Alex Link
I teach in the school of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly known as the Alberta College of Art and Design), in Calgary. I am also an academic administrator there.
I defended my dissertation in 2003 (_Postmodern Spatialities in the Contemporary Urban Gothic Novel_), lectured at the University of Toronto until 2005, and joined ACAD in the fall of that same year.
I have diverse areas of interest, though recently my focus is almost exclusively on North American (and, increasingly, Japanese) comics and graphic novels. I have even co-written some titles for Image Comics. In addition, I research science fiction, detective fiction, the Gothic, American prose fiction of any era, and eighteenth century British prose fiction. My theoretical inclinations tend toward psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and the theorization of (particularly urban) spatialities.
Also, I like to rock. I rock out. In case you couldn't tell.
I defended my dissertation in 2003 (_Postmodern Spatialities in the Contemporary Urban Gothic Novel_), lectured at the University of Toronto until 2005, and joined ACAD in the fall of that same year.
I have diverse areas of interest, though recently my focus is almost exclusively on North American (and, increasingly, Japanese) comics and graphic novels. I have even co-written some titles for Image Comics. In addition, I research science fiction, detective fiction, the Gothic, American prose fiction of any era, and eighteenth century British prose fiction. My theoretical inclinations tend toward psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and the theorization of (particularly urban) spatialities.
Also, I like to rock. I rock out. In case you couldn't tell.
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Papers by Alex Link
Romance—both as distinguished from realism and, simply, as romantic love—exists primarily to mystify and to enforce these relationships of exchange and domination in Unterzakhn. In particular, the graphic novel places comics on a continuum with film, the music hall, and myth as participant in the continual production of relations of power, including and especially gender relations. Romantic love seems to be impossible, and yet its absence is intolerable, turning popular narratives such as comics into both their locus and alibi. As a result, with its characteristic ambivalence, popular culture in this story both avers love’s existence and compensates for its absence. Unterzakhn’s sisters demonstrate extreme responses to this system into which they are born: a disavowal that ends in death, or an absolute complicity that leads to dissolution into that very system.
At the heart of both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet is the question of who, precisely, can speak cultural identity, and whether, when, and how it might be spoken. They represent popular voices raised in opposition to, in the former, an oppressive regime that lays sole claim to speaking Iranian identity in collusion with its western antagonists; and in the latter, a potentially homogenizing, or at least disenfranchising, global corporate entity that among other things suggests the global city might be a colonizing culture unto itself. Each defends local specificity against a global entity while drawing from myth as a paradoxically global narrative wellspring of indigenous identity, and from comics as itself an increasingly global medium.
Ultimately, this essay concludes, both narratives make specific cultural content secondary to the right to its expression by popular voices through such popular channels as comics. In both graphic novels, representing the fluid specificity of cultural identity in a manner that articulates it, and its immediate pressing concerns, without fixing it, shifts narrative emphasis to the fact of, and commitment to, self-representation perhaps above all else, while acknowledging a place in a world of many cultures, stories, and comics styles.
Book Reviews by Alex Link
Comics by Alex Link
Romance—both as distinguished from realism and, simply, as romantic love—exists primarily to mystify and to enforce these relationships of exchange and domination in Unterzakhn. In particular, the graphic novel places comics on a continuum with film, the music hall, and myth as participant in the continual production of relations of power, including and especially gender relations. Romantic love seems to be impossible, and yet its absence is intolerable, turning popular narratives such as comics into both their locus and alibi. As a result, with its characteristic ambivalence, popular culture in this story both avers love’s existence and compensates for its absence. Unterzakhn’s sisters demonstrate extreme responses to this system into which they are born: a disavowal that ends in death, or an absolute complicity that leads to dissolution into that very system.
At the heart of both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet is the question of who, precisely, can speak cultural identity, and whether, when, and how it might be spoken. They represent popular voices raised in opposition to, in the former, an oppressive regime that lays sole claim to speaking Iranian identity in collusion with its western antagonists; and in the latter, a potentially homogenizing, or at least disenfranchising, global corporate entity that among other things suggests the global city might be a colonizing culture unto itself. Each defends local specificity against a global entity while drawing from myth as a paradoxically global narrative wellspring of indigenous identity, and from comics as itself an increasingly global medium.
Ultimately, this essay concludes, both narratives make specific cultural content secondary to the right to its expression by popular voices through such popular channels as comics. In both graphic novels, representing the fluid specificity of cultural identity in a manner that articulates it, and its immediate pressing concerns, without fixing it, shifts narrative emphasis to the fact of, and commitment to, self-representation perhaps above all else, while acknowledging a place in a world of many cultures, stories, and comics styles.