On Reading Graphic Novels (differently)

I stumbled across this blog post by Rick Kleffel this morning, I don't have time to comment on it properly, but it's a great essay on the differences between reading conventional and graphic novels, and the author's hesitation to move from the familiarity of text boxes to the relative chaos of comic format:

But damn it, it's the words and pictures that threw me at first, even when I wanted, I really wanted to read them. You see, as I pick up a graphic novel to read, I'd just speed through the words and glance at the pictures, applying the same reading sensibility to the graphic novel that I did to the typeset novel. That style of reading renders the graphic novel into an annoyingly vapid and underwhelming reading experience. The pictures then lack the fullness of illustrations and the words lack the richness of a novel. The experience won’t gel correctly if you read graphic novels like novels.

http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-31-04.htm

Push and Pull

One of the nicer breaks from writing of late was making a giraffe collage on the wall at Locksmith Gallery, on the opening night of Push And Pull Redfern: Remaking Allan Kaprow. If you're in Sydney, this and the following Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the gallery is open and ready for you to push and pull stuff around.

Rief Larsen's lost images

Rief Larsen's new release, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, includes drawings, diagrams and graphs, attributed to the narrator and protagonist (T.S. Spivet, a twelve-year-old genius cartographer) and produced by Larsen. I haven't got my hands on a copy yet, so I can't comment on the success of the integration, but of great interest is that on Amazon.com, Larsen discusses his motivation for integrating the graphic elements:

"I initially wrote a draft of The Selected Works without any accompanying illustrations. After reaching the end, I still had that tingly feeling that usually means something is missing, and so I thought about it for awhile and realized that in order to really understand T.S., we actually need to see his drawings laid out on the page. T.S. was most comfortable in the exploding diagram or the annotation or the bitchin’ bar graph; this marginal material was where he would often let down his guard and reveal something he wouldn’t otherwise in the main text."

Larsen also provides an annotated list of "lost images" – graphic elements he produced but decided against including, with reasons why. A film director is allowed, in 'special features' additions to DVDs, to include 'lost scenes' for the dedicated to access, why not the novelist?

NOTE: I got a copy and I had to take it to my parents house so I didn't start reading it (NO reading, only writing) because it's a beautiful thing. I can't wait.

Research Blurb

This is not a graphic novel: looking at hybrid novels with the 'curious eye' of the design practitioner-researcher.

Zoe Sadokierski is a designer whose PhD thesis investigates a shift in literary practice –writers including graphic elements like photographs, drawings and experimental typography on the pages of their novels. This approach to writing produces hybrid novels, in which the narrative is formed by both words and images. Hybrid novels can be perplexing to readers accustomed to purely written novels, but not to designers. Her research asks: What is the potential to explain hybrid novels from a design perspective? What are these images on the page? How do they function as part of the text? Her hypothesis is that the graphic elements in hybrid novels are behaving unconventionally: rather than illustrating the written text, as images in books traditionally do, they are an integral part of the text.

Sadokierski’s analysis includes novels by both well-known authors like W.G. Sebald and Umberto Eco, and up-and-coming authors like Jonathan Safran Foer and Steven Hall.
Her investigation of hybrid novels aims to add to the growing interdisciplinary research around word-image relations.

Blog as research

I've returned from my overseas break and am very slowly getting my head back into writing mode.

As part of the thesis, I'd like to write up the value of using a blog as a research tool. I would love to have some comments about how this blog has been (or not been) a useful resource for researchers and/or practitioners. If you could either leave me a post here, or email me directly I would greatly appreciate your input, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant.

The great escape

This blog will be quiet for a little while - I deposited 30,000 words on Kate's desk last Friday (most of it's even in sentences) and I'm taking a three month vacation from anything to do with the PhD. The plan is to return in mid-January, put my head down and finish writing it up. In the mean time, I'll be freezing my way through a European winter. I will occasionally update here.

Interview

Here's the link to an interview I did a while ago over email - I was surprisingly articulate (and characteristically belligerent). Again, I still don't quite understand how I can write an articulate email but not type an articulate paragraph in a word document:
http://savvy.com/savvy_style/life_in_pictures

Tips from Dunleavy

"Authoring and thinking go together. You will very rarely work out what you think first, and then just write it down. Normally the act of committing words to screen (or pen and paper) will make an important contribution to your working out what it is that you do think. In other words, the act of writing may often be constitutive of your thinking. Left to ourselves we can all of us keep conflicting ideas in play almost indefinitely" (26)

State of Play

So the writing was going well, and I was giving myself smug pats on the back for having produced about 45,000 words (which I knew needed heavy editing, but stuff was being committed to paper). Then I stopped, took a step back and realised my argument didn't work. In fact, I was making about four arguments, and slipping in and out of all of them in different chapters. My chapter outline looked so neat and achievable on a digital A3 diagram, but when I started writing, it went horribly pear shaped. I knew it, but it took me months to accept it. As a smart man used to comment when I was labouring over piece of awful artwork: "there's no use flogging a dead horse."

So. I had a little cry, raged about a bit, drank a lot of wine and now I'm ready to start over. As Kate suggests, a metaphor is a helpful way to understand the bigger picture. And so it goes like this:

I'm standing in a fully stocked kitchen, but I don't know what I want to cook. Cooking by putting everything I like into one pot will not produce an edible meal. The ingredients have to be selected because they 'work' together. Once I decide what I want to make, there will be a lot of unused ingredients, but that's ok, I can use them to make something else later. (Or they might go off and I'll just have to throw them out). Everything I need is here, I just have to choose a recipe.

As I was staring at my keyboard and thinking it's ok, it's ok, it's ok, the computer spoke to me ... surely I can't be the first person restarting a writing project who has noticed these keys, telling me what to do:
Either that, or this is the point the psychologists will flag as when I "crossed the line".

the value of practitioner-researchers

Reviewing Jobling and Crowley's Graphic Design: Reproduction & Representation Since 1800 (1996), Victor Margolin ends with this criticism:

They are too ready to sacrifice design at the altar of an all-consuming capitalism, unlike Twyman, Meggs, and Hollis, who, as practitioners, convey in their writings a passion for graphic communication that is missing here. There is no reason why we can’t have critical analysis and a passionate engagement with the material. But that is another project.

This sounds like an argument for practice led research to me.

Media, mode, materiality

I think I had a go at this before, but I'm going to do it again. One of the issues working across disciplines is defining terms. As mentioned previously, my main problem is the word 'image': to a novelist, an image is created in the mind of the reader; to a designer, an image is an original artwork or reproduction of that artwork (where artwork could mean photograph, drawing, digital image, etc). Media, medium and materiality pose similar problems, but this time from art and communication theory. The media could mean the press, it could refer to paint or clay, it could distinguish between print or digital. Materiality could be form or it could be content. Ugly, I know.

Rather than trying to clarify this mess, I'm just going to state how I'm using the terms through an example.

1. An original pencil drawing on paper. The media is drawing (it is made by the act of drawing), the mode is visual (as opposed to verbal), the materiality is lead on paper (the surface it exists on, how we access it). It is a drawing.

2. When that original drawing is scanned, the media is now digital (it is made by pixel data), the mode is still visual, but the materiality is screen (pixels appear on the computer screen). It is a digitized drawing.

3. When that digital version of the original drawing is reproduced in a book, the media is now print (it is made by mechanical printing), mode is still visual, materiality is ink on paper. It is the reproduction of a drawing.

Anyway, the main point is that I can change the media or materiality and I still call it a drawing (though qualified with original, digital or reproduction). However, if I were to change the mode, and 'interpret' a drawing verbally or perhaps musically (ekphrasis), the it ceases to be a drawing and then becomes and interpretation of a drawing.

Does that make ANY sense? Maybe I have media and materiality mixed up? And is that actually faulty reasoning because the difference between a 'reproduction' of a drawing and an 'interpretation' of a drawing are not actually that different? I have a feeling like this is either quite important or absolutely irrelevant (which is a micro/macro feeling to the entire PhD).

PhD epiphanies

Post-it of the week

Designers' nightmares

Comments like this make me deeply unhappy:

"Today, thanks to computers and design packages, design awareness is very high. Even the novice computer user becomes proficient in designing documents within a few days, if not weeks. Usually, templates are available for brochures, reports, books, etc. All you need to do is fill in the contents in the readymade template." source

'Design awareness' and 'design proficiency' are wildly different beasts. Owning design software doesn't make you a designer anymore than wearing a police uniform makes you a policeman. Actually, instead of making this argument, I'm going to make a cup of tea...

Timo's blog

As if to rub in how self-absorbed I've become in my own research, I only realised TODAY that Timo, my fellow PhD candidate and partner in Postgrad Room high-jinx (which mostly involves laughing at ourselves, each other and stuff on You Tube) has a blog he's been running for 18 months or so. Well worth a nose around.

Post-it of the week

Spelling it out isn't coming so easily (I've never been a good speller, ask my Mum) but the saying no thing is surprisingly liberating.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! (gimmicks)

I recently met Jon Walker – a research fellow in history at Sydney University – whose unconventional biography Pistols! Treason! Murder! The rise and fall of a master spy was published in Feb 2007 by Melbourne University Press. The book is described as a biography of both person and place: Gerolamo Vano, one of the original spy masters, and 17th Century Venice as a city of espionage. Of particular interest to me is the inclusion of "playful comic strips, transcripts of imaginary conversations and a bar-crawl around contemporary Venice." (from the book's blurb, as listed on Jon's website) Several papers given about the book have referred it as "a multimedia assassination". [what's the difference between multimedia and multi-modal?] Jon worked in collaboration with illustrator Dan Hallet to produce these graphic elements. The original manuscript included just four illustrations (which didn't end up in the final version – Jon decided they were not up to scratch) and his editor at MUP requested more of these. Jon scripted what was to go in the illustrations, and Dan produced them, sometimes closely following the brief and sometimes pushing it. In conversation, Jon discussed that the text editing process was rigorous, but although the illustrations and graphic elements were endorsed by the editor, they weren't actually edited - allowing the author (and illustrator) greater freedom of expression with these elements. Were the visual devices not edited because the editor didn't know how, or because they were seen as less meaningful?

By email, Jon also explained that although MUP were supportive of the non-written elements and never questioned the value of using four different typefaces, other editors/agents were not so supportive: "By contrast, conversations I've had with other editors and agents about the possibility of overseas editions are almost always prefaced with remarks like, 'I wish you'd done it as a 'proper' history book. We'd have to get rid of all the pictures and the weird typefaces ...'."

Jon's book was nominated for the NSW Premier's History Award in 2007 and was described as 'our first true work of punk-history'. However, it has also at times received the same criticism as the fictional works I'm looking at - that the typo/graphic elements are 'gimmicks':

"The book is not helped by a motley collection of gimmicks such as comic strips and imagined conversations between invented 'historians. It's all rather confusing, but perhaps that's what Walker intended?" Paul Collins in the Herald.

Referring to the non-written material, most online sources seem to do as I have done above - regurgitate the blurb text that the book includes "playful comics strips ...", word for word. My defense is that I haven't actually read the book yet, as soon as I do I'll update the post. Perhaps it could be overlooked as time saving (lazy writing), or perhaps – again – reviewers are unsure how to tackle a description of the function of these elements?

In an interview with UK magazine Computer Arts Dan Hallett [click on Dan's name to see portfolio of illustrations from Pistols!] describes the intended function of his illustrations: "I want my work to tell a story or stimulate a thought. It is all about communication, even if the message is not always specific."

Jon questions the conventions of historical research and writing through his work. The abstract to a 2003 article published in Rethinking History:

This article attempts to do a number of things: Firstly, it describes the assassination of a priest called Giulio Cazzari in Venice in 1622, using the reports of a spy named Gerolamo Vano as a principal source. It confronts the distance between the experience of death and the representation of death, and explores possible connections between our understanding of death and our understanding of time. It uses formal experimentation and deliberate anachronism (inspired by Futurist literature and photography and the graphic novels of Alan Moore) to dramatise these themes. It does not, however, contain any detailed discussion of seventeenth-century espionage or diplomatic culture, or much in the way of context. This omission is itself part of an implicit argument about the nature of historical knowledge: i.e. that a meditation upon time and death is a natural and appropriate subject for a historian and that archival documents can be used as raw material for such a discussion. Historians should have the courage to ask questions that have no answers (in other words, metaphysical questions). Rethinking History, Volume 7, Number 2, June 2003 , pp. 139-167(29)

Jon's next book project is an illustrated novel. Watch this space.

Exploiting Borrowed Emotion

...was an idea I picked up from one reviewer's description of the still from Casablanca at the end of The Raw Shark Texts. I've come across it again in a review of Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Too much in the middle of what I'm doing to store it anywhere else but here:

In a blurb to this book, Salman Rushdie writes: ‘Perhaps the highest praise I can give is to say it completely earns the right to take on the World Trade Centre atrocity. The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed.’ Most of the time, I felt the opposite. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close offers, along with many local pleasures – Safran Foer is a writer of considerable brilliance – a narcissistic realism, in love with it own gimmickry. By the time you get to the end, and flip backwards through the pictures of the falling figure to restore the victim to the top of the skyscraper, as Oskar wishes, you may feel a good deal of the emotion has been borrowed and not quite deserved. Adams, T. 2005, ‘A nine-year-old and 9/11’, Guardian (Books), May 29

*note use of 'gimmickry' again

Idea of 'borrowing' emotion relates back to the postmodern idea of all texts being fragments of other texts - existing within the continuum of all literature (including film and other media) - we can't help making comparisons and drawing on our past experience to interpret the work at hand. Why not exploit that?

A review of Mysterious Flame (Umberto Eco) states:

In the Eco-ian universe, books aren’t merely stand-alone islands to be traversed in linear fashion; they are nodes in an exponentially expanding extranet. To read one book, you sometimes have to pass through several others, accumulating countless references and subtexts along the way. Ng, D. 2005, ‘Eco and the funnymen’, Village Voice, vol. 50, no. 27, pp. 32

Post-it of the week

Vonnegut's doodles...

An essay by Peter Reed on Kurt Vonnegut's website (http://www.vonnegut.com/artist.asp ... reprinted from Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 1999 Florida Altantic University) says of the felt-tip pen drawings that appear scattered throughout several of Vonnegut's novels:

“the drawings earn their place in the novel, and must be seen as integral to it. Some make graphic the ludicrous disparities that often exist between words as signifiers and what it is they signify. Others simply function as embellishments or even punch lines of jokes. In their almost child-like simplicity of line they have a certain ironic propriety in a novel where the central event is an arts fair. Above all, they are part of-and draw attention to-the seemingly naive, even adolescent, perspective by which Vonnegut deconstructs and demystifies American culture and society in this novel."

The word integral is important - again, these drawings aren't visual 'gimmicks', but part of the text. They serve a function within the text that goes beyond reflecting/reinterpreting the writing. Vonnegut called them "felt tip calligraphs".

Thanks, Wikipedia

About a year ago I made a bet with another researcher that I could reference Wikipedia a couple of times (legitimately) in my thesis. It was a joke at the time, based on the look of horror when I told someone that I understood Phenomenology because I'd read the Wiki entry on it (also meant to be a joke, although not entirely false).

Anyway, turns out I can win the bet. Online searching has become a valuable tool for my research – primarily, using the "similar to this" function. For instance, the function on Amazon which suggests if I like a particular book, I may like a list of similar books based on other people's buying history – I have located a number of examples I wasn't aware of using this. Also, on Wikipedia, looking at the suggested links has lead me to some interesting classifications of other similar types of literature, such as:

SLIPSTREAM fiction

"The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. Science fiction authors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, argue that cognitive dissonance is at the heart of slipstream, and that it is not so much a genre as a literary effect, like horror or comedy."

The description of this as a literary effect, rather than a genre is interesting because it is essentially how I describe the practice of integrating of typo/graphic elements in novels: rather than a new genre or literary form (to rival the novel), it is style of writing employed when words alone will not suffice.


Metagraphics/Hypergraphics

On the visual side, the Letterists first gave the name 'metagraphics' (metagraphie) and then 'hypergraphics' (hypergraphie) to their new synthesis of writing and visual art. Some precedents may be seen in Cubist, Dada and Futurist (both Italian and Russian) painting and typographical works, such as Apollinaire's Calligrammes or Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuum. "Composition – which is simply a fragmentary purification of the former object – in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or super-writing." Isidore Isou, "The Force Fields of Letterist Painting" , from Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste (Paris: Avant- Garde, 1964).

Ignoring the ridiculous phrase "super writing", idea, and (if I understand it correctly, and here is where I need to leave the convenience of Wikipedia and do some actual research...) they are claiming that if you incorporate a 'letterist notation' (what I would call a 'typo/graphic element') into a 'realist form' (in my case, the written text in a novel) the synesthesia of these two modes creates an entirely new kind of text. This mirrors my argument that, when integrated, rather than supplementary, word and image can communicate something that words alone cannot – the synesthesia of word and image produces a unique expressive form.

Wikipedia is useful as a kind of buffet for sampling new ideas, labels, genres, phrases that might overlap my area of research, but also useful in locating examples through a 'six degrees of separation' approach. I keep finding 'friends' of the books that I'm studying through these online networks.

The debate is being had in other media, too:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/28/wiki

Just in case I forget...

Using the typo/graphic novel as a case study, how could Visual Communications Design inform the field of visual studies, and what can it learn about itself in the process?

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Naomi pointed me to this passage in Doris Lessing's novel (my emphasis):

"During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I've had these moments of 'knowing' one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die. Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, its not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle, perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won't." (549)

Although Lessing didn't actually employ typo/graphic elements to fill the descriptive void, it is an interesting recognition of words failing to describe 'real experience'. The potential for an image, or the combination of word and image, to convey something immediate, ephemeral and emotive is an idea I've been carrying around from the beginning on this research. There is something about what is not said that makes the experience more real (and more subjective?)

visual communication or design?

I've started writing (it's much more difficult than I anticipated, but that's probably not surprising to anyone but me) and I think I need to start blogging again to store some of the issues as they arise.

Today's quandary is whether I use the term 'designer' or 'visual communicator'. Clearly, consistency is key. Initially, I thought it wouldn't matter as long as I am explicit in the introduction-ish section that in the context of this research, I am concerned with print design, but if part of my argument is that visual communication design partly straddles the Humanities and partly straddles Design, is using 'design' weakening my argument? Visual Communications is just more wieldy than Design in a sentence (however, it will possibly significantly pump up my word count).

Cutting off a limb

After a productive meeting with Kate and Naomi at the end of last week (my supervisors - I find combined meetings are really useful at planning stages), I finally have a chapter plan and (relatively ambitious) time line. Until now, I had the research divided into two parts:

1. Theory – descriptive/analytical: history of illustrated fiction, describing the phenomenon with a typology of devices and taxonomy of their functions, which would lead to;
   
2. Practice – speculative/experimental: a series of workshops and projects exploring the potentials for this way of working to affect the reading experience.

About half way through the meeting, I put an X through Part 2. It was a big moment - I wasn't sure if I felt a bit sick or excited (relieved?). This doesn't mean I'm cutting out the practice component, but that I have to stop thinking of the practice as an entirely separate entity to the theory. Because there is so little consensus on what practice-led research is/could be, it's difficult to determine what is just practice and what is practice-led research. I had a go at defining this a while ago (talking specifically about process, not necessarily design outcome):
I'll come back to this later, it's obviously inadequate.

I have always described the research as practice-led (I identified an issue in practice - while working as a book designer I noticed novels with images in them appearing more frequently but could find little written about this). I have described some of my methods as practice-led (the current exhibition of books experimenting with different typo/graphic devices, the mapping investigations and courses with both writers and designers I'm running at UTS and through the NSW Writer's Centre). I have always intended to mount my argument as piece of visual communication design - arguing that word and image combine to communicate something unique in words alone is illogical.

But for some reason, none of these elements seemed 'enough' to constitute a practice-led research degree. Is this because what I'm doing is so ingrained, so logical to me as a designer, that I don't think of it as design? Or because, as a print designer, my work looks like the research process anyway (working on paper as opposed to, say, a furniture designer making a chair)? My favourite question when I tell people I'm undertaking a practice-led doctorate is "what percentage is going to be practice?" Well, clearly if a drawing is worth a thousand words, so if I did 80 drawings I wouldn't have to write any words at all.... How is it possible to put a percentage value on practice? Is a table worth more than a chair? If the book I'm designing is the thesis itself, how do I 'count' what I've designed?

Sundays - upcoming exhibition at UTS

click on image for larger view

Sundays is an exhibition of three books, accompanied by annotated process work, that forms part of a practice-led PhD through the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney.

Zoë Sadokierski’s research examines a developing literary phenomenon: the integration of typo/graphic elements in prose fiction (novels with pictures in them). This is of interest to Visual Communication Design because it reveals writers working in a ‘designerly’ way: writers are borrowing techniques and strategies from the designer’s toolbox.

Sundays investigates how and why typo/graphic elements could be integrated into a short story. Using three different typo/graphic devices – experimental typography, drawing/diagrams and ephemera/photographs – three separate versions of the same story (written by Katherine Danks) are presented as individual books.

Viewers are invited to sit and read each book separately, then reflect on their experience of reading the typographic, the illustrated and the photographic elements in each version.

Essay in Heat

I have an essay (developed from the Word and Image in Contemporary Fiction lecture ... scroll down) in Issue 15 of literary magazine Heat, published by Giramondo Publishing:
http://www.giramondopublishing.com/heat/

New Readers

"Not everything in print is to be read in a traditional way; there are new modes of reading which correspond to new modes of writing." Emile Benveniste

"It is my belief that, long before the constituencies of the graphic novel have finished arguing among themselves, the stragegies that have been devised for long-range pictoral reading will contribute significantly to an emerging new literature of our times in which word, picture and typogrpahy interact meaningfully and which is in tune with the complexity of modern life with its babble of signs and symbols and stimuli." Eddie Campbell (World Literature Today, March-April 07: 13)

Deborah Adelaide put me onto Nabokov's essays on literature, in particular an introductory essay called 'Good Readers and Good Writers'. I've been putting off dealing with the issue of the 'contract' between writer and reader for a while, but I have to start dealing with it as I write up my main book reviews. One of the most interesting aspects of this topic – for designers – is the parallels between the process of writing and the process of designing: the way a writer uses literary devices to direct the reader's experience is a useful model for designers to use when thinking about the way they use their 'devices' to direct the viewer experience. Again, back to an idea raised in Kate Sweetapple's PhD thesis.

Material writing

The Material Poem, an anthology of poetic artworks curated by UTS Masters student James Stuart, is available online: www.nongeneric.net

His introduction describes these poems as the products of writers "engaged with writing as a material rather than purely literary practice." Many of the poems are accompanied by author's notes explaining their motivations. Although I'm not looking at poetry (you'd have to go into a great deal of historical grounding to understand how the poem has evolved as a visual-verbal form, and I'm more interested in experimental visual devices in prose - traditionally the domain of pure language), this is a great example of how visual rhetorical devices affect the reading experience.

Quoting Charles Bernstein: " All text is visual when read", Stuart elaborates "engaging with language necessarily entails engagement with its particular materiality." It is this consideration of form, of materiality (or modality?) that is fascinating to me, as a designer. The 'design' of literature shifts from a paratextual zone (the cover, the typesetting grid) to an intertextual zone (the visual elements affect communication/meaning).

The process of reading poetry is recognised by the likes of Michel Riffaterre as being inherently different than the process prose: you read a poem once to identify the semiotic structure, and then again to understand the structure. You necessarily re-read poetry. This is what George Alexander describes in his statement: 'meaning in poetry often seems to float just out of reach, like lost paper sail boats'.

Wayzgoose Press describes the motivation to typeset one of their poems in differing faces and weights: "to encourage a slower and more deliberate reading than the average reader is accustomed to with today's universal emphasis on speed."

Action Research and design

I've been to a couple of talks on action research lately, and Bob Dick's 2001 (find source) description of what action research is could be a description of the design process in general:

A commonly known description of the action research cycle is that of Kemmis and McTaggart (1998) – plan, act, observe, reflect; then, in the light of this, plan for the next cycle ... [action research] tends to be ... cyclic and participative and qualitative. I view all of these features as choices to be made by the researcher, usually in discussion with the participants. Good action research is research where, among other features, appropriate choices are made... If its advantages are to be obtained, it is mostly or always flexible and responsive to the research situation.

If you replace 'researcher' as designer, and 'participants' as the client/audience, I think this is a nice working definition of what design (specifically visual communications) does. It describes an iterative creative process that involves cycles of designing, reflecting and redesigning in collaboration with the other people involved in any given project (in my practice, this would be 'planning' (brainstorming) based on a brief from an editor, 'acting' (designing a set of roughs), 'observing and reflecting' in collaboration with editorial and marketing departments (showing them the roughs and discussing), then repeating the cycle until a final solution is agreed on).

The other particularly relevant idea is that of appropriateness. Good design is evaluated on appropriateness. There is no single ‘right’ design solution to any given design problem. Unlike science, which strives for THE solution, design will only offer A solution. So whether A design solution is evaluated as being good or bad, it is in terms of how appropriate the solution is at that time – how clear is the communication and how engaging is it to the intended audience.

I can't see action research being entirely appropriate for my research, but I think it's a valuable methodology for designers who are researching through practice.

To come back to:

Are gimmicks and visual rhetoric the same thing?

if you define rhetoric as persuasion, false, showy, artificial... "Rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit" John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

I'm just starting to read around rhetoric (and its application to design research) - seems to be (appropriately) a huge range of arguments around the value of rhetoric as a field of study at all, let alone for design. The value of rhetoric for design is that studies persuasion - how do you communicate a message in the most convincing manner. This the fundamental purpose of visual communications.

The central concern of rhetoric has always been method and manner: how to discover the most effective way to express a thought in a given situation, and then how to alter its expression to suit different situations. http://lsb.scu.edu/%7Eemcquarrie/rhetjcr.htm

Abstract for Postgrad Research Conference

Following is the abstract for a 20 minute presentation at the UTS Postgrad Research Conference, August 17 2007. Program available: http://www.gradschool.uts.edu.au/ProgramwithChairs.pdf

My research examines the integration of typo/graphic devices in prose-fiction (novels with pictures in them). Although not new, this is an insufficiently articulated phenomenon. It is of interest to Visual Communication Design because it reveals writers working in a 'designerly' way: writers are borrowing rhetorical techniques from the designer's toolbox.

I have identified emerging interest in this phenomenon from designers, writers and critics, and recognised that the phenomenon is met with resistance from some, who dismiss the visual devices as 'gimmicky' or merely 'decorative'.

Why are these typo/graphic devices being described as 'gimmickry'?
I suggest:
A) An inadequate understanding of the function of images (what can images communicate?), and;
B) Insufficient available language to describe the function of images (how can we talk about what images communicate?).

Despite much current discussion about a 'culture of the image' and a developing 'visual literacy', there remains a widely recognised need for a way to talk about what images 'do'. At the moment, this is explored primarily through semiotics and linguistics, which analyse images as if they were language. However, although similar, the verbal and the visual are not the same. Analysing images as if they were language does not account for the difference between Language and Image. What is lost in translation? What is it that images, or the combination of words and images, can communicate that words alone cannot?

Content Analysis - methodology

I have an article from 'Marilyn Domas White and Emily E. March on Content Analysis as a flexible research method that has been used in library and information science studies, does anyone know of cases where content analysis has been used as a design research method? It seems to be an appropriate way of describing what I have called my 'contextual review' - ie the activities I've used to analyse a series of novels to try to explain the phenomenon.

Marsh and White have used it to 'develop a thesaurus of image-text relationships' (which I have been looking at in my research), but I'm not sure if it's being used elsewhere.

Marsh & White 2006, 'Content Analysis: A Flexible Methodology', Library Trends, vol. 55, no. 1, 22-45.

New review site

From this blog, I was contacted by a postgrad student in London who's researching the same general area as me. We've been emailing and decided to start a blog to specifically review books with typo/graphic devices (or interventions, to borrow a great phrase from him). We've started posting, and would love some feedback: http://graphicinterventions.blogspot.com/

film v novel

"But most readers are also moviegoers, even if the converse does not apply. The interesting thing is that the same person who goes to see the film The Brown Bunny, and groans as the insects pile up on Vince Gallo's windshield, will curl up at home with Everything Is Illuminated and chuckle approvingly at finding the phrase "we are writing" printed 191 times in a row...
In short, two aesthetics often exist in the same mind: a moviegoing aesthetic that trusts primarily in personal taste and perception, and a reading aesthetic that is more likely to defer to established opinion."
BR Myers, 'A Bag of Tired Tricks', The Atlantic Monthly Boston, May 2005

"At heart, the two forms, movie and book, are irreconcilable. A book we “hear”, listening to our own reading. A movie we “see”. The images must move, clash and climax. Translating sound into picture requires the director to cross-reference senses. When you get a film/novel such as Perfume (smell) or Chocolat (taste), the book is always going to outstrip the movie – until the film of the future gives us smell-and-taste simulation. On the other hand, when the story moves into altered states (such as Altered States), the movie has the advantage. Film can deliver a stunning visual in a tenth of a second – think The Lord of the Rings, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and The Butterfly Effect."
Ken Russell, 'You've read the book - good luck with the movie", Times Online, August 16 2007. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2265338.ece

The limits of images

Marie-Laure Ryan claims: "the narrative limitation of pure pictures stems from their inability to makes propositions. As Sol Worth has argued, visual media lack the code, the grammar, and the syntactic rules necessary to articulate specific meanings. A propositional act consists of picking a referent from a certain background and of attributing to it a property also selected from a horizon of possibilities. Whereas language can easily zero in on object and properties, pictures can only frame a general area that contains many shapes and features...Pictures may admittedly find ways around their lack of propositional ability to suggest specific properties (for instance, through caricature), but there are certain types of statements that seem totally beyond their reach. As Worth argues, pictures cannot say 'ain't'. Nor, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, can they convey possibility, conditionality, or counterfactuality." Narrative Across Media, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

I'm not looking at 'pure pictures' – within my area of study, the visual always exists within the context of a written text (otherwise it wouldn't be fictional prose) – and I'm also not looking at the 'narrative' potentials of image ... I'm defining the typo/graphic elements in these novels as rhetorical (evocative, persuasive) rather than narrative (driving the plot) devices but the quote above is an interesting start at defining the limitations of images.

The ability for images to narrate (to tell: narrativity) is different than their ability to evoke (to affect: rhetoric)? I'm not suggesting that typo/graphic elements are always narrating (although they do in sequential art, but the narrative drive is to do with cognitive leaps the reader makes across the gutter ... see notes from comics lecture). Not about articulating specific meaning but about creating tone or evoking, the devices are affecting rather than narrating? To use design words, the visual devices are less about communication and more about engagement.

A picture cannot say ain't ... but through tone, texture, size, colour, composition, etc, it can imply a voice or a 'dialect'. Different typefaces, for example, can 'speak' in different voices: the manner in which a graphic mark is made has a language of its own - if I render a phrase delicately in calligraphic script or scratch it across a surface with a rough charcoal, it 'sounds' different to the reader. Using the media I have in my desk draw right now:


Design writer/educator Johanna Drucker sets her students an exercise in which they transpose the headlines of the Wall Street Journal and the National Enquirer in "a kind of design transvestism–so that the banner headline 'Bond Markets See Rates Drop By Slight Margin' took on a screaming impact, while 'Two-Headed Boy Gives Birth to Alien Savior with Telepathic Knowledge of Biblical Past-Lives' was modestly set in the grayest and least exclamatory of formats." (Text 16, 2006)

These examples illustrate the communicative power of typography – where the mode of expression impacts on the communication of the content. This seems blatantly obvious to a practicing designer, and I would think many contemporary readers, but this assumption is hasty. In a recent list-serve conversation, a design academic (I believe from engineering design) commented that he didn't understand how 'page layout' could be considered design. I'm not even going to grace that with a response.

In a recent Book Show interview with Canadian Arts&Culture Journalist Jeet Heer, Ramona Koval asked him what comics can do that literary fiction cannot. He gave an example from Spielgelman's Maus, where the characters are visualised as animals: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, etc. He points out that this technique is goes back to Aesop's Fables, but here it's so effective because Spiegelman shows, rather than stating it: "gives you a sense of what it's like to be in a culture where these two groups view each other, or are viewed, as totally different races and difference species even ... so as a visual metaphor, and precisely because it wasn't articulated in words ... it's all the more powerful ... a picture is direct, it goes straight to the brain whereas a word always has to be deciphered - the word 'read' comes from riddle, you have to riddle out words." What's important to note is that the visual description evokes a visual experience.

He also discusses the recent controversy around the Danish cartoon mocking Mohammad: it created massive immediate controversy because it was so easily distributable (no need to translate from Danish) and re-printable. "A visual language transcends barriers of dialect or of history even." So an image may not be able to say "ain't", but it may be able to speak immediately beyond dialect? An international dialect? Obviously there are huge holes in this claim: there's a great Mad Magazine cartoon where a man in a kilt and a woman in jeans are standing in front of two doors with the 'universal' man and woman icons scratching their heads. But perhaps images can EVOKE a visual experience more effectively than words?

What comes out at 3.47am (post-it note to self: drink less coffee)

It started as a rash around the bottom of my monitor. Mostly references I didn't have time to check and questions for later consideration:

As it spread to the upper edges, motivational tips began to appear:

It began to creep from screen to pin-board to wall, then not just in books but all over them, and a few even sprouted in surprising places like the back of my phone and in pockets I never used. I found them stuck to the bottom of shoes I only wear 'out' and, in the kitchen, ingredients for saffron chicken were accompanied by pithy quotes from Barthes and McLuhan. The back of the door developed a reminder of my deteriorating mental state:

I really became concerned when I woke one morning to find my bedside table alive with lurid yellow notes like a swarm of paper butterflies – noisy thoughts I'd released during the night. Yesterday, I scratched an itch at my collar and my hand returned with a note attached:
In the shower last night, I looked down to see a pulpy yellow lump bleeding inky ideas down the drain. This morning, I dreamed I had a post-it note epidermis – millions of scaly yellow reminders obscuring what used to be a pink fleshy person. This is worse than the time I reached into my handbag for a pen and produced a mouse. It has to stop.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

What affect does the inclusion of the notes have? Does it contribute significantly more than if I'd typed the messages? Immediacy. Trueness to form. I went back and reduced the size of the 'keys' note, because I think it works better smaller - to discover that after reading the text before it has more impact? If I were doing this in book form, I'd put that on the following page to delay the 'reveal' - manipulation of pace and reading experience by holding out, like a dramatic pause?

Gimmickry and publishing

To argue why the typo/graphic devices are more than (mere) gimmicks, I need to define what a gimmick is. Merriam-Webster online: "a: an important feature that is not immediately apparent b: an ingenious and usually new scheme or angle c: a trick or device used to attract business or attention gimmick>" (see my post: "this is not a threat" for another definition that is more negative in tone)

So the definition is not necessarily negative, except in 'c' where it is described as a 'trick' (playful at best, deceptive at worst). The negativity associated with the term 'gimmick' in the context I'm talking about – fictional literature – comes from a value judgment about language over image: the perceived 'hegemony' of word over image. Literature is highbrow, but advertising (associated with gimmickry) is lowbrow. So these visual 'gimmicks' or 'tricks' are criticised because they are perceived of as 'hype' - included as marketing hooks (conversation starters?) rather than for their literary merit.

To show where I'm getting the issue of 'gimmickry' from:

AUTHORS:
Steven Hall: "these storytelling techniques are still considered 'experimental' or even worse, 'gimmicky' in some book circles; whereas in art you can sit in a gallery with a dead lobster on your head for a week without fear of being accused of either."

From Khan, Design Week: According to Safran Foer, the use of images in novels is 'still considered to be a gimmick or some expression of the failure of language'.

Arguing for the inclusion of images, from an interview with Gabe Hudson in the Village Voice:
"It's a shame that people consider the use of images in a novel to be experimental or brave. No one would say that the use of type in a painting is experimental or brave. Literature has been more protective of its borders than any other art form -- too protective. Jay-Z samples from Annie -- one of the least likely combinations imaginable-and it changes music. What if novelists were as willing to borrow?"

CRITICS: (I've only cataloged Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close so far)

Myers in an article called 'A tired bag of tricks' says: "What may hurt the book even with its intended audience arc the various diversions that both writer and publisher seem to have thought would constitute a selling point...After a while the gimmickry starts to remind one of a clown frantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatal image."

Upchurch subtitles his review 'Gimmicks drown out power, poignancy'

Greer: "Oskar's grandfather's letters are the most gimmicky in the novel...He never really comes alive, and is perhaps the one major person in the book that is more a metaphor than a fleshed-out character."

Updike: "But, over all, the book’s hyperactive visual surface covers up a certain hollow monotony in its verbal drama. "

Robert J. Hughes: "The novel's ramblings and gimmicks are meager representations of catastrophe and often badly out of key. The end of the book features a stunt -- a short flip-book of photographs with a body falling upward to a World Trade Center tower, as if we could turn back the clock. We can't, of course, but we already knew that. It is fairly offensive to see a novelist co-opt such an indelible image of desperation and death for such a trite purpose. Whimsy and terrorist tragedy do not add up, at least in Mr. Foer's hands.

Jonathan Raymond, Artforum: Impressively, the book's bells and whistles actually feel appropriate to its larger meaning, rather than coming across as mere gimmickry.


How many of these authors have websites/blogs? Almost all of the contemporary (last 5 years) I've looked at do. Steven Hall was actively involved in the marketing strategies of his book (TBS interview?), Mark Danielewski released parts of House of Leaves on the Internet pre-publication. The contemporary novel is embedded in a marketing culture, and, more broadly, what Mitchell etc describe as an age characterised by a 'pictoral turn' – how does this context effect the content of contemporary fiction?

Postmodern fiction

Postmodern fiction in America often extends the novel beyond its conventional generic boundaries. Such writing, David Harvey explains, is "necessarily fragmented, a 'palimpsest' of past forms super-imposed upon each other, and a 'collage' of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral" (66). American postmodern writers, according to Nicholas Zurbrugg, create a literary montage that "interweaves and accepts the copresence of differing discourses and conflicting categories" (56). Horst Ruthrof describes this strategy as a "schema of 'openness,'" in which "meaning is...something on the move, a dynamic which at times is deceptively slow but never comes to rest in social discourse" (30, 32). These writers often set their formal textual innovations in the context of parody, satire, and irony, developing a form that features a carnivalesque delight in irreverence.
Nicholas Sloboda, 1997 'Heteroglossia and collage: Donald Barthelme's Snow White', Mosaic, v.30 n.4 p109(15).

This description characterising montage, collage and a 'carnivalesque delight in irreverence' as elements of 'postmodern fiction' seems to fit well with a lot of the literature I'm looking at, but I have the same unease with 'postmodern' as I do with 'semiotics'.

Sloboda provides an analysis of Donald Barthelme's Snow White that includes consideration of typo/graphic devices as a way of understanding Mitchell's notion of 'literary spatiality' (reconsidering Joseph Frank's theorising of spatial form, Sobloda describes as "in which the written text is linked to temporality in its articulation of sounds in time, while visual art is interpreted in terms of spatiality in its depiction of forms and colors in space":

Barthelme's inclusion, in many of his works, of both actual pictures and textual graphics (visualized letters and words) literally extends his narratives beyond their traditionally perceived temporal framework. In doing so his practice accords with Mitchell's contention that "traditionally 'deviant' or 'experimental' phenomena such as emblems, hieroglyphics, pictograms, and concrete poetry may well appear as the anomalies which suggest and require new paradigms for understanding verbal space in general," whereby reading emerges as a "visionary (not merely visual) experience" ("Spatial Form" 296, 297). Within his re-writing of Snow White, Barthelme prompts such "visionary" readings, shifting from traditional notions of temporality and spatiality as independent to considering them as interdependent (but not necessarily complementary). His introduction of graphic designs juxtaposed with the written text is in keeping with Mitchell's contention that both "the language of images" and pictorial representations themselves are not the "object of a...temporalizing interpretation but [are]...the interpretative framework which spatializes the temporal arts of...music and literature" ("Introduction" 7).

In addition to using graphics to challenge what Mitchell regards as the presupposed hegemony of the textual form, Barthelme also uses these graphics to illustrate what Bakhtin calls expressions of "extreme freedom and frankness" (Rabelais 271). At the outset of Snow White, for example, he describes her as a "dark beauty" and then goes on to spoof conventional expectations by focusing specifically on her multiple beauty spots. After listing their locations on her body, he describes a pattern: "All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down" (3). He then provides an abstract depiction of their position on Snow White's body: [image]

By featuring graphic art at the opening of the novel, Barthelme thus immediately extends his text beyond the written word and points to spatiality itself as a significant dimension of the (de)signifying process.

I need to think about this more before I can comment on it.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick

I'll start by pointing out that I haven't read this book yet but it's next on my ever growing list. However, the way the book is being talked about is fascinating, I've put together some quotes and comments from reviews and an interview with Brian Selznick on the New York Times Book podcast (does anyone know how to reference a podcast?) Have a look at the website here you can watch an animated version of the opening sequence of drawings.

In the New York Times 'Book Update' podcast, the interviewer, Julie Just, describes the book as alternating between writing and very intricate drawings that "advance the story, not just ... decorate it". A 533 page book (300 are full bleed illustrations) set in 1930s Paris about a young boy who meets film maker Georges Melies, aimed at 'middle-grade readers' (young adult?) it draws inspiration from movies with very cinematic illustrative techniques (close ups, pans, establishing shots, etc ... language from film studies could be useful for me). Selznick says he was thinking about "the way the language of cinema tells its stories and thinking about how I could adapt that language within the form of the book." So, in some ways, this is an issue of translation - how do you translate a story about cinema onto the page? Some sections - the climatic chase scene is apparently a 36 page illustrated passage - are, in Selznick's words "like having small silent movies throughout".

Just asks him if he was tempted to produce the book as a graphic novel, to "toss out the words". He responds that he "loves the way graphic novels use pictures to help tell their story but what intrigued me more what the way picture books ... tell their story ...the way the act of turning the page in a picture book ... reveals something entirely new ... With a graphic novel you read them very much like regular novels [left to right, down the page, turn the page when you get to bottom right] but with picture books ... you turn the page because you need to see what is going to happen in the next moment of the story itself ... making every picture in the book a full double page spread and making the reader have to turn the page it puts the reader in a different kind of position than they would otherwise be with a book because they are actively involved in moving the story forward." Again, the notion of a reader needing to be 'active' to read visual elements in a book. Selznick talks about making the reader experience time the same way the character experience time in certain parts of the book, so it is active, and it is about the experience of reading. This is also returning to the idea of how important the medium is to the experience of reading. He has very consciously chosen this approach because it is the best way to tell his story.

But what does that make this book? It's not a graphic novel and it's not a picture book. An article from Publishers Weekly quotes:

Selznick's editor for the book, Tracy Mack, has never seen anything else quite like it. "As editors, we're always getting excited about something different, not different just for sake of being different, but truly new," she says. "This to me felt wholly different. It's not a graphic novel. It's not a film. It's more like a picture book where the illustrations are pushing beyond what the words say." ...

This is an editor describing what makes this book a new and unique storytelling form, rather than a novel with gimmicky typo/graphic elements. The article continues:

The original vision for Hugo was pretty standard: a 150-page book with an illustration in every chapter. But Selznick was determined to make this story about the roots of French cinema work visually. In revising, he listed every passage that didn't contain dialogue or the boy's thoughts. "Anything that was just a description, I replaced with a drawing." Mack, who studied painting herself, pushed him even further. "He had a long introduction to the train station [where Hugo secretly lives) but we needed to get to Hugo quicker. I told him, 'Just draw it.' He resisted because he had really come to like that piece of writing, but it wound up being so much better because the visual introduction imparts such a strong sense of place," she says. 'Drawn to cinema', Publishers Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6417185.html

This is, perhaps, a technique that is acceptable mostly because of the readership - young adult books are 'allowed' to be more experimental as they 'graduate' from picture books to novels (I claim this from my experience of designing book covers - almost all my freelance work is now for young adult fiction because I am privileged with far greater creative freedom). Yet this combination of word and image can be a powerful and unique.

"So I was thinking about the role narrative illustrations play in chapter books. [from what I could find on the net, a chapter book is aimed at 9-12 year olds with one line drawing per chapter] Something in the illustration is usually referred to in the text, and usually you put something in the illustrations that adds to the story, but in almost all cases the pictures could be removed and the story would not suffer. That's not the case in picture books, and I was thinking especially about those books in which the words stop and the pictures absolutely take over, like the wild rumpus [from Where The Wild Things Are]...I mean, it's a book about movies. A movie is a visual experience...I asked myself, 'What if parts of the story were told only in the pictures? Could I take out some of the text and replace it with pictures?'" Sue Corbett, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 1/4/2007

Selznick talks about drawing from scenes in French cinema - how better to pay homage to a visual medium than visually?

Steven Hall and interactive reading

Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts, spoke at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Transcript from ABC Radio National available here.

Hall comes from an arts background (an interview on ABC's Bookshow described him as a 'text based artist', meaning – I assume – he experimented with layout and typographic illustration) which he points out gives him a slightly different perspective than critics who are less 'broadminded' about his visual devices:

For example, centuries after Laurence Sterne included a marble page and a pure black page in Tristram Shandy, these storytelling techniques are still considered 'experimental' or even worse, 'gimmicky' in some book circles; whereas in art you can sit in a gallery with a dead lobster on your head for a week without fear of being accused of either.

Again, another recognition of the problem with the term 'gimmicky' ... reassures me that I'm on the right track asking the questions why is this phenomenon not merely gimmickry?, and why is this a unique mode of communication/what are the potentials for this to be a unique mode of communication?

Hall justifies his interest in visual devices, as long as they enhance the experience of reading:

I'm a huge advocate of unusual typesetting, visual elements, even altering the structure of a book itself, but these devices must always enhance the reading experience rather than obstruct it ... The idea of interactive books, though, is not without its pitfalls. After all, we read a book because we're interested in the writer's ideas and the way they tell a story; we don't necessarily want to have to start writing the ending ourselves. But this new interactivity is less about the reader having to create a story and more about offering the reader opportunities to find more of the story for themselves if they're interested in doing so. I guess there are parallels between this form of interaction with an extended text and the appeal of trying to work out a 'whodunnit' mystery as you get closer to the end. It's not about creating so much as the offer of a more active form of engagement.

Again, supporting my claim that these visual devices are not 'gimmickry' if they are integrated in/intrinsic to the text, though Hall supports the idea that the elements can be supplementary rather than necessarily 'intrinsic'. His notion of a 'more active form of engagement' returns to my initial idea of a 'third reading' that occurs when the visual and verbal collide. Perhaps this idea is worth revisiting.

Further, his (publisher's?) strategy of releasing slightly different editions in different countries is an interesting way of playing with the book form that is unusual in commercial publishing (though I own two copies of House of Leaves - one with colour, the other without). That Hall expected a fight with his publisher about including the visual devices (a series of blank pages, followed by the 'flip-book' emergence of a typographic shark...you have to see it to understand how well it works) but didn't actually meet resistance is interesting - another indication that this is becoming a more accepted phenomenon?

What am I doing (again)?

Warning: I think this starts relatively coherently, then descends into confusing garble. Any comments/direction would be appreciated.

The phenomenon/area of study
A couple of years ago, I began to notice an increasing number of novels integrating visual elements into the written narrative (novels with pictures in them). I don't mean children's books, graphic novels/comics, or gift books. I mean novels.
As a book designer (and avid reader) I found this fascinating, but when I started to talk to people in publishing, I discovered a deep divide between those who embraced this phenomenon and those who despised, or at least pooh-poohed, it. Why do some people have such a hostile reaction to 'images', or visual elements, in fictional prose?

I began collecting as many examples of these novels as I could find* and also collecting reviews of them from newspapers, magazines, blogs and journals ('high' and 'low' cultural criticism). After analysing a collection of these novels–and criticism of them–I concluded that there is little consistency to the way authors use visual elements, and there is no particular genre that these novels belong to. Therefore, this is not an emerging genre or literary style. These visual elements are being used within the prose as if they were words, rather than supplementary illustrations – but they are not words. I need to make this clear: the main criticism of these visual elements is that they are merely 'gimmickry' or decoration (they are dispensable, not essential to the text). I want to argue that these visual elements are not being used interchangeably with written language, they are being used because, in combination with the written text, they express something that words alone cannot. Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close uses an array of visual elements, claims: “Most of what I do in my books I do exactly because I can’t explain in any other way.” (Gerber & Triggs 2006) What is it he cannot explain in any other way, and why?
As I started cataloguing the types of visual elements I was finding, I needed a term to describe what they were that was more specific than 'visual elements' (which could include anything from page numbers to the typeface the novel is set in - these, I'd argue, are 'invisible' visual elements and generally not what I am interested in). I rejected the terms 'images' and 'illustration'** – at the moment I am describing the non-writing elements in these novels as 'typo/graphic devices'.

I have categorised the kinds of typo/graphic devices I've found as:

1. Unconventional typography (typesetting that interrupts the reading experience);
2. Photography;
3. Ephemera (printed material like letters, ads, found objects);
4. Collage (can this be incorporated into ephemera and drawing?);
   
5. Drawings, and;
6. Diagrams/information graphics.

I'm not sure how (if?) this is a useful typology of 'typo/graphic devices' yet, but I'm starting to consider the differences between these devices (techniques? modes?) through practice by 'designing' the same short story with the different devices and reflecting on my process/motivation (what can photographs express in fiction, how is this different than what drawing or unconventional typography express?). I'm doing this because when I look at existing descriptions of 'word-image relationships' they count 'image' to be a single category, whereas I think that different kinds of images express different things. To lump photographs, drawings, typography etc under the label 'images' doesn't allow for the subtle but rich differences between these modes of expression. However, creating a typology of typo/graphic devices is jumping the gun a bit ... in order to understand what different types of visual device can express/achieve, I have to look at the broader question: what is it that visual elements (in general) can express that words alone cannot?

Questions
Within fictional prose: what can written language express?; what can graphics express?; What can the combination of writing and graphics express?

OR

What are the potentials for the visual (typo/graphic devices) to express something that language alone cannot in fictional prose? / Why is this a unique mode of expression?

OR

Why are these typo/graphic devices more than decoration / illustration / gimmickry?

AND

What are the potentials for this to be a unique mode of expression? (speculative)

To describe how typo/graphic devices interact with the written text, I've looked at several taxonomies, or systems, that attempt to describe 'word-image relationships'. (let's ignore, for now, that I have issues with the term 'image' in this research and take 'image' to mean typo/graphic device) These systems attempt to describe the function of the visual in relation to the written text – they are not asking what are they? but what are they doing?. One of the problems I have with the taxonomies I've found is that they propose a system that could be applied to all word-image relationships, from instruction manuals to picture books to web pages. In trying to cover such a broad range of relationships they make generalisations that are difficult to apply in any depth to such a specific area of study as mine. In addition, as visual communications doesn't have a theory of its own, it borrows from linguistics (the study of language) or semiotics (the science of signs) (see Crow, Visible Signs); these systems try to analyse the visual as if it were language. But words and images are not the same. By analysing image as if it were language, something is left unaccounted for... as a designer, I've always been uneasy with clinical semiotic analysis of images; it doesn't deeply articulate how the affective (evocative?) power of images is achieved (rhetorical pathos, the experiential, Barthes punctum?). Is this what is referred to as 'media blindness': using a framework from one media (language) to describe another (image) requires you to turn a blind eye to what is unique to that media (see Liv Hausken)? I am not saying that these models are useless – they provide an invaluable starting point – but to achieve a rich understanding of the visual that goes beyond illustration (visuals that support the written text), they need to be adapted for specific 'media' (in my case, the novel). Ryan (Narrative Across Media, 2004: 22) discusses two branches of media studies – one focuses on media as a channel of communication (examines the content of the messages sent through the medium under study), the second focuses on media (or 'medium', see Meyrowitz) as a means of expression (not the content of messages but the characteristics of the medium and how this affects interpretation). What's the difference between Media, Medium and Mode?

So, I need to describe why this phenomenon deserves a taxonomy of written-graphic relationships that is specific to it, rather than part of a larger generalised system. Initial thoughts:
Visual elements are not expected in novels. The 'images' in fictional prose are expected to be conceptual: 'drawn' in the 'eye' of the imagination, not graphically illustrated on the page (look at Lodge and Mitchell). On a website, in an instruction manual, a newspaper or children's book, images are - if not expected - at least not surprising, so we can make generalisations about how to relate the two modes of expression (words and images). But in a medium that has traditionally been the exclusive domain of writing*** we need a different system of analysis that accounts for the function of the visual that is distinct from written text.

When I am able to describe why the combination of written and typo/graphic modes can express something unique (why typo/graphic devices are more than decoration/gimmickry), I can speculate the potentials for this to be a unique mode of expression within fictional prose.

The other issue I want to address is one of language. Visual Communications has a language that is recognised by its practitioners but possibly not its theorists. Is there a way to develop a model of word-image relationships in a language that practitioners will understand (ie be able to use) rather than borrowing the analytical language of semiotics and linguistics? Can I develop this language by reflecting on my own practice?

I look forward to a point where I am confident enough to stop putting everything in inverted commas and italics.

* Locating relevant examples is a more difficult task that it may seem, as there is generally nothing on the cover to hint that graphic elements lurk within – I stand in book shops flicking through shelves of books, so please, leave me a message with any examples I'm missing from the list on the right side bar
** Rejection of the term 'image' is largely to do with reading image theory from the likes of W.J.T. Mitchell, another post will explain this in more depth, but essentially, the notion of 'image' is problematic especially for an interdisciplinary topic like mine – Mitchell clearly describes this problem by describing the range of things that go by the name 'image' across different discourses as "The Family of Images", with branches labeled: Graphic; Optical; Perceptual; Mental; Verbal. 'What Is an Image?' New Literary History, vol.15, no.3, Spring 1984). 'Illustration' is also problematic because there is no clear definition within any discipline - does the written text have to come before the image for it to be an illustration? If so, many of these images are not 'illustrations' as they are not actually depicting what is express in words. I need to think this through more thoroughly later.
*** I don't want to go into illustrated editions of classics, the original serialised publication of Victorian novels with book plate illustrations etc, I'm aware of these but confident I can describe the purpose of the illustrations as different than what I'm talking about.

Progress Report, June 07

Tracking my confidence levels over the first three semesters of my research. It's a bit like being 16 again – one minute I think I know everything and the next minute I think everything's a catastrophe and no one understands me. Sorry, Mum, you thought this had passed....

Literary theory applied to design?

Language and images are inextricably linked – they are both modes of expression through which we understand, represent and articulate the world. Yet our understanding of language is far more developed (documented, studied, refined?) than our understanding of images. W.J.T. Mitchell's article 'What is an image?' (New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 34 1984) offers a

So it makes sense to take the more established understanding of language and apply it to images – to 'read' images – however, it is important to remember that word and image, although similar, are not the same. What a linguistic analysis of images will not pick up are the elements of images that are unique. I think this is what's known in media studies as 'medium blindness'. Without reflecting on the difference between language and images, using a language framework to analyse images will inevitably fall short.

The focus of my research over the next little while will be look at what is different between these two modes. Or, to ask: what is it that images do that words alone cannot?

narrative vs. rhetoric

I've had a post-it note on my screen saying 'narrative device vs rhetorical device?' since January. I think I understand the difference now...

Fiction: non-factual narrative – stories drawn from the imagination rather than fact.

Narrative: From Latin narrare, meaning to 'recount'. Sequence of events. A story (or part of).

Rhetoric: From the Greek rhetor or 'orator'. The persuasive way one relates an idea/theme in order to convince.

So, a narrative device would be something that progresses plot, whereas a rhetorical device would be something that describes character, setting or action, more generally referred to as literary device, where literary means 'aesthetic'. Clear as mud.

The typo/graphic elements I'm talking about are therefore not narrative devices, as they are not used to progress the plot (what about Steven Hall's typographic shark?) but as literary, or rhetorical, devices, as they are used to persuade/evoke pleasure in the reader. These visual devices are experiential - they require the reader to participate with the text in a more literally visual way than reading words alone. Their 'value' is in the way they engage the reader.

Sydney Writer's Festival - some reflections

Took my Mum to the Janet Turner Hospital lunch today. She was talking about her most recent novel Orpheus Lost, a modern take on the Orpheus and Euridice myth. While writing, she listened to two operas composed around the myth, Gluck's and another (maybe Peri, I'm not familiar with it). I've been looking at writers who write 'out of' images, but how many write 'out of' music? Is this more or less recognised than writing from images (we often use musical analogies to describe the creative process in design)? She also talked about how current events influence her writing - she had promised her New York agent a less dark and tragic book this time, intending to write an upbeat romance (not sure how you could retell a myth where a man loses his love twice, once by fate and once by folly, in an upbeat way, but anyway). But current events (largely terrorism and the reaction to it in the States, where she currently lives) seeped in and it's another dark, tragic book.

On Saturday I went Andrea Stretton's talk 'The Book in Art' at the AGNSW. She wrote an illustrated article for Art&Australia (Vol 42 No 4 Winter 2005) on the topic. She had some interesting ideas about how books were represented in art (mostly painting) supported with images she's been collecting since her youth. She suggests that rather than seeing the digital era as a time of decline for the book, we could consider that the book has now been freed from its role as a symbol of all knowledge, the burden of history (what she calls 'the book as gravitas'). She also made an argument around the idea that in Western art, there are few images of men reading (who are not monks, saints or philosophers) but images of women reading abound. 19th Century paintings often depicted women reading or holding an open book. She attributes this to the idea that reading was 'women's private space', a passive, decorative activity.

Illustrating Alice

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures and conversation?' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Via an academically unverifiable Google search, I discovered British copyright expired on Carroll's classic in 1907, allowing any publisher to release a new edition. Perhaps this explains why it is such a commonly illustrated book (see, for example, the list of hundreds of illustrations: http://www.lewiscarroll.org/illus.html). Anyone who has taught in an undergraduate art or design degree will recognise it as a popular text to illustrate/reference (I can think of at least two projects in which I used Alice references in my own undergrad degree – they were both fairly awful). Carroll originally created 37 line drawings to accompany his first draft and added text emphasis (boldness, underlining, shaped text boxes, etc), which demonstrates his concern for the typo/graphic elements of his story. The setting of the poem 'A Mouse's Tail' is a good example of concrete poetry. The original illustrations he commissioned John Tenniel to produce were a blend of cartoon and caricature, apparently using real life politicians as inspiration for some of the characters. Marie-Laure Ryan, editor of Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, describes Tenniel's illustrations as a successful case of "the verbal and visual [blending] in the mind of the reader-spectator into one powerful image, each version filling the gaps of the other." (139)

This tradition has been maintained by later illustrators; Barry Moser and Ralph Steadman use quite obvious likenesses to contemporary figures (Moser's March Hare looks an awful lot like Ringo Starr). Is this a case of illustration functioning beyond (but always in tandem with) the written text? Something I'm thinking about at the moment. Almost all children's books use illustration in this way, but we lose that with adult literature.

It's occurred to me that writing this (tenuously relevant) post is a less productive activity than finishing my semester progress report, but if I write the word 'taxonomy' again I'm going to scream. I'm finding the blog a good way to digress (alright, procrastinate) at the moment, though some of my posts are becoming less productive than my earlier epic rants. I think this is a good thing.

Why not semiotics?

The process of reading an image is wholistic, not linear - the component parts only makes sense in relation to the whole (hermeneutic?) So how can you conduct a semiotic analysis (breaking it into a 'grammar' of compositional parts) to an image?

How do you analyse a found image, something that hasn't been consciously composed for the context you put it in, using a semiotic model?

Further to why I'm not focusing on semiotics, a quote from Kate Sweetapple's PhD thesis:

"Although the application of semiotic theory to the field of design has enabled a greater understanding of how meaning is produced in visual communication it does not account for how the designer affects the type of engagement the viewer has with the material, which is a significant aspect of the communication process. The absence of such an understanding results in designers having limited control over the viewer response to their messages, which in turn compromises the intended viewer experience."

Semiotic analysis interprets existing images by coding/decoding the elements (signs) within those images. It does not (to my admittedly limited understanding) account for the process of creation; the intention of the creator to affect the way the viewer/reader responds to the designed outcome (image or document).

Kate's thesis develops a model based on literary theory and the notion of 'distance' to identify four types of visual narrators (idiosyncratic, implicit, imperative and esoteric) and provide a new understanding of the relationship between the designer and their visual outcome. She provides "a theorised model of practice, and a method of visual analysis".

Rhetoric

The notion of rhetoric keeps raising it's head.

Rhetoric is the art of finding and employing the most effective means of persuasion on any subject, considered independently of intellectual mastery of that subject. Booth, The Rhetorical Stance.

Considered in relation to Safran Foer's assertion: “Most of what I do in my books I do exactly because I can’t explain in any other way.” (Gerber & Triggs 2006) Are there elements of narrative that are more persuasively articulated through visuals? Consider the 'flip book' ending of Safran Foer's book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where a man's body floats back up to the top of the Twin Towers, 'reversing the tragedy' – this technique asks a rhetorical question (what if?) in a visual way. Is this appropriate because, for so many of us, the experience of the S11 attack on the World Trade Centre was primarily a visual one, through television and the internet? If contemporary experience of current affairs (tv news, papers, websites) and entertainment (films, television, games) occurs through visual media, is the way we reflect on these experiences going to increasingly involve visual rhetoric?

Revised attempt at writing a methodology: 2

* I just need someone to make this for me.

Text, paratextual, intertextual (of a book)

Text: To define the two terms below, I need to establish that when I say 'text' I am only referring to the written content of a book (words), and not the entire book as an artefact (content and form).

Para-textual: Elements outside the text, 'packaging': jacket (book cover), blurb, prelim pages (imprint page, title page, dedication, etc), folios, running heads/feet. Chapter head illustrations? Picture sections? Elements added after the author has written the text; material generally generated by the publisher/editor/designer?

Inter-textual: Non-verbal elements within the text, supplementary (?) information: photographs, diagrams, illustrations that are integrated into the text. Conceived or generated during the composition of the text (or can they be added afterwards where necessary?)

The creative role of the book designer (where the designer has creative agency) generally involves para-textual elements (book cover design, typesetting design). If a designer is involved in generating inter-textual elements, these are usually producing illustrations/diagrams from a fairly strict brief (what I would call rendering rather than creating). In fiction with integrated (inter-textual) graphic elements, does the designer or writer maintain creative agency?

Revised attempt at writing a methodology

Presenting research – the difference between research and practice

A criticism of my doctoral assessment was that I came across as defensive and perhaps overly confident – at the perceived risk of not listening to feedback and being wedded to my own conclusions before testing them properly. I think this criticism is due to two factors: firstly, nervousness and secondly, the difference between presenting in professional settings and presenting research.

Firstly, when I'm nervous, I lose my sense of humour. I speak with a humourless gravity that may be misinterpreted as false confidence. A colleague suggested a couple of drinks beforehand may help, but no one likes a humourless drunk. I think experience in presenting my research is all that will help me here.

Secondly, and more importantly, I think there is a vast difference between what is expected from a presentation of professional work in progress and what is expected from a presentation of research work in progress. As a practitioner returning to academics, it's a been a distinction I've only come to understand recently, but an important one. If I'm presenting my work (often to a marketing department rather than a 'client' as such), it's in my best interest to gloss over uncertainties and speak with unwavering confidence; in many instances, I am presenting work in progress to an audience who are not visual thinkers, so when presenting unfinished work, the client/marketing department needs to be verbally convinced that I will produce an effective and well polished outcome. A good marketing department/client can sniff out uncertainty and will savage a work in progress like a pack of wolves (perhaps a slight hyperbole, but not entirely unwarranted). With research presentations, on the other hand, glossing over uncertainties and speaking with unwavering confidence does exactly the opposite of inspiring faith in your abilities to perform the research effectively.

I said that there are two factors that influence this criticism of me, but if I'm being completely honest in my reflections, there are actually three: it's sometimes true.

Conference: The Language of Images

It's been a few weeks since I was in Connecticut at the Language of Images conference: www.english.ccsu.edu/petit/ so now seems as good a time as any to post reflections. The most important idea I took from the conference is that I need to clarify that my area of interest is around written texts incorporating images in a literal sense – I'm discussing novels with actual images rather than descriptive prose. I was surprised to find that many discussions around "images in fiction" were about written descriptions of images (think Picture of Dorian Gray). Ekphrasis: a rhetorical device by which one art form describes another art form. I was also surprised by how many speakers did not show examples from the illustrated books they discussed. One paper compared W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants with Penelope Lively's The Photograph but without any images of the books it was unclear until half way through question time that The Emigrants has reproductions of photographs printed in the text but The Photograph does not - it has a written description of a photograph. Often 'photographs' were discussed, but not necessarily a specific photograph or in terms of the relationship to the surrounding text.

Feedback from my paper: I presented a way to discuss the typo/graphic elements in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by using literary terms. The response was an interest in how a designer would react to these elements, how I would use design rhetoric to describe them. An interesting exercise might be to review the same book from the perspective of a design critic and the perspective of a literary critic. Sebald's work will lend itself well to this exercise, as my first reaction to seeing his book was 'these photos are awful'; I was considering their aesthetic quality as individual images rather than their contribution to a narrative whole. Also need to look at the distinction between inter and intra text, semiotic analysis (sigh) uses these terms in quite specific ways.

Keynote: Karen Jacobs, 'The Archeology of the Image'
Postmodern archival text: post 1950s written text including public/private documents/ephemera. W.G. Sebald. Also Eco's Mysterious Flame?
Foucault discusses using archival documents as descriptive rather than interpretive.
You plot a map, but also a narrative.
"The paranoid reader": the more you look the more you think everything is connected.
Panel E: Literary Illustrations
Kirsty Bell: Claims illustration always follows text, as an illustration is an artist's interpretation of text (or idea?)
David Spector: Talked about "pre-illustration", when an illustration inspires text, he convincingly argued an illustration from Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds inspired the description of Thornfield mansion in Jane Eyre.
Panel C: Text and Image in Fiction I
Maha Meraay: discusses Sebald's work as a mosaic, comprehension of word and image is not through one to one relationships but by the bigger picture, the image is a function of the whole.
Pascale Tollance: describes the writer as a maker of images, but with words.

Keynote: Liliane Louvel
Captioning is reductive, captioning an image reduces the potential readings. Reading is active while viewing is passive (?). Notion of a 'pictoral third': in between text and image is a dynamic moment, synesthesia, when an image appears in a reader's head (their "inner screen") the pictoral 3rd hovers between image and text - a written description of an image hangs as a floating 3rd image, because the image in a reader's head will never be the same as the image in a writer's head.

Sebald
Sean McGlade: Giving voice to memory is like giving voice to an image, perhaps why memoirs include photographs. These photographs are often more inspiration than illustration (for the writer or reader?) A photograph can show what is significant more than what is true? Once an ekphrastic analysis is complete, it becomes an artwork in itself.
Isabell Gadoin: Sebald works in genres that usually have images - memoir, travel narrative. Text and image compete but do not repeat.

Questions:
If the "word is made flesh" through typography, what is the image made?
What does "graphic" mean in a literary sense? Look at Hillis Miller

A picture, requested by luima

Luima pointed out that there haven't been many images on my blog for a while. So here is a drawing I did after someone described my research exercises as "autistic" – when I reported this to my flatmate she pointed out that she had also described me as autistic the week before because my wardrobe consists almost entirely of red or stripy clothes. I drew the shirts I own that are stripy from memory. I think their definition of autism is limited. I also own a lot more stripy stuff than this.

The problem with design

It occurred to me that the main criticism about integrating graphic elements in fiction (graphic elements are gimmicky, style over substance, ornamentation for the sake of it) is parallel to criticism of graphic design in general. It is a prejudice of word over image. I defend the merit of these novels with the same defensive conviction with which I defend my profession.

Images have the potential to achieve more than mere illustration of a verbal idea. Images offer as much narrative potential as words, but the language of images is less universally understood?

Post Doctoral Assessment shift

After an intense but helpful doctoral assessment, I need to restructure/reconsider the scope and approach to this research. It is clear that my question is not an adequate (valid?) research question at this stage and that I've started to take a direction I believe I'm expected to take, rather than the one I want to take. It's difficult to listen to so many varied opinions and not want to take on all the advice offered, but after some initial (re)consideration here is a statement of where I believe I want to head.

i) This is happening: I've identified a phenomenon in contemporary writing – the integration of graphic elements in novels – as a designer, the notion of writers thinking/working in a designerly way is fascinating. Discussion around this phenomenon is embryonic from both literary and design camps. My first aim has been to show that/describe how this phenomenon is happening. I believe I've successfully achieved the basis of this aim through my survey of examples and early papers analysing some of these books.

ii) How can I talk about it? I've begun conducting an 'artefact analysis' (collecting and analysing examples of novels with integrated graphic elements), which has led me to generalise some strategies (ways the graphic elements are used). This analysis will continue throughout my research, but I want to spend a couple of months exploring this more deeply to develop ways of talking about this phenomenon.

iii) I will develop a more concise research question after further consideration of the 'artefact analysis'. My recent headache about this research has come from trying to squeeze a question out of a topic I don't fully understand yet. No one really understands this yet, because it is new – I need to spend some more time with the material before I know what I want to ask of it. Some questions I've squeezed and abandoned are: What are the possibilities for designers to participate in the process of invention (orchestration rather than origination?) in this new literary phenomenon?; How does this phenomenon affect the relationship between writer and designer (or 'book composer')?; How are the roles of writer and designer shifting with this emerging narrative technique?; Are there specific ways of integrating images that allow the designer to participate more actively in the process of invention?; What can design teach the literary world about discussing the use of images?; Who is credited with authorship in a mutlimodal text?

To ask of a research question: does it allow for a credible argument based on good quality evidence? What should PhD research do? P Dunleavy's idea that rather than filling a gap in literature, it should describe a new phenomenon.

The role of reflection

Putting together an essay for Heat magazine, I felt it was important to include images of the novels I was discussing. I thought the most logical way of doing this was to insert the images below the title of the book, but before the descriptive text. It was pointed out to me by Sally McLaughlin that the conventional protocol for academic papers is to insert the image somewhere in the text after you have begun talking about it. The fact that I had broken this protocol shows an (unconscious) consideration of the importance of 'reading' the image before the descriptive text. On reflection, I consider why I thought an image-first approach was most logical: 1. showing vs telling is a more immediate way to describe something visual, and 2. I wanted the reader to be able to see the example as they were reading about it (not afterwards).

Charles William Hatfield's PhD thesis, 'Graphic interventions: Form and argument in contemporary comics' starts with a note discussing the problem of inserting "visual quotes" (examples of the comics being discussed):

"positioning this quoted material within the body of the text has proved a challenge. There is not entirely pleasing way to do so, as punctuating the text with images tends to fragment the reading. This fragmenting, I would argue, activates different protocols of reading and makes for a tension-filled experience, somewhere between reading a traditional written text and reading comics per se." (p.vii)

Woman's World and A Humument, reviews

Two reviews cut from a paper I'm writing, posted here so I don't lose them...

Women’s World, Graham Rawle and A Humament, Tom Phillips
A different approach to typographic experimentation is Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. Stylistically and technically reminiscent of the typographic collage experiments of 20th Century avant-garde movements such as Dada and Futurism, Rawle’s 437-page novel was created from 40,000 text fragments cut out from 1960s women’s magazines. Removed from their original context, the cut out text fragments become more image than word. It is said to be a “surprisingly absorbing thriller” (Gerber and Triggs, Print) and that “Rawle’s narrative grips as a reading experience from start to finish.” (Poyner, Eye) Here, the graphic device drives the narrative from the outset; the written text is generated by the collaged elements.

At first glance, Woman’s World appears similar to Tom Phillips’ cult classic A Humument – first published in 1980 – but is, in fact, technically the reverse. Where Rawle creates a narrative by repositioning phrases from magazines, Phillips takes an existing book, W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document, and visually ‘treats’ it, painting and drawing over pages to cover and reveal strands of text. Where Rawle adds to a new page, Phillips deletes from an existing page. Phillips writes, “I plundered, mined and undermined the text to make it yield to the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words.” Regardless of whether images are added or subtracted, in both instances graphic elements are used as a writing to generate the narrative. Rather than mere typographic experiments, these books are Esher-like artworks in themselves – the text becomes image, but the image shapes the text.


> Phillips keeps reworking A Humament and re-releasing it, or sections of it. In the tradition of the altered book or the altered page.

BBC4 Radio Interview

I was interviewed by the Open Book show on BBC Radio 4 recently, talking about typographic experimentation in contemporary fiction. The interview is available to listen to online, it's the February 11 2007 show and the interview is about 13 or 14 minutes in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/

Literary terms for graphic elements

An issue identified early in my research was that reviews of books with integrated graphic elements never really discuss how these elements are being used (if they even mentioned them at all). There are of course exceptions, in particular reviews in design publications like Eye magazine or Print, but for the most part I found two types of description: 'gimmicky' or 'whimsical'. A very rough explanation of these two categories is that 'gimmicky' voices disdain toward the graphic elements (why are there pictures meaninglessly interrupting the words?), where as 'whimsical' voices an appreciation of the graphic elements (there are these lovely little additions). However, neither actual address HOW the graphic elements are being employed. Why is there such a hesitance to discuss the visual? Is it because the reviewer doesn't consider the elements essential (in the case of the 'gimmicky', yes)? Or because a reviewer would rarely describe an author's use of alliteration, allegory or aside (as John Dale pointed out, literary devices are discussed in writing theory/workshop classes, not by your average reader)? Or is it because reviewers are by and large "word" people, an not comfortable with a vocabulary to discuss image? Margo Hammond illuminates this point when describing how graphic novels are reviewed (not exactly what I'm talking about, but the same problem):

"But perhaps the biggest obstacle to reviewing these works is that they are neither fish (totally text) nor fowl (totally art). There are very few of us who know how to review this genre. Even when we do address works like "Persepolis" and "Maus," it is the text that is usually examined most closely, with commentary on the artwork brought in as an afterthought. What should be considered, it seems to me, is the interplay between the two art forms, which lies at the heart of why these works differ from any other." (2004, 'Comic books for big people', http://www.poynter.org/profile/profile.asp?user=4399)

I've set myself the task of writing up book reviews of several relevant novels using literary terms to describe how the graphic elements are integrated into the narrative. Off the top of my head, I expect to find examples of chapter head illustrations used as foreshadowing (I have done this in some text designs recently), photographs/illustration as dramatic irony (the reader is shown something the protagonist isn't), photographs for flashback. Hopefully this will show that graphic elements can be described in the same terms as literary devices.

Redirecting my research - Jan 2007

Design theorist Rick Poyner lists 3 reasons he believes a new school of writers producing 'visual prose' has not emerged (in print), despite much hype about this being an emerging territory in the past decade:

"First, because most writers have no desire to give up any aspect of their autonomy and no interest in extending the designer’s role. Second, because most designers don’t possess the degree of writing talent or commitment that ambitious writing requires (this is not meant to be harsh: designers’ primary skills and interests lie in design). Third, because without works produced in sufficient number to establish their place in the bookshops and reviews pages, there can be no viable market for books of this kind." (Poyner, R 2003, 'A new novel uses the possibilities of visual prose to tackle a timely subject', Eye Magazine, vol. 49, no. 13. Note: This article is a review of VAS: An Opera in Flatland, which Poyner cites as an exception to the above claim)

At this stage in my research, I find myself in a position to refute Poyner's claim. I assert that examples of 'visual prose' are, if not flooding, certainly seeping into the market (see lists of books on this blog, I can't update it fast enough with newly discovered examples). I also suggest that rather than considering 'visual prose' as a type of book (a genre with its own "place in the bookshops"), 'visual prose' should be considered a narrative style that may suit many genres. Reviewers are taking note (as demonstrated in my word mapping exercises) and both word and image camps are beginning to comment on the phenomenon in newspaper/magazine articles (popular media) and journals (academic). But of most interest, to me, is the smeared distinction between writer and designer. Instead of writers learning to share or co-author ("extend the designer's role") or designers learning to write prose, perhaps there is a new breed of writer/designer or designer/writer emerging. The most succinct example I can offer is:
Chris Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid in the World won the Guardian's Best Book award in 2001, while Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close won the V&A Illustration Award in 2005 -- a graphic novel takes a literary fiction award, and a literary novel takes an illustration award.

What does this mean for those in the practice of writing and designing books?
What can design teach new writing, and vice-versa?
How do I research this?

As mentioned previously, it seems logical to me that to research an issue about practice, you should start by experimenting in practice. My first practical experiment in asking writers and designers these questions will be through a short (6 week, 2 hours per week) course run through The Centre for New Writing at UTS.

Seminar presentation: Word&Image in Contemporary Fiction

Following is the presentation I gave at UTS through the Centre for New Writing on October 18, 2006. It's ridiculously long, so feel free to skip to the pictures. All images of published work are for the purpose of review, copyright remains with the publisher. All text is copyright of the author, Zoë Sadokierski, except where referenced otherwise.

Today, I’m talking about part of my ongoing doctoral research. Specifically, I’m addressing the use of graphic elements in contemporary fiction. I’m using ‘contemporary fiction’ as a loose term to mean ‘things happening now’. Most of my examples are from the past 5 or 6 years, and this is because I’m identifying an emerging narrative style.

I’m going to show some examples and talk through the way the graphic elements are integrated with written text, as well as looking at what this emerging style might mean for writers, designers and readers.

Graphic Novels
In the past couple of years, I noticed graphic novels were earning commercial interest in Australia. All of the major bookstores in the Sydney CBD have a graphic novel section, whether it’s an ad hoc shelf in sci-fi, or an entire wall awkwardly wedged between erotic fiction and romance.

While working as an in-house book designer, I was briefed to design the cover for a Jodi Picoult novel, The Tenth Circle. An international bestseller, Picoult often uses the technique of narrating each chapter from the perspective of a different character, and setting each character in a different typeface. The Tenth Circle takes this technique a step further – one of the main characters, Daniel, is a graphic novelist, so his ‘voice’ is shown through the graphic novel he’s writing as the story unfolds. If Jodi Picoult—who can shift 80–100,000 copies of a book in Australia alone—is using graphic novels, then they’ve certainly hit the mainstream.

I was excited by the prospect of playing with elements of the graphic novel in the cover design, then surprised that this was met with absolute opposition by the marketing and sales departments (well, actually not that surprised). They didn’t want this feature to be made a feature of; there was concern that the graphic novel element would turn off the ‘Jodi’ demographic. A frustrating aspect of working in commercial publishing is the perceived need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And apparently, the lowest common denominator doesn’t appreciate graphic novels. This isn’t specific to this publisher, or even to Australia. Since the release of the Allen & Unwin edition, I’ve been looking at overseas editions and none of them have tackled the graphic novel element on the cover either. (If you look closely I did manage to sneak it in, but it’s certainly not a feature).

Asking around, the reaction from readers and booksellers was strongly divided – people either loved it or hated it. From this, I became interested in how people react to the inclusion of images in fiction. Why are some people so violently opposed to the use of graphic elements in fiction? Why are comics and graphic novels considered inferior literature?

Graphic novels are not the focus of what I’m discussing, but I think they provide an interesting point of departure for examining word and image in contemporary fiction for two main reasons:

1. Graphic novelists and enthusiasts have long fought for validation and recognition of their art form in a print culture which values word over image, a problem currently faced by novelist using graphic elements in their work;
2. The interplay between word and image in these multi-modal books is complex: the words don’t simply reinforce the pictures and the pictures don’t merely reflect the words – they combine to form a new language that requires reading of both text and image to make sense. I argue many works of contemporary fiction incorporating graphic elements are achieving the same thing.

But let’s go back a step: What is a graphic novel? How is it different from a comic? I’ll offer a truncated explanation…

On a formal level, comics are generally shorter and stapled, whereas graphic novels are longer and bound like a book. In terms of content, a comic depicts an episode of an ongoing story featuring consistent characters, where a graphic novel presents a more complete narrative; it tends to be a one-off, or an anthology that encompasses an era of a certain story. The term ‘graphic novel’ is attributed to Richard Kyle, an American comic critic and publisher, in 1964. Inspired by the popular tradition of French ‘bande dessinee’ and Japanese Manga, he attempted to “galvanize American creators and readers to aspire to similar ambition and sophistication” as their foreign, more respected counterparts. However, this description is a prime example of what some critics use to disparage the graphic novel movement – they argue that it is a vain attempt to legitimise the comic form by slapping on a label that bestows a sense of cultural importance. It’s easy to argue that the label is an inappropriate one: many graphic novels are neither graphic (in terms of their content or their visual style) or novels (many are autobiography, historical non-fiction, etc). Many writers and illustrators of graphic novels reject the label, but no one has yet offered a suitable replacement. Though I like Art Spiegelman’s definition: “comic books that need a bookmark”.


Here are three examples from popular graphic novels. The far right, Watchmen, is what most people expect a graphic novel to look like; primary colours, speech bubbles and it even has men in tights. But this was an ambitious and pivotal work in 1986 which changed the way people read, talked about, and envisioned graphic novels. The other two examples are perhaps more artistic than most would expect, but equally considered graphic novels.

To qualify as a graphic novel, the work needs to be presented as what Spiegelman calls “sequential art”; action takes place in frames, and the size and composition of the frames gives a sense of duration, of passing time. For this reason, I’d argue that graphic novels are more closely linked to cinema than literature, a point supported by the recent proliferation of graphic novels being adapted as films. Many would be aware that Batman, X-Men, Sin City and maybe even Ghost World or American Splendour were graphic novel adaptions, but also Tim Burton’s From Hell, about Jack the Ripper, Road to Perdition and A History of Violence. That these graphic novels are being adapted to film is arguably a combination of factors – the largest movie going demographic is 15-18 year old males, the stories are already in a cinematic form with consideration of action and movement, there is great potential to serialise them and create marketable spin offs. But also, and more importantly, there is now a generation of adults who grew up in a time where graphic novels are considered by many to be a legitimate cultural form, not just light entertainment for children.

In an address to the Bristol Literary Society about the “Death of the Novel” in 1969, author and reviewer John Updike speculated: “I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip masterpiece.” And he has been proven correct. There are literally hundreds of articles from librarians and educators advocating the value of graphic novels and providing lists of appropriate works for different age groups. Graphic novels are even being recognised in literary circles:

Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which shows parallel narratives of Spiegelman’s father, an Auschwitz survivor and Spiegelman’s present-day life in New York City, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992; Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid in the World, won the Guardian’s First Novel Award in 2001, a controversial decision that apparently divided the judging panel.

New York Times reviewer Charles McGrath, whose quotation at the start of this lecture questioned what literary form may soon replace the novel, suggests graphic novels as a possibility, they are, he says: “what novels used to be—an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal—and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.”

Although I’m sceptical that graphic novels could replace the traditional novel as the major printed storytelling medium, the comic-strip masterpieces envisioned by Updike have arrived, as evidenced in the commercial growth, visibility and accolades for graphic novels. Yet the medium is still not widely respected in Australia. I spent the first six months of this year hurrying to assure people that I wasn’t researching comics. Because that would have been a bad thing? There seems to be a prevailing sense in Australia, and many other Western countries, that images cheapen – or distract from – good writing. Images in books are either for children, the illiterate, or gimmicky add ons – a good piece of writing for an educated audience should stand alone as a written text.

Garrett-Petts and Lawrence (2000) describe an historical resistance to visual culture, claiming that “visual images are said to offer only superficial snapshots of reality – sight without insight.” (ix) They continue: “Any integration of visual and verbal literacies…presents a potentially disruptive challenge to the hegemony of word over image – and openly suspicious (even hostile) characterizations of the visual should be seen… as an anxious reaction to that challenge.” (3)

I want to pause here for a moment and clarify a term. Many contemporary schools of thought would appear to contradict this statement, arguing that we live in an image-centric world: Steve Johnson, in Interface Culture, states “If you live your entire life under the spell of television, the mental world you inherit from the TV is the supremacy of images over text.”

We constantly interpret complex iconic interfaces: on mobile phones, computers, menus on digital television, even buying a train ticket. Using a desktop computer, we have a choice of fonts, we can add images to documents and we can choose from and alter designed templates to make power point presentations and web pages. We can edit video footage and compose our own soundtrack to go with it. There is a growing awareness, certainly in the Western world, of how visuals work. As a designer I’m not necessarily advocating this as a good thing, I think all clip art and the font Comic Sans should be globally deleted. But I think it’s undeniable that as our entertainment and information technologies become increasingly visually demanding, we develop a more visually literate culture, more capable of interpreting visual texts. And we’re only now seeing the emergence of a generation who’ve never known the world any other way. Kress and Van Leewin argue in their significant book, Reading Images, that visual literacy will begin to be a matter of survival.

So when I’m talking about a culture which values word over image, I’m referring to a literary, print culture. I’m interested in books, and specifically fiction with integrated graphic elements. To discuss these books, I can’t ignore media arts like film, television and the Internet, just as I can’t ignore graphic novels and comics, because their influence on the wider culture is pervasive.

I’m also not saying that all writers and literary critics are anti-visual – they are in the middle of the same cultural shift, but literary print culture seems to be the last bastion of the mediums where the hegemony of word over image remains. And many want to keep it that way. Kress and van Leeuwin summarise; “the opposition to the emergence of a new visual literacy is not based on an opposition to the visual media as such, but an opposition to the visual media in situations where they form an alternative to writing and can therefore be seen as a potential threat to the present dominance of verbal literacy among elite groups.”

So perhaps it’s a sense of literary elitism of word over image that prevents people from accepting graphic novels as valid literary forms. Or perhaps it’s simply a lack of eduction on how to read them.

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, a bestselling graphic memoir of her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, didn’t start reading or making graphic novels until she was 25.

In this page, a bomb has gone off on her street and she’s panicked that her family is dead. The longer panel shows her fear and shock being drawn out across that frame. By fluctuating the figure and ground in the next panel as she moves into darkness, with the speech bubble breaking through, you see very simple graphic elements can show a lot of drama. The blackness represents her fear, the white bubble the voice of hope, her mother.

On reading graphic novels, Satrapi says, “Like anything new, you have to cultivate your interest. It’s like in Opera. You have to go a couple of times to appreciate it.” I think what she means here, is that you have to learn how to read the language of a graphic novel before you can appreciate one. You need to be able to read and look at the same time, which is especially difficult if you’re used to reading quickly. This is not an easier form of reading, because it has pictures like a children’s book, it is a different way of reading. The sparseness of the written language requires the reader to draw a significant portion of the narrative from the images – not dissimilar to how we read life; by interpreting environments, gestures, body language, and facial expression. I define the term graphic novel as a description of a format, but also as a unique way of narrating, where word and image are integrated and inseparable.

Like it or not, graphic novels are emerging as a serious storytelling format. To discuss the potentials of integrating images in written storytelling, comics or graphic novels shouldn’t be ignored. Examining graphic novels and the discourse around them offers us a model for how to read images as narrative. They are the precursor, or older cousin, of a new writing style that incorporates graphic elements, which is my primary focus here. So, again, the two main issues to take from graphic novels when looking at works of contemporary illustrated fiction are:

1. Their plight for validity in a literary culture which values word over image;
2. The complex interplay between word and image in these multi-modal works.

Novels
Use of graphic elements in fiction is certainly not new: the history of word and image in print would fill volumes and I don’t have time to discuss this here. To grossly oversimplify, I’d argue that images have traditionally been used as decorative elements in fiction. Fancy title pages, or illustrated plates depicting characters or situations from the narrative were standard fare in Victorian literature, added or subtracted in different editions with no real effect on the narrative. What’s different about the emerging narrative style now, is that graphic elements are being used in a way intrinsic to the narrative, much in the way graphic novels use a combination of word and image that is inseparable.

These graphic elements are used as literary devices – they are integrated into the text as part of the narrative, rather than as accompanying illustrations. The image is no longer merely illustrating, or reflecting the written text, but elaborating, interrupting and sometimes contradicting it. You cannot remove these elements without losing essential parts of the narrative.

> Typographic experiments


An exceptionally early example of this style is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. Author Laurence Sterne uses an array of typographic and graphic elements to interrupt his written narrative, including: a blacked out page to represent the death of a character; a marbled paged to represent his father’s contribution to his conception; a blank page for the reader to draw his or her own likeness of one of the characters; elongated m-dashes and asterixes to insert pauses in dialogue and diagrams of how his storyline has meandered across the different books. These graphic interruptions are comparable to narrative asides (Schiff, 54) to consciously distract the reader, forcing a consideration of the “experience of interacting with the book as a consciously constructed object” (Schiff 30)
Peter de Voogd: “The text’s verbal and visual elements are so intimately interwoven that they form an aesthetic whole. Text and picture cannot be divorced from one another without serious loss: the picture is the text, the text the picture.” (in Schiff, 2005) Sterne uses typographic elements as literary device – they are not decorative, they are an integrated part of the narrative. Many contemporary books seem to continue from Sterne’s conceptual typographic playfulness to interrupt the flow and pace of a novel in an attempt to manipulate the experience of reading.

I’ve spoken about emerging generations who have grown up with a very different sense of primacy between word and image; who belong to a complex visual culture. Douglas Copeland knows this.

In his novel J-Pod, about a group of cynical 20-something computer-game developers who speak in movie quotes and advertising slogans, Copeland shows us that language looks different now; that dialogue looks different now; that some language has begun to resemble imagery. He switches typeface constantly, includes text fragments reminiscent of text message and computer languages like html, and pages of seemingly nonsensical numbers or symbols. I haven’t finished reading J-Pod, and will admit to skipping sections.

For example, a page that repeats “ramen noodles” in roughly 12 pt type for the whole page. I understand that the act of reading this page intends to impart a sense of boredom, of mundane repetition. I understand the concept without having to go through the process of reading it … in the same way I remember skipping meandering descriptions of the weather and country side while enduring Tess of the Durbervilles for high school English, and I don’t think I’m any worse off for it. Though I did count how many times ‘ramen noodles’ appears on that page; is it significant that there are seven columns of repetitions and 52 rows—reflecting the number of days in a week and number of weeks in a year—or am I trying too hard to make something of this? Perhaps this is the joy of unconventional elements; we’re not told how to read them, so meaning is open to many interpretations.

I’m not suggesting this use of truncated and coded language, spawned by new communication technologies, is a technique with much longevity. It grows tiresome quickly (for some by page one of the novel). But it is a technique appropriate to this story; it reflects the language and culture of its characters.

Likewise, Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper, (McSweeney’s, 2005), includes several typographic devices that visualise aspects of certain characters. Passages obscured by black blocks of ink, reminiscent of Sterne’s black page, show Baby Nostradamus’s meditative state (a soothsayer who sees only blackness). Die-cuts removing words, (perhaps reminiscent of Derrida’s sous-rature, or ‘under-erasure’ technique) and passages with the ink fading away.


Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and more recently Only Revolutions are highly experimental typographic novels. In House of Leaves, four narratives are distinguished by using four different fonts: this graphic element is practical one, to help the reader navigate. Complex grids and pages with very few words reflect what’s occurring in the narrative: characters make their way through the claustrophobic labyrinth of a house that defies real world logic, so the text is a claustrophobic grid of sections; at another point, characters are pursued by an unseen enemy, and a few words appear over a 25 page section, forcing the reader to flip quickly and engage with the pace of the novel. It also uses a colour coded system for some words, which is never explained. The word house always appears in blue – a reference to hyperlinks? The Internet abounds with theories, and there are online fanclubs … . Rick Poyner declared, “The positive reaction to House of Leaves suggests the degree to which readers’ tastes have already been transformed by exposure to devices, texture and rhetoric of contemporary graphic culture.” Only Revolutions tells two stories simultaneously. Reading the book forward is one character writing, flipping it over shows the other; supposed to read 8 at a time. Two book marks to keep your place in each story. For some people, this would be a nightmare to read, the constant physical disruption of turning the book too much to take. For others, an interactive reading experience. Not unlike playing a computer game.

A different approach to typographic experimentation is Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, a 437 page novel created from 40,000 text fragments cut out from 1960s women’s magazines, reminiscent of the compositional experiments of 20th Century avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Dadaism and Constructivism. I haven’t read it, but according to many critics, it’s a “surprisingly absorbing thriller”. Design theorist Rick Poynor describes in Eye: “Despite its unconventional and perhaps initially daunting appearance, Rawle’s narrative grips as a reading experience from start to finish.” The use of graphic elements here actually drives the narrative from the outset.

Visually, Woman’s World may appear similar to Tom Phillips’ cult classic A Humument, first published in 1980, which he refers to as a ‘treated Victorian Novel’, but is actually conceptually the reverse.


Where Rawle creates a narrative by repositioning phrases from magazines, Phillips takes an existing book—W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document—and visually ‘treats’ it, painting and drawing over pages to cover and reveal strands of text, again, using the graphic elements to generate the narrative from the outset. He writes, “I plundered, mined and undermined the text to make it yield to the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words.”

Rather than just typographic experiments, these books are artworks in themselves – the text becomes image.


Umberto Eco’s dense tome, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, was release with the strap line, ‘an illustrated novel’. The book’s protagonist, Yambo, suffers an incident that leaves him with profound memory loss of his personal life, yet he can remember the plot of every book he’s ever read and quote extensively from them. To retrieve his lost memory, Yambo returns to his childhood home and spends much of the book riffling through boxes of ephemera in the attic: old comics and newspapers, record covers, photo albums and diaries. The book is peppered with reproductions of the ephemera, and described on the jacket as taking “the form of a graphic novel”. In some editions, the cover actually resembles a graphic novel. Eco’s book needs the graphic elements to tell his story convincingly, but they are used in a more traditional illustrative way – the images are visual aids, in the sense an art or design book would contain illustrations of the work being discussed. They are interesting elements that add richness to the book, and it’s certainly a beautiful book, but they don’t contribute to narrative in a challenging way. It’s worth considering the fact that Eco is a prolific cultural theorist as well as novelist, and you have to question whether this use of cultural ephemera is more to do with sentimental indulgence than innovative writing.

To find more innovative, or challenging, integration of graphic elements, it's worth turning to new writers. Marisha Pessl’s début novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, also uses ‘visual aids’ – and even labels them as such, but these are more playful than Eco’s. The narrator and protagonist, Blue Van Meer, is an obnoxiously well read late-adolescent. She has been raised by her father, a college professor and Blue’s idol, who tells her; “Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids…” The story is a murder mystery, of sorts, and the reader is very conscious they are reading Blue’s interpretation of events. The visual aids are Blue’s drawings, and the fact that they are drawn is significant. Rather than photographs, they are the narrator’s interpretation—often from memory—of people and places. This visual technique mirrors the written recollections of events; you must ask not only why she has written about a character in a certain way, but also why she has drawn them as she has. You find yourself flipping back to the visual aids, looking for clues. And there are some. In particular, the second of three parts of the book, characters are ghosted on top of each other and into the environments depicted. This gives a sense of foreshadowing and perhaps implies that some of these characters may be more connected than you initially suspect. And I’ll say no more.

Why are these visual aids, not illustrations? They do more than just depict something described in the text – they expand or elaborate on the text in a way that Eco or Picoult do not. It’s closer to a social scientist’s use of visual aids than a novelists, which is appropriate for this novel.

Pessl was 27 when she wrote Special Topics, and Jonathan Safran Foer was in his late 20s when he wrote his much-lauded second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I’m using these two authors as representative examples from a generation of writers who have grown up in a visually conscious culture.


Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close uses an array of graphic devices, from photographs to proofreading marks and blank pages, to a flip book at the end which shows a man falling from the Twin Towers on September 11, in reverse. Oskar is the deliberately precocious 9-year-old protagonist of one narrative strand. His father dies in the Twin Tower tragedy and Oskar spends the novel on a quest to find the lock that fits a mysterious key he discovers in his father’s closet. He keeps a scrapbook he calls 'Stuff That Happened To Me', and images we assume are from this scrapbook are scattered through the novel. Included are photos Oskar takes of things he encounters during his quest, as if allowing the reader to see more accurately what he sees. But also included are images he finds on the Internet and in newspapers, where he sources much of his knowledge, occasionally inaccurately. A picture of Steven Hawkings, turtles copulating, Leyton Hewitt in what could either be a moment of victory or defeat. The fact that these are included in his 'Stuff That Happened to Me' book shows his inability to disconnect his personal life from the media. The photographs are a literary device that work with the text, and as a part of it. Safran Foer also includes typographic elements similar to Sterne – extra spaces, punctuation and almost blank pages to alter the pace of the reading. He says: “Most of what I do in my books I do exactly because I can’t explain in any other way.” (Gerber and Triggs, 2006)

ELIC was the 2005 Overall Winner in the V&A Illustration Awards. One of the judges, Mark Jones, described the book as, “A rare and really impressive example of a text with fully integrated visual elements. I like the way in which you encounter things that you don’t expect." Safran Foer didn’t actually take the photos – they were mostly found images, or commissioned. And although he apparently worked closely with the designer, he didn’t design the book himself. So we have an interesting blurring of territory.

On one hand, graphic novelist Chris Ware wins the Guardian First Novel Award and a writer wins the V&A Illustration Award. Amongst aggressive claims that just about everything is dying – the end of print, the end of fiction, death of the book, death the author … we’re at fascinating point in the history of literature.

The technology exists for a writer to produce their entire book themselves: they can compose, edit and layout their manuscript on a desktop computer, or portable laptop; they have access to digital cameras, scanners and pictures libraries to create or source images; they can output the whole thing as a pdf and send it to print. It’s possibly not too far from a point where they have a machine that binds the books in their printer, along with the scanner and fax machine, or dare I say it, they skip the printing process and email it straight to whatever ends up being the descendant of the Blackberry. Suddenly, I’m sounding very much like John Updike, suggesting that a doubly talented writer could produce a work of graphic and literary mastery. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Prophecies aside, at this stage, it’s time to ask what this increasingly popular narrative style means for; A. the writer, B. the publisher, C. the reader and D. the designer. Although there are some fascinating considerations for the publisher and especially the reader, I’m most interested in the effect on the writer and designer.

Authorship
In 1923, amongst the compositional experiments of 20th Century avant-garde movements like Dadaism, Futurism and Constructivism, El Lissitzky declared, “the new book demands a new writer…the book finds its way into the reader’s brain through the eye, not the ear.” He titled himself a ‘book constructor’, and I think, expected this ‘new writer’ to emerge from the ranks of visual artists. Similarly, after the chest-puffing bonanza in the design world around the 1990s, when many called for the label ‘designer-as-author’ to be worn proudly, design critic Rick Poyner wondered in his book No More Rules (2003), where all these design-authors are?

There are designers who write, just as there are writers who design and illustrate. Generally, these people are the exception to the rule rather than the norm. I don’t think merging the two disciplines is a realistic future. I think it’s collaboration. To explore this narrative style in a way that won’t render it a passing trend, writers and book composers (to borrow El Lissitzky’s term) need to reconsider their relationships.

If it’s appropriate for a novel to include graphic elements for narrative, rather than decorative purposes, the writer and the book composer must consider the book’s graphic elements from the initial stages of the process, rather than cake decorating a manuscript once it has cooled. In the tradition of literary pairings from Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake to Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman, I think writers and book composers need to develop closer working relationships; they need to understand the way each other work and think. It’s something that graphic novel writers and illustrators do well.

What I’ve discussed is an interesting development in new writing that may be influenced by mainstream acceptance of graphic novels, or perhaps it’s print’s way of competing with the complex, interactive visual culture developing around it. Will illustrated novels usurp the traditional novel? No, I don’t think so. Because this isn’t a new genre or literary form, it’s style, and unless the graphic elements are appropriate to the content of the novel, it will only ever be a passing fad.

upcoming public lecture > October 18, 2006

A free seminar through
the Centre for New Writing,
University of Technology, Sydney


18 October, 1-2 pm

UTS Building 2,
Level 7, Room 2.7065
1 Broadway, Broadway
Sydney



WORD & IMAGE in CONTEMPORARY FICTION

The use of graphic elements – photographs, illustrations, diagrams, experimental typography – in contemporary fiction has increased significantly over the past couple of years. This phenomenon is evident in works by both established authors, like Umberto Eco and Douglas Copeland, and emerging authors, such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Mark Hammond.

Rather than simply illustrating the written text, many of these books use graphic elements as a literary device to consciously interrupt, or disturb, the written text.

• What are some innovative examples of text/image interplay in new fiction?
• How can graphic elements consciously interrupt or disturb the written text?
• Who is generating these graphic elements, and why?
• What can Visual Communications offer new writers?

this is not a threat

Preparing for a public talk (through the Centre for New Writing at UTS: http://www.hss.uts.edu.au/oth/newwriting/index.html) around what Visual Communications can offer new writing, I'm anticipating some resistance from a 'words' audience. Unless writers are interested in experimenting with form, suggesting the addition of images to literary fiction is generally perceived as gimmickry.
[gim•mick n: 1. a piece of trickery or manipulation intended to achieve a result dishonestly; 2. something such as a new technique or device that attracts attention or publicity; 3. an ingenious device, mechanism, or ploy, especially one that works in a concealed way]

I'm not suggesting that images are destined to appear in all books in the future, though there are some interesting arguments for this around (see, for example Charles McGrath – who argued that graphic novels may replace the literary novel as a dominant form of print story telling in the near future, as the novel replaced poetry in the 18th Century, see 'Not Funnies', The New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2004.– ).

Good design recedes. It should not detract from the narrative unless the writer intends it to. See Tschichold. The familiar "greyness" of a traditionally well designed page makes the actual design invisible to most readers. Very few readers would notice, and even less care, whether the book designer has used Sabon or Garamond. So if a writer considers how the page looks to the point that the reader is drawn out of their immersion in the story to notice a typographic element or image, surely this is not a gimmick?

a question

After talking with John Dale, Associate Professor of the Writing and Cultural Studies department at UTS, I've had a small epiphany. I've been so concerned about focusing on the 'design perspective' that some incredibly obvious questions have been eluding me:

what are the potentials for graphic elements to effect new writing?
what can visual communications contribute to new writing?

Until now, I've been so focused on needing to explore a 'way of working' from a design perspective that I've overlooked where the design output ends up. What's most useful about this research is the potential for design to contribute to (some) writing, and vice-versa. At this stage, I need to return to the relationship between text and image, and also between writer and image maker/designer. I also return the problem that critique of illustrated literature seems to come almost entirely from the 'word', rather than 'image' camp (from my own research and discussions like Hammond & Heltzel 2004: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=57&aid=70817)

So, by analysing writing with integrated graphic elements A) historically and B) currently I will present an analysis of image-text relationships in fiction, from a designer's perspective. Then, I will explore, through practice, the potentials using integrated graphic elements as a literary device in new writing.

WHAT will it be: A) an analysis of existing forms; B) a set of 'projects' created by me and executed by both myself and other writers and designers; C) reflections and projections of the process of B; D) presentation of A, B, C in as book.

WHO is it for: designers, writers, publishers (as a way to practice/produce books); critics and readers (as a guide to reading the visual); academics (as a way to research, reflect on practice, and present research).

• How/why do writers use graphic elements (by locating and analysing, by contacting authors/publishers)?
• Are writers collaborating with artists/designers or taking on the image generation themselves (writer becomes illustrator: Jim Davis, 'Illustrated Guides', Design Week 23 Feb 2006).
• Does the text exist before the image, or are they produced simultaneously?

multi-modal

Every time I use the term 'multi-modal' people flinch. Perhaps it's worth replacing.

Personal Refelctions: In Form Symposium

In Form (http://www.dab.uts.edu.au/inform/) was a symposium on practice-led research held at the Powerhouse Museum on Saturday, August 19 2006, as part of Sydney Design Week. I gave a short presentation on my research (see previous post). Preparing for this presentation – which was the first time I had publically discussed my research – was a fantastic opportunity for me to structure an early model of my research design. Although presenting to around 60 design academics and professionals was a horrifically gut-wrenching experience, there's nothing like jumping in the deep end to see if you can float (swimming's still a while away).

The symposium itself was a refreshingly engaging day, with a well considered balance of practitioners who engage in research as part of their practice, academics defining the territory and aims of practice-led research (PLR), and doctoral candidates (from UTS) at varying stages of of a PLR PhD. Following are some (rambling) thoughts on issues raised over the day, and from discussions after the formal symposium, mostly with the postgrad students from RMIT – seeing their research blogs inspired me to begin this one: http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~e48618/blog/?cat=25

Kees Dorst cited an example where designers were presented with a vast and thorough research document to inform their design, but it was clear they didn't bother to read it, resulting in generic, run of the mill design outcomes. He questioned whether this was an indication of designer arrogance (I'm the designer, I know how it should look), or an inability to understand the research. Ignoring the arrogant designer (which we should probably do more often), this raises an interesting issue – one that cropped up a few times from the audience in the plenary session. When/where are practitioners taught how to interpret and use research? How is the research presented to them? Is it in a language they can understand? I'd argue that this is not just a design problem; if you throw a telephone book sized research report at most people, they're going to duck. Should there be more consideration of how research is presented to practitioners? Perhaps a step where the research report is condensed/interpreted and presented in an appropriate format? I'm not preposing that all designers are unable to interpret research and apply it to their work, but asking them to engage with a dense piece of academically written research is assuming they have been taught this language. There were several comments about how drawing practitioners back to university to undertake post-grad PLR projects is problematic because academic language is unapproachable for many practitioners.

This is where I think case-studies, or models, of PLR are going to be incredibly important; talking about what a PLR doctorate could be is not going to convince practitioners - showing them examples is. Seeing the incredibly varied ways Bridie Lander, Cecillia Heffer and the other postgrad students allowed practice to drive their research, which then feds back into their practice, was fascinating. One practitioner told me he was inspired, after seeing the postgrad presentations, to consider undertaking a PLR postgrad project.

So how do you make these case-studies visible to industry? In the case of academic PLR, this is part of the argument for producing an artefact. The artefact is an articulation of research in the language of the practitioner-researcher, which is also the language of their industry. This sounds too obvious to bother stating, but it offers one answer to the question of making case studies visible: you may not expect industry to read the exegisis (the academic documentation of the research) but you can expect them to come to an exhibition or examine an artefact.

So PLR is again seen as 'bridging' the gap between the academy and industry. It was discussed that expecting academic PLR to output both a written component and an artefact(s) is essentially demanding twice as much work, and, while I agree with this, I still believe for research to be relevant to both academy and industry, both articulations are necessary. Perhaps the length of the written documentation needs to be considerably reduced based on the scope of the 'artefact', which is, as I understand, what happens – christ knows who determines this ratio, and on what formula! But more importantly, non-academic PLR needs to present the process/reflections along with the artefact so practitioners are provided insights into the actual research; give us process, not just product.

There's much talk about 'bridging the gap' between industry and academy, but let's not get this confused with 'merging'. Not all practitioners are interested in research, but is a bad thing – if everyone is reflecting, who's doing? It is the responsibility of PLRs to make their research accessible to practitioners, even if this appears like more work, so it's not necessarily the act of researching that is influencial, but the knowledge of what research is uncovering through process. Publishing in journals along the way could be a valuable activity for researchers, even if only to force them to start writing, and allow feedback to identify problems. (I've actually heard a few academics argue, not at this symposium, that research students shouldn't publish until they are finished, but isn't the purpose of research to generate new knowledge, and make that knowledge public?). Also, publishing research in non-academic forums, in the language of the practitioner, should be recognised. Why not present the visual elements of your research to practitioners, to show them it's not all "ology" and dense text?

Where do practitioners go to talk about design? To design conferences (not academic conferences). In Australia, the main design conferences/festivals offer a limited slice of the design pie. Semi Permanent (although deserving of commendation for actually establishing a forum for Australian, and international, designers) is a showcase, rather than a dialogue, and this seems to be the case with other conferences I have attended. Why are practice-led designers not presenting here? I discussed the idea, with the RMIT students, of submitting to present a short selection of PLR postgrad projects, master and doctorate, from a range of Australian universities at the next Semi Permanent conference. It would also be fantastic to see some non-academic PLR projects discussed from the research perspective.

It's worth considering festivals like memefest (http://www.memefest.org/2006/en/), which are dialogue, rather than show-case, driven. Australian undergrad students should be submitting work to these festivals.

This is becoming a painfully long post/rant, so a few other comments in point form:
* The 'quantitative cosmologist's' (did I get that right?) comment about design needing a mythology about where design has come from and why we're here was a fantastic, outside perspective.
*There were a few comments about encouraging practitioners who'd been in industry for 15 or 20 years to return to academic research - what about 4-5 years? The we have a slightly younger PhD base in the industry, practitioners interested in generating dialogue and new knowledge, building the discipline from within?

Presentation for In Form Symposium 19/8/

I began a full time doctorate through the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney, in March this year. This is a presentation of the early stages of my research design.

For me, returning to full-time study from practice was problematic; do you have to sacrifice designing to be a design theorist? I wasn’t prepared to give up my practice entirely to pursue research. So discovering post-graduate research that involves ‘making’ was central to my decision to return to university. A full-time practice-led doctorate provides an opportunity to develop as a designer by reflecting on the process of a specific design practice, in my case, book design. As a design practitioner, I can provide insights – through reflection and articulation of the design process – that non-practicing theorists cannot.

This symposium, and other current discussions, demonstrates that rigorous debate surrounds what can and cannot be considered practice-led research. To complicate matters, what can and cannot be considered a practice-led doctorate is even more indistinct. Currently, a practice-led doctorate involves actively addressing this distinction. As a working definition (and I recognise this is by no means the only – or even necessarily a successful – model) I propose that my research:

1. Originate from an issue identified through practice;
2. Include a contextual survey and literature review (analytical component);
3. Involve ‘making’ as investigation (generative component);
4. Articulate: the process of making, reflections on significant shifts/discoveries and point to sociological/industry impact of the research
5. Present this articulated reflective process in an appropriate form.

I recognise that design is an iterative process; it involves cycles of making, critiquing, reflecting and refining. I expect to work back and forth around points 2, 3 and 4, but I cannot predict how this will happen until I actually begin designing.

1. Identifying an issue in practice
While working in-house at a publishing company, I noticed contemporary fiction using graphic elements in experimental ways was becoming increasingly more common. Some examples of these books are shown here :

I want to make clear that these are not graphic novels, or childrens' fiction. The images appear sporadically, scattered through a traditional looking novel. Most readers wouldn’t be aware that these books contain images until they stumble upon them. As such, this is not a new genre that requires a new section in bookstores. Rather, it’s a way of using graphic elements as a literary device within fiction.

Books that use graphic elements as a literary device are not a new phenomenon:

In fact, it could be easily argued that historically, books have been more heavily illustrated than they are today. However, these illustrations have generally been decorative embellishments, rather than conscious interruptions, to the written text.

Which leads me to my topic:
The integrated use of graphic elements in contemporary fiction; a designerly approach to multi-modal books.

To break down my terms:

Graphic elements may be photographs, illustrations, diagrams, experimental typography.

By the integrated use of these elements, I mean rather than examining books using graphic elements simply as illustrations of the text, or as a parallel narrative approach (such as comics, graphic novels, picture books), I am interested in books using graphic elements in a manner intrinsic to the writing; where the visual does something more than simply reflecting the text.

Contemporary fiction, here, means popular or literary fiction published in the past five years (this is not a strict definition, rather an attempt to manage the scope of my inquiry).

Multi-modal refers to more than one mode of communication (a graphic mode and written mode) combined in a single form (a book).

Finally, the designerly approach takes a little more explaining. Studies around post-modern fiction and Semiotics have interrogated similar text-image relationships, but primarily from the perspective of the text, rather than the image. So, I’m not focusing on why this is happening, from either an industry or cultural perspective. I’m also not focusing on how you read, or experience, these texts, though I recognise that these are both important areas of inquiry. What I am focusing on is how graphic elements are being integrated into the written text, from the perspective of those generating the text: the writer, the image-maker and the book designer.

How is this practice-led?
I intend to investigate how this phenomenon can be examined as a way of working rather than a cultural trend; instead of arguing for the legitimacy or longevity of this narrative style (a cultural studies approach), my research will investigate experimental word-image interplay as a way of practicing (a Visual Communications approach). The body of my research will be through articulated ‘making’: to explore the potentials of a way of working, it makes sense to experiment in practice.

At this stage, I am uncertain exactly what my ‘making’ will involve. I am expecting to develop projects from the findings of my preliminary contextual survey.

2. Contextual survey (analytical component)
After developing a topic, through an issue from practice, the first problem I faced was explaining what these books were to people who hadn’t seen them. I decided to conduct a contextual survey – an analysis of existing examples – that examins both how graphic elements appear in books, and how the inclusion of these elements is perceived. The contextual survey will contain both quantitative and qualitative information, and will be presented as a series of maps rather than a written document. Notable findings may be written up as sections of the final exegesis, but much of the information will be more valuable as a visual reference than textual analysis. As such, I'm using the language of my discipline to express the scholarly research.

Aside from more formal text-image analysis, I am conducting some investigative mapping exercises as a way of researching.

1.

I began this exercise as a means of locating an appropriate label for books with integrated graphic elements. In the early stages of my research, I toyed with ‘experimental graphic novels’ (immediately implied comics, which is not what I’m looking at), ‘illustrated literature’ (which denotes picture books) and a few other inadequate combinations of words to do with illustrations and books. I decided to look at how reviewers were describing books with the graphic approach I was interested in, to see if there was a term already in use, or one I might adapt. I chose four books using graphic elements in quite different ways – Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Jodi Picoult’s The Tenth Circle – and sourced ten reviews of each book. Although the exercise was searching for an appropriate label, I realised the more interesting descriptions were actually of how the reviewer reacted to the images being included in the first place. To analyse this in a way that allowed me to compare and contrast descriptions of one particular book, but also compare each book with the others, I developed visual maps. I streamed the text of the ten reviews of each book into a single document, then highlighted, in colour, how the critic has described: a) the format; b) the book as a whole; c) use of visual elements; d) writing style.

I can easily see repeated phrases or sentiments within each map, or line the maps up to compare how different books are discussed.

At this stage, I haven’t discovered what I was looking for – a convenient term to describe these books. Instead, I came to the realisation that there is no term for these books because the graphics do not define a genre or format, they are an integrated literary device that can be used within almost any style of written text.

The exercise has also raised the issue of critique. Why are these books not reviewed in design magazines and journal? Why are these books reviewed almost exclusively by wordsmiths rather than image-makers? Why are the graphic elements not being analysed in terms of how they affect the narrative? It sounds obvious now, but from this, I reconsidered my audience. Where I was initially so determined to focus on the ‘designerly’ aspect of my research, I forgot the value it may have for writers and publishers, as well as designers and design academics.


2.
In another investigative exercise, I intended to find patterns in where the graphic elements occur and get a sense of rhythm by thumbnailing each book. This is obviously an exercise in deconstruction, reversing the design process in an attempt to understand how the designer has put the book together, but more importantly, it is also a method which forces me examine the books more analytically. As a designer, sketching is a natural way of thinking images through. By committing pen to paper, I force myself to deeply analyse what an image may represent, rather than relying on what I have taken it to be on first glance.

The illustration above shows the thumbnailed spreads of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Throughout the novel, a full-page image of a doorknob appears several times. When I read the book, I assumed this was the same photograph repeated – an easy enough mistake if you look at how many pages divide each appearance of the image – but while drawing the thumbnails, I realised they were actually all different, which significantly alters my reading of this visual allegory in the context of the book. I may have noticed this in future readings anyway, but the act of replicating the images forced me to look at them with more critical eyes.

Again, the purpose of these mapping exercises is not to argue the cultural validity or commercial longevity of these multi-modal works of fiction, rather I’m saying: here is a list of examples; this is how they work; and here is how they are being critiqued. Through comparing and contrasting the maps I will produce for a range of books, I will identify issues of interest around the integration of graphic elements in works of fiction. This will inform the practice-led component of my research. I’m not sure what these issues or questions will be at this stage, and I won’t have a strong idea until I progress through this phase of my contextual survey.
I intend continue the contextual survey for the duration of the research, but at some stage it will need to recede to the background as I focus on generative practice.

So far, I’ve discussed how I am using my tools as a design practitioner to both investigate and then present the results of that investigation. Now, I’m going to address a different kind of practice.


3. ‘Making’ as investigation
The generative component of my research will occur in two phases:
To respond to questions generated by the contextual survey, I will create briefs to test – by designing – and reflect on my design process.
Some examples may be:

1. Asking publishers/editors I have working relationships with to consider integrating a graphic device in an upcoming project;
2. Finding passages of text with a strong recurring metaphor and replacing it with a graphic device;
3. Working with a writer to develop an integrated graphic device simultaneously with their writing.

Based on my reflections from the first generative phase, I will write briefs for others to respond to. I will document and reflect on their process, their results, and their personal reflections. This allows me to investigate the intuitive practice of multiple designers (and writers), rather than relying on my personal perspective as a writer/designer. These ‘case studies’ will provide a rich counterpoint to my own reflective practice.

At this stage, possible projects might be:

1. A short course through the Centre for New Writing, open to students from writing degrees and the school of design (I am drafting this course at the moment);
2. Online projects pairing professional writer/designers (it may be difficult to gauge their reflective practice as many professionals don’t document this);
3. Workshops and projects with local writers and designers.

4/5. Articulation and presentation in appropriate form
At this early stage of my research, I am lumping stages 4 and 5 together because I am not yet able to discuss them in depth. Anticipating how I will articulate my reflections before I have made them, or how I will present my content before it exists, would be to unnecessarily limit the potentials of this doctorate.
However, these will be crucial stages in defining my work as research, rather than experimental practice. Articulation, in my case through an artefact, distinguishes research from practice; making the process and reflective practice visible renderes this project a valuable resource for other designers and academics.
So, to set a simple dichotomy between practice and research:

This is not to say that design practitioners are not reflective or articulate. Rather, that as a practitioner, your reflections are implicit, private, contributing to your own tacit knowledge – your creative instinct, or designer’s eye. On the other hand, the aim of research is to publicly contribute to the body of knowledge within the design discipline, to make process and reflection explicit.

At this stage, I will present my research as a book containing:
Documentation of research process
Documentation of design projects
Articulation of reflections
Articulation of projections

The book itself will be designed using visual elements as narrative and documentary devices, so the final artefact contains my academic argument in both a scholarly and designerly manner. My doctorate will have both a practice outcome and a research outcome, providing a case study for both design practice and design research.

Presently, I am still not certain how to locate my research as specifically practice-led; there is no single moment where practice becomes central. Rather, the practice is evident/evolving in several ways:

As a designer, my practice informs the way I interact with and understand my world. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that practice appears everywhere in this research project.

Progress Report May 06

My goals for this semester were to read around the topic of ‘experimental visual literature’ and to develop a brief, based on a contextual review of existing forms, for a practice-led Visual Communications project. I found my research moved around a common territory but constantly shifted perspective. Through the process of examining consistently recurring ideas, I revised my focus significantly:

Where I was: 6 March 2006
Topic: The experimental graphic novel: A new genre of visual literature?
Aim: This research will investigate an emerging genre – the experimental graphic novel – from a Visual Communications perspective. The main aim of the research will be to address the question: What is the potential for word-image relationships to create a new narrative form?

Where I am: 25 May 2006
Topic: The emerging use of visual elements as literary devices in popular printed storytelling forms.
Aim: This research will examine the increasing use of visual elements (photographs, illustrations, experimental typesetting) in popular storytelling genres for adults (fiction, biography, historical texts) as a literary device. Rather than examining forms that use the visual as a parallel narrative approach (such as comics, graphic novels, picture books), I am interested in forms that include visuals as a literary device within a written narrative.
Although there is a rich history of books – particularly novels – using visual elements as literary devices, these books have previously belonged to the avant-garde, usually around times of significant technological/cultural innovation. Currently, an increasingly visually-literate population (influence of new media and interface technology) is capable of more sophisticated readings of uncaptioned visuals, providing the potential for these to enter the popular domain. I am not suggesting that incorporating visual elements to printed storytelling will become a dominant approach or replace the conventional novel, rather that it presents a narrative option for popular fiction that was once reserved for ‘experimental’ fiction.

This research will explore:
A. Where the employment of visual elements as literary device may be appropriate (by analysis of existing forms, through experimentation in practice);
B. How and why an author may use visuals as a literary device (by analysis of existing forms, through experimentation in practice).

Research Plan:
Analytical phase (establishing context)
1. Identify contemporary examples; examine and categorise how the visual is used as a literary device, eg: as a voice, Picoult; as description, Eco; as a clue/extended metaphor, Safran Foer.
Some examples:
Sophie Calle’s Double Game; Willy Vlauntin’s The Motel Life; B S Johnson’s The Unfortunates and See the Old Lady Decently; Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions; Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz; Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana; Richard Eckersley’s The Telephone Book.
2. Analyse how this work is critiqued – examine reviews of these texts to gauge popular opinion, map results.
3. Identify historical examples (as a visual timeline?) to analyse how storytelling tradition shifts to suit contemporary climate.
4. Interview practitioners who are working this way (writers, commissioning editors, reactions from booksellers?)

Generative phase (experimenting with the device)
1. Writer as illustrator: have writers produce a short story employing a visual element as a literary device (a photography/creative writing elective project?)
2. Writer/designer collaboration: brief a writer and a designer to develop a text that uses a visual literary device by working simultaneously.
3. Use the method on a range of different types of writing to speculate appropriateness?
4. Generate an appropriate form to present this research (using visual elements as a narrative device). Look at Derrider and social science models of presenting research in appropriate forms. Look at other design research presented as articulate artefacts.

Further:
This research may point to a sociological examination of how technological changes influence dominant popular storytelling forms, or an industry-centric examination of predicting/promoting the potential for visual literary devices entering popular publishing.

Why this blog exists

"In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise."
Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

I don’t find it difficult to write. I sit down, either with pen or keyboard, and it just comes out. It may not be particularly refined in terms of style or grammar, but the ideas are all there to be massaged into shape later. So when I recently started writing an abstract for a symposium about my doctoral research, I was faced with an uncomfortable realisation; academic writing is a completely different beast to other writing.

I often return from a meeting with my supervisor, where I have delivered a confident summary of my topic and research plan, and hover a pen over a blank piece of paper for the rest of the afternoon. I've also found I'm able to articulate my research to non-academics, in plain English, yet I write such convoluted, inaccessible waffle I often can't read it myself a couple of days later.

To counter this, I'm trying to:
Tape record myself in meetings and when I give talks;
Explain progress to friends via email;
Discuss ideas as they develop with different audiences (hence the blog).