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Jonathan Najarian
Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric
Department/Office Information
Writing and RhetoricContact
jnajarian@colgate.eduHow do developments in technology disrupt the media forms that preceded them? How does our understanding of the past change once the material conditions of that past are no longer accessible? How, broadly, does the present influence the past? My research seeks to answer these questions, exploring how innovations in print technology transform practices of textual production and, especially, how those innovations displace or obscure their own histories.
How, for example, do contemporary developments in technology, such as social media, bring the newspaper newly into focus as a rhetorical object? And what happens when we position the newspaper as one of the starting points for our contemporary digital culture? These questions motivate my current monograph, Comics Out of Context: Visual Rhetoric, Virtual Reality, and the Modern Body, 1890–Present. This project uses digital and material archives to tell the story of how American newspaper comics extended beyond the printscape, first in the cultural imaginary and then in the material reality of early twentieth-century readers. I argue that comics were a primary tool in what I call the “immediate fantasies” that preoccupied newspaper publishing: papers imagined a world where their content was ubiquitous, inescapable, and immediately available—literally unmediated. In tracking how comics evolve out of papers into various media contexts, the project offers insight into our current media ecology by charting the transformation of printed media into new media forms. Today, we might listen to music through an app on our phones, browse headlines on our computer screens, track our steps on smartwatches, and play games on our tablets. Though these experiences seem far removed from analog forms of technology or paper newspapers, I suggest that the origins of our ability and inclination to drift seamlessly across media forms can be traced to the early twentieth century, when comics characters began migrating out of the pages of newspapers and into the world that created them—and into the world that they created.
I am the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture, and my essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, American Periodical Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature, as well as the forthcoming edited collections The Edinburgh Companion to Popular Modernism, The Politics of Intermedial Modernism, Teaching the American Essay, and Comics: A Companion.
I offer classes in generative A.I. and the history of text technologies, visual rhetorics and comics, and writing at both the introductory and advanced levels.