Modernity’s Others: Marginality, Mass Culture, and the Early Comic Strip in the US
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Figlerowicz, Marta
Abstract
Working at intersections of comics studies, gender and race studies, and modernist studies, this dissertation takes a lowbrow aesthetic form – the comic strip of the early twentieth century American weeklies and dailies – as a point of entry into a more expansive, politically conscious, and even utopian view of Western modernism. “Modernity’s Others” considers the early comic strip as an example of vernacular modernism, an innovative, popular form born out of the cultural, linguistic, and economic transformations that defined the experience of the urban masses at the turn of the century. I examine the comic strip’s representations of class, race, and gender, revealing the political stakes of such representations by juxtaposing them with the self-reflexive depictions of artistic labor characteristic of the genre. By illuminating the interdependence of artistic labor and modes of modern capitalist production, the comic strip form, I argue, marks a unique site of dialogue between highbrow modernism and mass culture, allowing for a clearer understanding of the political possibilities of the modernist movement as a whole. My theoretical framework draws on the Frankfurt School’s, particularly Theodor Adorno’s, analyses of the culture industry and challenges the widely held belief that Adorno’s theory represents a rejection of mass culture. “Modernity’s Others” seeks to recover the promissory note in Adorno’s schema by making explicit the dialectic at work in his account of popular art and the utopian promise of mass culture, even as it is subsumed under capitalism. I read the opposition between high and low culture as a relationship of constitutive interdependence in which both sides play a necessary but not sufficient role in our cultural formation. Each dissertation chapter takes up a different example of the comic strip form and analyzes its portrayal of marginal communities and identities. The chapters illustrate the representational difficulties, in both the political and aesthetic sense, faced by each work and progressively make explicit the problem of artistic labor as one defined by the form of labor under capitalism. The opening chapter analyzes the formal mechanisms at work in the construction of gendered and racial stereotypes in Henry Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga (1904-1924). I argue, for instance, that the author’s use of the topography of the World’s Fair generates contrasting models of spectatorship – the wide-eyed voyeurs of the “ethnic villages,” the cosmopolitan students of the art pavilions – that challenge the reliability of the images of African American women and East Asian immigrants presented in the strips. The second chapter takes up the expression of utopian longing by the central characters in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944) and reveals its interconnectedness with the contradictions internal to mass cultural artforms. It reexamines Adorno’s arguments regarding the impossibility of casting a utopian picture in light of recent queer theories of utopia and of the critical-theoretical (re)turn to the nonhuman. It also addresses the racial and reproductive anxieties at the heart of Herriman’s work, contending that the perpetual variation of the characters’ origin myth satirically undercuts stereotypical narratives of racial and biological lineage. The third and final chapter engages with the image of the emancipated woman constructed by Martin Branner in Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner (1920-1996), claiming that Branner’s use of reified mainstream tropes, including representations of the flapper and the typist, invites a re-consideration of popular culture’s contradictory expression of women’s role in the spheres of production and reproduction. Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer’s retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, I read the protagonist’s navigation of mass culture, leisure time, and of her newfound role in the modern workforce as symptomatic expressions of labor relations under capitalism. Winnie’s humorous failures to keep a longterm job and her pursuit of leisure obscure her conformity to the economic status quo by producing a false sense of liberation, but by the same token, her naïve optimism distinguishes her from the very social order to which she has been assimilated. The vernacular typology associated with the newly liberated power of women is shown to disclose the instability of modern identity categories such as gender and sexuality by emphasizing their grounding in concrete historical conditions that need to be overcome.
Recommended Citation
Sidorenko, Ksenia, "Modernity’s Others: Marginality, Mass Culture, and the Early Comic Strip in the US" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1026.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1026
