Book Review

Here’s a set of reviews of nine recently published and forthcoming books I’ve enjoyed reading, reflecting on, and recommending of late. In the mix are two emotionally trenchant novels, a narratively enigmatic novella, a gauzily glowing volume of poetry, a vast survey of contemporary text-based art, a history of groundbreaking women photographers, a critical examination of the sociopolitics of walking, a collection of interdisciplinary essays about narrative slowness, and a revised historical glimpse into the early days of US comic strips. They’re all worthy titles to add to your fall reading list. Several would also make excellent additions to a fall or spring syllabus.
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Izumi Suzuki, Set My Heart on Fire, translated by Helen O’Horan
Verso Books, November 2024
Izumi Suzuki’s novel Set My Heart on Fire was published in its original Japanese edition in 1996, which already marked a full ten years since the writer, model, actress, and erstwhile factory worker and keypunch operator had taken her own life at just thirty-six years old. As such, the availability of this keystone component in Suzuki’s oeuvre has been much anticipated by her wider readership, especially since her decidedly counter-cultural repute in general, and English-reading audience in particular, have grown significantly in recent years. This is thanks in large part to fresh translations of her short story collections Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears, both of which are emblematic of the unique author’s trademark formula for science fiction that blends together punk-rock sensibilities, moody erotica, campy cultural referencing, jump-cut-like cinematic episodic-ness, and a sense of slightly mysterious prescience, at times mildly menacing, into narratives that are nothing short of literarily singular. You can read more about such features in Hit Parade of Tears in my Art Spiel review of it last year.
Helen O’Horan’s impressively fluid and colloquially apt translation of Set My Heart on Fire will surely broaden Suzuki’s international renown – while also enriching it, as this novel is distinct from the author’s short stories in many ways. Here, Suzuki’s sci-fi-ish bizarreness, confounding time warps, and comically imaginative interactions among sort-of-humans are largely absent. Present instead is a moodier, more consistently focused, chronologically mappable narrative of a jaded yet unflappable young woman – named, not incidentally, Izumi – who dips in and out of variably amorous, at times abusive relationships, problematic friendships, and bouts of depression in a milieu of rock and roll, flâneurish wandering, psychological wondering, abundant meds, and roughly equal parts lust and loathing. Izumi’s circles of interaction are tumultuous but not chaotic, unpredictable yet often boring, occasionally hopeful but regularly disappointing. Real love seems impossible, affections are fleeting at best, and disillusions abound. Falling back into bad habits in order to endure sorrowful circumstances becomes the order of the day, the days, the months, the years. Izumi mocks the forced machismo of her partners while maligning herself for her incapacity to detach from them lastingly. Her desires fail her all the more as she desires to desire them less.
Nonetheless, fair measures of fun are in the mix in this novel too, as is ample humor suffused with youthful apathy and snark. And really, the rock and roll context is key. Music grounds the restless protagonists and mobilizes them out of listlessness, and it’s often a topic of discussion, debate, and occasionally amusing grandstanding. Additionally, by way of chapter headings referencing songs by a range of international rock bands – including The Moody Blues, The Tigers, T. Rex, Vanilla Fudge, The Rolling Stones, and The Zombies, among others – music also serves as an organizing principle and thematic index. Suzuki’s readers will glimpse a somewhat more serious, somber side of the author in Set My Heart on Fire, but the relatable foibles, quirky charm, and imaginative spark with which she imbues her characters are as bright as ever. It’s been nearly forty years since the young author passed away, yet her vision and voice still register as strikingly contemporary.
Suzuki’s manner of prescience slants as expressly impressive. It wasn’t one of foreseeing events, rather of foretelling the tenor and temperament of an increasingly prevalent young-adulthood mood. A Suzuki biopic, anyone, please? Set My Heart on Fire would lend itself to screenplay adaption with relative ease. Creating its soundtrack would be even easier. See Table of Contents.
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Mario Desiati, Spatriati, translated by Michael F. Moore
Other Press, October 2024
Mario Desiati’s Spatriati, proficiently translated by Michael F. Moore, introduces the award-winning Italian author to English-reading audiences with a narrative that comfortably compromises several different literary genres or themes. First and foremost, at least ostensibly, it’s a coming-of-age novel, or rather a dual coming-of-age novel, as it relates the curiously intertwined trajectories from childhood to something along the lines of young, then not-so-young adulthood of two main characters, Claudia and Francesco, as told through the eyes of the latter. It’s also a story of family ties, and of family entanglements, and of families making rather indifferent attempts to keep from coming undone. And it’s a story of small towns and big cities, and of southern Italy and northern Italy, and of southern Europe and northern Europe more generally – in comparative terms of landscape and climate, politics and culture, work ethics and matters of faith, inhibitions and openness of expression, and identities hidden and personal freedoms as a given.
Also, though not quite a romance properly so-called, Spatriati is indeed a love story, or a story consisting of various love stories – of lovers who fall in and out of love, of thwarted loves, of unrequited loves, of lovers experimenting and questioning, of lovers resisting and giving in, and of loves that might never have been love after all. Yet despite the many and sundry forms of amorous passion that circulate and churn – and sometimes spiral out of control – in this emotionally charged novel, the more intriguing sentimental thread, and the one examined most subtly and meaningfully from beginning to end, pertains simply to friendship. For Claudia and Francesco, becoming friends arises almost passively out of a sense of interfamilial connection that’s also something of a calamity. From there, their friendship evolves and deepens in ineluctable fits and spurts – because the two are so unlike one another, yet with so much in common. Their friendship is as fueled by joy and enthusiasm as it is by delusion, envy, and resentment, and its many challenges, interruptions, reattachments, and misunderstandings make its unlikely endurance sincerely fulfilling and genuinely awkward for both of them. Desiati’s impressive narrative achievement here is in rendering visible and necessary a nearly superfluous range of fluctuating desires and uncertain maturities. Only by way of all of these features coming into confluence can the story of such a reliably disordered friendship unfold at all.
The thematic threads in Spatriati are many, and they’re all teased out engagingly and extensively, and even while some are subtly weakened by lacking details or insufficient character development – or confused by an inconsistently omniscient first-person narrator, or distracted by too many passages of prose diluted with tedious pop-cultural references and explanations – they’re all underpinned and interlinked by sentimental convictions and complexities that are always relatable, and always malleable, and always aptly activated components of a story that’s deeply compelling and wholly contemporary.
***

Joseph Andras, Faraway the Southern Sky, translated by Simon Leser
Verso Books
Joseph Andras’s Faraway the Southern Sky slots well into a type of historical narrative that isn’t necessarily a mere revisioning of history, but rather a creative abstraction of it. And yet, this carefully crafted novella defies even that degree of nebulous categorization, warping understandings of the descriptor ‘historical’ while wandering around in the margins of what might be called fiction.
In this gripping tale, Andras casts his research subject, a young Hô Chí Minh, as a mysterious, ceaselessly elusive protagonist. Within the narrative, however, the same protagonist seems to also cast himself – say, to those who might seek to track him – as a cagey subject of search, research, and suspicion. This dualistic aspect of the figure in question is reflective of how so much of what’s known about him historically remains deeply questionable, from exactly when he moved to Paris by way of London after fleeing Indochina, to how it was possible for him to inhabit so many different personas, and mingle with so many ideologues and incognitos alike, before moving on to the Soviet Union six years later as a substantially transformed, intellectually emboldened proponent of Vietnamese independence.
Andras himself, in his genuine yet splendidly ambiguous guise as a researcher in the story’s present tense, is part of this undulating narrative that drifts in and out of timelines and identities, a feature the author prepares you for in the opening pages: “He wasn’t called Hô Chí Minh, for one thing: he changed names like he changed shirts, sweating in the hope, no less, of making us all equal at last; he slept in pigsties, wrote articles in a language his mother had never sung to him in, and roamed Paris under the eyes of devious cops. It’s this man, in exile, in the nooks of a capital just out of the war, that you go in search of, knowing you won’t find a thing.”
Faraway the Southern Sky is a complicated narrative, to be sure, but its complications are at once inevitable and essential aspects of its intrigue. History is complicated too, after all, and here, rather than retold or reshaped, history is intercepted, intervened in, interfered with. Accordingly, Andras’s prose, nimbly translated from French by Simon Leser, bends and buckles, floats and crawls, spins and lifts.
***

Hanae Jonas, Softly Undercover
Mad Creek Books
It might be in the title of the collection, or in the titles of many of its constituent poems, or in the way in which the verses they gather scan as if illuminated by the golden orange glow of a desk lamp slung low – and glimpsed from outdoors, through a window, at dusk – but there’s something vaguely, irresistibly crepuscular about Hanae Jonas’s Softly Undercover. This makes autumn an especially fitting time read it, as it seems to me the season best suited to indulging in crepuscularity.
Much like moments of transitional atmospherics and light, Jonas’s poems assume malleable forms and inhabit space in protean ways. Consistent throughout the author’s taut compositions, however, is a finely calibrated tension between intimacy and critical remove, objective nearness and subjective distance, emotive reflection and refracted detachment. This register is neither cool nor aloof, rather suffused with a sense of perspectival abstraction that engages profoundly as if doubly focused, rendering the mode of reading doubly riveting. Jonas achieves this in syntactical or structural ways at times through line breaks and multifariously spaced, interrupted, and diffusely arranged verses, but it’s all the more ensorceling when it manifests through semantic juxtapositions and oblique, skewed points-of-view. The organic is undercut by the artificial. The intimate is hidden from and exposed by the public. The momentarily sentimental is held in check by the critical.
Jonas’s opening poem, “Rhododendrons”, sets you up for the many deftly versified instances of verbal collision and metaphorical distancing to come. Here, words like ‘love’, ‘animal’, ‘wilderness’, ‘cream’, ‘sugar’, ‘honey’, and ‘carnality’ elide and contrast with ‘stranger’, ‘pretend’, ‘rubric’, ‘barren’, ‘method’, ‘faking it’, and ‘ghost’. This leaves you especially alert to such dissimilarities when they’re more syntactically sequential, too: in “Aubade”, “I busied myself / with the spelling of distant affections”; in “Homing”, “To wake is to wait for // admonishments on instinct”; in “Künstlerroman”, “It wasn’t truth I liked / but its feeling”; in “The Glow”, “In this small town, / I’m sick / of visitors, meaning myself”. Where Jonas deploys her characteristic candor with a sense of sentimental nearness, as in “Lowlands”, the immediacy of beauty and warmth is disarming: “When I was not in love // mountains / disappeared from view”. Start reading Softly Undercover around twilight one evening this autumn, then enjoy rereading it for many seasons to come.
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Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art, Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by Evan Moffitt
Phaidon, 2024
Just over 20 years ago, the editorial team at Phaidon released Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, the first volume in what would soon become an indefinitely ongoing, broadly beloved, consistently evolving series of primarily medium-specific surveys of contemporary art. Since then, the expanding scope of the Vitamin series has yielded ten more volumes spanning a range of media, disciplines, and approaches, with several of the more recent editions demonstrating more conceptually finessed or materially restrained interpretations of the ‘medium-specific’ rubric. There are now three volumes on painting under the Vitamin P heading; three on drawing, billed as Vitamin D; one on clay and ceramic, Vitamin C; one on threads and textiles, Vitamin T; one on sustainable design and architecture, Vitamin Green; and one on collage, Vitamin C+, which I wrote about for Art Spiel when it was published last year. All of satisfyingly imposing heft, these volumes are also all indisputably excellent.
That’s true as well for the newest installment in the Vitamin series, Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art, which editor Simon Hunegs describes in a preliminary note as the first in the series to employ a theme, rather than a material or methodology, as a lens through which to view contemporary art. Much like the other Vitamin volumes, Vitamin Txt features profiles of just over 100 contemporary artists, a distillation from a presumably higher number of candidates nominated by a panel of over 60 scholars, curators, and critics. Of the latter, many are contributing writers for the volume as well, providing lightly biographical and succinctly critical profiles of artists they’ve nominated. Each profile is accompanied by full-page spreads of finely reproduced images of artworks or installation views, most all of which are very recent. The enjoyment of reading Vitamin Txt is thus doubled: you have the profiles to read and ponder; and you have the text-based artworks themselves, ranging from quite overtly to only barely legible, to read and ponder as well. There’s also a substantive, historically discerning introductory essay by Evan Moffitt, who provides an incisive narrative that maps and unpacks the multifarious understandings, functions, and semiotic, symbolic, and artistic manifestations of text, text in art, and text as art – and art as text – traversing millennia, and spanning a prodigious range of social settings, spiritual traditions, political contexts, and artistic expressions. For Moffitt, “An artist … is a maker of worlds, an assembler of forms and content, a diviner who writes things – with or without words – into being. It is generally true that words are pictures, and works of art are meant to be read.”
Moffitt’s general truth is one with which the artists in Vitamin Txt would likely agree. For many of them, in fact, text is of such paramount importance and presence as a driving force of creativity that it’s virtually a medium in itself, as opposed to merely a theme, and infusing their works with aspects of eventual lexicality is as essential as the material trappings. Among the 103 artists hailing from 34 countries and working in many different linguistic registers, some use text to communicate clearly and candidly, at times with ideological, emotional, witty, or somewhat self-reflexively art-world-directed commentary, such as Tony Cokes, Karen Davies, Jenny Holzer, Bethan Huws, Ichihara Hiroko, Barbara Kruger, Maurizio Nannucci, and David Shrigley. Some use it as code or indirect messaging, obscuring, scrambling, or camouflaging operative expressions, sometimes to hint at the inherent risks or societal prohibitions involved with such transmissions, such as Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Cian Dayrit, Graham Dolphin, Anita Dube, Shilpa Gupta, Kyungah Ham, Adam Pendleton, and Wang Dongling. Others use letters and words primarily as shapes, design elements, compositional implements, or aesthetically active albeit communicatively slippery or lexically defiant forms, such as Rosa Barba, Alexandra Grant, Keti Kapanadze, Wosene Worke Kosrof, Youdhisthir Maharjan, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Xu Bing, and Gozo Yoshimasu.
For the artists in Vitamin Txt, text serves, in one way or another, as a kind of formally generative medium, and the art that results becomes the recipient matrix for variably parseable messages. This is surely true for many other artists around the world who incorporate text into their work, too. I’m looking forward to reading – and reading about – more of them one day in, say, Vitamin Txt2.
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Gemma Padley, The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques
Laurence King, September 2024
Gemma Padley’s aim with The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques is to enrich the standing narrative of the medium’s history by expanding, diversifying, and in some ways complicating it, all the while demonstrating that, in various eras from the 19th century to now, photographic practices furnished women with a particularly apt mode of professional advancement and creative expression in settings that might not have offered them many other such opportunities.
Padley achieves and surpasses that goal. Her book is thoughtfully conceived, deeply researched, chronologically balanced, and exquisitely designed – in which ‘exquisitely’ is understatement – and its historically expansive yet thematically limited scope does much to inform readers of lesser-known women photographers, on the one hand, while also, on the other, shining a light on key moments of technological and aesthetic advancement in the medium itself. This is because The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques, in meeting and exceeding its conceptual and scholarly aims, also wholly fulfills the promise of its title. That is, all 50 photographers included here – hailing from all around the world, active in all eras of the history of photography, and of all levels of greater and lesser notoriety – are featured with specific regard to 50 different practical, expressive, or stylistic innovations that might be considered largely theirs, or to which they are crucial contributors. So while gaining a fundamental awareness of the importance and agency of 50 women photographers active in the past couple centuries, readers also acquire an understanding of 50 distinct photographic developments, applications, and manners of expression, from the earliest iterations of practices that could be termed photographic, to the multifarious forms of processes, images, and objects that variegate the disciplinary landscape of the medium today.
Padley’s selected subjects include scientists, journalists, activists, professional portraitists, and fine art photographers. Some are very well known and perhaps expected here, such as Imogen Cunningham, Liz Johnson Artur, Florence Henri, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, Shirin Neshat, Zanele Muholi, Lorna Simpson, and Vivian Maier. Some are slightly more obscure, such as Catharine Weed Barnes Ward, Alice Austen, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Consuelo Kanaga, and Claude Cahun. Among the early pioneers featured here, the earliest of them all is Anna Atkins, a botanist and scientific illustrator, born in 1799, whose groundbreaking work with cyanotypes led her to self-publish, around 1850, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, which is held to be the first photographically illustrated book. Among the contemporary practitioners featured here, the youngest is Nadine Ijewere, a fashion photographer and stylist born in 1992. Each photographer is profiled with a four-page spread that includes a portrait of the subject, a biographical text, an exemplary image, and a brief tutorial-type breakdown of a particular technique associated with the figure in question that readers are encouraged to experiment with in their own practices. With this latter feature, Padley’s book lives up to the second portion of the volume’s full title as well.
Also, I mentioned that ‘exquisite’ is understatement for how beautifully this book is designed. It’s worth reiterating. The 50 distinct hues that backdrop the third and fourth pages of each photographer’s section are so rich, and so brilliantly deployed in concert with featured images, that you’ll find yourself poring long over all the photos and lush layouts alike. I’ve been keeping the book at arm’s reach as much to revisit certain images as to indulge anew in the eye candy of its constituent colors. The deep royal blue in Vivian Sassen’s section. The creamy pink in Rahima Gambo’s. The nocturnal purple in Jessie Tarbox Beals’s. The lush golden ochre in Julie Cockburns’s. The brownish milky grey in Sally Mann’s. The bright cherry red in Eve Arnold’s. In a word, yum. Exquisite and then some.
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Matthew Beaumont, How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body
Verso Books
Matthew Beaumont has been writing about the personal, interpersonal, historical, and broadly sociocultural significances and philosophical understandings of walking for many years, largely through the lens of literary representation, as a way to examine what he calls ‘the poetics of walking’. For Beaumont, this poetics is tantamount to politics, and in his new book How We Walk, the politics of walking takes center stage with an urgency that makes its poetic counterpart appear of secondary importance, insofar as having the relative freedom to reflect on walking as such ranks as something along the lines of a privileged perspective of a privilege.
In this incisive and consistently illuminating book, walking is contingent upon a host of allowances and ‘socioindicative’ factors that are easily taken for granted or overlooked. Beaumont draws on the writings of and prodigious scholarship surrounding the Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and political activist Frantz Fanon, exploring deeply this influential figure’s ideas related to how colonization, racialization, oppression, and the variable ravages of capitalist exploits come to condition a range of patently observable dispositions and activities. Explored concretely, psychologically, and with great semantic nuance are such things as uprightness, gait, stride, bearing, standing, posture, comportment, pedestrian movement, ‘public being’, disability, disfigurement, breathing – and most crucially here, ‘walking while Black’, a particularly focused and revelatory critical framework that Fanon, known to dictate entire essays on walking while calmly pacing back and forth in his office, was instrumental in developing.
Through six richly layered chapters, each featuring Fanon ‘walking alongside’ Beaumont and a coterie of kindred thinkers – including Garnette Cadogan, Ernst Bloch, Nikolaus Friedrich, Peter Moss, Wilhelm Reich, Assia Djebar, and many others – How We Walk furnishes a lucid, interdisciplinarily ranging treatment of a thick rubric of sociological issues and inquiries that are as pertinent and consequential as ever, especially as technological shifts and alleged advancements increasingly transform how we work, move, and interact. For certain, Beaumont’s book is an essential read for anyone interested in body politics, cultural criticism, labor studies, urban planning, and related disciplines. But I’d go ‘a step’ further: How We Walk is a must-read for anyone who sees the title and thinks, ‘What’s this about?’ If that’s you, you owe it to yourself, your neighbor, and your community to find out.
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Slow Narrative across Media, edited by Marco Caracciolo and Ella Mingazova
Ohio State Press, 2024
Discussions about slowing things down have been commonplace in creative contexts for quite a while. In the visual arts, artists, critics, and curators talk about such things as slowing down the passing of time by making art, slowing down the process of making, slowing down the act of looking, slowing down the experience of visiting an exhibition space, and slowing down the process of making associations among and engaging with artworks. While such discourses aren’t necessarily new, they’ve certainly been newly invigorated, and rendered more immediately palpable, in recent decades when juxtaposed with, or contextualized in opposition to conversations around the mounting omnipresence of accelerated technologies, seductively packaged media, and superfluously consumable imagery – and the virtually instantaneous availability of almost everything, almost whenever, almost wherever, all on demand. And so on. Even that side of the broadened discourse – the digitally platformed, social media side – has been active long enough now to elicit eye-rolls as we rattle off its constituent features. There’s probably a TikTok account that tells everyone all about it. And yet another one that reposts videos from that account superimposed with unimpressed viewers rolling their eyes at them.
And yet, while the anxiousness-inducing themes of hyperspeed-everything and ubiquitous imagery have become as predictably tedious as quotidian doomscrolling, discussions of slowness have remained enduringly cogent, compelling, and productive – and maybe even pleasantly intriguing to engage with and deepen. Again with respect to the visual arts, artists speak of prolonged processes of making art as a means to open intuitive pathways for experimentation and discovery, and artists and exhibitors alike uphold the joys of the sense of aesthetic revelation that can result from longer looking, harder looking, longer lingering, and closer reading. It’s hard to argue against this connection-forward ethos of closer engagement, especially when considered in counterpoint to the quick glimpses, scans, and likes that characterize ‘engagement’ on social media, but it’s enlightening to question it by peeling back its layers. Such a deeper probe is essentially the starting point for the investigations featured in Slow Narrative across Media, a new collection of essays edited by Marco Caracciolo and Ella Mingazova. Their aim is to complicate and enrich the thematic space of slowness by demonstrating how certain types of works, often at the level of narrative, not only necessitate a type of slower regard, but are structurally inhabited by attributes of internal slowness.
Gathering about a dozen essays by as many writers, and focusing on variably legible texts in a range of media – and drawing reference to various eras and narrative disciplines – Slow Narrative across Media adopts a subtle yet profoundly effective perspectival shift. Caracciolo and Mingazova dismiss the ‘slow versus fast’ binary that can diminish the quality of discourse, by dint of oversimplification, by upholding speed as indicative of progress or efficiency, for example, and slowness as dull, debilitating, or backward, viewpoints that are far from exclusive to any particular era. Conversely, inverting the binary to praise slowness over speed obviates the nuance necessitated by more meaningful critical analysis. As Caracciolo and Mingazova note in their introductory essay: “[S]peed and slowness resemble cartoonish characters taking turns as the hero and the villain – largely depending on who you ask. The reality, of course, is that slowness and speed are relative concepts and that they are highly context dependent.” Thus the contexts they examine are narratives themselves, works themselves, and the extent to which slowness inheres within them – that is, the extent to which such texts “afford imaginative experiences of deceleration.”
The first two sections of Slow Narrative across Media explore these ideas through various forms and formats of prose, plot components, novels, and narrative cycles. The book’s latter two sections branch out into theater, cinema, and choice aspects of visual art. Greice Schneider investigates slowness in contemporary comics. Carolien von Nerom examines slowness through the music Philip Glass created for an opera retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Mingazova tracks slowness of mood, atmosphere, and tone in Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega as a written text and in its audio book format. Caracciolo seeks out ‘rehabilitating slowness’ and aspects of ecological imperatives in econarratology. And Peggy Phelan delves into spare narrative and decelerated cinema in one of the greatest paragons of filmic slowness, Andy Warhol’s Empire. To be sure, themes of slowness and speed will remain critically relevant as cultural issues for some time to come. Read Slow Narrative across Media to start having deeper, more relativistically coherent discussions about them sooner rather than later. Its constituent essays are all worth lingering on. Read them slowly, pensively, closely.
***

Alex Beringer, Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip
Ohio State Press, 2024
Among the many things you’ll learn by reading Alex Beringer’s deeply researched, insightful, and often surprising book Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip is that the broadly defined field of comics studies has been around for about a hundred years, at least, and that for much of that time, the generally accepted narrative of when and how a number of the comic formats familiar to us today, such as comics formatted as strips and serialized in Sunday newspaper supplements, points to a starting point in the 1890s. More specifically, that theory, narrowly focused on a certain understanding of the comic context in the US, indicates Richard F. Outcault’s character known as the Yellow Kid as the originating protagonist whose characteristics and popularity, given the expanded story that grew around him through serialization as Hogan’s Alley in The New York World, formed the groundwork for 20th-century developments like superhero comic books, graphic novels, and related applications of comic media. Known as ‘the Yellow Kid thesis’, this notion was established by Coulton Waugh’s 1947 study The Comics, and comics histories published in the ensuing decades more or less reiterated that assumption.
Enter Beringer’s Lost Literacies, which swiftly and summarily shreds the historical fabric of that assumption. That’s a mild overstatement, sure, insofar as it makes Beringer’s book seem intrinsically dynamic if not slightly pugnacious. It’s not. But it is true that Beringer’s revised narrative of the history of US comics is replete with intrigue and consistently exciting almost despite itself. Which is to say, while captivating, it’s also a comics-specific showcase of many standard features of scholarly publications: unadorned, even dry prose; copious, detailed footnotes; small fonts and tight spacing on large page formats; not quite handsomely, at best serviceably reproduced graphics and illustrations, in this case mostly comics; and manifold descriptions of and references to comics studies, studies of comics studies, and comics arcana that are surely of great interest to specialists in the field, though somewhat less so for a general readership.
And yet, many of the same scholarly features make Beringer’s account all the more fascinating, and overall, it remains plenty accessible for readers with even a passing interest in the subject matter itself. There’s much to love about academic volumes of this type anyway, insofar as they eschew editorial flair and presumed entertainment value in favor of quality, revelatory research and innovative perspectives. Here, there’s no wry or cheeky stylistics, no breezy accounting, no lighthearted delivery, and no lushly embellished graphic layouts to distract you from the compellingly investigative, dutifully interdisciplinary revisionist narrative at hand. Beringer’s vast knowledge of, and profound love for his subject matter is on full display, and he’s passionate – calmly, critically, rationally passionate – about setting the record straight. He achieves this by taking a longer view of comics history, drawing ample reference to European antecedents, and supplanting or supplementing accepted timelines with more layered alternatives. These features are complemented by copious demonstrations of how contemporaneous trends in literature, theater, music, street performances, public orality, publishing, journalism, graphic experimentation, and even the evolution of various types of humor – and the extent to which they might translate at all as illustrated expressions – were of crucial importance in the progression of comics as an increasingly successful medium.
Beringer’s scholarly zeal, however tempered, is infectious, and his generous study is both informative and inspiring – a magnifying glass on comics history that’ll ensure you never see comic books, graphic novels, New Yorker cartoons, Garfield comic strips, and the like in quite the same light. Should Lost Literacies pique your interest in learning more about comics studies, you won’t have to venture too far from this volume or its publisher to satisfy your curiosities. Ohio State Press alone has issued almost 50 related titles in the past couple decades. And of course, Beringer’s 22-page bibliography is a reputable guidebook to direct further research.
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About the writer: Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator. He is Writing and Thesis Advisor for the MFA program at The New York Studio School, and a regular visiting critic and instructor for several other institutions and residency programs. D’Agostino teaches writing workshops, is a translator and editor working in various languages, and writes about art, books, and film on a freelance basis. You can find him on Instagram and Threads @pauldagostinostudio