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I welcome Rafael J. Pascual's recent and detailed response in a special issue of English Studies to some of the arguments and claims I made in my book Early English Metre regarding the proper ident...

Despite a growing body of comics criticism, much of the basic grounding for the criticism of comics in formal terms remains to be effectively articulated; the translators of Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics, for example, described the situation as they saw it in 2007: "Questions of comics form have received relatively little attention in English language scholarship, which has tended to view the medium through historical, sociological, aesthetic (literary), and thematic lenses" (Beaty and Nguyen 2007, vii). Here, I hope to approach one important formal issue raised by comics, the problem of authorship; as I hope will be clear, I simply mean that the specific formal issues raised by comics have implications or consequences for how we identify the "author" of a comics work. Authorship may not initially seem to be a formal feature, but I will suggest that in comics (and thus elsewhere, I suspect) it is clearly implicated in formal structures.In its simplest form, the problem of authorship can be seen in the way that scholars, publishers, and even comics creators habitually privilege the "writer" of a particular comics work over the artist or artists, while (as Groensteen argues) "the necessary, if not sufficient, condition required to speak of comics is that the images will be multiple and correlated in some fashion" (2007, 19). Specifically, Groensteen argues for the primacy of the spatial (images and their relationships) over the linguistic as the definitive formal criterion of comics.1 The privileging of the author over the artist, to the degree that it privileges language over the image, is thus in conflict with the essential nature of the medium.The difficulties surrounding the proper identification of the comics author, as I will argue in more detail below, can be especially clearly approached by a consideration of autobiographical comics. As a genre, autobiography might appear to be only minimally vulnerable to epistemologica! problems centering upon the proper identification of the relationship between author and text. In simplistic terms, autobiography is that subset of biography in which the author is (or is understood to be) identical with the subject of the writing; if such an equation does not hold, we are in the realm of either biography or fiction, rather than autobiography. However, the autobiographical comics of Harvey Pekar's celebrated American Splendor series are especially intriguing, as Pekar never draws his own comics: Pekar is the author if we continue to privilege the linguistic at all costs, but the degree to which he does and does not control the visual aspects of his comics - the images and their relationships - suggests the possibility of slippage or uncertainty in our ability to identify Pekar (as the subject of the comics) with the unique author of the images.The crucial fact that Harvey Pekar writes the American Splendor comics but does not draw them has, in fact, attracted some critical commentary in relation to Amercian Splendou functioning as autobiography. Drawn by a variety of artists, in a wide variety of styles, Pekar's comics fail to be visually coherent, even to the point of seemingly irreconcilable variations of depictions of Pekar himself, a point made in one scene from the cinematic adaptation of American Splendor, when his future wife, Joyce Brabner, wonders which of the variously drawn Harvey Pekars she might be about to meet (Springer, Berman and Pulcini 2003). 2 The scene is a direct echo of a similar moment in the Pekar-Brabner-Mayerik collaboration, "A Marriage Album," but it reflects a difficulty encountered by anyone who reads more than a small handful of Pekar's stories.3 In an early critical response to American Splendor, Joseph Witek addressed the stylistic variety of the depictions of Pekar directly:since Pekar does not draw his own stories, the visual component of his character is continually being interpreted by his artist-collaborators, and these versions of Harvey overlay the fictional personae he adopts for himself. …

This study assesses the corpus of late medieval pilgrim badges (chiefly from the Low Countries) that feature “pseudo-text” inscriptions. Such inscriptions either have sequences of well-formed letters that cannot be construed or sequences of unreadable letter-like characters. Rather than suggesting that such texts are cryptic or magical, this study argues that pilgrim badge “pseudo-texts” functioned iconographically as signs of text. The conclusion that “textual communities” (as per Brian Stock) functioned around such inscriptions follows directly, and thus this study suggests that we can understand these inscriptions as revealing attitudes about (and ideologies of) literacy, even in contexts where the skills of literacy were not being used. As such, these brief pilgrim badge texts offer a new perspective on thinking about the nature, distribution, and functioning of late medieval literacy.

Focusing on the unique architecture of comics, in which panels are both sequenced linearly and meaningfully juxtaposed on a two-dimensional page, this essay explores Chris Ware's use of two- and three-dimensional narrative strategies to complicate linear understandings of narrative structure. In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware employs such multidimensional narrative strategies to effectively thematize the novel's engagement with issues of narrative time, circularity, and continuity, as well as to call into question the very notion of a "narrative line."

The copy of the Old English Bede in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41 is well-known for the extensive and varied texts copied into its margins in the mid-eleventh century. By carefully examining features of the marginal texts (line spacing, ink colour, page layout) it is possible to reconstruct a sequence of four stages through which CCCC 41's marginal archive developed. Doing so offers valuable insights into the possible textual relationships of the texts copied by the marginal scribe as well as insights into this scribe's perceptions of CCCC 41 itself and of the textual space that remained available to him.

In his discussion of the formal structures characteristic of Ælfric's ‘rhythmical prose’ style, John C. Pope prints the following passage from Ælfric's homily on Cuthbert, calling attention especially to the pointing, given as it appears in Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 3. 28 (?Cerne, s. x/xi):Ac an ðære fugela. eft fleogende com.ymbe ðry dagas. þearle dreorig.fleah to his foton. friðes biddende.þæt he on ðam lande. lybban moste.symle unscæððig. and his gefera samod.

Conventional linguistic and metrical perspectives claim that secondary elements of Old English compound names are only stressed if they are disyllabic or inflected. This essay argues that this conclusion derives directly from the use of Eduard Sievers's metrical formalism and that other formalisms may suggest that this counterintuitive result is, in fact, incorrect. Using Geoffrey Russom's innovative word-foot metrical formalism and examining evidence from secondary alliteration patterns, this essay offers evidence that monosyllabic secondary elements were given secondary stress. Furthermore, evidence from the spacing of compound names in the Beowulf manuscript supports such a conclusion. Taken together, the evidence from scansion, alliteration patterns, and the manuscript suggest that both Sieversian formalism and the linguistic claims that it gave rise to should be replaced.

This article examines gothic literature writing in England during the twelfth century. It discusses the gothicism of the chronicle form and gothic reproduction of the history of Britain. It suggests that an understanding of gothic concerns allows us to see more clearly the divergent trajectories of historical writing by authors such as William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester on the one hand, and works like Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia and Layamon's Brut on the other hand.