Description
“What happens between the panels is a kind of magic only comics can create”(Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, 1993, p. 92)
In this talk, I will address Scott McCloud’s idea of the magic in the gutter and his famous concept of ‘closure’ by taking on a linguistic and multimodal perspective on the coherence of comics and graphic novels. For this, I will begin with a short introduction to the concept of coherence in contemporary linguistics and its importance as a meaning-making mechanism in verbal texts.
With an example-based approach that zooms in on the various expressive forms of individual comic panels, strips, and larger pages, I will then present ways to describe the coherence of comics and graphic novels as a very similar mechanism. I will demonstrate how to specify the semantics of individual visual units and how to connect these units with the identification of discourse relations holding between them in order to create a coherent and structured discourse. The results will show how this multimodal approach to coherence allows deciphering McClouds ‘kind of magic’, i.e. our understanding and interpretation of the gutter, more clearly.
In a final step, I will then elaborate on this approach and its usefulness for an even stronger demystification of the magic of visual narratives by showing how the still somewhat hypothetical analyses can be further tested empirically and/or corpus-oriented, i.e. with experiments and/or a larger amount of data.
| Period | 14-Oct-2021 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Annual ComFor conference: Coherence in Comics |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- multimodality
- comics
- coherence