The poetics of modernism in the graphic novel. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan as a neomodernist text
The poetics of modernism in the graphic novel. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan as a neomodernist text

Summary/Abstract: The present article seeks to analyze aspects of modernist poetics contributing to the unique, essentially neomodernist, aesthetics in Chris Ware’s 2000 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Particular emphasis is placed on three aspects: (i) the status of the graphic novel as mass product/work of art in the context of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura”; (ii) modernist architecture, and (iii) the modernist concept of time as non-linear and “subjective.” First, I will address Benjamin’s notion of “aura” and its importance for modernist aesthetics, which will allow me to analyze Chris Ware’s explorations of the tensions between the mechanic and the unique. Next, I will turn to the role of modernist architecture in Jimmy Corrigan, which functions in the story as a sign of progress and is incorporated into the graphic novel’s sequential structure. Finally, I will examine the notion of time present in the graphic novel and its links with modernist Bergsonian ideas of “duration.” Ultimately, it will be demonstrated how Chris Ware adapts modernist techniques and themes into the genre of the graphic novel and thus complicates the graphic novel’s postulated status of a postmodern text, proving that the poetics of modernism is a vital component of the contemporary poetics of the graphic novel.

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