Subject
Further Boyd comment on NEW YORKER "Conclusive Evidence" issue
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Brian Boyd below offers and addendum to his previous
posting.
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I should add..... that this New Yorker issue is worth the price just
for the Art Spiegelman cover. I teach Spiegelman's Maus immediately after
Ada and Ulysses in a course in narrative that begins with Genesis and the
Odyssey, then winds its way through Shakespeare, Austen and Tolstoy, and
Spiegelman stands up easily in all this company. His cover for this Winter
Fiction issue, of a woman reading a volume of fiction as she lies in her
bikini on a beach-towel spread out in a park lying deep in snow, to the
consternation (his hat flies up in surprise) of the snowman looking on,
proves once again Spiegelman is without equal as a comic artist (the wry
twist on the seasonal preoccupation of New Yorker covers, the allusion to
summer and winter reading, the definition of fiction in the whole scene).
The image is particularly appealing to someone e-mailing from the heat of a
New Zealand summer afternoon who knows that this fiction after all isn't
fiction for some of us.
Best wishes,
Brian
Professor Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
fax + 64 9 373 7429
tel + 64 9 377 7599 x 7480
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz
posting.
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I should add..... that this New Yorker issue is worth the price just
for the Art Spiegelman cover. I teach Spiegelman's Maus immediately after
Ada and Ulysses in a course in narrative that begins with Genesis and the
Odyssey, then winds its way through Shakespeare, Austen and Tolstoy, and
Spiegelman stands up easily in all this company. His cover for this Winter
Fiction issue, of a woman reading a volume of fiction as she lies in her
bikini on a beach-towel spread out in a park lying deep in snow, to the
consternation (his hat flies up in surprise) of the snowman looking on,
proves once again Spiegelman is without equal as a comic artist (the wry
twist on the seasonal preoccupation of New Yorker covers, the allusion to
summer and winter reading, the definition of fiction in the whole scene).
The image is particularly appealing to someone e-mailing from the heat of a
New Zealand summer afternoon who knows that this fiction after all isn't
fiction for some of us.
Best wishes,
Brian
Professor Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
fax + 64 9 373 7429
tel + 64 9 377 7599 x 7480
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz