Fw: X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism

[snappydresser]

"The central tenant of Gnosticism..."

 What exactly is a 'central tenant' anyway? Someone who lives in a widowless
 appartment in the middle of a building?

 And really, is Dark City all that underrated? Much less 'tragically' so?

 I like comic books (and ruminations on Gnosticism) as much as the next 
geek,
 but this essay seems like the author just mashed together two topics in
 which he happened to have an interest at the time. I'm about five 
paragraphs
 into this thing, and it seems to me like Emerson and the X-Men fit together
 about as neatly as a sofabed up a horse's ass.

 YOPJ


 ----- Original Message ----- 
 From: "Dave Monroe" <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
 To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
 Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 12:18 PM
 Subject: X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism


>> Continuing his work in How to Read Superhero Comics
>> and Why Geoff Klock, in "X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism,"
>> argues that two writers of the superhero comic book
>> the X-Men suggest a whole new definition of the
>> Post-Human, an alternative to what Hayles, Haraway,
>> and Moravec have to offer. He begins by connecting a
>> moment in Mark Millar's Ultimate X-Men with a passage
>> in Ralph Waldo Emerson: an ancient heretical
>> second-century sect of Christianity called Gnosticism
>> is the common factor. Klock argues that Millar's X-Men
>> incorporates Gnosticism's radical notion of
>> subjectivity into its Post-Human narrative, but not
>> without cost: Millar's depiction of team leader
>> Professor X shows the ways in which Post-Humanism,
>> particularly in the realm of ethics, easily veers into
>> the inhuman. This pessimistic Post-Humanism, which is
>> held out above every alternative, is reflected in the
>> serial nature of the superhero comic book series
>> itself, in which decades pass without the book's
>> heroes being able to significantly effect their world
>> for the better. In the paper's conclusion, Klock
>> examines Grant Morrison's New X-Men story "Assault on
>> Weapon Plus" as a Gnostic Post-Human allegory that
>> suggests that our inevitable evolution into the
>> Post-Human will yield something darker than, say, a
>> cyber-utopia or a collective robot heaven....
>>
>> http://www.reconstruction.ws/043/Klock/Klock.html
>>
>>
>>
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