Discover Top Posts Tagged with #literalization

Literalization in Superhero Comics

I’m trying to figure out how to work in this blog post by academic Marc Singer:

“Zizek's point is that Hitchcock doesn't bury these emotional subtexts in figurative tropes; he makes them real, exploding them across the screen in a torrent of wings. The birds don't symbolize a psychological outburst; they are a psychological outburst unto themselves. And the result is a much more gripping, powerful narrative than the wan middlebrow alternative Zizek imagines.

As in Hitchcock, so in the superhero comics. Superman doesn't symbolize the immigrant's split impulses between assimilation and cultural tradition; he is that split impulse. The Vision doesn't symbolize artificial intelligence and the borders of simulated humanity; he is them. Cliff Steele doesn't symbolize the Western dichotomy between mind and body; he is an extreme test case of that dichotomy, a readymade vehicle only occasionally exploited for that purpose by a Grant Morrison type - but even there, Morrison doesn't make Robotman a "symbol" of the mind/body split because he doesn't need to.

[...]

What I'm suggesting is that superhero comics - or fantasy genres in general, perhaps - operate primarily through what Hayden White might term metonymy, not metaphor. They offer a literal substitution or stand-in or test case for the larger idea, not a figurative replacement.... Why (to jump back to my Thanos rant) would you try to make a supervillain a metaphor for the death-drive implicit in autocratic conquerers [sic] when you could just have him try to fuck Death?”

I think what’s great about this is that it engages with comic book superheroes on their own terms, and celebrates what’s great about the genre. I’m just not sure it fits into my paper, unless... actually, in the Afrofuturist narrative in the text, he does symbolize the eventual victory of history. Hmm... and he literalizes social justice when he enters the Afrofuturist narrative... now I just need to see if he’s written something somewhere in an academic journal. Oh man, I’m having so many ideas right now.

#s16capstone #literalization #comic books #superheroes #metonymy

Watch What We Say

I remember the first day when metaphor began to invade reality. I had said to my brother, "We need to watch what we say." It seems particularly fitting to me that I cannot, in any way, remember the context of this statement after what was to follow-- when we turned the corner, we saw, hanging in space in front of us in large, black, sans serif font, the words "What you say." The words were maybe seven or eight feet across, four feet tall, and three feet off of the ground. The end of "say" protruded into the street. When I think of it now, I find something poetic about the strangeness of the words, their removal of themselves from the context in which we had held them, into a context of their own, the context of the physical world, literal reality. All the same, we didn't know what was happening. People were crossing the street to avoid the text. We supposed it must be some sort of shared hallucination, or some other phenomenon that's been supposed in science fiction magazines and the like. We were ready to chalk it up to that unexplainable singularity of experience, when we heard a cabbie across the street yell at another motorist, "Fuck you," and the reply came, "Fuck you too, buddy." Both he and the other motorist, a well-dressed man in a suit, got out of their respective vehicles, stripped down in the middle of the street, and started fucking. Someone else said, "Holy shit."

#metaphor #fiction #Literalization