We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should be punitively prosocial, be quasi-omniscient, exhibit kin-signalling proxies and be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against (...) a large sample of 19,877 characters that were derived from 72,611 comics using data scraping techniques. Our results corroborate the view that cognitive constraints exercise a selective effect on the transmission of popular culture. (shrink)

A modern form of narrative, comic books are used to communicate, discuss, and critique issues in business ethics and social issues in management. A description of comic books as a legitimate medium is followed by a discussion of the pedagogical uses of comic books and assessment techniques. The strengths of the pedagogy include crossing cultural barriers, understanding the complexity of individual decision-making and organizational influences, and the universality of dilemmas and values. We provide an initial source for (...) educators on the topics, comic books, plotlines, and other commentary for consideration of use in the classroom from high school to graduate business ethics and social issues in management courses. (shrink)

What would happen if lightning struck a tree in a swamp and transformed it into The Swampman, or if saving billions of lives required sacrificing millions first? The first is a philosophical thought experiment devised by Donald Davidson, the second a theme from a comic written by Alan Moore. I argue that that comics can be read as containing thought experiments and that such philosophical devises should be shared with students of all ages.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has brought many of the best-known Marvel Comics stories to the big screen. But just because they use these stories it doesn’t mean they reproduce them faithfully. As it has been seen over the years, Marvel Studios’ film projects follow their own storylines that do not correspond to the main narrative of the comics. Starting from this premise, this research aims to study the evolution to Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) from the comic (...) class='Hi'>book series Thor: The Butcher of Gods (Aaron, 2018) on which it is based. Focusing both on what aspects they share and the differences that make Thor: Love and Thunder a standalone project. (shrink)

The 9/11 attacks in the USA had profound political consequences at both domestic and international levels. Specific and controversial policy developments were pursued requiring substantial legitimation to find acceptance. A prime example was the USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and subsequently received considerable critique due to the sweeping nature of its redefinition of what was acceptable in the cause of ‘fighting terror’. The media, and their construal of events and policies, played a significant (...) role in the necessary process of legitimation. In this paper, we explore how one particular area of the media, the superhero comic book, was also active in this regard. By focusing specifically on the multimodal meaning construction within Marvel's Civil War comics series, we suggest how a close multimodal discourse analysis can shed further light on the mechanisms by which particular discourse contexts of public opinion are propagated. (shrink)

The term gurlesque refers to an aesthetics that mixes feminism, femininity, the grotesque and the cute. This article explores how contemporary Swedish feminist comic books do gurlesque theory with the aim of contributing to the theoretical conversation about feminine aesthetics and gurlesque. The study focuses on two contemporary Swedish comic books, Jag är din flickvän nu by Nina Hemmingsson and Allt kommer bli bra by Lisa Ewald. The article views gurlesque as a queer aesthetics, as a form of (...) wilful misinterpretation and taunting of perceptions of femininity. The word gurlesque draws from the word ‘girl’, and questions the connection between girlhood and young age from a queer perspective. Although the gurlesque is rooted in images of girlhood, it has the potential to grasp femininities of all ages. (shrink)

One of the more compelling features of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct is its theoretical parsimony. Utilizing what essentially amounts to one explanatory principle—that of Darwinian selection—Dutton advances a theory of aesthetics that is at once general enough to account for cross-cultural variations in artistic production and sufficiently nuanced to promote insights into individual artworks. In doing this, Dutton’s work could not offer a greater contrast to some of the more vocal trends in contemporary aesthetic theory, where ponderous theorizing and (...) rebarbative jargons have violently opposed the idea—otherwise so modest—that aesthetic activities might draw on the evolved capacities of the human imagination. On .. (shrink)

In this essay, I take up the question of why so many of the movies made by Hollywood are endless sequels, “prequels,” and remakes of prior blockbuster hits and so many are based on comic books (X-men, Superman, Batman, and so on). I tie the explanation in part to the aforementioned 1950 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting production companies, and in part to broader cultural changes. In particular, I argue that precisely because film producers can no longer make money from (...) the concessions (i.e., the purchases within the theater), but only of the ticket sales, the producers keep producing remakes of known popular movies, rather than make deeply original movies. (shrink)

The core of the study is a critical comparison of Nietzsche’s notion ofÜbermensch, and its transhumanist rewriting into different variants of the posthuman. The first part contextualizes transhumanist thought, primarily in relation to certain evolutionary ideas that, in their totality, exhibit a fundamental anthropological deficit: they speak of the evolutionary overcoming of human, but the limit of sensibility that attempts to imagine a future human being is only the mere negation of what human has been so far. In this way, (...) the posthuman is not removed from the somewhat vague context of the technological “extension” of previous humanity. In this respect, the whole concept is grossly unaesthetic. The second part shows that Nietzsche’s rethinking of the overhuman was intertwined with other anthropological structures, for example, the idea ofMitfreude(‘shared joy’), which is supposed to creatively (in the manner of art) replace the morally misleading notion of compassion. The Übermensch therefore enabled Nietzsche to propose a different conception of intersubjectivity; one that would no longer be reduced to contempt for the human being. The third section traces the causes of the transhumanist failure in productive imagination. It is based on the hypothesis that this failure is driven by an unconscious preference for the figure of the comic book Superman. It postulates, through a Kantian conception of the sublime, that an adequate elaboration of the image of the posthuman cannot do without an affective component that would allow forBejahung(‘affirmation’). Only the artificial will always appear, to some degree, as alien, and therefore will never transcend the limits of reactive adaptation. A living posthuman could only emerge if he offered anthropological techniques of the art of living. Therefore, transhumanism continuously raises anthropological questions, especially regarding the problem of the extent to which the artificiality of art can be identified with technology. Without proper answers, it will not achieve the complexity of Nietzsche’s overhuman, and will always only dilute him into technological supplements. The posthuman will come into being when he is conceived as a grandiose work of art. (shrink)

This article argues that to disrupt legal education in a radical sense, students need to become acquainted with the art of worldmaking and the view that law is a “way of worldmaking”. First, I show that law is a cultural semiotic practice that requires decoding and, for that reason, demands a creative intervention by those that want to know, understand, and do things with law. Altogether this amounts to recognizing the different modes in which law creates, and is part of, (...) worlds. Second, I propose that due to different features of their aesthetic form, comics are a particularly effective medium to place students before the myriad ways in which law and lawyers make and reproduce worlds. Third, I illustrate the argument by exploring how the Saga comic series, through its formal multimodality and narrative and cultural complexity, can make good on that challenge. (shrink)

Comics have great potential to depict an almost infinite range of themes, questions and lives. But what about their ability to express and interpret philosophical concepts? How can we differentiate between the representation of theoretical concepts in and of themselves, and the impact of comics techniques on the legacy of philosophers, their lives and their thought? This book explores the historical and artistic value of representing lives through the medium of bande dessinée (BD), French-language comics. The text analyses three (...) biographical BDs dedicated to the lives of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus as well as a selection of print and online comics that extend the legacy of these philosophers and their historical movement. The work is the first to analyse biographical BD through the lens of Existentialism, offering a new theory of reading biographical comics. The research not only contributes a novel approach to comics but also an enhanced understanding of Existentialism and the Existentialists, including their enduring contemporary relevance. (shrink)

Was macht den Comic als Medium aus? Wer oder was macht ihn zu einem Medium? Für die Erforschung von Comics gibt es bislang keinen allgemein verbindlichen Medienbegriff: Zu divers scheinen sie, wenn sie aus Texten und Bildern arrangiert, in Zeitungen gedruckt, als Hefte gesammelt, als graphic novels besprochen oder auf Smartphones gelesen werden. Die Medien des Comics entwickelt ein Medialitätsmodell, mit dem sich der medialen Bestimmung von Comics gerade in ihrer Veränderbarkeit nachgehen lässt. Medialität wird dazu als ein Verbindungsprinzip (...) verstanden, nach dem die Einrichtung eines bestimmbaren Mediums Comic aus Materialien, Zeichen und Institutionen stetig neu vollzogen wird. Analysen zeigen auf, wie heterogene Akteure diese modernen Medienbestimmungen verändern - und wie dabei Kontroversen hinsichtlich der Mediengeschichte, Nostalgie, Selbstreflexivität und Materialität von Comics aufkommen. Dabei führen die Fallbeispiele von der Vergangenheit der comic strips und comic books zu aktuellen Entwicklungen im Zusammenhang mit Smartphones, Webcomics und Blogs. Der Band richtet sich an Comicforschende unterschiedlicher Disziplinen sowie an Medienwissenschaftler: innen, die sich mit Transformationsprozessen auseinandersetzen. (shrink)

A great deal of the humor that we encounter is narrative in form. This is obviously the case with many, if not most, jokes. But humor also occurs in more expanded narrative frameworks, including plays, novels, films, short stories, TV programs, comic books, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether there are any plot structures—of magnitudes greater than that of the joke—that might be thought of as comic in virtue of (...) their narrative form. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s HeptaméronG. Mallary MastersHeroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, by Dora E. Polachek; 170 pp. Amherst: Hestia Press, 1993, $19.00.The volume of essays edited by Professor Polachek represents one of the most attractive collections of symposium papers I have seen in recent years. Attractive to see and to read, it contains a variety of approaches dealing (...) with a timely topic, the “feminine” perspective of a sixteenth-century French collection of novellas within the framework of a “romance” written by a female author. Professor Polachek has masterfully edited the materials, grouping them by subject and giving her readers a text remarkably clean of typographical errors. Her introduction gives a review, as it were, a critical evaluation of the contents. The reader who wishes a more detailed synopsis of the studies in the volume may consult it to advantage.Building upon the historic reference implicit in the introduction, “The Heptaméron Then and Now,” the first group of essays by Robert D. Cottrell, Robert Melançon, and Judy Kem appear in the section entitled “Locus Amænus: Setting the Stage.” They provide background setting for the two groups that follow. Articles by Patricia Francis Cholakian, Carla Freccero, Jeffery C. Persels, and François Paré deal with the topic “Heroic Virtue: Signaling Crisis.” Gary Ferguson, Paula Sommers, Jerry C. Nash, and Dora E. Polachek conclude the volume’s third part with the theme “Engendering Laughters: Men Mocked.”The Amherst conference on Marguerite proved, of the three I attended, the most varied in theme, in critical approach, and in openness of discussion. It produced an outstanding volume of essays: timely, imaginative, qualitative, and even provocative. Colloquium implies dialogue, and dialogue means dialectic, open debate of divergent opinions. And yet, even as Marguerite herself would [End Page 150] wish it, the total experience is one of harmony, the sounding together in unison of the divergent themes, the seemingly discordant approaches that parallel the different voices created by one of the great sixteenth-century female authors of the French Renaissance. In her edition of the conference, Professor Polachek has succeeded very well in presenting a coincidentia oppositorum of the sometimes discordant opinions of Marguerite’s critics whose divergent points of view contribute to our better understanding of her too often underestimated text.The volume will prove very useful for students of Marguerite at all levels of inquiry, as it permits exposure to many different critical approaches to the text and provides additional bibliography such that readers may pursue their own interests and serious research on the subject by looking into the best of Marguerite criticism of the last decades and, indeed, of the last two centuries. The studies contained in it propel us back to the beginnings, so to speak, of Marguerite criticism, bring us up to date in terms of the most recent approaches, and move us forward through the setting of new directions and standards for future research.G. Mallary MastersUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel HillCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on comics and the anarchist imagination. The curators of the 2014 British Library exhibition, "Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK," noted that "there has always been a certain anarchic streak" in comics. Indeed, since Ralph Chaplin's Black Cat appeared alongside the work of Ernest Riebe and Ern Hanson in the IWW's Industrial Worker in the early twentieth century, comics and cartoons have been prominent fixtures in anarchist (...) publications, while comic books themselves have often featured anarchist heroes. To take a few more examples: in the 1960s and 70s, Donald Rooum's Wildcat comics strips featured... (shrink)

_The Art of Comics_ is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a powerful contribution to the philosophy of art. The first-ever anthology to address the philosophical issues raised by the art of comics Provides an extensive and thorough introduction to the field, and to (...) comics more generally Responds to the increasing philosophical interest in comic art Includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis Many of the chapters are illustrated, and the book carries a stunning cover by the rising young comics star David Heatley. (shrink)

Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor develops an inclusive theory that integrates psychological, aesthetic, and ethical issues relating to humor Offers an enlightening and accessible foray into the serious business of humor Reveals how standard theories of humor fail to explain its true nature and actually support traditional prejudices against humor as being antisocial, irrational, and foolish Argues that humor’s benefits overlap significantly with those of philosophy Includes a foreword by Robert Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker.

This book is the first attempt to think philosophically about the comic phenomenon in literature, art, and life. Working across a substantial collection of comic works author Agnes Heller makes seminal observations on the comic in the work of both classical and contemporary figures. Whether she's discussing Shakespeare, Kafka, Rabelais, or the paintings of Brueghel and Daumier Heller's Immortal Comedy makes a characteristic contribution to modern thought across the humanities.

The aim of this paper is to present how an innovative approach to teaching philosophy can effectively meet the requirements of the prescribed curriculum, and contribute to achieving the expected learning outcomes, interdisciplinary teaching and learning links, formative monitoring and evaluation of student achievements, to achieve educational subject goals. In this paper, the authors, considering comics as a kind of teaching medium, i.e., the application of the comic method in teaching, on the example of a scenario for a philosophy (...) lesson in high school show how it is possible to combine a comics approach to teaching philosophy with philosophy for children. Philosophy for children as well as the comic book approach to teaching philosophy are extremely complementary (they are provocative and dialogical, stimulate students' intellectual curiosity, develop critical and creative thinking, create a positive and stimulating learning environment), which allows them to be combined effectively. (shrink)

A patient arrives in the emergency room apparently in a comatose state. But is he really unconscious or just faking? The young doctors on duty are skeptical. Failing to get a reaction with a chest rub, they try a variety of methods that become increasingly sadistic—pressing on the patient's fingernail with a ballpoint pen, spraying his testicles with a skin‐freezing compound, announcing an imminent eye injection to scare the patient awake.I first encountered those chilling pen‐and‐ink images in a 2012 (...) class='Hi'>comic book, Disrepute, authored by Thom Ferrier, the nom de plume for British general practitioner Ian Williams. Disrepute is part of a young but growing genre that Williams helped dub "graphic medicine" when he founded a website by that name in 2007. Using the graphic novel form, doctors, nurses, and patients are producing accounts that often reveal the dark underbelly of the world of medicine. From patients and their families, these include portraits of imperious and insensitive physicians or nurses; from doctors, explorations of the doubt that racks them when their treatment ends in a mistake or a patient's death. While the form is also referred to as “comics,” the work, as in Williams's strip, is bleak just as often as it is humorous. (shrink)

Examining Henri Bergson's work, philosophy, and the body, this volume explores the history and philosophy of comedy, film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future, creating a theoretical and practice-based framework for the field.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Problem The Filmstrip Argument Metacomics Bomb Queen's Editor Girl The Filth's Max Thunderstone Conventions and Aesthetic Analysis Conclusions Notes References.

In Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, the text describes its main character as witty, brave, and resourceful. The drawings of the story’s main character which accompany this text, however, present a unique kind of harm that only becomes clear when the work is read as a collection of single-panel comics rather than an illustrated book. In this chapter, I show what happens when we read drawings in books as textless comics, and, based on how things turn out from this (...) reading, motivate why we have some substantive reason to read both Little Black Sambo and other books with drawings-as-comics. (shrink)

What exactly are comics? Can they be art, literature, or even pornography? How should we understand the characters, stories, and genres that shape them? Thinking about comics raises a bewildering range of questions about representation, narrative, and value. Philosophy of Comics is an introduction to these philosophical questions. In exploring the history and variety of the comics medium, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray chart a path through the emerging field of the philosophy of comics. Drawing from a diverse range (...) of forms and genres and informed by case studies of classic comics such as Watchmen, Tales from the Crypt, and Fun Home, Cowling and Cray explore ethical, aesthetic, and ontological puzzles, including: -/- - What does it take to create-or destroy-a fictional character like Superman? - Can all comics be adapted into films, or are some comics impossible to adapt? - Is there really a genre of “superhero comics”? - When are comics obscene, pornographic, and why does it matter? -/- At a time of rapidly growing interest in graphic storytelling, this is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of comics and some of its most central and puzzling questions. (shrink)

From US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s 1933 judgement in Louis K Liggett Co v Lee to Matt Wuerker’s satirical cartoon “Corpenstein”, the use of Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for the modern corporation has been a common practice. This paper seeks to unpack and extend explicitly this metaphorical register via a recent filmic and graphic interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein myth. Whilst Frankenstein has been read as an allegorical critique of rights—Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a monstrous body, reflecting the (...) figurative construction of a body by rights discourse—the metaphoric notion of reanimating a ‘soulless corpse’ resonates with Edward’s Thurlow’s description of the corporation as having ‘no soul to damn’. By exploring the figurative and optical representations of this process of reanimating the body in Scott Beattie’s film I, Frankenstein and Kevin Grevioux’s companion graphic novel I, Frankenstein: Genesis, I would like to extend this metaphoric register, by examining the theological origin and nature of the corporate form. This theology is explicitly referenced in the film and graphic novel via the battle between Gargoyles and Demons, which dominates the plot and backstory. The role of Frankenstein’s monster—now called Adam—however, is about enabling the reanimation of thousands of corpses without souls for possession by the demon hoard headed by Prince Naberius, who in his alternative persona Charles Wessex, controls the Wessex Institute and Wessex Industries. This ‘corporate baron’ himself has devoted his ‘life’ to enabling the rediscovery of Frankenstein’s ability to reanimate the dead for the purposes of gaining immortality. This mythic framing, however, renders explicitly visible the nature and purpose of the corporate form itself—of capturing and reanimating life in a form of immortality via the mechanisms of perpetual succession. This visual rendering, of a metaphoric framing goes to show the way in which the optical nature of the dominant forms of popular culture—film, television, comic books—provide a means for seeing law’s metaphorical images and for thus unpacking, interrogating and rendering them anew. It argues for a shift from the image of the corporation as a monstrous body to one which involves relations of reciprocity, gratuitousness and gift. (shrink)

During nearly two centuries, American storytellers have celebrated comic figures, ebullient showoffs who turned up on one frontier after another—in the old South, in Kentucky and Tennessee, along the great inland rivers, in the mountains and the mines and on the prairies. Often, the stories went, when these characters engaged in a favorite pastime—playfully bragging about their strength, their skill and their exploits—they used animal metaphors such as Opossum, Screamer, Half-Horse Half-Alligator, the Big Bear of Arkansas or Gamecock of (...) the Wilderness to furnish nicknames. Often they were also identified as fictional or real frontiersmen—Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Jim Doggett, Pecos Bill—and tall tales clustered around them. Explaining a metaphor and a nickname, an Ohio newspaper in 1830 cited the most famous braggart of this sort: "Ring-tailed roarer—A most vicious fellow—a Crockett." . . . The stories did not have to have roots in reality and often were not new. The real Crockett was well built, handsome, ruddy-cheeked. But traditional jokes made ugliness a funny quality. Falstaff claimed Bardolph's crimson proboscis glowed with a flame that made torches inoperative. The Spectator in 1711 told about "Spectator's" election to England's Ugly Club. Joke 177 in Joe Miller's Jests was about the British kingdom's champion ugly man. When Gus Longstreet entered law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813, a student welcomed him: "Here, sir, is a knife always given to the ugliest student. . . . Until now it has been mine, but beyond doubt, sir, since you are here, I have now no right to it any longer." Andy Jackson—"Old Hickory"—won a like award. Lore had it that Davy was so repulsive looking that if he grinned at a raccoon, it tumbled from its tree. Once, worried because he grinned and grinned without bringing down his victim, he was relieved when a close look showed he had mistaken a knot for a beast. All the same, he had grinned all the bark off the branch. Walter Blair is professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Chicago. His many influential works include Native American Humor and Horse Sense in American Humor. "Americanized Comic Braggarts" appears in a slightly different version in the book America's Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury. (shrink)

A fun introduction in comics to deep thinking and the history of philosophy -- Back cover.

The roster of Muslim superheroes in the comic book medium has grown over the years, as has the complexity of their depictions. Muslim Superheroes tracks the initial absence, reluctant inclusion, tokenistic employment, and then nuanced scripting of Islamic protagonists in the American superhero comic book market and beyond. This scholarly anthology investigates the ways in which Muslim superhero characters fulfill, counter, or complicate Western stereotypes and navigate popular audience expectations globally, under the looming threat of Islamophobia. (...) The contributors consider assumptions buried in the very notion of a character who is both a superhero and a Muslim with an interdisciplinary and international focus characteristic of both Islamic studies and comics studies scholarship. Muslim Superheroes investigates both intranational American racial formation and international American geopolitics, juxtaposed with social developments outside U.S. borders. Providing unprecedented depth to the study of Muslim superheroes, this collection analyzes, through a series of close readings and comparative studies, how Muslim and non-Muslim comics creators and critics have produced, reproduced, and represented different conceptions of Islam and Muslimness embodied in the genre characters. (shrink)

A review of John Morrreall's book Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor.

Why read the chapter of Rousseau’s Social Contract devoted to the Roman assemblies? Because that text relies on the best available historical sources at the time, especially Carlo Sigonio’s work, to examine a key issue in Rousseau’s political philosophy: the implementation of common interest. In other words, the chapter on the comitia raises the following question: how can the people take part in public life? How can popular action maintain a republican government instead of threatening it? To understand this question, (...) and why Roman history plays a crucial part in the argument of The Social Contract, it helps to remember that for Rousseau a Republic is a government that does not act on behalf of private interests. Res publica, the recent book by renowned historian Claudia Moatti, further highlights Rousseau’s representation of the Roman Republic. The article examines in particular the meaning of the expression “public thing”, a literal translation of res publica, which appears twice in Rousseau’s text, demonstrating an understanding of Roman history that seems quite close to Claudia Moatti’s. Like her, Rousseau seems to identify two distinct visions of the Republic: one based on citizens’ rights, the other focused on the defence of the state. Today, as these two definitions of the Republic both appear in public debate, Rousseau’s vision of Rome is all the more striking and topical. (shrink)

In his “Translator’s Introduction” to The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann writes: “This book … mirrors all of Nietzsche’s thought and could be related in a hundred ways to his other books, his notes and his letters. And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art.” Judging by their actual treatment of The Gay Science, few commentators have taken this claim to artistic completeness seriously. Instead, the usual practice has been to abstract passages from the (...) book, treating them either as initial statements of key Nietzschean doctrines or as casting light on general issues raised throughout Nietzsche’s works. Until now, no commentator of note has attempted an interpretation of The Gay Science as a unified whole. It is to this end that Higgins has written Comic Relief. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Comic Business: Theatricality, Technique, and Performance Contexts in Aristophanic ComedyC. W. MarshallMartin Revermann. Comic Business: Theatricality, Technique, and Performance Contexts in Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiv + 396 pp. 15 black-and-white plates. 3 black-and-white figs. 5 tables. Cloth, $115.The cover illustration of Martin Revermann's book on Aristophanic performance betrays the author's personal and intellectual debts: caricatures of five scholars thanked in the (...) preface, drawn as if they were characters in Clouds, including Oliver Taplin in a swing looking down from above like Socrates. It is a shame many libraries will not keep the cover, since the lighthearted image is quite revealing about the nature of this study, though without any intended association with the academic pedantry of the Thinkery. Following chapter 1, entitled "Comic Business" (3–7), really a short whirlwind of an introduction that raises many of the sorts of questions the book addresses, the structure of the book falls neatly into two parts: three chapters examine the nature of performance criticism of ancient comedy and address a wide range of specifics; three chapters address individual plays, Clouds, Lysistrata, and Wealth. Each chapter falls into well-labeled sections, which will facilitate ongoing reference to the book. Revermann's study aims at a theoretical sophistication that is needed if the study of ancient performance is to proceed meaningfully. While he does not engage with every issue he raises in sufficient depth, Revermann provides a crucial advance on previous discussions (the book comes thirty years after C. W. Dearden's Stage of Aristophanes and twenty-six years after Kenneth McLeish's Theatre of Aristophanes).Chapter 2, "Performance Criticism: Point and Methods" (8–65), addresses some important and underexplored methodological questions that often go unmentioned in such studies. After arguing that "no ancient statement known to [End Page 431] me... claims a necessary link between meaning and dramatic performance" (15), Revermann identifies a "nexus of competitive agendas and social performances" (22), building on those Wilson has described for the choregos. Many of the issues raised (non-competitive performances, pay for poets, the relative importance of dramatic festivals) are equally important for the study of tragedy, and the book generally raises issues that students of tragic performance will need to consider. A general vocabulary of theatre semiotics is introduced, helpfully, with specific examples examining how performance generally is framed.Revermann embarks on an ambitious project of replacing the "significant action" hypothesis (which assumes that every significant action within a Greek play is indicated by the words a character says) that has dominated discussions of ancient stagecraft. This is a very helpful discussion, and it is surely correct, culminating in a good articulation of Revermann's methodology (63–64). Again, the principal examples come from tragedy. However, when Revermann invokes the question of on-stage frogs (agreeing with my 1996 discussion, which in its way sought also to challenge the "significant action" hypothesis), I think he needlessly muddles the matter by imagining the possibility of subsequent, frogless performances, when, I would say, a great deal is lost as a result. Revermann's interest is more with the possibilities offered by performance generally (65: "'Why frogs?,' irrespective of their visibility"), and sometimes the nitty-gritty of specific staging choices is not pressed (comparison is made with the offstage songs of the cloud chorus on 200).Chapter 3 (66–106) addresses "Two Fundamental Problems." The first relates the performance script (as attested in our manuscripts) to a concept of authenticity, considering that many plays were reperformed in the fourth century and after. Given that issues of reperformance were barely acknowledged until the last decade (Easterling's 1994 discussion is subtitled "A Speculative Note"), Revermann provides a solid discussion, arguing that the scripts of both tragedy and comedy closely match what was performed in Athens. Inconsistencies exist, but they are mentioned; context-specific references in Aristophanes point to the primary script surviving. An appendix on the time allocated to a performance during a festival is relevant (333–37). Revermann argues that the scripts as we have them may not have been performed in their entirety during their initial performance, suggesting, for example, that one... (shrink)