In the Tide Pool: Making a Home with SpongeBob SquarePants 7 views

“Everybody’s a critic” -SpongeBob SquarePants "In the Tide Pool" is a work of experimental postcritique which close reads the show, SpongeBob SquarePants (seasons 1-3) and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004) with attention to friendship, family, and the making of art. What follows takes lightly the notion that scholarly work requires rational affects or detachment from one’s subjectivity. That which, from Roland Barthes, “punctures” us, touches on the personal, is no more suspect (or necessarily privileged) than that which does not. This project also raises questions about how we impute onto mass cultural aesthetic objects the distinction of unseriousness in the first place. I do this by examining, at turns, a childhood where such objects were the available objects. I would like to narrow the division between the so-called “common” consumer of mass culture and the critic. The essay engages a dual experiment: could a critic write about a silly object: SpongeBob, in a contentious form: first-person criticism? Does the claim to scholarliness depend, if not on distanced method, then, at minimum on a serious object? What if what we took up was both too close to the personal in method and also too close to the personal in object—a childhood show? This project is an honest attempt at illuminating what such a criticism can look like, in this double exposure. This is an entry into a naïve criticism, a criticism open to the humiliations of love.

MA (Master of Arts)

autotheory; naive reading ; affect; postcritique

English

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2026-04-30