The didactic tone of the Essay bears witness to its origin as a lecture, as well as to his primary stylistic influence, Thomas Carlyle, with whom Meredith shared a belief in the value of work and in the healing power of laughter. As the most extensive discussion of the comic genre produced in the 19th century, the Essay remains frequently cited in studies of British comedy and in discussions of the role of women in comedy.
A Change of Masks: A Study of the Novels, London: England, —, Princeton, New Jersey: Gordon and Breach, Schocken, Polhemus, Robert, Comic Faith: Duke University Press, Princeton University Press, A Food Tour of Classified U. As this short and by far non-exhaustive list of comics suggests, there is ample evidence that comics is experiencing a new thrust in creative experimentation and innovation marked by the coming together of cartooning and different types of images.
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The increasing sophistication with which comics artists introduce different visuals into their cartoon storyworld is deserving and in need of critical consideration. Mixing Visual Media in Comics begins this overdue work.
In his examination of multimodal novels, Wolfgang Hallet draws note to how the visual additions to novels are "a semantic, cognitive, or epistemological surplus that multiplies aspects and dimensions of the storyworld that are accessible to the reader" "The Rise of the Multimodal Novel" A similar proliferation of expression and meaning unfolds when comics artists engage multiple visual modes of communication. Few would contest that in comics, images are more than mere aids for understanding and that variation in the visual track, especially the easily recognizable intrusions of non-cartoon images, impacts how meaning is created, received, and interpreted.
As multimodal theorists Michael Halliday, Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen Reading Images ; Multimodal Discourse stress, multimodal communication is comprised of "modes," forms within various sign systems that carry the meanings that a social collective recognizes and understands.
Since a multimodal text engages the "dynamic interplay of semiotic resources as they contribute to narrative meaning" 8 , a net of rich cross-fertilizing influences is put into place in comics that utilize, adopt, and adapt, a plurality of visual modes in the communication of their narrative. Observations about the proliferation of meaning through the transfer of pre-existing material in multimodal texts corroborate and, at the same time, extend Eisner's insights into how the multimodality of comics impacts reading.
The regimens of art e. As Eisner suggests, the combination of words and images characteristic of the comics form puts in place a reading practice that fluctuates between, but ultimately combines, two types of literacy. Comics, in other words, instate a multimodal literacy defined by Alice Leber-Cook and Roy Cook, as "involving multiple often interwoven modes of expression" 23 that require "the mastery of a number of different literacies" When, however, the visual track is comprised of different types of visual material, readers are encouraged to engage in a multifaceted visual literacy, one that takes into consideration the different information—social, historical, imaginary—each type of image communicates alone and in combination with other types of images in a comics universe.
In these instances, readers are asked to engage multiple visual literacies, to integrate them in the construction of the storyworld, and to synthesize them into a coherent narrative meaning. Eisner's visual interpretative skills, which are restricted to information communicated across aesthetic techniques, cannot fully account for visually complex narrative strategies where a cartoon-drawn visual narrative is interrupted by and complemented with different types of images.
To create meaning from these comics requires an interpretive process described by Hallet as "multisemiotic reading," whereby,. In comics that narrate across different types of images, readers join aesthetic considerations with considerations of how a particular type of image communicates and what meanings are implied in its mode of production, its history, and its familiarity to readers. When images are borrowed or quoted in the visual track of comics, their original context real or imagined , as well as their re-presentation in the new context of the comics cartoon universe, also factor into the visual interpretative process.
The appropriated images are made to exist in a different version, taking on new meanings with their new configuration and within the new comics context. The mixing of visual images in comics thus orchestrates a unique reading experience, one that draws on the preconceived notions of readers, accentuates the mechanics of visual storytelling, instates complex multimodal reading practices, and distinguishes comics as a highly malleable and experimental multimodal form.
It asks readers to adopt an interpretative practice that respects, but also crosses boundaries, separating visual semiotic modes. Comics that mix visual media can thus be said to partake openly in the post-media condition, which sees various media intermingling and mixing. Art and media theorist Peter Weibel proposes that for art in the post-media condition, "no single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the different media influence and determine each other. And, visual theorist W.
Mitchell stresses that "all arts are 'composite' arts both text and image ; all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes" 94— Complex relationships, including aesthetic, narrative, semiotic, and semantic relationships, exist among and between modes in all texts. However, they may very well be more overtly and critically engaged in texts that rely on more than one mode to communicate meaning, such as comics, and particularly comics that disrupt the visual stylistic coherency of the visual track by introducing a different type of image.
Mixing Visual Media in Comics sets out to explore the mixing of cartooning with other types of images in comics in terms of its narrative power. It explores what stories and histories are evoked, told, and challenged by different images, how they are experienced, and what type of reading practices they instate. The result of an intensive three-day international workshop held in St.
*An Essay on Comedy, by George Meredith
Although contributors adopt different methodologies and engage in close analysis of different comic books from different comics genres, several interrelated assumptions guide the research collected here:. This multi-person investigation of how cartooning works alongside other types of images in comics to shape and communicate a story suggests novel ways of understanding the history and practice of visual modes of representation, especially for what concerns visual storytelling techniques and literacies.
To determine the distinct and shared storytelling properties of different types of images, as Mixing Visual Media in Comics aims to do, is to take a significant step toward better grasping how images evoke emotions, drive reader engagement, and perhaps even foster changes in behavior. This volume is thus situated within the broad project of reaching a more comprehensive understanding of visual forms of storytelling and how they interact. Aidan Diamond and Lauranne Poharec and multiple units of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial University of Newfoundland generously funded the workshop from which this collection grew.
May Contain Graphic Material: Comic Books, Novels, and Films. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. U of California P, A Journey in North Korea.
An Essay on Comedy
Duncan, Randy and Matthew J. The Power of Comics: History, From, and Culture. Continuum International Publishing Group, They adopted a method based on the physiological concept of the four humours , or bodily fluids blood, phlegm, choler, melancholy , and the belief that an equal proportion of these constituted health, while an excess or deficiency of any one of them brought disease.
Since the humours governed temperament, an irregular distribution of them was considered to result not only in bodily sickness but also in derangements of personality and behaviour, as well.
The human contradiction
The resultant comedy of humours is distinctly English, as Dryden notes, and particularly identified with the comedies of Ben Jonson. Humour is native to humankind. Folly need only be observed and imitated by the comic dramatist to give rise to laughter. Observers as early as Quintilian , however, have pointed out that, though folly is laughable in itself, such jests may be improved if the writer adds something of his own—namely, wit.
A form of repartee , wit implies both a mental agility and a linguistic grace that is very much a product of conscious art. Quintilian describes wit at some length in his Institutio oratoria ; it partakes of urbanity, a certain tincture of learning, charm, saltiness, or sharpness, and polish and elegance. Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else.
Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. The distinctions persist into the most sophisticated treatments of the subject. Sigmund Freud , for example, in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious , said that wit is made, but humour is found. Laughter, according to Freud, is aroused at actions that appear immoderate and inappropriate, at excessive expenditures of energy: It is a token both of an infinite misery, in relation to the absolute being of whom humans have an inkling, and of infinite grandeur, in relation to the beasts, and results from the perpetual collision of these two infinities.
The comic, he says, is an imitation mixed with a certain creative faculty, and the grotesque is a creation mixed with a certain imitative faculty—imitative of elements found in nature.
Mixing Visual Media in Comics
Each gives rise to laughter expressive of an idea of superiority—in the comic, the superiority of man over man and, in the grotesque, the superiority of man over nature. The laughter caused by the grotesque has about it something more profound and primitive, something much closer to the innocent life, than has the laughter caused by the comic in human behaviour. Bergson traces the implications of this view in the sundry elements of comedy: Comedy expresses a lack of adaptability to society; any individual is comic who goes his own way without troubling to get into touch with his fellow beings.
The purpose of laughter is to wake him from his dream. Three conditions are essential for the comic: The essential difference between comedy and tragedy, says Bergson, invoking a distinction that goes back to that maintained between ethos and pathos, is that tragedy is concerned with individuals and comedy with classes. And the reason that comedy deals with the general is bound up with the corrective aim of laughter: To this end, comedy focusses on peculiarities that are not indissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person.
It is the business of laughter to repress any tendency on the part of the individual to separate himself from society. The comic character would, if left to his own devices, break away from logic and thus relieve himself from the strain of thinking ; give over the effort to adapt and readapt himself to society and thus slacken in the attention that is due to life ; and abandon social convention and thus relieve himself from the strain of living. The mind, he affirms, directs the laughter of comedy, and civilization is founded in common sense, which equips one to hear the comic spirit when it laughs folly out of countenance and to participate in its fellowship.
Whatever the limitations of the latter, it nonetheless explores the implications of its own thesis with the utmost thoroughness, and the result is a rigorous analysis of comic causes and effects for which any student of the subject must be grateful. Aristotle said that comedy deals with the ridiculous, and Plato , in the Philebus , defined the ridiculous as a failure of self-knowledge; such a failure is there shown to be laughable in private individuals the personages of comedy but terrible in persons who wield power the personages of tragedy.
Shakespearean comedy is rich in examples: The movement of all these plays follows a familiar comic pattern, wherein characters are brought from a condition of affected folly amounting to self-delusion to a plain recognition of who they are and what they want. For the five years or so after he wrote Measure for Measure , in —04, Shakespeare seems to have addressed himself exclusively to tragedy, and each play in the sequence of masterpieces he produced during this period— Othello, King Lear , Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra , and Coriolanus —turns in some measure on a failure of self-knowledge.
They contain, as well, an element of romance of the kind purveyed from Greek New Comedy through the plays of the ancient Roman comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. Children lost at birth are miraculously restored, years later, to their parents, thereby providing occasion for a recognition scene that functions as the denouement of the plot. Characters find themselves—they come to know themselves—in all manner of ways by the ends of these plays. Tragic errors have been made, tragic losses have been suffered, tragic passions—envy, jealousy, wrath—have seemed to rage unchecked, but the miracle that these plays celebrate lies in the discovery that the errors can be forgiven, the losses restored, and the passions mastered by the godly spirit of reason.
The near tragedies experienced by the characters result in the ultimate health and enlightenment of the soul. What is learned is of a profound simplicity: In comedy of this high and sublime sort, patience, repentance, and forgiveness are opposed to the viciously circular pattern of crime, which begets vengeance , which begets more crime. Comedy of this sort deals in regeneration and rebirth.
There is always about it something of the religious, as humankind is absolved of its guilt and reconciled one to another and to whatever powers that be. The 4th-century Latin grammarian Donatus distinguished comedy from tragedy by the simplest terms: Such a differentiation of the two genres may be simplistic, but it provided sufficient grounds for Dante to call his great poem La Commedia The Comedy ; later called The Divine Comedy , since, as he says in his dedicatory letter, it begins amid the horrors of hell but ends amid the pleasures of heaven.
Comedy conceived in this sublime and serene mode is rare but recurrent in the history of the theatre. It may represent the most universal mode of comedy. The American philosopher Susanne K.
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