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Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 30:1 (2023) ► pp.180–208

Narrating and focalizing visually and visual-verbally in comics and graphic novels

ORCID logo | University of Amsterdam
Literary narratology has rightly devoted much attention to analysing the source(s) of verbal information about the story world, usually discussed under the label “narration”, and to any agent(s) that present(s) non-verbalized perspectives on it, usually discussed under the label “focalization”. Assessing the identity of narrators and focalizers is crucial for understanding what is going on in the story world. Which narrative agent is in charge? Is the narration and/or focalization layered? If the latter, is there any “colouring” by the higher-level narrative agent of anything said, thought, or experienced by the lower-level agent? Is the information provided trustworthy? Nuanced? Prejudiced? Narration and focalization have supra-medial as well as medium-specific dimensions. Over the past years, the issue of how these concepts function in the medium of comics, which combines visuals and language, has begun to be systematically addressed. This paper aims to show how the visual mode can, on its own or combined with the written-language mode, signal the sources of narration, focalization, and joint narration-and-focalization, as well as distinguish between different levels at which these take place.
Keywords: narration, focalization, comics, graphic novels, visual studies, multimodality, meta-representation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Narration and focalization in written fiction
  • 3.Narration and focalization in comics: The “reciter” and the “monstrator”
  • 4.Case studies
    • 4.1Reciting-plus-monstrating by the fundamental narrator
    • 4.2Monstrating sensory focalization
    • 4.3Monstrating mental focalization
    • 4.4Free visual focalization
  • 5.Concluding remarks and further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Sources of examples
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22007.for
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