My paper examines the storytelling practices of Japanese manga, their transcription and translation into animated format, and their impact on American popular culture. I focus, primarily, on one of the best-selling, still ongoing manga series, Naruto, which situates elements of fantasy, magic, science, and technology within a coming-of-age/mythological quest narrative that reveals and promotes an ideology of peace and friendship in the world that it generates. The narrative provides a space for both young people and adults to envision a multiplicity of futures and pasts as it challenges notions of utopia and dystopia and raises questions about peacemaking practices. These theoretical issues are discernible within, and by way of, the graphic and animated format of this narrative, a feature which distinguishes it from some of the more predominant live action fantasy/sci-fi adventures such as The Hunger Games, X-Men,etc. Regarding animation in particular, I explore how storytelling practices are influenced by our ability to imagine that which our reality appears to deny us access to (e.g. a limitless human body, unearthly creatures, and other cosmic events) as well as how those stories influence us upon receipt. Animated narratives can provide us with a means of transcending our corporeal sociocultural realities not in order to escape, but as a way of initiating or reclaiming a sense of wonder in the fantastical. While critical texts about anime do exist, academia still appears to struggle with acknowledging some of the literary formal/theoretical complexities that a graphic/animated narrative like Naruto may present. Not only might we learn something from its content, but we can recognize its value as a narrative mode that promulgates a visual/verbal/textual world outside the confines of static, written text alone; and, moreover, it has the capacity to speak to a more general population of narrative consumers.
About the presenterMegan Holmberg
I am currently a PhD student in the English department at Temple University. I received my B.A. (2007) and M.A. (2009) from Boston College where I completed an honors thesis on children in Henry James’s fiction. I have presented several papers on James’s works, the most recent on the film adaptation of What Maisie Knew at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2014 conference. My primary field of research is Early American literature/texts with an interest in conversion narrative practice, pedagogy, and storytelling practices (written, oral, and visual)among the colonists and Native Americans during the early period and into the 19th century. However, my interests branch beyond this period as I find myself constantly examining these cultural practices in a variety of different media today.