Search Results

For Kafka, there is always something out of this world, meaning radically weird and inexhaustible, about Kafka that arrives in broad strokes and tiny splashes. Kafka was uncannily attuned to the systematic restructuring ensuing from nineteenth-century colonialism and military science, from twentieth-century corporate organization and bureaucracy, and from the enlarged scale, acceleration, and range of mass communications facilitated by such technologies as the telephone, radio transmission, and photo journalism. Kafka's imagination of systems and of urban and bureaucratic space under advanced capitalism succumbs to contemporary graphic fiction as the taking-off point and basic assertion of this chapter.

This chapter offers an example of how to productively teach Lynda Barry’s graphic narrative One Hundred Demons through the lens of ambiguity, which runs throughout Barry’s coming-of-age comix. Ambiguity of her intended audience (adults vs young adults), of the genre (autobiography, fiction, novel, art), and most especially of her ethnic and racial identity (white appearing with a Filipino extended family) saturate One Hundred Demons, in the collision of text, image, and color. The fluidity of ambiguity threaded in Barry’s comix allows students to enter and engage with the graphic narrative and to see the universal elements through the specificity of her story. The unique power of Barry’s graphic narrative lies in how well she is able to convey liminality: through pictures and words, Barry captures the heartbreakingly painful awkwardness of transitioning from childhood into adolescence and of being an other and an outsider, sometimes within her own family.

The final chapter of Style in Narrative turns to graphic fiction. Much of what one might say about style in graphic narrative is already covered by the treatments of literary and film style earlier in the book. However, some unique aspects of graphic narrative style remain. In this chapter, Hogan identifies some of the distinctive stylistic components of graphic narrative, illustrating and expanding these by reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. A key feature of this chapter is systematizing the analysis of graphic fiction by reference to the various stylistic levels (storyworld, story, plot, narration, and perceptual interface) and their functions (narrative exposition, communication of themes, and the cultivation of emotional effects). Lack of clarity about these distinctions has sometimes led to theoretical problems in the analyses of graphic fiction proposed by influential theorists of the medium.

The fifth chapter of Style in Narrative in part parallels the second chapter, but with a shift from literature to cinema. Specifically, it takes genre as its scope, though it considers genre in visual representation, rather than story structure. Moreover, in this case, it focuses on an unusual genre, one that is not widely identified as a genre—painterly films, which is to say, films that draw their visual models from non-cinematic forms of visual art. The chapter presents an account of the kinds and functions of painterly film, ranging from mere allusion through imitation of a period or movement, to the cultivation of broader sensitivities characteristic of painting beyond a specific period. This chapter considers works by Luis Buñuel, Éric Rohmer, Deepa Mehta, and M. F. Husain. It focuses particularly on Robert Rodriguez’s remediation of graphic fiction, in part to prepare the way for the treatment of graphic fiction later in the book.