Abstract
While the previous chapters addressed readers’ views on the Superhuman, Transhuman and Post/Human in turn, this penultimate chapter develops the notion of the reader-text relationship in Post/Humanist terms as a Deleuzo-Guattarian “assemblage”. Section One described how theories of audience-text relations frequently hinged on a binary opposition between audience and text. Later authors argued that this model’s dichotomy was simplistic and that the comics industry, for example, should instead be seen as engaging in a dialogic encounter with readers. Brown suggests that this is a sympathetic relationship rather than “a struggle for power and meaning”.1 For Barker, there is a “symbiotic relationship” between producers of formulaic narratives (such as superhero comics) and their consumers: “A symbiote is an organism which lives in a relationship of mutual dependence with another. Although it is possible to study it separately, any full account of its structure and its behaviour depends upon studying it as an organism-in-relation”.2 This book proposes reframing Barker’s organic metaphor of the symbiote in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms as an assemblage. While the metaphor of the symbiote presents producer and consumer as a mostly harmonious whole, when considered as assemblage, the relationship between these two parts is itself constantly forming new assemblages: reader AND text AND creator AND history AND science AND so on. This chapter would like to go some way to articulating this concept more thoroughly.
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Bibliography
Johnson, L., & Youngman, P. (2011). Are we ready for nanotechnology? Redefining the human in public policy. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 1(17), 250–259.
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Jeffery, S. (2016). Towards a Theory of Reader-Text Assemblages. In: The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1_10
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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