PCA: Supertexts The Waste Land

Teaching Intertextuality and Parody through the Graphic “Supertext”: The Case of Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land (1990)
Kevin Flanagan, University of Pittsburgh

This is a live blogging of the session.

allusion approach is the whole focus of my work

film institutions, linguistic sensibilities of TSEliot
incoherence of textual

“what they call text might not have or ever have had meaning as such”

re-representations of historical work,

English caricature part of graphic novels
“brilliant and credited with lending graphic appropriateness”

How Graphic Comics Work and What They Mean
don’t run the same current of the original text, classic realist novel is good at what it does, but it isn’t what the graphic novel is doing

sequential graphics are good for kinetic narratives

TSEliot’s poem resists spatial

Christopher Marlowe detective, involved in double crosses, looks for Holy Grail
multimodal detective story, convenient medium for the search, grotesque parody

Fascinating idea:
notion of the supertext
ideal type of the genre
structure the entire course of reading around tropes and ideas and culture that is referenced in the graphic novel

2 advantages to using Rawson’s The Waste Land
integrates graphics, whiz framing
parody, contradictory modernism is as textual phenomenon
literary modernism

not useful to teach this in a version approach

If you are saying it’s a supertext, looking at the first text that it is based on is ridiculous.

A different approach.

given a preliminary amount of information, clues, students can reverse engineer Rawson—a detection of their own

Robert Stand’s

“throw away details” where introduce other points
pre-Raphaelite paintings pre-industrial

two panel page, got to London,
fantastic sections of “wandering around cities”

dramatizing the distinction between parody and pastiche

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