Contemporary Comics Storytelling

Notes

189 Notes Introduction 1. I adhere to the conventional distinction between “postmodernism” and “postmodernity”: “postmodernity” refers to the social, economic, and political conditions in late capitalist societies beginning with the postwar period, whereas “postmodernism” refers to developments in the cultures and arts within those conditions. As my discussion concentrates on cultural and, more specifically, literary developments, I mainly use the term “postmodernism.” 2. These features are collated from the discussions in New 1999 and in Widdowson 1999. 3. In her recent article “Narrative, Language, and Comics-as-Literature” (2011), Hannah Miodrag proposes to base the “literary” aspect of comics on their use of literary language only. “In seeking proper accreditation of comics’ literariness, critics must acknowledge that it is the formal properties of writing and not the diverse practice of narrating a story that accords specifically literary value,” she writes (2011, 277). Using formally complex language is certainly one of the possible (formal) markers of literariness in comics. However, I propose a much broader, story-based definition of literature, because this takes the social and imaginative dimensions of the phenomenon into account. Unlike Miodrag, I would not hesitate to consider film, opera, and other multimodal media to be literature. 4. In 2010 alone, two new comics journals were launched: Studies in Comics (Intellect) and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge). Various other journals specializing in comics, such as European Comic Art and ImageText , have been published for several years now. Both the University of Mississippi Press and Ohio State University Press have book series devoted to the graphic novel. 5. For example, the special issue on “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory ” in SubStance (40, no. 1; 2011), the special issue on “Graphia” in English Language Notes (46, no. 2; 2009), or the special issue on “Graphic Narratives ” in Modern Fiction Studies (52, no. 4; 2006). 190 Notes to pages 5–17 6. For notable exceptions see Frederick Aldama’s Your Brain on Latino Comics (2009), Charles Forceville’s work on conceptual metaphors in comics (2005; Forceville, Veale, and Feyaerts, 2010), Teresa Bridgeman’s account of cognitive salience (2004), and David Herman’s account of comics narrative in Basic Elements (2008). Neil Cohn’s empirical work on narrative structures in “sequential image comprehension” (see Cohn et al. 2012), which seems to be based on a Chomskyan model, offers an interesting comparison to the model I will propose in chapter 1, based on relevance theory. Unfortunately, it came to my attention too late to be discussed in detail here. 7. My use of the term “reader” is a generalization, of course. It includes both the reading of words and the viewing of images. Furthermore, the “readers ” I talk about here perform cognitive processes as one would expect from the results of experiments in the cognitive sciences, which are based on actual readers. Similarly, the reader concepts of reader-response criticism, from the “mock reader” (Gibson 1984), the “implied reader” (Iser 1972), the “competent reader” (Culler 1989), the “informed reader” (Fish 1980), and on to the “superreader” (Riffaterre 1966), serve as aggregates of readers whose coherence results from referring back to the design of the author (Gibson), the structure of the text (Iser and Riffaterre) or institutional education and literary competence (Culler and Fish). Neither this book nor the readerresponse approaches perform a large-scale empirical inquiry, as outlined by Bortolussi and Dixon 2003, for example. I share with reader-response criticism the interest in larger literary questions, such as intertextuality, discerning and evaluating fictionality, and emotional involvement, but perhaps with, as Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “the main difference [being] that today’s cognitive narratologists are better informed of cognitive science” (2010, 481). 8. The definition of what is a comic is a vexed question for comics studies: some scholars suggest that there are also comics without words (“sans paroles ”), and base their definition entirely on the visual part and the “iconic solidarity” of image sequences (see Groensteen 2006). Others claim that even a single image can imply sequence and narrative causation and therefore that single-panel cartoons should be included into the definition of comics (see discussion in Carrier 2000). My definition here is not designed to exclude images “sans paroles” or cartoons but rather to serve as a working definition of possible active features of the comic. 1. How to Analyze Comics Cognitively 1. There is currently an active debate on whether we attribute mental states to others because we form a theory of mind (see Baron-Cohen 1995...