Stanley

MA VCS Thesis Proposal

Title: But We, To Whom The World Is
Author: Bradshaw Stanley
Abstract.
In this thesis I view the animated childrens show Adventure Time as a 21st
century surrogate, in the sense developed by performance theorist
Joseph Roach, for Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By
viewing surrogation, reconstruction, and even re-enactment as occurring
between two artworks rather than two artists, I outline a theory of
desubstantialized body-to-body transmission that does not rely on real
or substantial bodies for its support. I conclude by arguing that
embodiment can be understood as a formal problem rather than one
defined by organic function or phenomenological sensoria.
Research Areas.
Embodiment, Affect Theory, Formalism, Animation Theory, Performance
Studies, American Studies, Childhood Studies, Queer Theory, Film
Studies, New Media, Visual Studies, Critical Theory
Agenda.
Popularly acclaimed as the trippiest show on television (Rolling Stone),
groundbreaking[and] ever more experimental (AV Club), sneakily sophisticated
(New York Times), and dark, gripping and almost nightmarish (Indiewire), Adventure
Time may sound more like an HBO series than a Cartoon Network animated childrens
program. Because such accolades are typically reserved for adult (not to mention liveaction, "underground" or foreign) productions, it is unsurprising that Adventure Time has
been used to satirize conservative cultural anxieties, as in a ChristWire article that,
perhaps picking up on the shows trippiness and eagerness to experiment, asks whether
it is a gateway drug to LSD, homosexuality, and the rave lifestyle. Such satire indicates
a bleed between the formal qualities of a work and the embodied responses its viewers, in
this case young children, may have: being exposed to trippy and experimental work, the
thinking goes, may incline one to seek out trips and experimentation in other contexts.

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Indeed, this is a bleed that the Cartoon Network brightly capitalizes on in its
commercial breaks, where children are routinely shown buoyantly re-performing clips
from the channels line-up. In this thesis, I will be following the neon-colored trail of
those bleeds, the mimetic and non-mimetic circuits that link the non-/dis-embodied and
immaterial to the embodied and material responses and performances that they enable; I
will be asking how incorporeal performers, such as cartoon characters, transmit their
unique behavioral, affective, and narrative orders to the regime of corporeality; and I will
be examining how we, "to whom the world is our native country," as Dante wrote,
establish and perform modes of sovereignty in a non-native worlda world where the
four principle elements may not be fire, water, earth, and air, but fire, ice, slime, and
candy.
Put at its most polemical, my thesis raises the following question: What if
embodiment could be understood as a formal problem concerning line and color rather
than organic function or phenomenological sensoria?
Although to begin unpacking this question I turn to Adventure Time and the
burgeoning field of animation studies, which claims line and color as its formal
provenance, it is important to note that my thesis is not a media history or study of
childrens animated programming. Consequently, I will not be pronouncing on longstanding debates between film and animation, nor will I be focusing on the circumPacific production routes that most Cartoon Network productions participate in, nor still
will I be examining the sizable fan culture that has grown up around Adventure Time and
other animated works. Such considerations, although important for a fuller view of the
issues I will raise, are beyond the scope of this thesis and fall to other scholars.

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What I primarily will be addressing, then, are the formal elements of Adventure
Time: its visual themes, narrative structures, rhetorical figures, and affective labors. Since
I will not be looking at the immediate production context of the show, or what Donald
Crafton has termed the performance of animation, I suggest instead another, perhaps
unsuual context: the story that Ernest Hemingway described as the fountainhead of
American literature, Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By placing these
works together, I propose to focus on what Crafton calls the performance in animation,
or the ways in which animation, by complicating our ideas of liveness and embodiment,
can be said to perform (Crafton 15). In this case, that performance is a question of color
and linea question that the author Mark Twain, in the age of the color line, surely had
in mind as he wrote Huck Finn, although the bleed to embodied performances was far
darker.
If Adventure Time has merely been satirized as a gateway drug for children to
moral failure, Huckleberry Finn was outright banned upon its release at libraries
throughout the United States for being trashy and vicious (Springfield Republican),
flippant [and] worthless (San Francisco Chronicle), and not altogether desirable for
parents who want a good future of promise for their young folks (San Francisco
Evening Bulletin). It is worth remembering, however, that Twain described the novel not
as a book for boys, but as a book for men who remember being boys. Likewise, when
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward says that he makes the show according to what
I would have liked when I was a kid, he refers not to what he did like but to what he
would have liked, participating in the subjunctive mood that characterizes performance.
In short, Adventure Time and Huckleberry Finn are primarily designed to restore parts to

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our (boyish) selves that are past. More than both works simply being stories for men who
remember being boys, however, Adventure Time and Huck Finn also play across the
mythic chronotope of adventure-time, which Mikhail Bahktin describes as an
extratemporal hiatus between two moments of biographical time, in which events can be
reconfigured and rearranged without damaging the narrative arc (Bahktin 90).
(In performance, this adventure-time is perhaps better known as rehearsal.)
Both Adventure Time and Huck Finn crucially and oddly structure their diegetic
universes around a temporal tripping: whereas Huck Finn achieves this by omission,
since it was written after the policies of Reconstruction had been enacted but takes place
in a time that is either before or to the side of the US Civil War, thereby tripping the
past and present, Adventure Time signals its tripping of past and present through the
anachronistic insertion of Abraham Lincoln into its animated, post-apocalyptic world.
Adventure Time's pilot, a 7-minute short originally produced for NickToons in 2007,
introduces Pen, a 12-year old, human boy whose name suggests that of his creator, who is
accompanied by his magical, shape-shifting, 28-year old dog, Jake. As the two try to
cheer up a sobbing Lady Rainicorn (a flying half-unicorn, half-rainbow creature who
does not speak English), they stumble into the frozen biome of the nefarious Ice King,
where they must fight to save Princess Bubblegum. When the Ice King momentarily
gains the upper-hand in battle, Pen's body is frozen and his mind is "transported back in
time and to Mars" where Abraham Lincoln tells a disoriented Pen to believe in
himself. This temporal marker positions the show in an American mythosand
especially its mythos of mis-/dis-remembered wars and national, international, and even
interplanetary material conquest.

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This is particularized several years later when the Cartoon Network picks up
Adventure Time as a full series. There, Pen is re-introduced as an orphan named Finn the
Human, a kind of distorted orthographic inversion of Huckleberry Finn, and Jake returns
as Jake the Dog, now also playing the role of Finns older brother. As we know from
Sianne Ngais essay, On Animatedness, the cartoon animal is often a stand-in for the
raced other: Finn is to Jake as Huck is to Jim. This should remind us, if reminding need
be, that what counts as human, for us as well as for Huck Finn in his own time and place,
is always an open question.
By focusing on how Adventure Time re-performs, re-imagines, re-enacts, and
even re-constructs (with all that term's historical weight) Huck Finn along formal
dimensions, my thesis hopes to hold open the gaps of Adventure Times playful (re)performances in order to glimpse and map some of the contours of that (re-)performing
body that is irreducible to the human body, that body of forms, that body that is form, a
body that, like a cartoon figure, is "not human" and "not not human, thereby revealing
the performative (rather than phenomenological) dimensions of human embodiment.
Methodology.
Because I envision this thesis as a work of performative scholarship, I want to
include a final remark on how I will be putting this material together. Performative
scholarship, as Della Pollock has argued, is a mode of criticism that dispenses with the
ontological interrogative What is? Thus, my thesis generally declines the
conventional art historical labor of evaluation and judgment; instead, I am keen to
approach Adventure Time by working to understand its internal logic and the expression
of that logic as it is revealed through form. As the performance artist Matthew Goulish
says, the labor of understanding is one that happens from any direction whatever, and it

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is precisely from any direction whatever that I approach Adventure Time. Parafictional
narratives and memories of paratheatrical events from my own childhood snake their way
through the meta-critical commentary and close viewings that comprise the thesis. I
deploy these personal details as sites for readers to re-perform the text before them, and
I exploit the pleasures and difficulties of lacing disparate verbal registers together in
order to enhance the performative dimensions of the work.

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Structure.
Introduction / The personal is the critical (5-7pp)
Introduces this thesis methodology of performative scholarship through a
manifesto for criticism
Act 1 / What time is it? (12-18pp)
Introduces AT and contextualizes it as a surrogate for Huck Finn; Bahktin and the
post-apocalyptic; textuality vs visuality in animation; Eisenstein; performing the
non-/dis-embodied
Intermission / Lines that turn (5-7pp)
Meditates on the figure of the timeline; Deleuze and issues of recurrence, return,
the (non-)original; the fold; nonlinear ontology; poetics
Rehearsal / Drawing (it) out (12-18pp)
Close viewings of AT episodes touching on: erotic confusion and homophobia;
salt vs sugar; cuteness and trauma; cartoon ethics and quantum mechanics; fart
jokes and death
Interval / Surface affects (5-7pp)
Explores the affective limn between animation and realism; mimetic vs nonmimetic narrative; sex and writing
Act 0 / Beyond the animation principle (12-18pp)
Elaborates the threat of de-animation as figured by The Lichs storyline in AT;
formal horror, formal bodies; nonlinear optics; Bersani and de-narrativized time;
queer cosmology
Telemission / What time is it (not)? (5-7pp)
Concludes with meditation on desubstantial/incorporeal materialism; queer grief
and screen erotics (Mark Doty: Kiss me, please, the dead are watching); reading
for bodies

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Bibliography.
0. Adventure Time episodes
Produced by NickToons (2007)
Pilot
Produced by Cartoon Network (2010-Present)
Season 1.
Episode 1: Slumber Party Panic
Episode 5: The Enchiridion!
Episode 10: Memories of Boom Boom Mountain
Episode 12: Evicted!
Episode 16: Ocean of Fear
Episode 25: His Hero
Season 2.
Episode 5: Storytelling
Episode 16: Guardians of Sunshine
Episode 17: Death in Bloom
Episode 24: Mortal Recoil
Episode 25: Mortal Folly
Season 3.
Episode 1: Conquest of Cuteness
Episode 9: Fiona and Cake
Episode 12: The Creeps
Episode 15: No One Can Hear You
Episode 19: Holly Jolly Secrets (Part 1)
Episode 20: Holly Jolly Secrets (Part 2)
Season 4.
Episode 1: Hot to the Touch
Episode 7: In Your Footsteps
Episode 8: Hug Wolf
Episode 18: King Worm
Episode 25: I Remember You
Episode 26: The Lich
Season 5.
Episode 1: Finn the Human
Episode 2: Jake the Dog
Episode 14: Simon and Marcy
Episode 34: The Vault

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Episode 44: Apple Wedding

Episode 45: Blade of Grass
Episode 48: Betty
Episode 52: Billy's Bucket List
Season 6.
Episode 1: Wake Up
Episode 2: Escape from the Citadel
Episode 12: Ocarina
Episode 16: Joshua and Margaret Investigations
Episode 19: Is That You?
Episode 24: Evergreen
Episode 25: Astral Plane
Episode 26: Gold Stars
1. Animation Studies
Beckman, Karen Mixing Memory and Desire: Animation, Documentary, and the Sexual
Event, in Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation, ed.
Jayne Pilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Kindle edition.
Buchan, Suzanne, Animation, in Theory, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen
Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.
Bukatman, Scott, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
--------, Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, the Cartoon Cat in the
Machine, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.
Cholodenko, Alan, First Principles of Animation, in Animating Film Theory, ed.
Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.
Crafton, Donald, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in
Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
Eisenstein, Sergie, Disney, trans. Dustin Condren, eds. Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar
Hochmuth (Berlin: PotemkinPress, 2011).
Halberstam, Judith (Jack), The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011).
Hawkins, Alys, Whose Body Is It? in Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality,
and Animation, ed. Jayne Pilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Kindle edition.
Hayes, Ruth, The Animated Body and Its Material Nature, in Animating the
Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation, ed. Jayne Pilling (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012). Kindle edition.
Johnson, Barbara, Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion, Diacritics 16:1 (Spring
1986). 28-47.
Koch, Gertrud, Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on Human
Beings? trans. by Daniel Hendrickson, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen
Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.

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Lamarre, Thomas, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
---------, Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation, Documentary, and
Photography, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.
Leslie, Esther, Animation and History, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.
Ngai, Sianne, On Animatedness, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2005). Kindle edition.
Steinberg, Marc, Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory
from Japan, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014). Kindle edition.
Wells, Paul, Understanding Animation (New York: Routledge, 2006).
2. Childhood Studies
Kincaid, James, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998).
Mavor, Carol, Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Latigue,
Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Stockton, Kathryn Bond, The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth
Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Winnicott, D. W., The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little
Girl (Madison: International Universities Press, 1977).
3. Cinema Studies
Bazin, Andr, What Is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005).
Brinkema, Eugenie, The Forms of the Affects (Duke: Durham University Press, 2014).
--------, e.g., Dogtooth, World Picture 7 (Autumn 2012):
http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/Brinkema.html.
Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1979).
Conley, Tom, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Metz, Christian, Film Language: On the Semiotics of Film, trans. Michael Taylor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Rancire, Jacques Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006).
del Rio, Elena, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Kindle edition.
Rodowick, D.N., Elegy for Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
--------, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001).
4. Performance Studies

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Blocker, Jane, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, Performance (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Brody, Jennifer, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008).
Cervenak, Sarah Jane, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual
Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
Doyle, Jennifer, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
Fleetwood, Nicole, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Heathfield, Adrian, ed., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (New York:
Intellect Ltd., 2012).
Hill, Leslie and Helen Paris, Performing Proximity: Curious Intimacies (New York:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014).
Jakovljevich, Branislav, Daniil Kharms: Writing and Event (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2009).
Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge,
1996).
Phelan, Peggy and Jill Lane, eds., The Ends of Performance (New York: New York
University Press, 1997).
Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996).
Schechner, Richard, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
Schneider, Rebecca, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2012).
5. Theory & Philosophy
Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2003)
Bahktin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1986).
Butler, Jeremy, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 3rd ed. (Mahwah:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007).
Butt, Gavin and Irit Rogoff, Visual Cultures as Seriousness (Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2014).
Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Danto, Arthur, The Body/Body Problem
Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
--------, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
--------, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel Smith (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press).
--------, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia

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University Press, 1990).
Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Fiedler, Leslie, Come Back to the Raft Agin, Huck Honey! in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, eds. Gerald Graff and
James Phelan (Boston: Bedford, 2004).
Fineman, Martha Albertson, The Vulnerable Subejct and the Responsive State, Emory
Law Journal, Vol. 60; Emory Public Law Research Paper No. 10-130.
Harraway, Donna, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007).
Heller-Roazen, Daniel, The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone
Books, 2007).
Jones, Amelia, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual
Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012)
Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New
Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Khalip, Jacques and Robert Mitchell, eds., Releasing the Image: From Literature to New
Media (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Lippit, Akira, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005).
Merlea-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (New
York: Routledge, 2012).
Morton, Timothy, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013).
Ngai, Sianne, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012)
ODonnell, Victoria, Television Criticism (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2007).
Phelan, James, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative
Theory: Core Concepts & Critical Debates (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2012).
Quirk, Tom, The Realism of Adventures of Huck Finn, The Cambridge Companion to
American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, ed., Donald Pizer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 138-153.
Silverman, Kaja, Flesh of My Flesh (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Smith, Daniel W., Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 2012).
6. Queer Theory
Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2013).
Bersani, Leo, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1976).
--------, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Copjec, Joan, The Strut of Vision: Seeings Corporeal Support, Imagine Theres No
Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 178-196.
de Lauretis, Teresa, Freuds Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Dean, Tim, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004).
Love, Heather, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2007).
Ricco, John Paul, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Roof, Judith, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008)
Vincent, John Emil, Queer Lyrics (Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry) (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).