If the poetics of fact had a dictionary, it would need to contain a long entry on the reality effect. The concept originates with Roland Barthes, whose 1968 essay by that name addresses literary details that can't be assimilated to character, atmosphere, or narrative function. Such “futile” or “useless” details (141, 142) — Barthes's examples are a barometer in Gustave Flaubert's novella A Simple Heart and a little prison-cell door in Jules Michelet's History of the French Revolution—seem to fall outside any symbolic function and refer directly to concrete reality. In the essay's key move, however, Barthes claims that such insignificant details possess a second-order significance in certifying the existence of a world “out there,” irreducible to narrative function. Far from denoting the real, Flaubert's barometer and Michelet's little door connote reality; they “finally say nothing but this: we are the real” (148). The reality effect achieved by this implied speech act is ideological, Barthes adds, in the way it consecrates the separation and opposition between what exists and what has meaning. This ideology, in turn, has been indispensable to a roughly coemergent set of modes, disciplines, and institutions “based on the incessant need to authenticate the 'real,'” from literary realism, photography, and reportage to “objective” history and its manifestations in museums and tourism sites (146).

The vortex of the twentieth century, the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s, provides an appropriate setting for Jennifer Egan's experiment in historical fiction. Many popular histories have glorified the bands of brothers and Rosie the Riveters of the so-called greatest generation. The best fiction and poetry of the 1940s offered a different, unflattering view. Journalists from that era—Martha Gellhorn, for one—said they needed fiction to get the history right (313). Literary treatments of the war focus on its incommunicability and on the crisis of meaning it inspired, but they have been vastly overshadowed by popular history books, documentaries, movies, and television shows that depend for their very production and distribution on an appeal to the fantasies that the contemporary war literature contradicts. In a decade when the idea of making America great again seems supercharged by notions of America when it was supposedly great, we can use some diving into the wreck.

At first glance, Hillary Chute's Why Comics? presents itself as a chronicle of the heroic deeds of a Pantheon of creative gods. Across ten chapters, Chute tracks the aesthetic achievements of more than twelve world-renowned comics artists whose innovations in sequential visual art represent a range of human experiences, from wartime violence to teenage sexuality to queer family history to living with cognitive and physical disability. In Chute's narrative, such luminaries as Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, and Marjane Satrapi rise up from the vast landscape of comics production as artists whose bodies of work testify to comics's aesthetic diversity and sophistication. These typically erudite cartoonists work at a distance from mainstream comics and produce adult-oriented, long-form graphic narratives considered aesthetic masterpieces. “Although comics of all kinds are flourishing in the twenty-first century,” Chute explains early on in Why Comics?, “there has been a dramatic uptick” in the kind of “auteurist comics” produced by these cartoonists (18), who relish, in Clowes's words, the way the medium allows them to “control absolutely everything and make it … exactly what you're seeing in your own head” (qtd. in Why? 18). For Chute, it is this “singular intimacy of one person's vision”—best displayed in comics produced by sophisticated adult cartoonists writing and drawing for other adults–that underscores that comics are also for grown-ups (18). By now, we all should know this, but we have not learned the lesson well enough (or perhaps some just refuse to listen).

In 1931, S.R. Ranganathan, an unknown literary scholar and statistician from India, published a curious manifesto: The Five Laws of Library Science. The manifesto, written shortly after Ranganathan's return to India from London—where he learned to despise, among other things, the Dewey decimal system and British bureaucracy—argues for reorganizing Indian libraries. Ranganathan believed that India's libraries, many of which had been established by the British, could promote radically egalitarian ideals if they followed five fundamental laws.

Why Comics? is a celebration of all that has changed both in comics and for comics over the last generation, written by the person most qualified to host the party. Indeed, our being where we are today owes a good deal to Hillary Chute, who began her career writing some of the field's most intelligent and informative reviews and interviews and went on to write two of the most influential books in comics studies, Graphic Women (2010) and Disaster Drawn (2016). I first met Chute when she was working on her dissertation, and although the decade between us placed me in the role of outside reader on her committee, she was already leading the way forward for all of us in the field.

The end of the cold war brought countless changes and challenges to everyone east of the Berlin Wall. Words—both printed and spoken—changed their meanings virtually overnight, and texts from the indices librorum prohibitorum (“lists of prohibited books”) carefully compiled by Communist authorities began to flood the newly commercialized book market in print runs of hundreds of thousands. “Living in truth” (Havel), and reading in it, suddenly appeared feasible.

During World War II, women were heavily recruited for scientific and technical jobs across the united states. Many assumed roles previously allotted to men, serving as welders, riveters, sheet metal workers, crane operators, ship fitters, and chauffeurs, to name just a few. Between 1941 and 1944, over 6.5 million women joined the workforce; over 10 million were already working outside the home in 1941 (Pidgeon vi). The Brooklyn Naval Yard, featured in Manhattan Beach as the workplace of Anna, Nell, and their friends, also saw an increase in women workers, albeit a somewhat modest one. By 1944, according to The New York Times, women represented 4,000 of the 65,000 workers at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, not counting office workers (“Women Help Build Carrier”). While women represented just 6% of the industrial labor force at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, women represented 11.5% of all shipyard workers in 1944, according to the United States Department of Labor (Hirshfield 481).

Temporal concerns are baked into the matter of facts. From an etymological point of view, facts are moments of making and doing that are no longer alive and kicking. Coming into English and other modern Western languages by means of both the past participle of the Latin word facere (“to make or to do”) and the Latin noun factum, whose senses include the “result of doing” and “something done,” fact denotes an action that has happened and is now preserved like a fossil in the accumulated sediments of history (“Fact”). Etymologically speaking, facts are safely removed from the vicissitudes of the present and the whims of our leaders. So it makes sense that there should be some hand-wringing over facts that have become so thoroughly destabilized that they no longer seem to be based on anything. The defining moment in this distressing development occurred when the Trump administration, not content merely to put a spin on facts, dismissed quantifiable facts by summoning “alternative facts” to deny that the low attendance at the 2017 presidential inauguration was real. A dictionary, not the renowned one from Oxford but Urban Dictionary, offers the following definition of alternative facts: “an attempt to gaslight the population in an effort to control the media and create propaganda” (Mozzy-o). If only we could take refuge in etymology and remind ourselves and anyone else who will listen that facts are veritable faits accomplis, over and done with, past participles that stand as linguistic monuments to a bygone event beyond alteration.

Why question Why Comics? in many ways this book does everything: It provides an insider's overview of the history and context of comics, deftly introduces some of the leading current creators and creations, and adopts a thematic approach that allows each chapter to raise broader societal questions. It is erudite, well-illustrated, clearly expressed, and fun. End of story? If it were, this series of essays would be the PMLA equivalent of a Chris Ware comic book in which nothing happens.

In a review for The New York Times, Amor Towles writes that Manhattan Beach “is far less interested in domestic relationships than in those of the workplace.” I would submit that Manhattan Beach is in fact suffused with domestic relations and that many of those relations are structured by disability plots. A few of those plot strands are so clichéd that you can hardly believe their prominence in this contemporary novel. But another cluster of the novel's disability motifs spins a fabric so inventive and rich that you begin to suspect Egan of deploying the other, shopworn plots chiefly to authenticate the novel's mid-century ethos, to evoke a moment when the American public tended to perceive disability as hopeless, or tragic, or repulsive. In what follows I extricate from the novel's broader historical concerns three of these related disability plots. I begin with an account of the disability-as-melodrama plot and then move to an analysis of the plotlines associated with novel's diffuse treatment of disability's generative powers. I close with a reading of the problematic plot that relies on what disability scholars call the “curative imaginary.” My aim here is to illustrate Egan's contrapuntal disability aesthetics.

In 1959, in the midst of the liberation struggle in Algeria, Frantz Fanon published L'an v de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism), which contained a chapter dedicated to the role of radio in anticolonial resistance. The chapter, “Ici la voix de l'Algérie” (“This Is the Voice of Algeria”), describes how the radio changed from mouthpiece of the French occupation to voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily between 1954 and 1956. Before the liberation struggle, Fanon tells us, over ninety-five percent of radio receivers belonged to Europeans, for whom the radio was a link to Radio-Alger—or, simply, “Des Français parlent aux Français” (“Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen” [“Ici” 309; Dying Colonialism 74]). The station was a “réédition ou écho de la Radiodiffusion française nationale installée á Paris” (“re-edition or an echo of the French National Broadcasting System operating from Paris”) and “exprime avant tout la société coloniale et ses valeurs” (“is essentially the instrument of colonial society and its values” [305; 69]).

How postmodern is populism? Is there a hidden legacy of the 1968 manifestos in today's right-wing protest culture? In recent years, questions like these have often been posed in a more or less polemical manner. They should be reconsidered in a more sober, nuanced way. In academia, they are of far more than merely historical interest since unlike the hairstyles, clothing fashions, body culture, and living spaces from the late 1960s, many of the theories from that period are still regarded as contemporary. Above all, this applies to poststructuralism as a collective name for the impulses of what is often called French theory, which have set the tone in the humanities for two generations. However, the problem with the continuing topicality of poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking is that many of their elements are becoming virulent under completely changed political circumstances.

The inaugural conference of the comics studies society, held in August 2018 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, was the most professionally diverse conference I've ever attended. There were presentations by tenure-track faculty members, non-tenuretrack faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars; by people from four-year institutions, community colleges, and high schools; by literary critics, art historians, media scholars, research librarians, and working artists. Everywhere one felt the energy of a new field of study coming together, of institutionalization in a good sense: the gathering of past work to create a critical canon, the debate over methodology, the effort to establish priorities for moving forward as a discipline. he emotional palette that this event produced, at least for me, was an odd combination of excitement and melancholy—melancholy because, at a moment when traditional humanistic disciplines are having their support cut, it's hard to imagine a new ield getting anything like the resources or hires it needs to survive, let alone thrive.

Forty years ago, the poet and literary critic William Harmon distinguished between two ways in which language can fail. Writing in these pages, Harmon observed that speechlessness and silences can be markers of frustration, incapacity, and failed connections. Think of the disjointed language of William Faulkner's Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury or, more recently, the silences of the ghostly character Given who haunts Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Alternatively, spaces beyond the horizons of language can embody a tranquility so thorough and full of meaning that words would mar the perfection of the moment. In this second sense, inarticulateness is a point of peace and stillness toward which language is at best a clumsy passage. Harmon contended that in the twenty years between the world wars the poetry of T.S. Eliot shifted from the first sense of inarticulateness to the second (450).

When erich auerbach was living in Turkey, exiled from Germany and helping Kemal Ataturk set up a humanities curriculum at the University of Istanbul, he wrote a much-discussed letter to Walter Benjamin on 12 December 1936 in which he alluded to his dislocation as a European humanist trying to orient himself in relation to a Turkish-language politics that radically estranged prior print cultures:

In this essay, i contend that our current crisis of truth, however distressing, is a replay of an earlier one that saw a far-reaching, devastating destruction of truth. The simultaneous recrudescence of right-wing populism and dawn of the post-truth age recall the way totalitarian movements in the twentieth century exposed the masses to organized lying. Today, the plague of so-called alternative facts and fake news, while incubated and spread by digital technology, can, like totalitarianism's organized lies, be traced back to the erosion of democratic institutions and the loss of faith in democracy's foundational narratives. To understand how our contemporary politics could be going down the dark lane of history again, I turn to the political philosophy of Claude Lefort, Anthony Giddens, and Hannah Arendt, who have written perspicaciously on what happens to truth when the citizenry collectively disinvests from common knowledge and disbelieves in the common good.