Graphic Novels as Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Essex County ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Alan Moore

In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, this book addresses two questions: which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each chapter ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding. The chapters examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One chapter discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another chapter reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human. Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each author, graphic novelist, and artist are all doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.

Computing Literary Surplus Value: Alan Moore and the Density of the Comic Book as Graphic Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Alexander Dunst ◽  
Rita Hartel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Specific Element ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Textual Content ◽  
Alan Moore

Abstract The term graphic novel has increasingly functioned as a catalyst for understanding comic books as an emergent literary genre. This article focuses on one specific element within this historical process: the claim, made by artists such as Alan Moore, that graphic novels are characterized by greater formal complexity, or density, than serial comics. These claims are evaluated by combining computational text and image recognition of a corpus of 131 graphic narratives with sociological metadata on production and circulation. The results show that Moore’s own book-length comics, in particular Watchmen and V for Vendetta, rank among the densest graphic narratives in the sample in both their visual and textual content. Graphic memoirs, in contrast, only show an increase in textual complexity. With Pierre Bourdieu, the article understands complexity as a social and aesthetic strategy that aims at increasing the cultural capital of comics creators. At the same time, the article contextualizes computational results against the background of a changing marketplace for comics, in particular the decline of serial comics, the shift towards digital printing, and increased access to book distribution. This analysis shows that graphic narratives pursue both literary and popular aesthetic strategies, challenging Bourdieu’s account of a clear opposition between profit and prestige in cultural production.

scholarly journals Breaking the Contract between God and the Visual-Literary Fusion: Illuminated Manuscripts, William Blake and the Graphic Novel

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
Andreea Paris-Popa
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Book Of Kells ◽  
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Alan Moore

Abstract This essay follows three different stages of the fusion of images and words in the tradition of the book. More specifically, it tackles the transformation undergone by the initially religious combination of visual figures and scriptural texts, exemplified by medieval illuminated manuscripts into the spiritual, non-dogmatic, illuminated books printed and painted by poet-prophet William Blake in a manner that combines mysticism and literature. Eventually, the analysis reaches the secularized genre of the graphic novel that renounces the metaphysical element embedded in the intertwining of the two media. If ninth-century manuscripts such as the Book of Kells were employed solely for divinely inspired renditions of religious texts, William Blake’s late eighteenthcentury illuminated books moved towards an individual, personal literature conveyed via unique pieces of art that asserted the importance of individuality in the process of creation. The modern rendition of the image-text illumination can be said to take the form of the graphic novel with writers such as Will Eisner and Alan Moore overtly expressing their indebtedness to the above-mentioned tradition by paying homage to William Blake in the pages of their graphic novels. However, the fully printed form of this twentieth-century literary genre, along with its separation from the intrinsic spirituality of the visual-literary fusion in order to meet the demands of a disenchanted era, necessarily reconceptualize the notion of illumination.

scholarly journals Roughing It in the Bush, The Graphic Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 321-334
Author(s):  
Javier Martín Párraga ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Carol Shields ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
Susanna Moodie ◽  
Alan Moore ◽  
Theoretical State

Graphic novels and comic books are no longer minor cultural artifacts which are produced to generate economic benefits, mostly consumed by young, not very literate, readers who do not hope to be educated but simply entertained. Quite on the contrary, authors such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or Umberto Eco has vindicated the fundamental role these artistic manifestations play nowadays. The present paper analyzes Carol Shields and Patrick Crowe 2016 graphic novel adaptation of Susanna Moodie’s seminal book Roughing it in the Bush. In order to reach this goal, a brief theoretical state of the art is introduced. Consequently, the original writer and text are equally studied. Finally, the contemporary graphic novel adaptation is considered, explaining the genesis of the project as well and the similitudes and differences it shows when compared to the original work by Susanna Moodie.

STUDENTS’ ACCEPTANCE TO USING GRAPHIC NOVELS IN LEARNING LITERATURE (L2): A MALAYSIAN CASE STUDY

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Abu Yazid Abu Bakar ◽  
Dayang Nurfaezah Abang Ahmad ◽  
Melor Md Yunus
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Mixed Method Study ◽  
Motivation To Learn ◽  
Esl Teachers ◽  
English As Second Language ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

Research has shown that using graphic novels in the classroom is one of useful approaches to promote the understanding of learners especially for lengthy and difficult literature texts. This study reports the extent of graphic novel in facilitating students’ understanding of literature and the students’ perceptions towards using graphic novel in learning literature (L2) as compared to other genre of texts. This is a mixed method study which employs quantitative and qualitative methods to obtain data. The findings indicate that most students found that graphic novel helped them to enrich their vocabularies and understand the text better. The findings also reveal that students were attracted to the illustrations in the literature text in which this helps to boost their motivation to learn literature in the classroom. The findings provide useful insights for English as Second Language (ESL) teachers in incorporating and expanding the literature learning through graphic novels in the future. The findings also imply the need of ESL teachers to use graphic novels effectively in facilitating their teaching and learning of literature in L2 classrooms particularly to suit the 21<sup>st</sup> century teaching and learning.

scholarly journals graphic novel as a popular genre of book publishing in the context of modern design

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktoriia Oliinyk
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Synthetic Methods ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Visual Component ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Meta Level

The relevance of the research is due both to the lack of research that would comprehend a graphic novel as an independent phenomenon and subject of art history, the youth of the genre, and its relative non-proliferation in the Ukrainian literary space. The vast majority of Russian publications touch on the analysis of specific graphic novels in the context of modern literary studies, which focuses on the narrative and ideological components of individual works without taking into account the role of the visual component for the genre as a whole. Theoretical analysis and practical application of new synthetic methods and means of transmitting visual socio-cultural codes are of value not only in the context of design but also for other multimodal-oriented industries. The structural approach is the main approach to the study of this problem, which uses the methods of linguistics and semiotics, bringing them to the meta-level regarding design, as well as discursive analysis, in the subject field of which there is a question of the cultural and historical conditionality of a graphic novel as a genre and the nature of its perception. 

scholarly journals A INTERTEXTUALIDADE COMO ELEMENTO FUNDADOR N'A LIGA EXTRAORDINÁRIA

2017 ◽  
pp. 204
Author(s):  
Ismael Bernardo Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Alan Moore

O presente artigo propõe a intertextualidade como um elemento fundamental na obra de Alan Moore, presente através de diversas abordagens que resultam numa reavaliação dos elementos referenciados. Ao analisar como esse elemento se manifesta em sua obra como um todo, pretende-se igualmente argumentar que na sua graphic novel A Liga Extraordinária, em específico, a intertextualidade tem um papel de elemento fundador, devido à complexidade e diversidade de seu uso. Como bibliografia central, utilizam-se os conceitos de intertextualidade, de Júlia Kristeva, e gêneros do discurso, de Bakhtin.

scholarly journals Śmierć porwana. O terezińskiej sztuce Hledáme strašidlo Hanuša Hachenburga z 1943 roku

2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 327-335
Author(s):  
Agata Firlej
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Zygmunt Bauman ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Puppet Theatre ◽  
East And West

The stolen death: About the play Hledáme strašidlo by Hanuš Hachenburg from 1943The puppet theatre play Hledame strašidlo by Hanuš Hachenburg was written in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943 and over 50 years was hidden in the archive until it was presented to readers and viewers in the 1990s — but it turned out to be still surprisingly valid and cogent. The author, a 14-year-old prisoner of the ghetto, used the conventions of the puppet theatre, the carnival and the fairy tales. The mythical or fairy-tale-like “timelessness” allowed him to show the absurdity of Nazism and — yet unnamed — the Holocaust. The main character of the play, the King, captures Death itself, which soon becomes so ordinary and kitschy that no one is afraid of her. The confinement of Death — a motif known, among others, from the myth of Sisyphus — is an important theme of the theatre in Terezín; it appears also in the German-speaking opera by Peter Kien and Viktor Ullmann, Der Keiser von Atlantis Emperor of Atlantis. In this article, I show how the old themes of enslaved Death and the dance macabre between extasy and destruction become the symbols of the war, and indeed of the 20th century, which culminates in the devastating forces of the great ideologies and in which there can be found the origins of retrotopia, which is now, according to Zygmunt Bauman, the dominating point of view in East- and West-European and in American discourse.  Únos smrti. O terezίnske divadelnί hře Hledáme strašidlo Hanuše Hachenburga z roku 1943Divadelní hra Hledáme strašidlo od Hanuše Hachenburga byla napsána v ghettu Terezín / Theresienstadt v roce 1943 a více než padesát let byla ukryta v archivu, aby v 90. letech si našla cestu pro své čtenáře a diváky — a ukázalo se, že je překvapivě platná a přitažlivá. Autor, čtrnáctiletý vězeň ghetta, využil konvencí loutkového divadla, karnevalu a pohádek. Mýtická nebo pohádková „nadčasovost“ mu umožnila ukázat absurditu nacismu a — tehdy ještĕ nemenovaného — holocaustu. Hlavní postava hry, Král, zachytí samotnou Smrt, která se brzy stane tak obyčejnou a kyčovitou, že se ji nikdo nebude bát. Únos smrti — motiv známý mimo jiné i z mýtu Sisyfa — je důležitým tématem divadla v Terezíně; objevuje se také v německojazyčné operě Petera Kiena a Viktora Ullmanna Der Keizer von Atlantis Císař Atlantidy. V tomto textu ukazuji, jak se staré motivy zotročené Smrti a danse macabre mezi extázi a zničení stávají symbolem války a celého dvacátého století, v který vyvrcholily ničivými sily velké ideologie a kde lze nalézt počátky retrotopie, která je podle Zygmunta Baumana dominantním hlediskem ve východním, západoevropským a americkým diskurzu.

scholarly journals Vigiando os vigilantes: uma abordagem sobre o Panoptismo a partir de Watchmen

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (19) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Mateus De Oliveira Fornasier ◽  
Thiago Dos Santos Da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Graphic Novel

Este artigo objetiva apresentar uma discussão filosófica a partir da obra Watchmen, abordando assuntos como o panoptismo e o utilitarismo (Bentham), discutindo a supervigilância na atualidade. O problema que norteia a elaboração do trabalho é: é possível discutir sobre questões filosóficas, morais e políticas a partir da mídia das graphic novels? Como hipótese, apresentou-se que sim, dado o alto teor filosófico apresentado em Watchmen, inspirado na crítica literária das ideias de panoptismo e utilitarismo. O texto tem, como objetivos específicos: 1) Introdução e comentários críticos acerca da graphic novel Watchmen; 2) explicação do panoptismo, com ênfase na supervigilância presente na pós-modernidade; e 3) estabelecimento de um paralelo entre a obra Watchmen e o panoptismo. Sua metodologia é dialética, estabelecendo-se uma conversação interdisciplinar entre a obra Watchmen e o panoptismo.Palavras-Chave: Panoptismo. Watchmen. Vigilância.

scholarly journals (Anti)Fascism and Superhero Comics: An Anthropological Examination of Innovativeness in Comic Books as Exemplified by "V for Vendetta"

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miloš Zarić
Keyword(s):  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Semantic Dimension ◽  
Alan Moore ◽  
The Way ◽  
V For Vendetta

The paper analyzes the V for Vendetta comic books, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. These volumes are graphic novels whose characteristics place them in the literary genre of the critical dystopia, but they have also been associated with the genre of the superhero comic, which, according to a number of authors including Alan Moore, is inextricably linked to the ideology and practice of the political right, which in its extreme form assumes the form of fascism. The way that fascism is treated in that work, as well as in two other comics discussed in the paper (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns), is linked to the way in which the process of creativity/innovativeness functioned in the context of the revision/deconstruction of the superhero comic book genre in the 1980s, both on the collective (intra-genre) and the individual level, on the level of the thought structure of the British writer Alan Moore. Using the structural-semiotic model of analysis, the paper seeks to fathom the logic of this deconstruction procedure "broken down" into the three comic books discussed in the paper, with particular emphasis on the analysis of V for Vendetta, with the aim of establishing its "hidden", connotative semantic dimension. The study adopts a modern view of the comic book according to which the essence of this medium, which distinguishes it from other narrative and graphic forms of expression as well as from film, can be recognized in the specific, sequential way of combining its visual and narrative components, thus generating meanings whose interpretation depends on the intention of the author but also on the view of the reader.

scholarly journals Book Review: The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Graphic Novels, 2nd ed.

2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Karl G. Siewert
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Guiding Principles

Taking Ranganathan’s five laws as guiding principles, this new edition of a 2010 work addresses issues of how to effectively discuss and recommend materials in the graphic novel format with readers of all types. It addresses head-on the misconception that graphic works are only for teens and poorly socialized adults and presents a holistic view of the format and the particular challenges that it presents for library workers advising readers.

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