Images of modernist fiction: literary and pictorial narrative from Joyce to Spiegelman

• Main Author: Najarian, Jonathan
• Other Authors: Chodat, Robert
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: American literature; Comics; Images; Literature; Modernism; Narrative; Visual art
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/41528

This project develops a new context for understanding the rise of the graphic novel by linking the grammar of comics as a form to the multimedia experiments of modernist writing. Presenting a counter-history of comics, I show how the form can be traced not just to the emergence of newspaper comics, as critics routinely claim, but also to the intermedial strain of modernist avant-garde fiction. With developments in photomechanical engraving and offset lithography, the space of the printed page increasingly became a zone of uncertain contact between text and image. Taking up a number of different genres—philosophy, modernist prose, book illustrations, and the wordless novel in woodcuts—I argue that modernist writing and early experiments in graphic narrative alike responded to this transformation of the book’s materiality by imagining new modes of literary and pictorial storytelling.  While comics scholars often trace the rise of the graphic novel to the work of Winsor McCay, George Herriman, and other early-century newspaper cartoonists, I offer a history and an aesthetics of graphic narrative that takes full account of the medium’s roots in the debates and collaborative practices of the modernist avant-garde. Graphic narratives undoubtedly take their grammar—panels, word balloons, motion lines—from newspaper comics. But they also become aesthetically entangled with the intermedial dimension of modernist writing. Literary modernism, I argue, is not a high cultural tradition that graphic novelists want to attack and overturn. It is instead a tradition that foregrounded the questions about media, language, and narrative that dominate contemporary graphic fiction. Exploring the dynamic connection between modernists like Joyce, Matisse, Rockwell Kent, and Lynn Ward, this project seeks to uncover the buried history of modernism’s kinship with the graphic novel, a kinship based on the legacy of inter-art experimentation that characterizes both modernist fiction and graphic narrative. === 2022-10-09T00:00:00Z