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Thesis
“Natural Things Would Make More Sense”: Black Hole as Neo-Pastoral
University of West Florida Libraries
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2024
Abstract
In the epigraph in Charles Burns’s Black Hole #11 (2003), a teen provides one of twelve retrospective accounts of the events of Black Hole’s (2008) narrative. The teen proclaims that “[Humanity would] be happy if we could live simple lives, enjoy each other and… I mean maybe live on a farm or something and grow things… You know, get back to the Earth.” The teen’s statement along with the teens’ framing of Planet Xeno as a “soft, insulated green world” invokes the language of the pastoral. However, Black Hole’s invocation of the pastoral mode and the binary of country and city in both the comic and graphic novel publications is a far cry from the archetypal pastoral that critics such as Northrop Frye outline. Black Hole’s construction of its pastoral idyll through the environment of Planet Xeno moves beyond archetype and accounts for capitalism’s ideological transformation of natural space and, by extension, the pastoral green world. This recognition of modernity frames Burns’s text as a neo-pastoral in the vein of Raymond Williams’s foundational materialist criticism in The Country in the City (1973) and hearkens to contemporary critical discussions of Karl Marx’s metabolic rift theory to present the limits of the pastoral world under the capitalistic conditions of 20th-century America. This limit, I argue, Black Hole makes evident through both its subversion of archetypal pastoral tenets and through the graphic novel’s omission of these optimistic epigraphs: a move suggesting the end of futurity as we know it.
Details
- Title
- “Natural Things Would Make More Sense”
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Contributors
- David Baulch (Committee Chair)Kevin Scott (Committee Member)
- Publisher
- University of West Florida Libraries
- Format
- pdf
- Number of pages
- 33
- Copyright
- Permission granted to the University of West Florida Libraries by the author to digitize and/or display this information for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires the permission of the copyright holder.
- Identifiers
- 99380551696806600
- Academic Unit
- English
- Language
- English
- Awarding Institution
- University of West Florida; Master of Arts (MA)
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida