Criticism
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Almost since the inception of the superhero in comic books, the concept has come under fire from critics. Most famously, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) alleged that sexual subtext existed in superhero comics, and included accusations that Batman and Robin were gay and Wonder Woman encouraged female dominance fetishes and lesbianism.
Writer Ariel Dorfman has criticized alleged class biases in many superhero narratives in several of his books, including The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Mind (1980), and is not alone in doing so. Marxist critics, such as Matthew Wolf-Meyer ("The World Ozymandias Made") and Jason Dittmer ("The Tyranny of the Serial") often point out that not only do the superheroes arguably constitute a ruling class, but by simply defending the world as-is, they effectively keep it from changing, and thus lock it into status quo. Some contemporary critics are more focused on the history and evolving nature of the superhero concept, as in Peter Coogan's Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (2006).
Read more about this topic: Superhero Fiction
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)