Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25501865.pdf

Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative

Highlighting the under-researched interrelationship between workplace humour and resistance, this paper examines employee opposition in a Brazilian telecommunications company. Much of the literature on corporate culture and humour has emphasized the way that 'having fun' can facilitate production. Functionalist in perspective, such studies treat organizational joking both as a means by which employees can 'let off steam' and as a flexible tool for man agers in reinforcing corporate culture. Questioning the universality of this 'safety-valve' theory of humour, our empirical analysis suggests that humour may be a relatively effective means of expressing employee dissatisfaction especially where more overt forms of resistance might provoke managerial reprisals.

'Having Fun'?: Humour as Resistance in Brazil:

Recently Marianne Hirsch has argued it is necessary to think anew about words and images and their expressivity in the specific cultural and historical context of the 'war on terror'. Here Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Art Speigelman's In the Shadow of No Towers are read in terms of 'autographics': the distinctive technology and aesthetics of life narrative that emerges in the comics. Unique mediations of cultural difference occur in the grammar of comics, which make demands on the reader to navigate across gutters and frames, and shuttle between words and images, in an active process of imaginative engagement with others.

/pdf/autographics-the-seeing-i-of-the-comics-3g5yb70p2z.pdf

Autographics: The Seeing "I" of the Comics

In this era of globalization, when news about political violence can haunt anyone, anywhere, those whose families have suffered political violence in the past are particularly vulnerable to current distress. Skilled in understanding transgenerational processes, family therapists need to be familiar with the mechanisms by which children are exposed to the effects of political violence suffered by their elders-that is, the ways in which they become their witnesses. This article presents a framework for understanding how the trauma of political violence experienced in one generation can "pass" to another that did not directly experience it, and proposes a model to guide clinical intervention.

Witnessing the effects of political violence in families: mechanisms of intergenerational transmission and clinical interventions.

The explosion of creative practice in the field of graphic narra-tive—which we may define as narrative work in the medium of com-ics—is one with which the academy is just catching up. We are only beginning to learn to pay attention in a sophisticated way to graphic narrative. (And while this special issue largely focuses on long-form work—\"graphic narrative\" is the term we prefer to \"graphic novel,\" which can be a misnomer—we understand graphic narrative to encompass a range of types of narrative work in comics.) 1 Graphic narrative , through its most basic composition in frames and gutters—in which it is able to gesture at the pacing and rhythm of reading and looking through the various structures of each individual page—calls a reader's attention visually and spatially to the act, process, and duration of interpretation. Graphic narrative does the work of narration at least in part through drawing—making the question of style legible—so it is a form that also always refuses a problematic transparency , through an explicit awareness of its own surfaces. Because of this foregrounding of the work of the hand, graphic narrative is an autographic form in which the mark of handwriting is an important part of the rich extra-semantic information a reader receives. And graphic narrative offers an intricately layered narrative language—the language of comics—that comprises the verbal, the visual, and the way these two representational modes interact on a page. This special issue of Modern Fiction Studies—the first special issue in the broad field of modern and contemporary narrative devoted entirely to the form of graphic narrative—demonstrates the Introduction 768 viability of graphic narrative for serious academic inquiry, and also reveals what it does differently from the kinds of narratives with which we have more typically been engaged. It is no longer necessary to prove the worthiness and literary potential of the medium of comics (which has always contended with much denigration). Comic strips like Winsor McCay's and later long-form works like Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986; 1991) have, as with many other comics works before, in between, and since, demonstrated clearly how moving and impressive comics can be. In our current moment, in which an array of new literary and popular genres aim to further the conversation on the vital and multilayered work of narrative, graphic narrative has become part of an expanding literary field, absorbing and redirecting the ideological, formal, and …

Introduction: Graphic Narrative

Bande dessinee dont les 6 premiers chapitres ont paru en feuilleton dans "Raw magazine" de 1980 a 1985 avant d'etre publies en un volume en 1986. Les 4 chapitres suivants ont paru dans la meme revue de 1986 a 1991 avant d'etre publies en un second volume avec un cinquieme chapitre inedit en 1992

Maus, a survivor's tale

Some historical events simply beggar any attempt at description--the Holocaust is one of these. Therefore, as it recedes and the people able to bear witness die, it becomes more and more essential that novel, vigorous methods are used to describe the indescribable. Examined in these terms, Art Spiegelman's Maus is a tremendous achievement, from a historical perspective as well as an artistic one. Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs-Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

In the Shadow of No Towers

The Complete Maus

n the final comic set piece of Philip Roth's novelistic memoir about his relationship to his father, Patrimony: A True Story, Herman Roth attempts to cajole his author-son into helping one of his card-playing buddies from the Y get his memoirs of World War II published. Philip is understandably resistant-especially as his father has regularly asked him over the years to aid other aspiring authors of books about home mortgages or annuity funds. Of course, a book about the Holocaust is different, and Philip even admits that he has taught Holocaust memoirs and briefly knew Primo Levi.

Art Spiegelman

Papers

Maus, a survivor's tale

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

In the Shadow of No Towers

The Complete Maus

"We Were Talking Jewish": Art Spiegelman's "Maus" as "Holocaust" Production