Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Pao, L., D. Coughlan, K. Mikkonen, and S. Buchenberger
The Many Languages of Comparative Literature, 21st World Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA)
Unsettled Narratives: Graphic Novel and Comics Studies in the 21st Century
University of Vienna, Vienna
Session Organiser
2016
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0
Optional Fields
21-JUL-16
27-JUL-16
Comics and graphic narratives engage in a wide array of artistic practices. They have emerged as genres from the long-debated relationship between the verbal and the visual, and have since then continuously challenged understandings of graphic storytelling. Today, scholars widely agree that comics and graphic narratives are more than a mere combination of textual and graphic media, art forms, and means of representation, but it remains an open question as to how they have critically shaped our contemporary categories of media, literature, aesthetics, and culture at large. The proposed group session aims to advance these ongoing questions about the history of the genre, and the cultural and social developments of comics and graphic narratives as significant expressions of historical and cultural realities. With the focus on “unsettled narratives,” the sessions brings together recent topics and approaches such as, but not exclusively, the theme and representation of war and conflict, the role of gender in superhero comics, and the history of satire and journalistic publications; topics that continue to invite us to ask what it means to read, interpret, and analyze graphic novels and comics not only as a part of today’s literary scene but a fundamental question of literary criticism and comparative literature. The session is a continuation of the symposia held at the previous ICLA congresses in Hong Kong, Rio, Seoul, and Paris, and invites papers that contribute to these developments, including historical and comparative approaches (questions about genre, medium, production, and reception), narrative studies (forms of storytelling, sequence, temporality, spatiality, voice), culture, social, and media studies (globalization, comics and other media, gender, ethnicity, politics, pedagogy), as well as analytical and theoretical approaches in linguistics, literature, philosophy, and arts.