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Non-fiction and Comics

Defining Nonfiction

�  Hayden White: “The same event can serve as a different kind of element of many different historical stories…. The death of the king may be a beginning, an end, or simply a transitional event in three different stories” (7).

�  Perry Nodelman: “Nonfiction shares many of the qualities of fictional narrative….. Since plots emerge from the actions of characters, histories and biographies inevitably imply interpretations of the motivations of those involved, just as fictional stories do” (129).

Nonfiction

�  Nodelman: “…photographs, commonly used in many nonfictional texts as scientifically generated representations of truth, make a claim to accuracy that disguises the photographer’s choice of what to shoot from where, what focus and film type to use, and what sort of cropping to perform” (129).

�  “Representations of reality in nonfiction have almost the same status as the ones found in fiction. Both are always slanted or partial versions of the truth…[that] can and do easily reinforce ideological assumptions about individuals and society” (129).

Non-Fiction Graphic Narratives

Non-Fiction Graphic Narratives

Social History in the Mid-20th Century

�  According to Foner and Garraty, “The U.S. triumph in World War II led to what has been called the age of consensus in American historical writing. With their nation at the center of world events and compelled to compare it with the European powers that were now under its sway, historians sought to explain America’s centrality and history” (502).

�  “…historians read the American past as one of a relatively homogeneous and conservative culture, essentially free of social conflict” (502).

Social History in the Mid-20th Century

�  Moreover, historians of this era were committed to the idea that “history should deal with the great moments in western European and American history, and nothing more; its presentation style should emphasize inspiring narratives” (Stearns 688).

�  Typical titles: Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics (1953) and Potter’s People of Plenty (1954)

Factors Behind the Shift to a New Social History

�  Influence of French historians such as Marc Bloch, who “regarded every aspect of life and every social group as worthy of study” (Foner and Garraty 503), including peasant life and popular culture.

�  Influence of British historians such as E.P. Thompson, who advocated a “bottom-up” social history that took Marxist ideas regarding class relations into account in the creation of historical narratives. Typical titles from the 1960s include Williams’ The Tragedy of American History (1961) and Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

Factors Behind the Shift to a New Social History

�  Influence of the Civil Rights movement, as intellectuals realized that “history could lend dignity to the political cause, by showing that groups besides the white male elite had contributed to the past and by showing past examples of suffering and effective struggle…” (Stearns 685).

�  Influence of the computer, as the ability to collect and to process extensive data sets enabled historians to back up their assertions with compelling data.

Factors Behind the Shift to a New Social History

�  Influence of interdisciplinary studies that encouraged historians to take into account the foci of other disciplinary areas, including sociology, further expanding their purview into issues such as the history of gerontology and the history of family life.

Postmodern Concerns

�  In addition to historians such as Charles Beard, who called into question the idea of objectivity, other new historians such as Hayden White compelled his colleagues to “confront the argument that history is a narrative endeavor, that all social reality is understood through language, and that our comprehension of the facts is not a knowledge of something but a representation of something” (Kutler 141).

�  The new emphasis is on telling history from multiple perspectives and on emphasizing the interrelatedness of groups (141).

The Literature of the United States (1966)

Heath Anthology of American Literature (2001)

�  Volume A: Colonial Period to 1800 Part 1: Colonial Period: to 1700 Native American Culture and Traditions The Europeans Arrive New World Cultures New World Literatures Native American Oral Literatures Native American Oral Narrative Talk Concerning the First Beginning (Zuni) Changing Woman and the Hero Twins after the Emergenceof the People (Navajo) Wohpe and the Gift of the Pipe (Lakota) The Origin of Stories (Seneca) Iroquois or Confederacy of the Five Nations (Iroquois) Iktomi and the Dancing Ducks (Christine Dunham, Oglala Sioux) Raven and Marriage (Tlingit) The Bungling Host (Hitchiti) Creation of the Whites (Yuchi)

Heath Anthology of American Literature (2001)

�  Native American Oral Poetry Zuni Poetry ----------- Sayatasha's Night Chant Aztec Poetry ----------- The Singer's Art ----------- Two Songs ----------- Like Flowers Continually Perishing (Ayocuan) Inuit Poetry ----------- Song (Copper Eskimo) ----------- Moved (Uvavnuk, Iglulik Eskimo) ----------- Improvised Greeting (Takomaq, Iglulik Eskimo) ----------- Widow's Song (Quernertoq, Copper Eskimo) ----------- My Breath (Orpingalik, Netsilik Eskimo)

Heath Anthology of American Literature (2001)

�  Cluster: America in the European Imagination Thomas More from Utopia Michel de Montaigne from Of Cannibals Theodor Galle, after a drawing by Jan van der Straet [Stradanus] America, c. 1575 John Donne Elegie XIX, To his Mistris Going to Bed Francis Bacon from New Atlantis

Heath Anthology of American Literature (2001)

�  New Spain Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) from Journal of the First Voyage to America, 1492-1493 from Narrative of the Third Voyage, 1498-1500 Cluster: Cultural Encounters - A Critical Survey Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) from The Significance of the Frontier in American History Andrew Wiget from Reading Against the Grain: Origin Stories and American Literacy History Annette Kolodny from Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers

Sacco’s Journalism

�  Joe Sacco has made a career out of traveling to places where the US is involved, either indirectly, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or directly, as in Iraq.

�  Understanding the shifts that have occurred in the representation of historical events can help us to better contextualize Sacco’s work.

Competing Views of Empire: Neo-con

�  At the turn of the century, a number of competing views about US involvement in the world were debated publicly. The Neo-con view argues that “we won the Cold War, so the story goes, and as the only superpower, we will maintain global supremacy primarily by military means, by preemptive strikes against any potential rivals, and by a perpetual war against terror, defined primarily as the Muslim world. We need to remain vigilant against those rogue states and terrorists who resist not our power but the universal human values that we embody” (Kaplan 3).

Competing Views of Empire: Liberal Interventionists

�  “Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the ‘reluctant imperialist.’ In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be constitutionally unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the moral authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the world” (Kaplan 4).

Howard Zinn’s View of Empire

�  “We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea that this would help their cause, killed thousands of innocent people. But what do we do with that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out violently and blindly just to show how tough we are?” (1).

�  “Throughout U.S. History, our military has been used not for moral purposes but to expand economic, political, and military power” (7).

�  Zinn calls this “Permanent War” (254).

Howard Zinn and Joe Sacco

�  If I were to align Sacco with any prominent US historian, it would be Howard Zinn. In fact, Sacco’s introduction to Journalism includes his declaration that he wishes to tell history from the perspective of those people who often do not have a voice – in this respect, his aims match those of Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States, a text only narrative, and A People’s History of American Empire, a comic, both focus on writing history from the perspective of the marginalized, the poor, and the voiceless.