How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Cynically ENJOY! The Post-9/11 Superhero Zeitgeist

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Notes

1. Benjamin Svetkey, “Q&A Director's Chair,” Entertainment Weekly, 1 August 2008, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20215252,00.html (accessed November 10, 2008).

2. Slavoj [Zcirc]i[zcirc]ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1989), 28–30.

3. Slavoj [Zcirc]i[zcirc]ek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 202.

4. Joshua Gunn and Shaun Treat, “Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeutic on Ideological Subjectification and the Unconscious,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, issue 2 (May 2005): 144–74; Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, “‘Ouija Board, Are There any Communications?’: Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, issue 4 (2005): 83–106.

5. William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study. of Myths and Rituals (University of Alabama Press, 2000); Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, ed., The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media (Routledge, 1991).

6. Thomas Andrae, “From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of Superman,” in American Media and Mass Culture, ed. Donald Lazere (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 124–38.

7. Thomas Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, “‘Mother isn't quite herself today’: Myth and Spectacle in The Matrix,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 (2002): 64–86.

8. Jewett & Lawrence, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2002); Jeffery Lang and Patrick Trimble, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? An Examination of the American Monomyth and the Comic Book Superhero,” Journal of Popular Culture 22, issue 3 (1988): 157–73.

9. Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain Books, 2006).

10. Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz, Projecting The Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (University Chicago Press, 1995); Michael Spivey and Steven Knowlton, “Anti-Heroism in the Continuum of Good and Evil,” in The Psychology of Superheroes, ed. Robin S. Rosenberg, (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2008), 51–64; Shaun Treat, “The Shadow Knows: The Counter-Fantasy of the American Antihero in Golden Age Radio,” forthcoming in Journal of Radio and Audio Media, 2009.

11. http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/editorial-is-the-iraq-war-propelling-the-superhero-film-phenomenon.php (accessed November 10, 2008).

12. Benjamin Svetkey, “Obama vs. McCain: The Great Presidential Pop Culture Debate,” Entertainment Weekly, 15 October 2008, http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20217425,00.html (accessed November 10, 2008).

13. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (William B. Eerdmans, 2003). http://www.americansuperhero.com/spiegel-cvr.gif (accessed November 10, 2008).

14. Spencer Ackerman, “Batman's ‘Dark Knight’ reflects Cheney policy,” The Washington Independent, 21 July 2008, http://washingtonindependent.com/509/batmans-dark-knight-reflects-cheney-policy (accessed January 12, 2009); Andrew Klavin, “What Batman and Bush have in common,” Wall St. Journal, 25 July 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121694247343482821.html (accessed January 12, 2009).

15. Mark Fisher, “Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins,” ImageText 2, issue 2 (2006), http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v2_2/fisher/ (accessed November 10, 2008).

16. “Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency”; “The Two Perversions of The Matrix”; “The Revenge of Global Finance”; and other [Zcirc]i[zcirc]ek works available at http://www.lacan.com.

17. Slavoj [Zcirc]i[zcirc]ek, The Ticklish Subject (Verso, 2000), 320–45; For an excellent analysis of The Dark Knight using “Whither Oedipus?” see: Tina Beattie, “The dark (k)night of a postmodern world” (21 July 2008), http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-dark-k-night-of-a-postmodern-world (accessed November 10, 2008).

18. Jamie A. Hughes, “‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’: Ideology and ‘Real World’ Superheroes,” Journal of Popular Culture 39.4 (2006): 546–57; Tim Blackmore, “The Dark Knight of Democracy: Tocqueville and Miller cast some light on the subject,” Journal of American Culture 14, issue 1 (2004): 37–56.

19. Robert E. Terrill: “Put on a Happy Face: Batman as Schizophrenic Savior,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 319–35; “Spectacular Repression: Sanitizing the Batman,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, issue 4 (2000): 493–509.

20. Eugene Holland, “Affective Citizenship and the Death State” in Deleuze in the Contemporary World, ed. Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) 16–174.

21. [Zcirc]i[zcirc]ek interview, http://seattlest.com/2008/09/09/zizek_the_dark_knight_of_postmarxis.php (accessed November 10, 2008).

22. Jodi Dean, [Zcirc]i[zcirc]ek's Politics (Routledge, 2006).

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Shaun Treat

Shaun Treat is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas in Denton. His interests include mythic rhetoric, fantasy psychodynamics of charismatic membership, and constitutive rhetorics of postmodern civic identities