From
Nick Sousanis, something special. Dr. Sousanis (Columbia, Ed.D. 2014) has transformed his one-of-a-kind dissertation into a monograph examining comics and graphics in culture.
Description from HUP's website.
The primacy of words over images
has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably
linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as
comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis
defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a
stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans
construct knowledge.
Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint.
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.
In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening
is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis
calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A.
Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of
“upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries
of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new
forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.
More
here.
Dr. Sousanis is currently a
post-doctoral fellow in the Department of English, University of Calgary.
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