I want to write a dissertation that treats comics, the primary material, as the intersection of a whole bunch of different things. To put that differently, studying comics as 'just' texts in and of themselves would give us not even half the picture of how they function. To fail to include the things that surround the work--industry, economics, fan culture, 'insider' allusions--would be an oversight of remarkable proportion.
The intuitive reason I cling to this notion has only just now occured to me, though I suspect my supervisor has been trying to tell me this for about 18 months now. The very fact that the writers I study, the art to which I am drawn, is almost continually meta-textual requires that readers are constantly aware of the 'whole phenomenon': the industry, the fan culture, and the art itself. This art constantly looks at itself as something embedded in culture, implicated in economics, and enmeshed in art history (visual, narrative, literary); therefore, as a critic, I have to take all of those things into account.
Posted by orion at August 16, 2006 3:44 PM