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ERIC Number: EJ1102584
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0362-6784
EISSN: N/A
Comics and the Structure of Childhood Feeling: Sublimation and the Play of Pretending in Gilbert Hernandez's "Marble Season"
Lewkowich, David
Curriculum Inquiry, v46 n3 p286-307 2016
In this paper, I study the narrative structure of comics as a means to describe the ways that indeterminate modes of representation can allow the reader to imagine that which in childhood can never be fully expressed. Analyzing a number of panels from Gilbert Hernandez's graphic novel, "Marble Season," I describe a conceptual link between the psychoanalytic idea of sublimation (referencing the theories of Freud, Loewald, and Winnicott), and Raymond Williams' notion of a "structure of feeling." In particular, I examine the latency stage of childhood as a time where the challenges of individual development involve a struggle to channel into the social world, in potentially productive ways, the internalizations of lost love. I also explore how the gutter, the space between the panels in comics, may function as a zone of sublimatory reconciliation between the self and the object world, and where, in their interactions with the space in the middle, the reader invariably engages with the structure of childhood feeling as a product of their own reading.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A