Locating George Herriman's Krazy Kat in American Modernism

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George Herriman's Krazy Kat1 (1913-1944) is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished American comic strips, counting e.e. cummings and Pablo Picasso among its fans, and credited by Jack Kerouac as an 'immediateprogenitor to the Beat Generation'.2 This project will assess Krazy as an American modernist text, siting it within channels of artistic and literary influence by reading the strips' contexts, content, form, distribution and receptionclosely alongside contemporaneous modernist productions. This thesis will contribute to discussions pertinent to current global modernist and periodical studies: American modernities, high vs. low culture, mass publication, andrace. Comics and modernism may seem unlikely bedfellows. What little scholarship there is tends to link them in passing, usually with reference to Gilbert Seldes' The Seven Lively Arts, a 1924 collection of essays applying1 Hereafter, Krazy. 2 Martin Skidmore, 'Krazy Kat: Modernism and Influence' (2011), FA: The Comiczine - intellectual critique to popular artforms, and often with little attention paid to their particularities of form. A 2016 journal cluster began to probe the field in more depth, with contributions covering comics' pre-history, modernity insuperhero comic books from the late 1930s onwards, and parallels between Ezra Pound and Alan Moore's intellectual property rights.3 However, the coexistence of experimental comic strips such as Krazy with canonicalmodernist texts was glossed.While some connections between Krazy and modernism have previously been noted and briefly contested, this has taken place without the grounding of a systematic, text-centred approach. 4 Currently, there are two books on Herriman: Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, which privileges biography and history over closereadings, and Michael Tisserand's 2016 biography, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. 5Otherwise, despite its perceived cultural capital by canonical modernists (e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, among others); 31 years' worth of strips, densely layered with experimentation, subversion,irony and reference; and calls for extended critical attention from the comics' community, the particularities of Krazy are still to be explored.6 Thus, my question is: how can George Herriman's Krazy Kat be effectively readas an American modernist text?