Good Fathers Versus Bad Fathers: Hollywood Superheroes and the American Way March 14, 2011

Ezra Claverie, UMSL alumnus, who now studies and teaches English at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, shares his research examining the Hollywood superhero movie as an exemplary postmodern, medium-crossing, mass-culture “intertext.” His talk focuses on the political dimensions of the superhero coming of age stories in Spider-Man (Raimi 2002) and Batman Begins (Nolan 2005), wherein the hero must choose among competing visions of adult masculinity and, implicitly, among competing modes of relating to the imagined communities of city and nation.

Official Website: http://ce.umsl.edu/cfh