Oct 29, 2016 | 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM | MAIN LOFT

Ms. Emily Leach, Master of Arts

"'See Better': Kill Shakespeare, Vision, and Truth"

As James A. Knapp explains in his chapter “Ocular Proof’ and the Dangers of Perceptual Faith” vision was of particular concern to people in Shakespeare’s time, because of its contradictory nature as “both the most direct conduit to the world as it is and the sense most susceptible to illusion and misinterpretation” (143). Vision thus becomes a key concern within many of Shakespeare’s plays, from Othello’s insistence upon finding “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s infidelity to Kent’s constant pleading with the misguided Lear to “see better.” The Kill Shakespeare series, which brings together many of Shakespeare’s best known heroes and villains in a new narrative, continues to explore these same questions.

In my paper, I will examine the ways in which Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery’s graphic novel series uses the medium of the comic book to grapple with Shakespeare’s questions about the nature of truth, particularly through an emphasis on eyes and sight, both within the artwork, which not only includes numerous panels which depict a close-up of a character’s eyes, but is also organized in some places in such a way that it forces the reader to change how he or she looks at the page in order to follow the narrative, and also through the re-purposing of well-known lines from Shakespeare’s own work which reference vision and truth. In doing so, I will argue that by allowing Shakespeare’s well-known plays to speak to one another through adaptation, and doing so in a graphic novel format, Kill Shakespeare not only presents vision as subjective and therefore untrustworthy, affirming the Elizabethan anxiety about the idea of vision as a source of truth, but that it also promotes a more active kind of seeing which is modelled by the unique reading experience offered by comic books.

Dr. Lesley Thornton-Cronin, PhD

Milicianas: Representations of Women in the Spanish Civil War

Fearing that he had been placed on Francisco Franco's blacklist, the Catalan Surrealist artist Joan Miró begrudgingly spent the duration of the Spanish Civil War in exile in France, following the conflict closely in the newspapers and translating his trepidation primarily into small, private compositions. In 1937, he broke his silence on Spain’s vicious political polarisation and contributed two works to the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne: an enormous mural called The Reaper and Aidez L’Espagne, a design for a postage stamp, both of which feature a rebellious Catalan peasant. He did not speak out publicly on political matters during the last year of the war (1938–1939), but instead coped with his exile by executing a succession of approximately sixty-five private works on paper that communicate a complex range of emotional responses, encompassing rage, fear, frustration, and a prevailing faith in the Spanish people.

A recurring theme that governs nearly a third of these works is the savagely eroticised female figure confronting various scenarios relating to war. Miró depicts the nude female form, subjected to grotesque deformation, as both victim and attacker, in search of both escape and rebellion. In these compositions, Miró unleashes an artistic violence upon the female body and explicitly references the reality of contemporary violence.

This paper considers how both eroticism and war function as transgressions of taboos in Miró's drawings. The artist's depictions of women are situated within the sociopolitical context of the Spanish Civil War, in which the profoundly Catholic nation had to reconcile the introduction of women into the public sphere. In celebrating the "miliciana," or warrior-woman (who would be criticized by the Right as a prostitute), Miró's "woman drawings" show a version of women's wartime experiences that stand in stark contrast with contemporary Republican propaganda, including Picasso's "Guernica," which favoured depictions of female victimhood. I argue that through the medium of private drawings, the artist can transgress traditional depictions of femininity, merging the violent with the erotic in a manner considered inappropriate for public works.

Ms. Sabrina Axster, MSc

Victim/Survivor/Father/Husband: How Comics Can Capture the Multi-Dimensional Nature of the “Victim”

Mainstream media has created an image of what it means to be a “victim,” often ignoring individual factors that define this experience and focusing instead on aspects such as trauma and helplessness. Such discourse permeates mainstream debates instead of reflecting on the multiple forms in which victimhood can manifest itself. This essay seeks to explore how comics can portray the complexities of victimhood. The visual imagery of comics allows certain truths to be woven in organically, for example by adding one frame in one place or drawing something in the background that reinforces an emotion. Art Spiegelman was one of the first to pioneer comics as a way to deal with difficult histories.

In his two Maus comics, he recounts both the strained relationship between himself and his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and how his father survived the Holocaust. Rather than presenting Vladek as the traditional victim as martyr, Spiegelman adds to the complexity of his character by portraying him in a negative light. This paper explores how he uses visual frames to highlight the uncomfortable truth that his father was not always likable as well as how he challenges the perceived dichotomies between categories like “victim” and “racist.” Drawing on the methodological toolbox put forward by Scott McCloud, this paper seeks to unpack the visual effects through which the reader sees Vladek and how comics help to show Vladek as a multi-dimensional character who performs in several categories: as victim, survivor, father, and husband. This paper examines how the reader thus develops a closer relationship to Vladek by learning about his strengths and weaknesses which in turn helps make the Holocaust relatable. Providing such a holistic understanding of the victim can help change many of today’s victim narratives by breaking away from the narrowly confined borders of what defines victimhood.

Biographies

Emily Leach

Emily Leach is a third year PhD student at Queen's University specializing in Elizabethan drama. Her dissertation work involves the study of adaptations of Shakespeare's work into manga, graphic novels, and other comic book forms through the lens of performance studies. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Western Ontario. She is also currently the co-Editor-in-Chief of The Lamp, a literary journal for graduate and professional students based at Queen's University.

Publications

Refereed Publications

“Seeing the Sentiment: Eighteenth Century Theatrical Portraiture and Garrick’s Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet” ( Published in Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture in 2014 )

Non-Refereed Publications

“To Know a Godly Woman: Una and the True Church in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene” ( Published in The Semi-Colon, the University of Western Ontario’s undergraduate student journal in 2012 )

Dr. Lesley Thornton-Cronin

Lesley Thornton-Cronin is an art historian and recent PhD graduate from the University of Glasgow. Her thesis, "Boundaries of Horror: Joan Miró and Georges Bataille, 1930-1939," investigates the overlaps between the art of the Catalan artist Joan Miró and French philosopher Georges Bataille. Her areas of interest include Surrealism, the Spanish Civil War, and the Catalan avant-garde.

Publications:

Conferences: University of Glasgow History of Art Postgraduate Research Symposium (2015) Association of Art Historians Annual Conference: 2015 University of Glasgow History of Art Postgraduate Research Symposium (2014) Juan Facundo Riaño Prize Giving Ceremony (Embassy of Spain, UK) (2014) University of Glasgow History of Art Postgraduate Research Symposium (2013) Fourth Annual Bonn-Glasgow Art History Conference (2012)

Awards: University of Glasgow College of Arts International PhD Scholarship (2013-2016) Research Support Award, University of Glasgow (2014) The Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Medal (2014)

Publications:

"Miró," The Burlington Magazine, no. 1346, vol. 157 (May, 2015): 371-373 "The Spanish Holocaust, by Paul Preston.' Review by Lesley Thornton-Cronin. The Kelvingrove Review, no. 12.

Sabrina Axster

Sabrina Axster is a doctoral student and teaching assistant at the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University. Prior to this she served at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs as a member of the core team preparing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Ms. Axster holds an MSc in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a B.A. in Media and Cultural Studies and Politics from the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. She is a Global Ethics Fellow for the Future at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the Sigma Iota Rho Honor Society for International Studies. In her field of global political theory, Ms. Axster is interested in migration as well as notions of victimhood and representation and how these can be analyzed and challenged by using discourse analysis of text and images. For her research she will focus on the privatization of migration control in Europe and the US, assessing how this trend has evolved and with what repercussions in terms of legitimacy, accountability and migrants’ rights. Other projects she is currently working on include an analysis of the representation of refugees in the British newspaper The Guardian.