The Poetics of Slumberland

In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberlandto explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy characterized by hyperbolic emotion, physicality, and imagination. Slumberland is more than a marvelous world for Nemo and its citizens, it's an aesthetic space defined through the artist's innovations; an animated space that opens to embrace the imaginative sensibility of a reader; and it's a temporary space of play. The book broadens to consider similar "animated" behaviors in seemingly disparate media--films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical My Fair Ladyand the story of Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic superheroes--drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder.

Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of many books, including Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction and, most recently, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century.