Art, Literature, Music

Frame by Frame A Materialist Aesthetic of Animated Cartoons

by Hannah Frank (early 2000’s?)

A scholarly work about cartoons might seem a bit contradictory, but Hannah approaches the period between 1920 and 1960, when cartoons were hand-drawn, and the period that followed, when Xerography speeded up production, with enormous erudition, originality, and, most of all, patience, The first of these early periods before computer animation took over is referred to as the Golden Age of Animation, when Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, Felix the Cat, and a host of other characters sprang to life. Her case study for the cartoons of the sixties, when Xerography came into use, is 101 Dalmatians.

As the title states, Hannah looks at the individual pictures (known as cels) frame by frame. Instead of the illusion of motion, Hannah is concerned with a search for artifacts of what was going on when the cels were…

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity by Sarah F. Derbew.  If you think that scholarship, particularly scholarship of ancient relics and literary works, is dry and tedious, think again.  Sarah Derbew’s journey back and forth through time will acquaint you with, among many other things, clay artifacts from the fifth century BCE and how they relate to museum curation today, The Suppliants, a lesser known play of Aeschylus, and how it relates to the work of twentieth century Martinican writer Franz Fanon, and the role of Aethiopians, a term full of entanglements in itself,  in Herodotus’s Histories and how this role relates to Cavafy’s wonderful poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” 

You are in for a dizzying ride because Sarah’s purpose is to show how much care we must take when we examine the distant past lest we make the mistake of seeing through the distorting lens of our own time.  The stereotypes and…

There’s a Mystery There, The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott ’62.  Maurice Sendak was a great admirer of Melville, so it is fitting that Jonathan Cott takes the title of this work, which is mostly about Sendak’s Outside Over There, from Melville’s Redburn. There is enough mystery in Outside Over There, ostensibly a children’s picture book, to sustain this ambitious work of analysis-through- interview and to lead the reader to feel that the last word has not yet been spoken.  

The complexity of Outside Over There emerges from a kaleidoscopic range of perspectives.  Jonathan interviews Sendak himself, a Freudian analyst, a Jungian analyst, a specialist in children’s literature, an art historian and a highly respected playwright.  Each interview shifts our view of the work from autobiography to psychoanalysis to object of art to mythologizing storytelling as life events meet a tender imaginative psyche.  This rich mix gives…

Domina Virgin Mater Trix: The Kaleidoscopic Identity of Women by Christel Johnson f. Christel’s book is a copiously researched scholarly study, that shows how stereotypes rearrange themselves like DNA (her metaphor) generating unique literary and real-life heroines.

The title refers to four female stereotypes that have endured over the centuries. After a presentation of structuralist/post structuralist theoretical grounding, based on the work of, among others, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, Christel explores how these stereotypical roles play out in classical Greek and Roman literature as well as in the chosen persona of Queen Elizabeth I.

Christel’s analyses of Sophocles’ Antigone or the Greek goddesses or the beloved of Catullus lead back to her central idea -- the women of literature cannot be pinned down to one type. They may assume the power of domina even as virgin maidens or display maternal characteristics even while manipulating men for treasure. (Trix…