Donald Ault
Encyclopedia
Donald Ault is a professor at the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

 and is primarily known for his work on British Romantic poet William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

 and American comics artist Carl Barks
Carl Barks
Carl Barks was an American Disney Studio illustrator and comic book creator, who invented Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck , Gladstone Gander , the Beagle Boys , The Junior Woodchucks , Gyro Gearloose , Cornelius Coot , Flintheart Glomgold , John D...

. He is also known as a foundational figure in the development of American Comics Studies
Comics studies
Comics studies is an academic field that focuses on comics and graphic novels. Although comics and graphic novels have been generally dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts, scholars in fields such as Semiotics and Composition Studies are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as...

, and is the General Editor of the academic journal devoted to comics called ImageTexT.

Career

Donald Ault graduated from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 in 1968, after completing work on his dissertation tracing the conflict between British physicist Sir Isaac Newton and William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

. Since then, he has taught at University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

, and the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

.

Working with William Blake

Ault's interests are wide and include everything from Romantic poetry
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...

 to Psychophysics
Psychophysics
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they effect. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual...

, Holography
Holography
Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that when an imaging system is placed in the reconstructed beam, an image of the object will be seen even when the object is no longer present...

, Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

, Deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

, Typography
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

, Mathematical notation
Mathematical notation
Mathematical notation is a system of symbolic representations of mathematical objects and ideas. Mathematical notations are used in mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering, and economics...

, and the history of Animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

. At Berkeley in 1972-74, he instituted curriculum changes by creating English 176 (“Literature and Popular Culture”) and English 177 (“Literature and Philosophy”). Ault's first book Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton, an extended version of his dissertation, dealt with the complex relationship between Blake and Newton. The book won wide acclaim among Blake critics, and quickly became a foundational book in the field. He also published the most exhaustive book on Blake's visionary poem Vala called Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake's The Four Zoas. After reading Narrative Unbound, Jerome McGann
Jerome McGann
Jerome McGann is a textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth-century to the present.-Career:Educated at Le Moyne College , Syracuse University Jerome McGann (born July 22, 1937) is a textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of...

 called Ault "probably the most innovative Blake critic in the country" Ault has published numerous articles on William Blake, including the notable "Where's Poppa? or, The Defeminization of Blake's Little Black Boy." which utilized "anomalous textual details" and turned attention away from the obvious racial issues present in the poem focusing on the more subtle politics of gender difference. He ends the essay with the note that, in a dream, he "showed this manuscript to Blake, who told me that he was 'not uncomfortable' with my reading of 'The Little Black Boy.'" While such comments have alienated some members of the Blake studies community , they are part and parcel of his criticism which highlights the textual minutae, visionary complexity, and visual oddity of Blake's work.

Donald Ault and Donald Duck

Ault also worked closely with Disney comic artist Carl Barks
Carl Barks
Carl Barks was an American Disney Studio illustrator and comic book creator, who invented Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck , Gladstone Gander , the Beagle Boys , The Junior Woodchucks , Gyro Gearloose , Cornelius Coot , Flintheart Glomgold , John D...

 and participated in a number of interviews with him. Ault's forays into "Comic Studies" revolve around his encounter with Barks' work on Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Donald Fauntleroy Duck is a cartoon character created in 1934 at Walt Disney Productions and licensed by The Walt Disney Company. Donald is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet. He typically wears a sailor suit with a cap and a black or red bow tie. Donald is most...

. Ault sees Barks creating a surreal environment for the Disney characters in which what happens
happens outside normal visual space. It cannot happen, but it does--and with apparent ease. In film, a technique of rapid crosscutting would quickly disorient the viewer; but Barks' shifts in perspective--precisely because they are anchored in the simultaneity of the panels on a comic page--ground us in a coherent imaginative world.
Ault created controversy at Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

 for teaching comics in University classes , and was featured in several newspaper articles about his work as well as a segment on Entertainment Tonight
Entertainment Tonight
Entertainment Tonight is a daily tabloid television entertainment television news show that is syndicated by CBS Television Distribution throughout the United States, Canada and in many countries around the world. Linda Bell Blue is currently the program's executive producer...

. Ault edited a volume of interviews with the Disney artist, Carl Barks: Conversations, in 2003, and also was executive producer and editorial supervisor for the videotape production The Duck Man: An Interview with Carl Barks (1996).

ImageTexT

In 2004, Ault founded the webjournal "ImageText". ImageText promotes the

the academic study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition, production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual culture.

External links


Selected bibliography


  • Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Ed. Donald Ault, Mark Bracher, and Dan Miller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. 382 pp.

  • Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
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