighters.
Adverb: It looks like a snail; it just is a snail.
Conjunction: It felt like everything had dropped away.
Suffix: I went, “[groan]” or something stroke-like.
These are the forms that Meehan, and ultimately D’Arcy as well, would describe as grammatical content words.
There are however, D’Arcy claims, other forms of like. These she describes as Vernacular Uses/Functions of Like;
Quotative Complementizer: I was like, “Where do you find these people?” (f/19)
Approximate Adverb: You know, it was like a hundred and four [degrees], but it lasted for about two weeks.(m/84)
Discourse Marker: Nobody said a word. Like my first experience with death was this family. (f/82)
Discourse Particle: She’s like dumb or something. Like I love her but she’s like dumb. (f/18)
Through these examples and differences in meanings between the forms of like, D’Arcy was about to outline how like can’t be meaningless within a sentence. In fact, the particular kind of use of like can help to describe the event or the speaker with more clarity depending on how like is used.
Myth Number Two: Only Women Say Like
A common belief surrounding like is that both men and women use the word, but women have a tendency to use it more often than men. Again, D’Arcy used the data collected from the Toronto English Archive and broke down the uses of like and organized them by gender. What she found was that the question of who uses like more, men or women, is greatly dependant on what form of the vernacular is being looked at. Her table looks as follows:
Clearly, we can see that although women use like more than men as a quotative, adverb, and discourse marker. However, men use like more often than women as a particle, a functional projection (where like is located hierarchically between the tense phrase and the verb), and as a predicate adjective. The greatest margin of difference in usage between men and women is with the quotative form, which also has the greatest usage of all other forms.
Myth Number Three: Like Originated with Valley Girls and Adolescents
It is a fairly common belief that the introduction of the different forms and functions of like originated from California and the West coast. In particular, teenagers were attributed with the various functions and uses that identified their status in society. Many felt and still feel that these uses were appropriate during these particular periods in a person’s life, yet when the person matures and grows more sophisticated, these uses are dropped and become “shrugged off when its suitability wanes” (D’Arcy 398). Many linguists however, may see a differentiation between the individual uses and the locale where it originated. Many people see these uses of like as Americanisms, but linguists see like more detailed than that.
For example, the marker form, the adverb, and the particle forms developed among counterculture groups in New York during the 1950’s and 1960’s, such as the jazz, cool, and Beat groups. The quotative complementizer formed much later in California, during the 1970’s and hitting its peak during the 1980’s. Therefore, the only form of like that truly has Valley Girl origins is the quotative form of be like; whereas the discourse marker and particle have much longer histories and have been influential in language long before hand.
D’Arcy also finds in her data that the use of like as a quotative is not limited to just adolescents and teenagers. Although the peak of those who use like as a quotative are between the ages of 17-19, the percentage declines yet is still apparent in speakers aged up into their 60’s. Her findings conclude that with speakers in their thirties, be like accounts for 26% of their quotative verbs overall. This would be the generation born in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, who would have been teenagers during the 1980’s. D’Arcy was able to find older data, from 1995, that recorded that speakers between the ages of 18 and 27 use the form be like at 13%. Currently, ten years later, the use of the same form for speakers between the ages of 25 and 29 has grown to 58%. This presents a dramatic increase in the same form and use of like for speakers at the same age; which is growing.
Myth Number Four: Like can be used Anywhere
The media and language commentators are to blame, according to D'Arcy, for the myth that like can be inserted anywhere in a given sentence. She even states that there are some linguistic sources that claim like can "occur grammatically anywhere in a sentence" (D'Arcy 408). D'Arcy addresses this issue right away and with strength; "While it is true that the combined functions of marker and particle account for a wide range of contexts across clause structure, it is also the case that these positions are not random" (D'Arcy 408). By looking at the data collected from the Toronto set, D'Arcy sees two distinct patterns of how like is used. First, the pattern of adverb + like and the second, like + adverb. The first pattern can be seen in the sample sentences she observed:
Speaker Oriented
I don't really like judge people on what music they listen to. (m/15)
We literally like cooked all the food. (m/26)
He actually like stood up. (m/21)
They honestly like threatened me. (m/21)
Subject Oriented
Andrea still like comes to lunch with us. (f/16)
Me and my friends, we always like took rulers. (m/11)
They like it but they never like played. (f/17)
The second pattern can be seen in these sample sentences:
Degree
A trade that I like really like was the one they had got from Jersey. (m/12)
Some people like totally fell into the mold. (f/19)
The glue like slightly falls off your hair. (f/11)
Manner
But people will like slowly get into it. (f/19)
And then he like slowly added more and more things. (m/15)
And then they like gradually changed like how they looked. (m/15).
These brief examples show that modern usages of like are not randomly placed within a sentence. They do follow a specific pattern and speech structure. D'Arcy gives a reason for why like seems as if it can go anywhere in the sentence: due to the ability of like to appear as many different forms (i.e lexical verb, noun, preposition, conjunction, suffix, quotative, discourse marker, etc), and due to the fact that many of these forms sound like one another, the illusion is created that like is versatile enough to go anywhere in the sentence. This also leads back to the first myth that like is completely meaningless, which it is not.
Of course, all of these are examples of like being used in the colloquial spoken English. In her article, "An Alternative View of Like: Its Grammaticalisation in Conversational American English and Beyond," Isabelle Buchstaller takes on the use of like in a more direct way.4 She lays out each use, then briefly describes those uses in clear examples. In a way, Buchstaller picks up where D'Arcy's article left off.
Like is a discourse sensitive item with multiple functions and ambiguous scope. I will show that even though its different uses are often highly ambiguous and overlapping, and therefore hard to pin down, it is nevertheless not justified to claim that like can have all functions in all contexts. Rather, the function it assumes is a given utterance depends on the intra- and extralinguistic context. (Buchstaller 23)
What Buschstaller is saying here, is like D'Arcy, she is recognizing that like can have multiple functions in modern colloquial English. However, Buschstaller goes a bit further than D'Arcy by saying that the functions of like depend on the rest of the sentence. Buschstaller takes D'Arcy's Myth Number Four, and takes it to the rest of the sentence.
Buschstaller begins by focusing on how like is used in non-quotative forms. "Like as a preposition or as a conjunction has a clearly comparative function with identity between the compared and the comparer" (Buschstaller 23). This is important to keep in mind because the following two functions are based off of like as a comparative meaning. The first that Buschstaller explains is the comparative to hedge meaning. She describes how like moves from a comparative to a hedge when the speaker inserts it in a sentence where the speaker doesn't want the audience, or receiver, to take the sentence too literally. A simple example sentence:
He ran like, sixty miles an hour!
It is understood by the receiver that the subject ran fast, but not at the sixty mile an hour rate. In this example, like hedges itself into the middle of the sentence and directs the irony to the receiver.
She discovered, like, a million stars.
Again, like is used in the middle of a sentence to exaggerate how many discoveries the subject has made. The receiver is expected to understand this exaggeration.
Buschstaller also discusses how like moves from a comparative to a filler. A filler is a word that is not given much meaning in a sentence but rather used as a hesatative sound. Other common fillers are oh, um, and well. However, unlike those other fillers, like "typically precedes afterthought modifications by speakers who want to continue their utterance but have difficulties formulating it" (Buschstaller 24). What she means by this is that a speaker will often times "jump into" the middle of a conversation and not have their utterance planned out. This impulsive move results in more needed time to complete their thoughts, leading to like being used as a filler in the middle of a sentence.
I'm taking math and it's like called Sequential Bias.
Here, the speaker hesitates because they forgot the name of their math class, and needed the extra time and space in discourse to remember it.
4. Buschstaller, Isabelle. "An Alternative View of Like: Its Grammaticalisation in Conversational American English and Beyond." Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics. 2001. No. 11 (21-41).
The article “I’m Like, “Say What?!’: A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative,” the issue of like as a quotative is broadened into the form of like + to be.5 The authors, Blyth, Recktenwald, and Wang, all focus their article on the use of like with the verb be. An example conversation may help make this formulation clearer:
When she said that, I said, “Well, is that in California?” ‘cause I wasn’t sure if it was in
California.
And she goes, “Yes.”
And I’m like, “Oh.” And I go, “Is that where the redwoods are?”
And she goes, “No.”
And I’m like, “Oh.”
This article was a case study with thirty participants. By listening to the way the participants used like, the authors were able to determine what significant factors lead to the use of be + like in spoken narrative English. What they found was that tense was the most significant factor for this specific use, while age was the second most significant factor. For tense, the participants were seventy-one percent more likely to use be + like in the present tense and twenty-eight percent likely in the past tense. For the aspect of age, sixty-eight percent of the participants within the ages of twenty to twenty-four used the combination, thirty-one percent of participants aged twenty-seven to thirty-two, and those aged thirty-eight to seventy-two didn’t use the combination together at all.
These authors did, however, come across findings that were slightly different than D’Arcy’s. They found that fifty-four percent of the participants who used be + like were male speakers, while only forty-six percent were females. This means that males are more likely to use be + like more than women, which is different than the data D’Arcy observed that outlined that females used the quotative more than men did. It is important to keep in mind that these are two different kinds of quotative that are being analyzed. D’Arcy’s quotative is like alone as the quotative form, while Blyth, Recktenwald, and Wang all look at the verb to be + like as a quotative combination.
Like can also be used and viewed in the academic settings. In his article, “Gender, Power, Discipline, and Context: On the Sociolinguistic Variation of okay, right, like, and you know in English Academic Discourse,” Erik Schleef describes how these tag words are used within a lecture and seminar context within different disciplines.6 Just looking at like, Schleef points out that within the humanities departments men and women use like fairly equally, while within the natural sciences departments, women use like much more often. Women also use like more often in seminar and lecture presentations.
5. Blyth, Carl, Jr.; Recktenwald, Sigrid.; Wang, Jenny. "I'm like, 'Say What?': A new quotative in American oral narrative." American Speech v. 65 (Fall '90): p. 215-7.
6. Schleef, Erik. “Gender, Power, Discipline, and Context: On the sociolinguistic Variation of okay, right, like, and you know in English Academic Discourse.” Texas Linguistic Forum. Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual symposium about Language and Society. April 16-18, 2004. 177-186.
However, the forms of like vary by discipline. “Like was used by all humanities instructors at least three times, by less than half of the natural sciences instructors, so that humanists used the discourse marker like 7.57 times more often in lectures and seminars than natural scientists do” (Schleef 180). Schleef gives an explanation of why the difference in disciplines; “The difference between the humanities and the natural sciences in the use of like…is primarily due to different traditions of discourse and the contexts which like is used. Humanities instructors and students express more opinions, views, values, and approximations than natural scientists, who give reports, descriptions, and present factual information.
How to post a link to your paper
The best way to do it would be to put it on your W: drive that the university gives you and then link to it. For example if your file is named "thesis.doc" the link to the file would simply be, in the HTML view:
http://www.ilstu.edu/~ULID/thesis.doc
Where I have ULID in all caps you will simply put your ULID.
In order to connect to your W: drive you will need to use VPN if you are off campus. You can get this by going to http://webvpn.ilstu.edu to use the new online VPN. Once you have logged on you will see an option to view your W: drive files, while there simply upload your file and then you are ready to link to it. If you have any questions please email me at cppohlm@ilstu.edu
http://www.ilstu.edu/~ULID/thesis.doc
Where I have ULID in all caps you will simply put your ULID.
In order to connect to your W: drive you will need to use VPN if you are off campus. You can get this by going to http://webvpn.ilstu.edu to use the new online VPN. Once you have logged on you will see an option to view your W: drive files, while there simply upload your file and then you are ready to link to it. If you have any questions please email me at cppohlm@ilstu.edu
Iron Man Lives Again...Partially Anyway
I have here a rough draft of my essay. My 'so what' section is not developed yet, and my citations are probably abysmal. I also have quite a bit more to include throughout the paper. But like I said, it's a rough draft.
An Ulterior Magnet: Connecting
Just ‘cause you’re black,
Folks think you lack,
They laugh at you and scorn you too.
What did I do to be so black and blue? –
The people who have crippled you
You want to see them burn – Black Sabbath
Everyone knows the story, they just all tell it differently. Our protagonist has been known to exchange slights with the best of the best; you may even hear how he told off the devil himself. In one version of this yarn he may actually be found in the hero’s shoes. In another, he is the anti-hero, victoriously slaying his enemies and walking away with a lady on his arm. He calls himself Stagger Lee and he is the baddest mother fucker this side of
Every community and culture recalls his adventures according to their liking. Just the same, each of these communities has given him a different name: Stack O’Lee, Set,
In 1952, American literary critic and author
In the winter of 1970, four musicians from
Throughout this essay, I will be focusing mainly on the correlation found between these two texts. Continuity, character, and history will all be a part of this task. We will begin in the depths of the American delta, following the infamous crossroads to find parallel evidence between
Another piece of this puzzle will be violence. We will see retribution side-by-side with slaughter, as well as the kind of vitality that comes from the birth of identity. Works by the revolutionist author
I hope to end on a very high, very loud note. In the final throws of attestation there will emerge a link that is very real, one that persists throughout time and circumstance. Why are we affected by two seemingly different worlds in the same fashion? How can we find the testimonial of the ‘other’ to be our very own? The famous question of ‘So what’ will hopefully be answered. Time and circumstance, however, are definitely not on our side. Separated by nearly five decades and thousands of miles, environments, and ideologies, we will in fact find ourselves at a crossroads of our own, one where Invisible Man meets
Who Are You: Where We Begin
It would be fair to assume that there is an important question at the forefront of our study which needs answering. To preface this question, it must be noted that I have not been imbibing any sorts of mind altering drugs. I came up with this all on my own.
Now to the question: what the hell can Invisible Man and “Iron Man” possibly have in common? The best way to answer that is by taking a look at the passage in the book which set me on this pursuit in the first place.
Toward the end of the novel,
Somewhere between nightmare and revelation, he finds himself on a black beach beside an armored bridged which protracts the near-by stream. He imagines all the enemies from his past converging upon him. Brother Jack of the Brotherhood; Norton, the old patron from his college; the dean of the college, Bledsoe; Emerson, the businessman who would have lead him into obscurity; and Ras the Exhorter turned Ras the Destroyer, the militant Jamaican separatist from Harlem, they are all holding him down. They threaten him with emasculation unless he returns to their world:
“No,” I said. “I’m through with all your illusions and lies, I’m through running.”
“Not quite,”
“No thank you; I’ll free myself” (569)
As he asserts this self-reliance, they produce a knife and severe his genitalia, dangling them in front of his face before throwing them over the bridge where they catch at the apex and dangle there for him to watch on in misery.
Now, freed of all his illusions—in more ways than one—the protagonist accepts his identity as an invisible man and laughs in his enemies’ collected faces. They are infuriated by his insolence and demand to know what he has to laugh at. In a fashion very true to the blues, he tells them that, “I now see that which I couldn’t see” (570) – but at what a price. They gain in on him to investigate further:
And
“See what?” they said.
“That there hang not only my generations wasting upon the water—” And now the pain welled up and I could no longer see them.
“But what? Go on,” they said.
“But your sun…”
“Yes?”
“And your moon…”
“He’s crazy!”
“Your world…”
“I knew he was a mystic idealist!” Tobitt said.
“Still,” I said, “there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make. Now laugh, you scientists. Let’s hear you laugh!”
And high above me now the bridge seemed to move off to where I could not see, striding like a robot, an iron man, whose iron legs clanged doomfully as it moved. And then I struggled up, full of sorrow and pain, shouting, “No, no, we must stop him!” (570)
Here is where Invisible Man begins his journey in becoming
To be one hundred percent clear on the association, here are the lyrics to “Iron Man” in their entirety:
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We’ll just pass him there
Why should we even care?
He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold
Now the time is here
For iron man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved
Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge
Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron man lives again! (Black Sabbath)
We will spend the rest of this analysis drawing connections between each text. Other portions of
One more uncertainty needs to be addressed however, and that is my integrity. Not my temperament or reputation, but my critical integrity. How can I possibly expect to be taken seriously in a dual study of an American literary classic and the most hummed chordal progression in history? Why does my interpretation bear more merit than those of critics on and above my sensical capabilities? An answer like ‘because’ may not seem worthy enough, but it very much is indeed.
The postmodern literary critic Stanley Fish supports this notion in “Interpretive Communities”, an excerpt from his most famous essay, “Interpreting Variorum” (1976). Fish’s focus throughout this study is the concept of literary interpretation. It is his contention, much like the formalists, that everyone, respectively, truly understands what it is they are reading.
In Fish’s estimation, when one reads a text they are not simply perceiving the text at face value, they are making two distinct interpretations: 1.) That the work is itself, and 2.) The work was written by the respective author. As simple (or confusing) as this mini process seems, once these decisions have been made (identifying empirical facts), recognizing certain predisposed traits in the text can be easily done:
That is to say, interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading (the pure act of perception in which I do not believe); they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them (Rivkin & Ryan, 218).
In short, I see Ellison’s text as the first step in the transformation of a certain character, and Black Sabbath’s text as the second, eventual final step in that transformation, because I can—my “interpretive strategies” or more akin to such an association. Critic
What makes my interpretation more right than someone else’s, you may ask? Fish addresses this question very straightforwardly: as long as one respects another interpretive process, and acknowledges said process as being just as correct as theirs, no problems should arise. “My evidence is the entire history of literary criticism”, he says. I do not have to have the same opinion as Book Week did in 1965 when they called Invisible Man “the most distinguished American novel written since World War II” (Norton, 1537), nor do I have to agree with Rolling Stone Magazine’s vandalizing 1971 review of Paranoid.
How can I say that Invisible Man is ultimately Iron Man? Because I say he is, that’s how. Now that we are all on the same page—or at least in the same book, metaphorically speaking—let us begin.
Under the Sun: A History of Both Parties
To understand a story, one must first understand the storyteller. Of course they did not just spring from the earth, manuscript in hand or song in tow, and set out to change the world, they had to be shaped into their roles as raconteurs. I want to focus our attention on where each of our case studies came from before digging into their relationship with one another. When we understand how these very different artists came to create their respective works, we may just find that they are not so different after all.
Just as
His interest in literature began to blossom as he was gradually introduced to numerous titles in the broadening canon, his favorites being Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. These works gave him some much needed ground on which to stand and take note of his life. By way of Hardy’s
Upon his third year of school, with just $100 in his pocket and a sense for bigger and better things, he moved to
In 1943,
Over the course of seven years,
When searching for common threads between the author and the rock act, one needn’t look any further than the blues. As a style of music, the blues has been more influential than any other cultural force of the last century. Rock and roll, pop, rap, and especially heavy metal owe their very existence to the blues. The music’s storied past is a long and tremulous ride, much of which is actually quite superfluous to the context of this paper.
Author
This blues impulse, as
In his book Popular Music and Society (1995), sociologist
“the songs, the music, changed as the people did.” [The blues] “is, it seems, the deepest expression of memory. Experience re/feeling. It is the racial memory…The Blues (impulse) lyric (song) is ever descriptive of a plane of evolution, a direction” (115) (
It is at a crossroads in this evolution where Black Sabbath appear.
Black Sabbath started out their career as an electric-blues band called Earth. Much like the rest of their constituency, the group had been seriously turned on to the assaults of electrified passion, discontent, and vitality that was coming from
In 1969, things got plenty louder when Earth officially became Black Sabbath. Naming themselves after the 1963
In the so-called blues scale, the root note progresses seven steps, all the way to its octave. The fifth note within this particular scale is diminished however, which means instead of a respective whole step progression, it only ascends a half step (Longhurst, 139). The result is a very jarring, spooky resonance. Black Sabbath’s achievement was nothing particularly new, as composers throughout time had made use of the “devil’s note” to equal effect, but their motivation certainly was (
The release of Paranoid in 1970 cemented that evidence even further. Black Sabbath’s new brand of music was a far cry from Muddy Waters singing “Hoochie Coochie Man”, but Iommi’s guitar rode under Osbourne’s voice on a newly constructed metal track of the blues. “Iron Man” is very much a blues, musically as well as in substance. Typical fashion finds the instrumentalist starting on the root chord, switching to the fourth periodically as the lyrics go on, and eventually climbing to the fifth step before returning to the root. According to Longhurst, Black Sabbath are following a structural method by which we can understand music in a semiotic sense. Developed by musicologist
“2. Culturally determined applications of (1), specific to musical materials (for example…time-frames, patterns of tonal and harmonic relationship)…
3. Style-specific syntaxes constructed from (2) (for example, available scales, intervals, rhythms, parameter relationships; preferred formulae, modes of combination). Distributionist, commotional and paradigmatic approaches are appropriate at this level.
4. Intra-opus patterns: the individual piece in all its uniqueness” (168)
Sabbath has taken a recognizable blues progression and inverted it. Instead of starting on the root, they begin at the fifth and move backwards.
Slowly, methodically, they create not just a piece of music but an aura; the music introduces us to the character even before we hear his roar of autonomy. Iommi’s guitar treads along, and the pronunciated attack of every beat and note plays together with the theme of the song—you can hear Iron Man’s footsteps and feel his anger (174). By designing this character, they have taken not just their music out of the previous tradition, but our protagonist as well. Invisible Man may have been a personality within the blues, but Iron Man is very much one of heavy metal.
Solitude: Granting Our Studies Their
Here is where we can give each character the gift of freedom.
It is apparent that both Invisible Man and Iron Man declare their independence at the onset of their respective journeys. One is supposedly intangible while the other is very much material. “I am an invisible man,” are this character’s first words to us. “I am Iron Man”, is likewise our first introduction to this personality. There is much more to these statements than simple intrigue or pandemonium however. These are revelations of identity. They are establishing themselves as conscious beings, not just to an audience, but to their initial authors as well—they become individuals.
We can find support for this notion in the work of the Russian philosopher
This process is broken down into two methods: (1) the author puts themselves in their characters’ shoes in order to construct them, and then (2) jumps back into their own identity, a process Todorov calls exotopy. Through analysis of this concept, Todorov brings us to a conclusion concerning the relationship of artist and creation: once the artistic process has occurred, and a work or character is given consciousness (written down or recorded, it is sent out amongst a vast audience), the author no longer has control over that consciousness: “the best exotopy…does not confine the character in the consciousness of the author and puts into question the very notion of the privileging one consciousness above another” (103). As it is,
Excommunicated from
You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds…And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world…you curse and your swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. (4)
He has been utterly disillusioned and decided to hole himself up, away from the world that would ignore and misunderstand him. This imposed hibernation foreshadows his ultimate decisive act: “a covert preparation for a more overt action” (13).
After introducing himself, he tells his story. Every twist and turn lands him at the end. We are told of his dream, the one which finally opened his eyes to the obscurity of his existence. The epilogue of the novel brings us back to the beginning. We have not quite gone in a circle, but have come to understand our narrator inside and out. And it is time for him to become visible again. In a manic sort of suggestion, he seeks to relate to us:
You won’t believe in my invisibility and you’ll fail to see how any principle that applies to you could apply to me. You’ll fail to see it even though death waits for both of us if you don’t. Nevertheless, the very disarmament has brought me to a decision. The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath. There’s a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell…of death… And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stench of death. (580)
He is evolving. He is coming back to the world he knew, not as a different person per say, but definitely a distinctive personality. Now is when he will feel vindication. Now is when we get to meet
Just as Invisible Man becomes his own being, so does
To make a little more sense of this, I’ll turn to narratologist Seymour Chatman. Chatman works prolifically in narrative theory, exploring how narrative structures effect our perceptions of a certain text. As soon as a story beings, Chatman says, a narrator is created. We identify with this narrator as the authority in all matters we will hear of from now on. What must suppose is that the author and this created ‘narrator’ are different voices, the first using the latter to tell a story. Such would be the case for Invisible Man. At first, he is a product of
Before coming out of his hole, Invisible Man scolds himself for staying in hibernation far too long: “Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime…since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (
This change of persona also reflects upon the character’s legacy. As a blues invention, Invisible Man was a creature of irony, a principle which is very familiar within the culture.
The ‘meaning’ of any engagement between a text and its consumer cannot be assumed, or ‘read off’, from textual characteristics alone. The text’s historical conditions of production and consumption are important, as is the nature of its audience, and the various meanings in which they mediate their encounter within the text. (14)
There is a history in Invisible Man that undoubtedly persists and changes in “Iron Man”.
Black Sabbath maintain that impulse
Symptom of the Universe: Finding the Ties That Bind
For the time being, we will have to hold off on this awareness of violence until we finish addressing the direct correlations between the character’s first story and this new retelling. Iron Man is at the helm now, but the account is still the same. To completely understand this connection once and for all, we have to take our narrator at his word. For the sake of continuity and coherency, I will address each verse of the song sequentially. This may seem like a petty attempt at making a point, but I believe we may all avoid a major headache by doing so.
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We’ll just pass him there
Why should we even care? (Black Sabbath)
Here we have our newly realized personality reflecting on his past self. Chatman would explain this as our “implied author” being at “virtual odds with his ‘author’-narrator” (99). It is quite clear that Iron Man is berating Invisible Man. Why should we care about someone so passive; so invisible. This will not stand for an effective personality, resulting in the exhumation of our protagonist from his self-imposed exile.
He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold (Black Sabbath)
At first a far cry from anything coherent, we can make sense of Iron Man’s narration by thinking in slight metaphor. His being turned to steel is simply dispossession, disenfranchisement, and disillusionment. This magnetic field is the path of toil he has had to endure.
This thought of time travel is far from absurd as well. Time traveling is exactly what he has done. Recall the scene when he buys a sweet potato from a street vendor after being released from the hospital:
I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom—simply because I was eating while waling along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer has to worry about who saw me or about what was proper…but to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. (
This is not the first or last time he is faced with accepting his people’s past. It is his past just the same, a part of who he is. The future of any culture depends on reiteration, and he was more than willing to accept this responsibility. But life was not fair to him. Instead of embracing him, the world shunned him, ignored him—they turned him invisible. So he conceded and dissented, biding his time: “Here, at least, I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground” (
Now the time is here
For iron man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved
Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge (Black Sabbath)
Finishing his story as Invisible Man, our character gives us the impression of having an advantage—“He leaves the reader with his conviction that the double-consciousness of being both narrator of and a participant in his own story empowers him in a way that his earlier duplicity did not” (Smith, 121) We may never know if Bledsoe was really as haughty as he was portrayed, or if the Brotherhood truly deceived him. Our narrator has loaded the dice in his favor. We are to accept that his college betrayed him, his social institution abandoned him, and the rest of the passed him by.
He justifies the imminent violence by professing these betrayals. His work for the Brotherhood was to be constructive for the better good of the Black community, for everyone in fact.
“Destruction lies ahead unless things are changed. And things must be changed. And changed by the people. Because, Brother, the enemies of man are dispossessing the world! Do you understand?” (
When our protagonist accepts their ideology and beings making progress within the community, this fervor is juxtaposed against resentment. He is becoming too much of a figurehead. They take away all of his public address powers, accuse him of treachery, and actually put him on trial.
He had put his faith in an institution for the second time, and again it swindled him. “The protagonist’s mistrust of the Brotherhood precipitates a period of reflection for him. This betrayal reminds him of the other people who have betrayed him in similar ways. Like
According to Chatman’s studies, this process is known as speech act. “This is not linguistics in the strict sense: it is not concerned with the grammatical composition of sentences in a language, but rather with their role in the communication situation, particularly in their function as actual acts by the speaker” (Rivkin & Ryan, 100). As
Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron man lives again! (Black Sabbath)
So now he has these boots of lead. Such an allusion is evidently filling his erstwhile victims full of some serious dread. And they have a reason to be nervous. The dream sequence in which Invisible Man sees his genitalia as his past, his present, and his future has come back to haunt the rest of his world.
He tells those who would afflict them to laugh when he knows they will later be running for their lives: “There’s your universe…all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make” (
In order to understand this, we turn to psychiatrist and revolutionary
Fanon famously summarized that “violence is man recreating himself” (
Our character was to ascend the ladder of society and become a shining example of his race. Such a notion is demeaning, this is obvious, but working inside of this patronization proves to be the only method of success. He is not quite under the radar, nor is he using the system in his favor. Ambiguously, he is following the path they lay for him to the letter, by the letters. The letters of recommendation sent with him to
This case represents, my dear Mr. Emerson, one of the rare, delicate instances in which one for whom we held great expectations has gone grievously astray, and who in his fall threatens to upset certain delicate relationships between certain interested individuals and the school…I beg you, sir, to help him continue in the direction of that promise which, like the horizon, recedes ever brightly and distantly beyond the hopeful traveler. (
He had fallen into the trap laid for him by those who would ruin his course. Our protagonist returns to this slight as Iron Man. By destroying the institutions that abused him in the past, he is absolving himself of any shame or accountability for his descent in life. “Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon” (Fanon, 86). Iron Man lives again, now as an agent of retribution.
We have seen this transformation within our character’s world before. The leader of the opposing social movement in
[“]What is your pahst and where are you going?...Nowhere! Ras is not ignorant, nor is Ras afraid. No! Ras, he be here black and fighting for the liberty of the black people when the white folks have got what they wahnt and done gone off laughing in your face and you stinking and choked up with white maggots.” (
There is no clemency for such betrayal. But this preaching is not enough for Ras. He must have engagement; he sets an example for
“The time for ahction is here…
“It is time Ras the Exhorter become Ras the DESTROYER!”…
“I repeat black ladies and gentlemahn, the time has come for ahction! I, Ras the Destroyer, repeat, the time has come!” (
Now Ras is ready to exact his vengeance upon the world. The next time we see him, he is leading a crowd through riots, mounted on a horse in full Abssinian formal dress. Ras the Destroyer hurls a spear at our protagonist, chasing him down a calling his mob to hang him from a nearby tree for treachery.
I looked as Ras on his horse and a their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. (
In his misplaced zeal, Ras the Destroyer had helped Invisible Man move one step closer to becoming Iron Man. Where Ras was only looking to smoke out a rat, Iron Man seeks a total reckoning. He has created this character not as an impermanent lake duster, but as a rancorous identity. There really is no resolution in either text (“the story ends before he reenters society, the reader never know to what degree he will conform to institutional expectations once he goes back to the world” (V. Smith, 120)), so we are left with the understanding that Iron Man will only continue destroying. Now that we know he has absolutely no intention of conforming to any institutional expectations, those that have left him as steel to the rest of the world, we can allow the coda to take us away into the void of his loud, abrasive existence.
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