Harvard University Press is boldly going where it has never gone before, comic book publishing. They aren’t exactly getting into the superhero game, though. The press will soon be releasing the first dissertation ever presented in comics form. It was created by Nick Sousanis, and is titled Unflattening. I say “created”, because to write “written and illustrated” seems almost counter to its intended point – that words and pictures are inextricably linked in our minds when it comes to how we process and construct knowledge.
Read more about this unique academic work after the jump.
Sousanis, a life-time comics fan, felt that comics could tackle academic discourse as competently as text. Apparently, he was not alone, because now he is Dr. Sousanis, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies at the University of Calgary.
The description of Unflattening on the HUP website reads:
Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.
As an undergrad with postgraduate ambitions, I find this to be a fascinating precedent. It raises so many interesting questions. Why do we give primacy to words over images? How can “visual literacy” help us spread knowledge, even across traditional language barriers?
This isn’t as foreign a notion as it may seem. Certainly advertisers, marketers, and propagandists have known for a long time the power of images, and how powerful the combination of words and pictures can be. So, why not academia? The examples I listed may not seem very positive, and arguably they aren’t, but it just begs the question of how visual literacy can be used in more enlightening or constructive ways. Think about safety cards in airplanes. Or even internet memes. Now think about physics, philosophy, or political science. Can images help us learn and teach complex mathematical theories or Marxist superstructures? I would say yes, but I’ve never seen a textbook in comics form.
Unflattening will be released March 23. It should be an interesting read. You can find more information (yes, in text form), along with illustrations from the book, on Sousanis’ blog.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
What a fantastic idea! As a future teacher, especially of reading, I'm always looking for new ways to help students understand and wrap their minds around new ideas. This is a fascinating development, and I look forward to see how it continues and changes. Comics could be the new way to reach nonreaders!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Maria. As a future teacher, this immediately spiked my interest and I was thinking of how to incorporate it into my classroom. Isn't it still reading, even if we don't read words, but images? I believe there is a different kind of reading that applies to images and graphics and it is something the academic world should consider too.
ReplyDeleteThis is the coolest thing I've read all day, like the superlative cool.
ReplyDeleteWow this is so interesting, and I feel as though it really taps into the way that the human mind works. Math, for example, has always been an incredibly challenging topic for me, but if it had been presented to me in a more pictorial format, I feel as though I would have gained so much more understanding. I think that our society's leaning towards text over images is the idea that language is more developed and complex of a form of communication than images. Our "primitive" ancestors communicated with pictures (hieroglyphics), and so our educated community, especially in the area of academia, sees that as a lesser educated form of work. Language is something that most people have the capacity to learn, but pictures and images are something entirely different, socially, although they are both equally artistic and academic.
ReplyDeleteI am so stoked that this is finally happening in comics. It took over seventy years for comics to even start going mainstream, but with this move from a "more legitimate" audience I think the conversion is really going to pick up. No longer will comics be assumed to be a juvenile form of entertainment, but a real literary theater!
ReplyDeleteThat is awesome! It makes me want to do something crazy for my exit interview that I will hopefully have next Spring...but then again I probably won't in case the Education department didn't like it!
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