Assuming a hybrid logic of reading: comics, psychoanalysis, and the multimodal promise of visual response

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith the increasing educational and institutional legitimacy afforded to multimodal texts, there is a need to further explore the use of the visual and its place in reader response, not only as a textual means to prompt interpretation but also as a form of interpretation itself. In this paper, I look at the multimodal interpretive practices of one adult reader who participated in a study I recently conducted with a number of undergraduate students in teacher education, reading a series of graphic novels that centred on themes of adolescence. I explore this reader’s responses to two texts: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer, and Lynda Barry’s My Perfect Life. In response to their experiences of reading, I asked this reader to think about her own adolescence and to create a visual representation of a memory that was sparked while reading. I thus proceeded with a methodological assumption that to limit our students to only one mode of response is also to limit their possibilities for textual description and existential understanding. Along with a theory of multimodal literacies, I turn to psychoanalytic theory as a way to describe the potential effects of the unconscious on reading experience, memory, and visual response.