Clark Kent Research Articles

“To me, Superman is the living antithesis to the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely”: an interview with Phillip Kennedy Johnson

ABSTRACT In September 2023, as part of the Superman’s Cleveland: Lineage and Legacy programme honouring Superman’s 85th anniversary, Phillip Kennedy Johnson was interviewed live at Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference. During the interview, Johnson shared his thoughts on Superman, what it means to shepherd a character with such a legacy and reflected on his run on Action Comics. He shared stories about his break into comics, gave insight into his writing process, and offered advice on working collaboratively in comics and how that process works. Johnson, who is also a trumpet player, spoke about the connection between comics and music. Finally, Johnson answered audience questions about Superman, the character of Clark Kent, and how he thinks about writing the Green Lantern, John Stewart.

Behind every Superman there is a Clark Kent: discovering the silent strengths in the entrepreneurial journey

Behind every Superman there is a Clark Kent: discovering the silent strengths in the entrepreneurial journey

Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest. By Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno

In Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, anthropologists Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno jump into the hazy pool of assumptions and images associated with the Midwest and emerge with a compelling case for the ways in which banal, uninterrogated discourse about the region directly service and uphold White supremacy. Rejecting a static notion of region and instead referring to the Midwest as a knot of narratives or a canvas for nationalist projections, they pull together seemingly fragmented examples to show how Midwest Whiteness is created and recreated regardless of material reality. For example, they begin by showing how imagining heartlands as strongholds of virtuous White labor and property ownership propels and maintains settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession in the United States and beyond. The core of the book then draws together a smattering of cultural products to make claims about how Whiteness operates, even—especially—when depictions do not explicitly address race. From Regionalist paintings and familiar images of an agrarian Midwest landscape to the poetry of Robert Bly or Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic publications, the region is often imagined as homogenous and insular, which in turn can be interpreted as either virtuous or deplorable. Either way, it bolsters nationalism and White supremacy by instructing observers on the features of ideal Whiteness. Similarly, a chapter co-authored with Jada Basdeo looks at fictional characters like Dorothy Gale and Clark Kent to show how the creation of “intimate others” informs audiences on the merits and shortcomings of “plain” Midwest Whiteness. Meanwhile, several classic horror films utilize the Midwest as a backdrop of White ordinariness and safety, even as the region’s actual historical serial killers are placed outside of the Midwest in film portrayals. Imagining the Heartland then culminates with a chapter co-authored with Lena Hanschka that shows how the now well-established mechanisms of White supremacy were deployed in mass media from 2010 to 2019 in depictions of the suffering White farmer or industrial worker in the Midwest.

Bastiaan Bloem: power against Parkinson's disease

Clark Kent is Superman. Matt Murdock is Daredevil. Bruce Banner is Hulk. Peter Parker is Spiderman. Bastiaan Bloem is Healthcare Hero (as named by the Dutch Ministry of Health). Or maybe Dr Tulip? This handle—if not quite as punchy as Wolverine—was given to him by former colleagues in California, and it does kind of work. It's an obvious reference to Bastiaan's home country (the Netherlands), and the tulip is a symbol that represents the fight against his arch enemy—Parkinson's disease. But, in case you should accuse me of being onomastically frivolous, may I point out that when he gigs as a DJ, he goes by the name of DJ Boem Boem Bloem! Of course, he does have a real title—professor of movement disorder neurology at the Radboud University Medical Centre (Nijmegen, Netherlands)—but in all his e-mails to me, he just signed off as Bas.

Behind Every Superman there is a Clark Kent: Patience as a Strength in the Entrepreneurial Process

Entrepreneurs act under uncertain conditions and resource constraints to bring new products or services to life. While examining what characteristics and behaviors help entrepreneurs traverse the challenging period between idea conception and venture sustainability, the academic and popular discourse has emphasized fiery traits and behaviors like risk-taking, perseverance and passion. Patience, the propensity to wait calmly in the face of frustration and adversity, has largely been unnoticed. An inductive, longitudinal study of nine nascent entrepreneurs in the early stages of venture building finds that patience is an important trait that could partly explain why some entrepreneurs stay the course while others give up. The article contributes to the study of nascent entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action by lending empirical evidence to the existence of ‘Entrepreneurial Patience’ as a trait that can influence the venture creation process.

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz

Reviewed by: Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz Matthew Brake (bio) Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero. McFarland, 2021. x + 364 pp, $45.00. In Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, Roy Schwartz sets out to demonstrate that despite the many Christian allegories portraying Superman as a Christ figure (made popular by the 1978 Superman movie), Superman is actually a Jewish character. Schwartz's work joins a growing body of scholarship dedicated to parsing out the Jewishness of the Man of Steel. Schwartz himself makes note of works like Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007). While Schwartz does not mention it, one could suggest Martin Lund's 2016 book, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish-Comics Connection, another text that examines Superman's supposed Jewishness (with a more critical eye toward the question). Schwartz offers three ways that his book uniquely contributes to this growing body of literature: "it examines the entirety of Superman's career, from 1938 to date, whereas others have limited themselves to his formative 'Golden Age,' ending around 1945, with a few ventures up to 1960. It also explores more deeply the Jewish parallels, including their theological, folkloric, historical and sociological meaning. And it's the first to focus exclusively on Superman" (5). One of the best ways to evaluate this book is to judge it by the criteria Schwartz lays out here. Starting with Schwartz's first point, the book is impressive in its breadth of material. Schwartz guides readers through Superman's origins and the early concepts from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that eventually led to Superman's debut in Action Comics #1. From there, he doesn't stop until events from Brian Michael Bendis's recent run on the character, including when Superman reveals his identity to the world. Schwartz also references the recent CW television show Superman & Lois, which debuted in 2020. In between, he discusses Superman's depiction in various comic book publishing "ages" (i.e., the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc.) as well as the various serials, television shows, movies, and other transmedia adaptations of the character. While a book like this will end up leaving some things out, Schwartz follows through [End Page 89] on his promise to explore the entirety of Superman's existence, from the early ideas leading to his creation to works that have appeared within the last two years, all the while attempting to highlight the Jewishness of the character. I will address the exploration of Jewish parallels last, but to Schwartz's claim that this book is the first to focus exclusively on Superman, that's not quite accurate. Lund's (previously mentioned) text predates Schwartz's by five years, although Lund's does confine itself to Superman's early years. Also, Schwartz's book does focus on Superman overall, although at times in deviates into a discussion, more broadly, on the history of comics in general and on Jewish contributions to the creation and growth of the industry specifically. This is fine, and is done to provide context for the claim of Superman's Jewishness, but there are places where the text veers off course into one of these other directions so that Schwartz needs to throw in a sentence to remind us that the book is about Superman's Jewishness. I direct a majority of my critiques to Schwartz's claim that the book more deeply explores Superman's Jewish parallels than many other texts. To this point, Schwartz does need to be commended for the breadth of material he has assembled in this text. It is an interesting survey of comics history as well as the Jewish presence in the comic book industry throughout this history. Many scholars studying the history of the Man of Steel may also appreciate this text as a resource to find primary and secondary sources for their own research. There are places where Schwartz makes the...

Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics

Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics

Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England

Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England

Quotational and other opaque belief reports

AbstractIn a novel move against Russellianism, Heck (2014) has argued that reports of the form S believes that p are semantically opaque on the grounds that there are no other means in English to report psychologically individuated beliefs, such as those Lois Lane reports using the names ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent.’ I show that there are several other ways to meet this need. I focus on quotational reports of the form S believes “p,” which philosophers have overlooked or mischaracterized. I argue that reports of this form are no more metalinguistic than those using the complementizer that. In both, the meaning of the report depends on the meaning, not the form, of the complement. Some distinguishing features of non‐metalinguistic quotational reports are that their complements force “deictic shift” and have no transparent interpretation. Free direct speech and thought bubbles have the same properties. The “q‐ascriptions” McCullagh (2017a) proposed to defend Russellianism against Heck are not in common use and on his account are unsuitably metalinguistic. The fact that quotational belief reports are opaque without being metalinguistic makes the Russellian thesis that the meaning of a name is its referent untenable, thereby undermining Russellianism about belief reports.

Public Heroes, Secret Jews: Jewish Identity and Comic Books

Public Heroes, Secret Jews:Jewish Identity and Comic Books Jennifer Caplan (bio) "Who was that masked man?" was the common refrain of those who witnessed the Lone Ranger (John Reid) perform some heroic act or feat of derring-do. The Lone Ranger began in 1933 as a radio program, so it was up to the audience to imagine what the man and his mask looked like. By 1938 there was a syndicated comic strip, and in 1948 The Lone Ranger comic book series began its 145-issue run.1 These visual representations created the now iconic look of a man in a simple black domino mask, which was enough of a disguise that no one could recognize the man under the mask. Superman had already established that something as simple as removing or adding a pair of glasses could obscure a hero's identity, so the Lone Ranger's domino mask was more than sufficient as an act of subterfuge. Putting on or taking off a mask is an almost sacred act within the pages of comic books. The mask is the thing that separates, protects, and creates the liminal space in which an alter ego exists. This essay is going to use what I am calling "masking theory" to think critically about both what it means to have a secret identity and how Jewish comic book characters have had their Jewishness masked and unmasked throughout their history. Masks do not all work the same way. Bruce Wayne wears a mask so that people do not know he is also Batman, but Clark Kent is the mask that Superman wears to hide his otherness. Characters don masks for many reasons, but the most common is to hide something about themselves that they do not think society would understand. Sometimes they are protecting the reputation and family of the "real person" under the mask, but not always. Superman hides in plain sight as Clark Kent just as Wonder Woman hides as Diana Prince; they hide their inhumanity while Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker (Spiderman) hide their humanity. The mask is always a defense mechanism, but what it is defending is not always the same thing. Masking theory, in this case, is focused not only on the characters but also the comic book authors themselves, and what we might infer about them based on what masks they apply to their creations. The masking and unmasking of Jewish characters speaks to what Rachel Kranson calls the "ambivalent embrace" of postwar American Jews and middle-class American identity.2 [End Page 53] For this study I focus primarily on four characters: The Thing (Ben Grimm), Magneto (Max Eisenhardt), Ragman (Rory Regan), and Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde). Drawing on Tom Morris's work on secret identities, as well as other contemporary theories of comics and graphic novels, I argue that for three out of the four characters, it has been their Jewishness that has been their "secret identity" at least as much as their "real" name. I am beginning with The Thing because his mask is the least stereotypical. His identity was never a secret, so if (as Morris argues) a secret identity is an integral part of the superhero genre, The Thing allows us to ask what his secret might be. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created The Thing, and they and the other Jewish writers like them might have been masking themselves as they were masking their characters. While fear of exposure might have driven art to imitate life, secret identities are nevertheless powerful, in part because they open up space for more: more personality, more diversity, and more exceptionality. A character with two separate yet fully formed identities offers greater space for writers and artists to explore social and political issues, and yet there can be downsides to keeping certain parts of a character hidden, or masked. In "The Secret of Secret Identities" Morris writes, "for most of the superheroes, a dual identity is primarily about masking. The costume and the superhero persona (from the Latin for 'mask,' or presentation) keep a secret."3 Masking is substantially different from both hiding and making invisible. Masking is about taking something obvious or apparent and...

It's a Roman … it's a Persian … it's Rabbi Meir! Secret Identities and the Rabbinic Self in the Babylonian Talmud

It's a Roman … it's a Persian … it's Rabbi Meir!Secret Identities and the Rabbinic Self in the Babylonian Talmud Sara Ronis (bio) What kinds of leaders were the late antique Babylonian rabbis? What kinds of heroes did they think they were? This paper explores Talmudic narratives about heroic rabbis using insights from modern superhero studies. What does it mean to see the Babylonian rabbis as superheroes? According to Peter Coogan's popular definition, a superhero is A heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers—extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically express his1 biography, character, powers or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generally distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret.2 Though Coogan ignores the gender diversity inherent in the modern world of superheroes, he notes a range of commonalities across superheroes that shape what it means to be a superhero. But there are actually two kinds of superheroes.3 There are figures like Batman—Batman's true identity is the all-too-human Bruce Wayne, an identity that he hides when he puts on his Batman costume and gets in the Batmobile to save Gotham City. An ordinary human making himself extraordinary through a costume. Then there are figures like Superman. Superman really is Kal-El, the alien child from Krypton who has extraordinary powers here on Earth. Superman hides this identity when he dresses up as Clark Kent to earn a paycheck and date Lois Lane. He is an extraordinary being disguising himself as ordinary. Yet both types of superhero are selfless, exceptional, have multiple identities, and exist in particular literary contexts. Indeed, superheroes' commonalities move beyond the surface. As Jeph Loeb and Tom Morris have noted, "The stories of these characters embody [End Page 93] our deepest hopes and fears, as well as our highest aspirations, and … can help us deal with our worst nightmares. They chart out questions we'll all have to face in the future. And they shed new light on our present condition."4 Superheroes function in similar ways in our collective imagination, reflecting a particular imagined past as they also shape the range of futures that are possible. When we think of the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud, we do not tend to think of them as masked men in tights, flying about ancient Babylonian cities. And indeed, they were not superheroes in the modern sense. But the rabbis did think of themselves as exceptional, as heroes, and even as superheroes relative to ordinary people with their ordinary abilities. Their actions entailed developed physical and mystical skills, self-sacrifice, pro-social agendas, and special titles ("rabbi"), though spandex had not yet been invented. And as superheroes, they took their self-imposed responsibility for the Jewish people seriously. Their stories also served to model one way to live in a complex and often hostile world in which few had political and economic power. They offered one vision of the Jewish past and present that had the potential to shape a rabbinic future. The rabbis of Late Antiquity lived in two geographic regions, at the whims of two major forces: the Sasanian Empire and the Roman Empire. The land of Israel was part of the Roman Empire, which was at times hostile to its religious minorities. Babylonia was a part of the Sasanian Empire, which largely had a policy of toleration of religious minorities. And yet, even in Sasanian Babylonia, the rabbis were aware that they were at the mercy of mercurial kings and administrators.5 In a world in which imperial policies were set by a dynastic ruler, the rabbis of both regions were very aware that each ruler brought the potential for radically new and destructive policies. The rabbis had many ways of mediating this danger: prayer, bribery, respect, and subterfuge. To achieve their aims—like all superheroes—the rabbis...

50 at 50: The Fifty Most Important Contributions to the Game ed. by Bill Nowlin

Reviewed by: 50 at 50: The Fifty Most Important Contributions to the Game ed. by Bill Nowlin David Pegram Bill Nowlin, editor. 50 at 50: The Fifty Most Important Contributions to the Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 608 pp. Cloth, $49.95. In his foreword to SABR's new anthology, 50 at 50, John Thorn admits that to be a baseball researcher is to be a nerd, though only in disguise. In fact, Thorn suggests that, like Clark Kent, the baseball researcher's true identity is that of Superman, carrying out a "never-ending quest for fresh baseball data" [End Page 209] (ix). The comparison to Superman makes perfect sense, especially when taken a step further: like Superman, baseball research could also be considered a search for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. In some respects, this appears to be the underlining theme of the anthology: truth in what data reveals to us; justice in bringing players and events to light; and the American Way in celebrating the National Pastime. Edited by Bill Nowlin, 50 at 50 coincides with SABR's fiftieth anniversary. It is a wellconceived collection of "the fifty most important contributions" to baseball research. But the book is more than just SABR's greatest hits. Nowlin (with help from Thorn, Mark Armour, and Leslie Heaphy) has carefully selected material that presents the spirit of baseball research: diverse, sometimes nerdy, and ultimately informative for any baseball fan. Furthermore, the book functions as a chronology, as the reader is (re)introduced to the themes, stories, issues, and concerns of researchers over the past fifty years. Nowlin's selections focus on biographies that shed light on forgotten players, evaluate teams and performances, and provide deep statistical analysis. Suffice to say, the breadth of the anthology is staggering. Thorn, of course, kicks things off with his Foreword. As the Official Historian for Major League Baseball, a position he has held since 2011, perhaps nobody knows the full scope of baseball history as well as Thorn. But he is also somewhat of an anomaly in research circles: both a noted historian and an early promoter and advocate of sabermetrics (a term created in reference to SABR). His unique ability to navigate those two worlds, and do so effectively, is noteworthy. His Foreword highlights how sabermetrics reinvigorated the research of baseball—a shout out to quantitative data and large amounts of it; but he is clear that baseball research has a qualitative purpose, as well. In his own work featured in the collection, "Pots & Pans, Bats & Balls," based on a speech he gave at the 2007 SABR convention in Cleveland, Thorn is clear about the important role of history (and the historian) in baseball. He asserts that we should embrace the subjective nature of it. He states, "There may be no 'I' in 'team'—nor in 'research,' not in 'SABR,'—but there is one in 'history' … and there ought to be one in the writing of it" (376). Much of 50 at 50, therefore, vacillates between those two poles: history and statistical analysis. Some pieces, such as Mark Armour's "The Effects of Integration, 1947–86," do a little bit of both. But overall, those aware of the relationship between SABR and sabermetrics may be surprised at the amount of history that the book covers. We get fresh looks at historical figures John McGraw, Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Urban Shocker, and Honus Wagner. Bill Kirwin, founder of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, gives a nod to Cy Seymour, one of the few players to ever be both a successful [End Page 210] hitter and pitcher. Larry Lester zeroes in on one game in particular: an epic pitching duel in 1930 that, as Lester recounts, demonstrates the power of history and its narrative. And Robert K. Fitts's "Babe Ruth, Eiji Sawamura, and War" points out some bitter ironies stemming from the 1934 Goodwill Tour. Readers might also be drawn to "Zooming in on an Old Great Photo" and "The Georgie Peach: Stumped by the Storyteller." Both are beautifully told accounts (accompanied by artifacts) of the authors' investigations into the past. However, the quality of the writing is not...

Steve Goes to Carnival by Joshua Button

Reviewed by: Steve Goes to Carnival by Joshua Button Deborah Stevenson, Editor Button, Joshua Steve Goes to Carnival; written by Joshua Button and Robyn Wells; illus. by Joshua Button. Candlewick, 2019 [56p] ISBN 978-1-5362-0034-8 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-6 yrs As the Rio zoo settles down for the night, keeper Antonio departs; Steve the gorilla, missing his friend, escapes his cage to go searching. A wide-brimmed yellow hat proves a miraculously effective disguise as Steve hops a tram into the city to find that it is “carnival time in Rio!” A festive Steve tracks Antonio down to a club, where he’s playing sax in the jazz quartet. Steve happily partners up with a beautiful dancer to cut a rug to his friend’s tune; when his hat falls off and he’s revealed as a gorilla, there’s a moment of surprise from the hostess, but his fellow dancer carries on without missing a beat and they dance the night away. This is a spirited spiritual descendant of Rathmann’s Good Night, Gorilla (BCCB 5/94) and Savage’s Where’s Walrus (BCCB 10/15) with an extra helping of Brazilian brio. Steve’s anthropomorphization, to the point of his being able to talk, raises some unanswered questions about his life in captivity, but it also makes for an entertaining joke as he passes unobserved among the humans via a disguise that makes Clark Kent’s glasses ruse seem impenetrable by comparison. Australian illustrator Button loves confident yet naïve lines, with a Picasso-esque air to his portraits and a touch of Gregory Christie in their poses. Painterly strokes (especially tactile on Steve himself) combine with digital touches of color for vibrant effect, and a trickly tracery of lines in a variety of colors compose zoo, city, and club behind our hero. It’s a vivacious and offbeat outing, and it’ll leave kids peering at fellow commuters in hope of a secret zoological identity. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Disguising Superman: How Glasses Affect Unfamiliar Face Matching

SummaryCould a simple pair of glasses really fool us into thinking Superman and Clark Kent are two different people? Here, we investigated the perception of identity from face images with a task that relies on visual comparison rather than memory. Participants were presented with two images simultaneously and were asked whether the images depicted the same person or two different people. The image pairs showed neither image with glasses, both images with glasses, and ‘mixed’ pairs of one image with and one without glasses. Participants' accuracies, measured by both percentage correct and d′ sensitivity, were significantly lower for ‘mixed’ trials. Analysis of response bias showed that when only one face wore glasses, people tended to respond ‘different’. We demonstrate that glasses affect face matching ability using unconstrained images, and this has implications for both disguise research and authenticating identity in the real world. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Two Constraints on a Theory of Concepts

Two general principles have played a crucial role in the recent debate on concepts. On the one hand, we want to allow different subjects to have the same concepts, thus accounting for concept publicity: concepts are ‘the sort of thing that people can, and do, share’. On the other hand, a subject who finds herself in a so-called ‘Frege case’ appears to have different concepts for the same object: for instance, Lois Lane has two distinct concepts SUPERMAN and CLARK KENT which refer to the same person (Superman/Clark). Several theories have tried to meet both of these constraints at the same time. But should we really try to satisfy both principles? This paper will argue that the traditional project of fulfilling these two constraints has been a misguided one. Through a variation on classic identity mistake cases, I will show that our two desiderata are inconsistent: it would thus be impossible to incorporate both of them in our best theory of concepts.

Berg’s Answer to Frege’s Puzzle

Berg seeks to defend the theory that the meaning of a proper name in a belief report is its reference against Frege’s puzzle by hypothesizing that when substituting coreferential names in belief reports results in reports that seem to have different truth values, the appearance is due to the fact that the reports have different metalinguistic implicatures. I review evidence that implicatures cannot be calculated in the way Grice or Berg imagine, and give reasons to believe that belief reports do not have the implicatures Berg attributes to them. I also argue that even if belief reports did have such implicatures, they would not explain why the belief reports in Frege’s puzzle seem to have different truth values. I point out that Berg has no reason to believe that Lois Lane believes Clark Kent is a reporter and Lois Lane believes Superman is a reporter are both true rather than both false, and that Leibniz’s Law cannot be used to defend substitutivity in belief reports because belief reports are not relational in the requisite way. Finally, I observe that some of the linguistic data Berg uses to argue for substitutivity in belief reports concerns the transparent interpretation of belief reports, whereas Frege’s puzzle concerns the opaque interpretation.

FILM IN REVIEW

1 8 2 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R A scene in Richard Lester’s 1981 film Superman II points up everything that’s wrong with today’s superhero movies. Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) has guessed Clark Kent’s secret identity, and rather than watch her age and eventually die while himself remaining forever youthful, Clark (Christopher Reeve) decides to renounce his super powers so that they can love and live together as mortals. It’s an irresistible romantic conceit, the stu√ of myth. But what immediately follows is a reminder that myth’s power to a√ect us lies in its relation to the human. Dropping into a truck stop for a bite, Clark and Lois encounter a bully who comes on to her, and when Clark steps in, the bully beats him up. The scene ends with Reeve – so beloved now as a figure of tragedy we forget what a wonderful actor he was – wiping his bloodied mouth, looking at his hand and saying, ‘‘Huh, blood,’’ with an awful, crumpled laugh, the sound of someone realizing the joke fate has played on him. I’ll never forget watching that scene in a theater and feeling as if the floor of the world had dropped away: if Superman can’t protect Lois, then the rest of us have no protection as well. The New Yorker critic Richard Brody might have been talking about 1 8 3 R this scene when he wrote last summer of superhero movies: ‘‘In their often-blundering way, they bring together world-scale con- flict and intimate dreams and failings. That is the very reason for their success. They represent, in cartoonish form, great fears, great hopes, and great yearnings.’’ The occasion for Brody’s comments was the declaration by the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu that making superhero movies constitutes ‘‘cultural genocide .’’ This was especially rich coming from a man whose recent film Birdman, a serviceable backstage comedy tarted up with the kind of illusion-and-reality games that, for some, signify depth, depended on deprecating allusion to Tim Burton’s two Batman movies, whose poetry and grandeur Iñárritu has never begun to match. As his lead, a washed-up movie star most famous for starring as a superhero, Iñárritu cast Burton’s Batman, Michael Keaton . The irony was that the role gave Keaton no opportunity to reach the depths he sounded as Bruce Wayne’s alter ego. Iñárritu, though, did have a point, which Brody granted: ‘‘The engine of [superhero movies’] commercial success is also the cause of their most common failing, and it’s exactly the one that Iñárritu cites: money. . . . The budget of the new Avengers film is estimated between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and seventynine million dollars. . . . There’s no reason to expect that a filmmaker will enjoy the same level of creative control over a project with a nine-figure budget that he or she would with a six-figure budget. The problem with superhero movies is built into the system of their production. The generally disheartening experience of watching them results from the lack of creative freedom that their directors enjoy while making them.’’ When I tell people I’ve stopped going to superhero movies – as well as to most big-budget spectacles – they assume I’m saying that I find the content juvenile. That’s not it at all. I love superhero movies, and fantasy movies, which, at their best, work on us the way a great night at the opera does, by magnifying elation and tragedy and providing the pleasure of being swept up into something bigger than ourselves. To achieve that, though, room must be made for human feeling within the mythic, and in superhero movies with quarter-billiondollar budgets, the human no longer exists. Hell, movie stars don’t exist in these movies. Stars are no longer listed in the print ads or 1 8 4 T A Y L O R Y billboards or in the previews for these movies, and they’re often...

Semantics and Pragmatics of Referentially Transparent and Referentially Opaque Belief Ascription Sentences

This essay takes a critical look at Jonathan Berg’s theory of direct belief. Berg’s analysis of the concept of direct belief is considered insightful, but doubts are raised concerning his generalization of the purely extensional truth conditional semantics of direct belief ascription sentences to the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences. Difficulties are posed that Berg does not discuss, but that are implied by the proposal that the truth conditional semantics of belief ascription sentences generally are those of direct belief ascription sentences, and that once mentioned must enter into an evaluation of the proposition that by implication all beliefs are direct. Another line of objection concerns Berg’s second main thesis that the pragmatics as distinct from the semantics of belief ascription sentences can explain away apparent substitution failure validity breakdowns in belief ascription sentences as inappropriate utterances according to rules of roughly Gricean conversational implicature, rather than correspondence or non-correspondence with the facts about such things as what it is that people actually believe. These two parts of Berg’s argument, that the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences are those exclusively of direct belief ascription sentences, and that apparent substitution failure is effectively salva propria rather than salva veritate, are explored within the general framework of Berg’s thought experiment, eventually arriving at diametrically opposed conclusions, reflecting on what we believe comic book character Lois Lane believes and does not believe about Superman, and what she believes and does not believe about Clark Kent.

Intuition and the Substitution Argument

Superman has a bad allergy to kryptonite. And since Superman is Clark Kent, it follows that Clark Kent is allergic to kryptonite. Which, indeed, he is. If you were to take some kryponite into the offices of the Daily Planet, Clark would soon be feeling quite poorly. Of course, not many people know that Clark is allergic to kryptonite. In particular, Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor does not know that Clark is allergic to kryptonite, which is why he does not sneak into the newsroom and hide some kryptonite in Clark’s desk. But of course, Luthor knows perfectly well that Superman is allergic to kryptonite, and he frequently tries to expose him to it. That, at least, is the sort of thing one would usually hear people say. Familiarly, however, taking such remarks at face value generates problems. The most immediate of these is that it requires us to restrict the logical principle known as “substitution of identicals”:

Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way HarryBrod. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way Harry Brod. New York: Free Press, 2012.Harry Brod's exercise in reclamation attempts to recount the story of the influence of Judaism and Jewishness in comics in Superman Is Jewish ?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. This topic has already been mined in several recent books: Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007); Arie Kaplan's From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (2008); Simcha Weinstein's Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero (2006); Paul Buhle's Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form (2008); and The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (2008). If the title is bit misleading, as Brod treats other non-superhero topics-such as Mad, Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)-while also devoting some attention to the Jewish comics from the Old Country, this comprehensiveness may also be the book's chief strength, separating it from some of these earlier volumes. The author states that his goal this book is that someday Jewish comic artists and writers will be mentioned along with the great Jewish-American artists and literary figures.Likening the predominance of Jews in early comic books to the wide-open frontier of the early motion picture industry, Brod recounts the origins of the Man of Steel and how it was easier Jews (particularly those who were firstor second-generation Americans) like his creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster to get into comics than into other publishing venues. Brod further sees Jews working in the medium of illustrated books as a natural fit, connecting it to the Passover Haggadah, the guidebook used the Passover meal, as well as other illustrated religious texts for children that tell a heroic story of people in peril being rescued by a savior with a secret identity (35). The parallels between Moses and Superman are made obvious: sent off in a small vessel to avoid the death of his people, raised among a people who do not suspect his secret identity, champion of the oppressed with miraculous superpowers. This differs from a character like Batman, who also had Jewish creators but lacks the Jewish connections of Superman. But Brod ignores the overt Christian interpretations of Superman, which were made most explicit in the 1978 film of the same title. After the opening chapter on Superman, Brod looks back in the next chapter to some of the traditions that have shaped the Jewish character in comics, such as Marc Chagall, children's books, the legend of the golem, and science fiction (especially Isaac Asimov). …