English and Cinema Studies

The Jukebox in the Garden demonstrates how American popular music-from folk and country to jazz and hip hop-has given voice to new questions and insights about wider social, political, and historical contexts in an age of ecological crisis. Once again leading the study of popular culture into promising new territory, British scholar David Ingram investigates a wide range of theoretical and ecophilosophical approaches to the study of popular music as he speculates on the potential role of popular music in raising environmental awareness. As in his previous book Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Film , Ingram provides a comprehensive overview of his subject by employing concise diction and meticulous organization. One of Ingram's great strengths is his ability to summarize and explicate the musings and ideas of an exhaustive number of musicians and theorists while maintaining a clear sense of argument and direction throughout each chapter. Ingram demonstrates this strength in two ways. First, the book opens with a series of chapters that examine the ecophilosophical claims that have been made about music by John Cage and other thinkers. These chapters establish the key concepts and theories that inform the rest of the book and usefully bridge the scholarly discourse of ecocriticism with those of musicology and cultural theory. Ingram offers a compelling justification for this study by connecting contemporary trends in popular music and musicology to the rise of the modern environmental movement since the 1960s. Chapter One, for example, explores the different ethical positions toward popular music, society, and the natural world taken by humanist-Marxists

How does one translate silence onto a silent medium? Printed comic books and graphic novels are generally a non-auditory art form. This has caused them to be traditionally perceived as ‘silent’. This also means that comics artists have come up with some of the most innovative ways of translating sound to a primarily visual medium – bold letters, onomatopoeic words, fading images, etc. Nonetheless, these innovations have often in fact failed to address silence. As an art form where both the blank space and the printed word acquire their own unique visual signification, is comics rather a stubbornly un-silent medium? If so, then how does one depict silence in an un-silent medium? My article addresses these questions by first examining the works of Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen and Barbara Postema and their study of sound in comics. I then build on these theoretical frameworks to problematize the conventional correlation of visual signifiers with sound and silence, primarily examin...