Adam Whybray | University of Suffolk (original) (raw)

Courses by Adam Whybray

This introductory primer to the History of Czech Animation is perfect for animation scholars and ... more This introductory primer to the History of Czech Animation is perfect for animation scholars and students, especially for those with an interest in some of the most inventive and formally beautiful stop-motion animations of the last one hundred years. Practitioners should find the recommended practical exercises at the end of the lessons inspiring, while history students will appreciate the rigorous socio-historic contextualisation that covers Nazi occupation, Czech Communism, the Prague Spring, Normalisation, and the Velvet Revolution, to the present day. Fair use clips and illustrative examples are combined with slides and lectures.

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Videos by Adam Whybray

Video recording of 'Animated Allegories of Communist Czechoslovakia', Animation Research Network ... more Video recording of 'Animated Allegories of Communist Czechoslovakia', Animation Research Network Scotland, ‘Bringing Legacy to Life: Stop Motion Conference’, 29–30 April 2021. Covers work by Garik Seko, Jiří Trnka, Jan Švankmajer, Břetislav Pojar, Hermína Týrlová and Michaela Pavlátová.

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Video recording of 'A Hypertext of Horrors: A Post-Mortem of Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Al... more Video recording of 'A Hypertext of Horrors: A Post-Mortem of Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe Adventure', University of Warwick, ‘Tales of Terror: Gothic, Horror, and Weird Short Fiction’, 21–22 March 2019.

You can play 'Evermore' here:
http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2016/Evermore/index.html

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Book Monograph by Adam Whybray

Bloomsbury, 2020

The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation... more The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta.

Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects.

In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers.

Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.

Book Chapters by Adam Whybray

Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, 2022

If, as this book contends, gothic texts tend towards the “mashing up” of elements from previous c... more If, as this book contends, gothic texts tend towards the “mashing up” of elements from previous cultural texts, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe double down on this tendency. In the entry for Poe in The Handbook of the Gothic Benjamin Fisher (2009, p.67) notes that the author’s earliest reviewers decried his fiction as existing in a “passé mode”, suggesting we might consider his work as a pastiche of a mode that already tended towards pastiche. In apparent contradiction to its focus upon “unity of effect”, Marshall Brown (2005, p.20) uses Poe’s 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ to evidence the author’s principal method of creation as being one of blending heterogeneous elements, an approach which he also locates in work by Henry James and Mary Shelley.

Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first “classic novel” to be adapted into hypertext – mashed up with by L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) by Shelley Jackson using Eastgate System’s hypertext creation software ‘Storyspace’ and released as Patchwork Girl in 1995. Hypertext is a form of electronic literature navigated by the reader via links between nodes. As such it possesses a (sometimes limited) degree of interaction and tends towards the non-linear and associative, rather than purely sequential. Poe’s self-reflexivity, use of pastiche, and the lack of closure to many of his stories, make them uniquely suited to the form of hypertext and could, it will be argued, be considered proto-hypertext themselves.

Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe Adventure was submitted to the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in October 2016. This hypertext game, produced with the software Twine, attempted to adapt, truncate and mash together over sixty of Poe’s short stories into a single branching hypertext form. As such, while large portions of the game consist of sections of pastiches written by the present author, Evermore must be considered partially authored by Poe himself, from whose writings the majority of the game was directly adapted.

Michael Joyce (1996) and Astrid Ensslin (2007) take the position that hypertexts like Evermore are only truly authored in the process of their reading. The reader of hypertext is not a full participant in what they read – as per a player of videogames – but neither are they a completely passive reader. Rather, they are closer to a reader-writer, with a hand in shaping the narrative which they explore often intuitively and semi-randomly. Recent tools for authoring hypertext, such as Twine, emphasize the visual structure of hypertext. As such, the experience of making such interactive fiction becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from the experience of consuming it. If the reader of hypertext is a reader-writer, then the creator of hypertext is a writer-reader.

From this critical position, a post-mortem of Evermore’s production elucidates the hypertextual potentialities within Poe’s own work, which exhibits aspects of the mash-up even before being further mashed-up by the writer(s) and reader(s) of the game.

No Known Cure: The Comedy of Chris Morris, Jun 14, 2013

Nathan Barley, the 2005 sitcom by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, was, whether disparaged or la... more Nathan Barley, the 2005 sitcom by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, was, whether disparaged or lauded in the press, generally seen as lacking satiric focus. The series, set in the fictional borough of Hosegate, follows the exploits of self-publicising fashionista Nathan Barley and the staff of SugarApe magazine, including the cynical journalistic Dan Ashcroft, who is hailed as a 'preacher man' by his co-workers, despite his feelings of disenfranchisement from the magazine and its surrounding culture. By turns, journalists identified the programme as being spatially focused upon the Shoreditch/ Hoxton areas of London; specifically a media satire; an attack on youth culture; or concerned with a 'dot-com' magazine culture that was five years past by the point of the programme's broadcast. In this paper I argue two things. Firstly, that the satirical focus of the show is 'post-ironic' discourse; a mode of performative speech that deploys the rhetoric of irony, while entrenching a given position, rather than critiquing a position through strategic differentiation (as per 'traditional' irony). So, for example, the September 2001 cover of the magazine Sleazenation designed by Scott King, which read: “NOW EVEN MORE SUPERFICIAL/ OVER 100 PAGES OF HYPE & LIES” is post-ironic, rather than ironic, as it relies upon the reader to register the cover as being ironic, despite the fact that the magazine embraced superficiality. Post-irony favours self-satire. Secondly, I will argue that the programme itself exemplifies this mode of post-ironic discourse and so lacks satiric differentiation from the cultural phenomenon it sought to attack. Whether this is a deliberate ruse on the part of Brooker and Morris to have their form reflect the programme's content, or else merely shows us the homogenizing, seductive power of post-irony, is a matter of curious ambivalence.

Journal Articles by Adam Whybray

Punctum, 2022

Critiques of the objectification of female characters in comics have often focused upon depiction... more Critiques of the objectification of female characters in comics have often focused upon depictions within the superhero genre (cf. Avery-Natale 2013; Cocca 2014; Nelson 2015). Such arguments adopt the framework of Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' (1975) to assess the costuming, physical physique, and narrative role given to such characters. In one comment on similar controversies, Neil Cohn (2014) has argued for a greater emphasis upon the visual language used in objectifying depictions that does not get caught up in debates over realism since, he argues, comics are unconcerned with reality. Autobiographical comics, however, now form a significant part of the comics market and scholarship (cf. Schlichting and Schmid 2019). A tension exists between the rhetorical mode of visual metaphor exploited by comics (cf. Venkatesan and Saji 2021) and the appeal to authenticity made by non-fiction (cf. El Refaie 2012). Focusing on autobiographical comics-here, some published between 1991 and 2018-allows us to assess how sexual objectification operates within comics without the issue being clouded by irresolvable appeals to reality in the fundamentally escapist/ fantastic superhero genre. The visual language in the comics by Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and David Heatley has been criticized for reducing the 'other' to a series of more stagnant, occluded, and restrictive graphic patterns than afforded to their author surrogates. Ariel Schrag's work, meanwhile, points towards possible means of avoiding such tendencies in future autobiographical comics.

Childhood Remixed, 2018

Ann Turner's 1988 film Celia is set amongst the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1950s during the "Red... more Ann Turner's 1988 film Celia is set amongst the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1950s during the "Red scare" of the Menzies administration. When 9-year-old Celia's grandma dies, Celia finds emotional solace in the company of her next door neighbours, the Tanners. Celia's conservative father, Ray, attends to stop his daughter from associating with the communist-sympathising Tanners through the gift of a rabbit. In the 1950s attempts to cull Australia's "rabbit plague" involved the widespread banning of rabbits as household pets. When Celia's pet rabbit is taken from her she seeks retribution against the forces of patriarchal domination in her life, including her father and uncle. This retribution involves stylised magick rituals, staged judicial "performances" and acts of direct violence.

This paper will argue, after Foucault, that, divested of political power as a girl and a child, Celia establishes a phantastical heterotopia that sits radically outside of the hegemonic power structures of conservative Australia. This opens a radical potential for a judicial approach that reflects a child's experiential understanding of the world. Tragically Celia's imitation modelling ensures her replication of the retributive model of punishment of her adult milieu (both in its treatment of communists and rabbits), albeit with a degree of public spectacle repressed by the private space of the adult penal system. More optimistically, Celia's stagings also contain elements of restorative justice. The paper will conclude with a consideration of how a penal model based upon restorative justice for under 18s would better serve children's development and rehabilitation.

Journal of Comedy Studies, 2016

Monty Python (1969–1974) and Kids in the Hall (1988–1994) are two male comedy sketch show troupes... more Monty Python (1969–1974) and Kids in the Hall (1988–1994) are two male comedy sketch show troupes well known for performing as women. Through analysis of the performance styles present in Monty Python and Kids in the Hall sketches, we can observe a shift from a camp to a queer sensibility. Esther Newton's Mother Camp (1972) and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) were released, respectively, during the broadcast of each show and provide a critical framework through which the subversiveness of a given act of drag can be evaluated. Female impersonation in Monty Python's Flying Circus is signified by handbags, permed hair and voices that alternate between shrill and husky. Gender transformation is achieved through the foregrounding of token signifiers that hyperbolically represent femininity, but do not attempt to approximate it. By contrast, the more nuanced female impersonation in Kids in the Hall reconfigures the gender of the performers to achieve a queering effect. Using Newton and Butler to define and illustrate the difference between these two modes of performance, the subversive/conservative value of both (as enacted in the shows) will be evaluated.

Conference Papers by Adam Whybray

'Folk Horror in the 21st Century' at Falmouth University, 2019

In 'Pathologic' (2006) and 'Pathologic 2' (2019) Russian videogame studio Ice-Pick Lodge – and pa... more In 'Pathologic' (2006) and 'Pathologic 2' (2019) Russian videogame studio Ice-Pick Lodge – and particularly their founder Nikolay Dybowski – adapt, transfigure and gamify ritual practices of Mongolian/ Buryat shamanism, staging them within a virtual heterotopic space, in order to communicate the importance of ritual and sacrifice in the face of escalating ecological catastrophe.

'Grad CATS Conference 2017: Evolving Stories' at De Montfort University, 2017

For 45 years The Residents performed and released music anonymously in accordance with N. Senada'... more For 45 years The Residents performed and released music anonymously in accordance with N. Senada's 'Theory of Obscurity'. The album cover of Eskimo (1979) introduced the band's most famous visual iteration as eyeball-headed figures in tuxedos. In February 2017, Hardy Fox, having previously identified as a spokesperson for The Residents' management team, The Cryptic Corporation, openly identified himself as the primary composer for the group. Despite this admission, Fox insisted that he was not a member of The Residents since “The Residents” were a concept, not a band. Fox may, at times, have embodied aspects of this concept on stage, but “The Residents” remained immutably above and beyond such embodiments, archetypal.

Days before Fox's confession, The Residents released their 1997 project Disfigured Night for the first time on CD. The album's narrative conforms to the archetype of the 'hero's journey' , following the psychological and spiritual transformation of a developmentally disabled child, Billy, through a traumatic process of self individuation. Billy begins his journey unable to differentiate his own phenomenological experiences from those of strangers. By the end of his journey he has achieved a form of self-actualisation, ironically affirmed by his recitation of Michael Jackson's single 'We Are the World'. Through its emphasis upon the psycho-spiritual dimensions of the monomyth, Disfigured Night returns Joseph Campbell's narratology to its genesis in Jungian archetypes. This paper will demonstrate that The Residents' playful approach to identity reached a critical apex with Disfigured Night, laying the foundations for their final disavowal of anonymity.

'Ludus: The Narrative of Games and the Art of Play' at Goldsmiths College, 2012

As early as Sierra Online's Mixed Up Mother Goose in 1987, video games have reconfigured fairytal... more As early as Sierra Online's Mixed Up Mother Goose in 1987, video games have reconfigured fairytale and mythic narratives through parodic techniques, non-linear narration and the exploitation of the relationship between the player and the game's playable character (PC). While adventure games of the late 1980s and early 1990s deployed such methods simply for humorous or educational purposes, the emergence of independent game developers across the late 1990s to the present, saw these methods turned to more radical ends. In this paper I shall illustrate how two game designers, interactive fiction writer and theorist Emily Short and micro-game developer Increpare/ Steven Lavelle, deploy such methods to interrogate the ideological underpinnings of these archetypal narratives and force the player to confront their complicity in their continuation. Lavelle's players are often placed in an ethically compromising situation in which they are implicated in the suffering of a (female) character recognisable from fairytale or myth. A reversal can then occur that forces the player into the role of the abused victim, or else the narrative is systematically fragmented and deconstructed in such a way as to expose its hegemonic workings. From Lavelle's gameography, I will examine Sleeping Beauty (2009), a disquieting reworking of the fairytale of the same name; Dirty Little Slut (2010), a satirical piece of narrative creation software indebted to the theories of Vladimir Propp; and Judith (2009), a retelling of the 'Bluebeard' story, made in collaboration with Terry Cavanagh. Emily Short's first and most widely-discussed work is Galatea (2000), which is structured around the 'Pygmalion bride' myth, but with the statue now a post-feminist cyborg made of synthetic marble. Short's ambitious collaborative work Alabaster (2009) tells the story of Snow White, but as a hypertext of branching narrative paths that asks the player whether they will allow emasculation of the male playable character in exchange for the empowerment of a vampiric Snow White. Finally, Glass (2006) and Bronze (2006) are smaller works that cast a canny look at 'Cinderella' and 'Beauty and the Beast', respectively. Do we, as the player, feel bound to adhere to the dictates of known narrative archetypes, or do we feel able to help forge a new story?

'From Granite to Rainbow – Transmuting the Material into Text' at University of East Anglia, 2012

The London student protests of November and December 2010 over the raise in the tuition fee cap, ... more The London student protests of November and December 2010 over the raise in the tuition fee cap, received considerable coverage in both the British broadsheet and tabloid press. Generally the press was sympathetic towards the protesters, though condemnatory of instances of direct action, occupations or vandalism. What this paper shall focus upon is that fact that the stories told in the press about the protests – the narratives that unfolded – were predominantly constructed around things. These politically encoded things were constructed as either anthropomorphised victims of violence or as phantasmal agents of chaos and dissent. Through deploying a novel cross-fertilisation of thing theory with the most haptic impulses of Kleinian psychoanalysis, I shall show how the journalistic response to the protests can be read through politically-encoded things such as the following; the fire extinguisher thrown by Edward Woollard from the roof of 30 Millbank; the Cenotaph, which was climbed by Charlie Gilmore; the police van protected by a band of schoolgirls at the Whitehall march on November 24th; and the wheelchair that protester Jodie McIntyre was thrown from. The dialogic framework I shall use, suspending Kleinian psychoanalysis in communication with thing theory (as exemplified by Bill Brown's work in Critical Inquiry and 'A Sense of Things'), will ensure that neither the psychical potency of these objects nor their very thingness, is lost from view.

Unpublished Dissertation by Adam Whybray

The University of York, 2010

The project of this dissertation is to investigate the way in which Czech animator Jan Švankmajer... more The project of this dissertation is to investigate the way in which Czech animator Jan Švankmajer gives expression to the inner-life of 'objects' and 'things' in his film-work of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; although work from outside of this period will help contextualise the discussion. Through this enquiry we will establish the difference between what we might regard as an 'object' and what we might regard as a 'thing' within his work and question whether their animation expresses a response to the Czech political situation at the end of the Cold War. This practice of 'letting objects speak' will be understood within the terms of the surrealist movement (both in its French and its specifically Czech incarnations), universal animism, and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. My framework for this investigation will be 'thing theory', with particular consideration paid to the work of Bill Brown, due to the special attention afforded to objects within Švankmajer's films.

PowerPoint Talks by Adam Whybray

'Dark Economies: Anxious Futures, Fearful Pasts' at Falmouth University, 2021

The Oxford Word of the Year 2019 was “climate emergency”. Oxford Languages (2019) report a 4,290%... more The Oxford Word of the Year 2019 was “climate emergency”. Oxford Languages (2019) report a 4,290% increase in the use of the term “eco-anxiety” in the same year, referring to experiences of fear, anxiety and other forms of mental distress stemming from awareness of the climate emergency and related ecological breakdown. They note, however, that mental health professionals do not consider eco-anxiety to be pathological since it emerges as a rational response to an escalating catastrophe, possibly now irreversible due to the potential passing of various so-called “tipping points”.

This sense of a grimly inevitable cascading of ecological and climate-related horror leading – in both teleological and eschatological terms – to the near-term extinction of all life on Earth (often referred to as the “Doomer” or “Doomist” perspective) is played out with feverish, near-mechanical rigour by Kazuo Umezu in his shōnen horror manga The Drifting Classroom and Fourteen. With their dioramic splash pages of nightmarishly sublime apocalyptic wastelands, as well as their emphasis upon mass-scale ecological degradation, both series can be (un)comfortably classified within the eco-gothic genre. The Drifting Classroom stages scenes of mass flooding, starvation, pandemic disease, killing for resources, torture and abuse, all involving very young children. Fourteen – even more phantasmagoric – includes animal hybrid chimeras, geomagnetic reversal, air pollution that strips all oxygen from the atmosphere, mass sexual depravity and – most significantly – the character of Chicken George, the embodiment of collective non-human animal consciousness, variably protagonist and antagonist of the series.

Eco-anxiety represents an irresolvable paradox for a cognitive-behaviourist approach to psychology which holds that chronic anxiety is a maladaptive response to stress. Catastrophising is no longer catastrophising if a catastrophe is actually unfolding. We are thus confronted with a limitation of therapeutic methods rooted in this approach, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), currently the form of therapy mostly commonly offered by the NHS and most campus student services. However, psychoanalysis – especially through the concept of the “pure war” state (Borg, 2003) – offers an alternative way of engaging with the “post-apocalyptic unconscious” (ibid). The Drifting Classroom and Fourteen can be read as exemplifications of an unconscious grappling with anxiety since they exist resolutely within the pre-Oedipal imaginary. Nathan Chazan (2020) expresses this simply: “Umezu's commitment to a childish point of view is uncompromising”. Both comics stage a manically vacillating dialectic between, on the one side, a fantasy of infinite plenitude in which castration does not exist (Castrillón, 2017) and, on the other side, a schizophrenic state of pure war, in which psychic survival is paradoxically assured through the belief that absolute disintegration has always already occurred (Borg, 2003).

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PowerPoint for paper delivered at 'Dark Economies' conference, Falmouth University, 21 - 23 July 2021.

'BCLA Postgraduate Conference: Revolution & Evolution' at University of Essex, 2014

Jiří Barta was one of the leading animators in Czechoslovakia during the period of late Czech Com... more Jiří Barta was one of the leading animators in Czechoslovakia during the period of late Czech Communist rule known as ‘normalisation’ that stretched from the defeat of ‘socialism with a human face’ in 1968, through to Velvet Revolution in 1989. His work spans a variety of mediums, including traditional 2D animation, stop-motion photography and, recently, C.G.I. Under the government of the Czech Communist Party/KSČ it was essential that artists had to obscure any political commentary within their work, or else face censorship and persecution. In stop-motion animation, this was achieved through a process of political encoding, by which some of the animated objects and things in a film would be imbued with a subversive political meaning. In this paper it will be argued, in line with concepts developed by post-Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, that not only things and objects, but also space and time themselves can be made to carry political meaning. Three animated films by Jiří Barta – Balada o zeleném drevu/A Ballad About Green Wood (1983), Projekt/The Design (1981) and Klub odlozenych/The Club of the Laid-Off (1989) – will be used as case studies to demonstrate how this can be the case. It will shown that Barta's films are either structured around natural rhythms and repetitions, or else they concern how clock time and spatial planning have warped natural sensibilities. Barta's films endorse a return to a mode of living in which humans are more intimately familiar with the variegated rhythms of nature.

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PowerPoint for paper delivered at 'Revolution & Evolution' conference, University of Essex, 10 - 11 July 2014.

Interviews by Adam Whybray

Radio Prague International, 2020

Adam Whybray, a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Suffolk, has just published a compr... more Adam Whybray, a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Suffolk, has just published a comprehensive English-language account of the history of Czech animation, from the 1920s to the present. As the book’s title would suggest – The Art of Czech Animation: A History of Political Dissent and Allegory – he takes a keen interest not just in the craft but in the oft hidden, ambiguous or subversive messages therein.

Book Reviews by Adam Whybray

Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2021

Kate Egan and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Appr... more Kate Egan and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, And Now for Something
Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. ix + 243, 10 illus., ISBN
101474475159 (hb), £75.00.