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59 Chapter Three Language in Context The Spatiality of Text in Comics Thus far, the focus has been on comics’ incorporation of literary writing, and how those literary qualities depend on mechanisms specific to the linguistic system. This approach has been used to show what is lost by the habitual sidelining of comics’ language. However, while it has been demonstrated how comics can achieve the same verbal prowess as prose texts, the specificity of the comics form and peculiar ways it can deploy language have so far been ignored. Critics’ “search for comics exceptionalism ” (Beaty 1999: 67) has led to many a dubious claim about features “unique” to the comics form,1 and though it is important to avoid claims like these that do not stand up, it is nonetheless necessary to consider the medium’s particularities. The preceding analyses have been deliberately skewed toward the sort of textually focused literary criticism that could be applied to traditional literature, examining features and devices definitely not unique to comics, but which they are capable of utilizing. Anglophone comics criticism would certainly benefit from a more attentive and thorough importation of these “scholarly traditions with which it might best intersect” (Groensteen 2006: viii), particularly where the neglected textual aspect of the form is concerned. My aim here has been to demonstrate that, far from being a secondary incidental consideration as the likes of McCloud would have it, comics can and should be viewed in terms of their use of literary language. I have also insisted, however, that such an approach is necessarily (obviously) incomplete, and as a closing statement to this first section will consider how literary language is put to work specifically within the comics form. As we have paid an unusual level of attention to language in the preceding chapters, it should now be clear exactly what is lost through the critical vagueness that avers that “‘[w]riting’ for comics can be defined as the conception of an idea, the arrangement of image elements and the construction of the sequence of the narration and the composing of dialogue” Language in Comics 60 (Eisner 1985: 122). Such an expansive view of “writing” provides little scope for appreciating the genuine literary value that comics’ linguistic element can possess. That said, due caution must be taken when applying neighboring analytical paradigms, such as literary close reading, to the comics form. Such applications can only ever be a starting point for a fully developed theory of comics; we cannot simply build comics theory from pieces of existing theory without attuning these to the art form’s particularities. Though comics’ separable elements are ill-served by approaches that fail to treat them as such, the form is certainly not reducible to its visual and verbal elements, and an adjustment of the existing critical frameworks is, perhaps always, necessary in order to effectively apply them to comics’ interwoven components. The problems surrounding notions of language and literariness that have become cemented within critical discourse on comics seem the result of a detachment from established critical traditions, which a more attentive augmentation of those traditions might guard against. However, it would be a counterpart error to attempt too rigidly to apply the standards , expectations, and practices of literary analysis to comics, without acknowledging their divergences from prose literature. Comics can be highly literary and, as demonstrated above, attending to their linguistic content enables us to validate this claim. However, not all comics—complex , rich, and thematically sophisticated as they may or may not be— employ literary language, or indeed any language at all. In promoting an approach to comics that considers linguistic content, I do not suggest that all comics can summarily be judged as if they were “a kind of literature,” certainly not without expanding what that term implies to the point of losing sight of its specificity. The expansive characterization of “writing” that equates it to broader narrative and artistic practices effectively undermines comics’ claims to the linguistic dexterity that truly distinguishes literary from non-literary writing. The association between comics and literature has been increasingly open to question in recent debate (Beaty 2007: 7, Wolk 2005: 13), though it seems as if truly literary readings of comics texts have rarely been carried out in the first place. Such readings potentially offer a rich seam for criticism, but the caveat regarding automatically classifying all comics as literary works remains. Not all comics can be usefully critiqued...

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