with respect, setting myself up for a lot of work’s rather the point. this thing needs to keep me occupied for at least three years, and i’m hoping it’ll lead me on to other, related work on collaboration and authorship; it’s the starting point on a path of work i’ll never complete, but that’s academic work.
that said, i’m never going to be able to cover everything neccesary to a comprehensive study of the subject in a thesis-length work; as with any thesis, i’m going to have to be highly selective as to what i cover, and indicate areas i neglect or skimp on. my MA thesis ended up covering about a third of the material i intended it to cover, and i’ve already had to jettison planned parts of the DPhil one because i’d die before completing it. so yeah, it’s a lot of work, but that’s why it’s going to take years, not months. a year in, there’s little resemblance between the original proposal and what i’m turning out, but supervisorial opinion suggests that that’s perfectly healthy.
the problem of scope’s the main reason i’m focusing in around mr. morrison. it means i’ve got a built-in limit on the textual set i’m working with, and hopefully, it’ll narrow things down somewhat, means i both can and have to nail the theory to a limited number of texts.
regarding the cahier du cinema approach, one of the things that’s creating the most difficulty for me is that i think it’s a huge mound of horseshit. it’s politcally reactionary and based on a rather lzy pragmatic desire for the authorship of films to be as uncomplicated as possible. thankfully, the original cahiers authors freely accepted that auteurist criticism wasn’t based on a coherant theory; bazin’s ‘on the politique de auteurs’ underlines that. as soon as you turn the post-structuralist lights on, auteurist criticism begins to look quite extraordinarily weak.
i took my MA at Reading, in the film dept, and i think it’s fair to say that the faculty there includes a fair few hardcore auteurists; when i choked on the whole idea, they happily accepted that auteurism’s a school of thought that’s completely at odds to any number of others; it just happens to be the one that won out as the orthodoxy in film studies. the only reason i’m going anywhere near auteurism is that it illustrates the critical positions that post-structuralism arguably sought to bulldoze; more to the point, the similarities between film and comics production suggest that the theory applied to the one might be useful in the investigation of the other. if i’m going to borrow film theory to work on comics, i can’t do so without at least passing near auteurism. that’s not to say all film theory’s at odds with the attempt to find a model for multiple authorship: robert l. carringer has a lot of good stuff on collaboration.
you’re right, i do tend to dismiss scott mccloud too easily, and you’re dead right that, to an extent, i don’t like his work because of the style; the good points get hidden in the midst of the ‘how-to’ book atmosphere. i actually rather enjoy reading his books, especially that alan moore portrait in the new one, but there’re times when you wish he’d stop pissing about and just get to the point. i have to accept that the serious misgivings i have about his stuff result less from what he does, but more from the effects that his success in doing it have had on the comics academia ghetto.
mccloud provides very sound accounts of comics grammar and the systems within the text, but, as some says in the mccloud thread, he tends to place the visual aspects of comics in a superior position to the verbal; i know he admits himself that he’s visually orientated, and he’s often dealing with speigelman-type solo producers, but i feel he reflects an auteurist tendency in the field, in which the scriptwriter is the director or artists’s bitch. the fact that people tend to want to study single-author texts isn’t helped by the fact that mccloud’s the only show in town, and ; i was hoping ‘making comics’ might have more material about collaborative efforts, because mccloud’s influential enough to really open the field up. as you say, he’s scrupulously careful not to say anything to exclude areas he doesn’t cover; one day, he might engage with those areas, and we’ll all be much better off.
the more general problem derives entirely from his success; because his books’re the best and most popular studies of comics around, the few students i’ve taught have problems escapiong their gravity, and tend to just apply mccloud, in the same way that people get swallowed by the other –isms. the ‘image and narrative’ review here sums up the problem; mccloud’s too strong, and distorts comics studies, in much the same way that cahiers du cinema bent film studies out of shape.
i should’ve posted that in the mccloud thread, but i doubt anyone cares...
if you ever want something to lull you into a gentle coma, i’m happy to e-mail chapters out for constructive piss-taking as and when and if they appear.
verbose little shite, me. |
