Full Description
Finding the superhero genre in need of further investigation from philosophical standpoints that value excess as a creative drive, rather than denigrate it as a problem to be resolved, this book opens up discussions that highlight different approaches to 'the creative excess of being' as expressed through the genre.
While superheroes are an everyday, culturally dominant phenomena, philosophical methods and investigations have a reputation for lofty superiority. Across 13 chapters, this book facilitates a collision between the superhero genre and the discipline of philosophy, resulting in a voyage of exploration where each illuminates the other. The contributions in this book range from new voices to recognized scholars, offering superhero studies a set of critical interventions that are unusual, conceptually diverse, theoretically grounded and varied in practice. These chapters consider 'excessive' traits of superheroes against schools of thought that have attempted to conceptualize and understand excess by analysing texts and figures across a variety of mediums, such as The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Vision, Logan, Black Panther and Super Hero Girls.
With its unique approach to the superhero genre, this book will be an invaluable read for students and scholars working on comic studies, transmedia studies, cultural studies, popular culture and superhero studies.
Contents
1.Introduction; 2. Excessive Embodiment and Monstrous Containment in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's The Fantastic Four; 3. Legion, Fugue and Ontological Excess; 4. Captain America, Ronald Reagan, and the Battle for the American Dream of Excess; 5. Image Comics: A New Flight of Excess; 6. 'You Too Shall Be New': Synthezoid Phenomenology and Canonical Memory in The Vision; 7. Evolve or Die: Logan, Repetition, and the Excesses of Tradition; 8. Difference, Repetition, and the Superhero Comic; 9. Heroic Skin: Superheroes, Excess and Black Skin as Costume; 10. Too Many Wonder Womans: Constraining and/or in the DC Extended Universe; 11. Design Fictions from Beyond: A Pataphysics of Objectile Excess; 12. Superheroes at the Vanishing Point; 13. Afterword: Defeated Taxonomies
