Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies

Abstract

The structure of the research university needs serious rethinking," says James Chandler, in his contribution to Critical Inquiry's 2003 symposium on "The Future of Criticism."Calling for, à la Foucault, a historical epistemology of the academic disciplines and indeed the very concept of disciplinarity, Chandler hopes for both "a more rigorous account of what a discipline is" and the exploration of "new possibilities for interdisciplinary connection and exploration" (359).This essay will, if not precisely answer Chandler's call, then undertake a self-reflexive examination of the issue of disciplinarity in academic comics studies, particularly in North America.In the process, I hope to explain why comics studies, which is already inevitably multidisciplinary, must work toward a model of true interdisciplinary collaboration if the field is to thrive. 2As this issue of Transatlantica attests, and as the growing number of journal issues, articles, and books devoted to comics confirm, comics studies in North America constitutes a nascent academic field of great productivity and promise.Indeed by now one might expect and hope that the field would qualify as something more than "nascent."Certainly much work has been done, horizons for future work have begun to take shape, and, at present, the larger critical and cultural reception of comics in North America is encouraging.However, a number of factors make it difficult to speak of the field as anything other than nascent.These include the weakness of the field's institutional footing (in the form of academic programs devoted to comics study), a lack of consensus regarding critical standards for published work, and, above all, a lack of dialogue regarding the disciplinary status of the field.In fact comics studies has no disciplinary status in the traditional sense, that is, no clear, cohesive, and selfcontained disciplinary identity.I am not about to argue that the field requires such an identity.Rather, I would argue that comics studies cannot have such an identity, for two reasons: one, because the heterogeneous nature of comics means that, in practice, comics study has to be at the intersection of various disciplines (art, literature, Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies Transatlantica, 1 | 2010

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