Tintin Forums

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer for your consideration this:

In Extremis: Hergé's Graphic Exteriority of Character

Is it just me, or is it complete and utter pants??

I am not wishing to blow my own trumpet unduly here, but I have an honours MA degree in English Language and Literature, with courses in Film and Television Studies and Philosophy, and I have studied semiotics, art history and am now in my forties – I think I have my head screwed on the right way round, and am reasonably well educated and well read; I have no idea what it’s about, or what point she is trying to make. It may get spelt out completely at some point, but I lost the will to live before finding it, and gave up

She is definitely of the opinion that to use big words and fancy terms (including using the word “exteriority” as if she had just made it up) makes her more serious or academic, when it doesn’t, it just renders her idea, whatever it may be, incomprehensible.

I started to flag early, but was cheered somewhat when reaching a paragraph begining: “It becomes very clear...”, only to suffer the bitter realisation that it was, in fact, to become more opaque:

It becomes very clear why it is important to propose the term "logographic" to designate the verbal function of Hergé's art, instead of following normal usage as does BD commentary: to refer to "the verbal", to "writing", to "speech" or to "dialogue" is to fail to make plain the fact that the materiality of the word in the Tintin corpus is a drawn materiality with graphic properties.

How can it not be plain that a comic has “graphic qualities”??

I made it through to the disection of the opening of Crystal Balls, when we get some sort of relationship made between the steam from the train, and the speech baloons, and I had to give up at the point where she decided that Hergé invented the tail on the speech balloon - I’m fairly certain that the tail actually pre-dates the invention of the balloon, as it was used in Renaissance frescos to point to words.

I’m sorry, but this sort of exercise does itself no favours: while there may be something of merit to her thesis, she kills it stone dead and then jumps up and down on its grave by not being able to frame a simple declarative sentence to tell me what it is!!

This is somewhere around the 500 mark in terms of the number of topics posted to tintinologist.com, and I think that I have never read as poor a piece on here as she wrote there; I think between us, an ad hoc community of amateurs, we manage to produce more valuable insight and information than a so-called professional, without resorting to the needless jargon and brain-busting strangled syntax of the poorer type of academic.

I look forward to the next 500 topics (and beyond!), and any further entries to the “Hall of Shame” in Tintin studies!!

Seems like a load of BS to me. I'm a good reader, and yet the writer's overuse of large words with small meanings threw me off right away. If you're writing a paper about Hergé and Tintin, you ought to make it interesting! :-)

What the heck! Well, I don't have a clue what she's trying to write, but then again many intellectual types like this confuse me!

Is it just me, or is it complete and utter pants??

Phew, it might take a while to digest. I found it quite funny actually, it's so over-academic to the point of being hysterical! But as a serious piece of study on “Hergé's Tintinian corpus”, yes, it's definitely pants...

Extreme Tintinology!

It's over-analysis taken to the ultimate extreme. Pointless, absolutely pointless. What is she trying to say ?

I have a sneaking suspicion that she herself doesn't know what she's trying to say ! It's a load of big words thrown together, some in quotation marks (I counted fourteen in one paragraph), the mixing of French and English to an incredible extent, and words in italics presumably because the author thought it would look clever.

That article confused me and made my head hurt ... I'm going to relax with the nice, simple, forthright "Hergé & Tintin Reporters" - at least the author of the "Tintin as a myth" chapter knows how to write clearly and concisely. :-p

Heh heh ... I agree; "Tintin as a myth" is much better than "In Extremis: Hergé's Graphic Exteriority of Character".

That article is nothing but the work of a pompous, over-bearing, self-proclaimed pseudo-scholar.

I didn't have the energy to read much of it, but it looks to me to be like the Turner Prize- come up with a load of c**p about something, argue your point, and some people will buy it. There are endless things you can read into anything, but that doesn't make them true.

Any Private Eye readers on the forum? I spy a new entry to Pseud's Corner...

Ed