Ekphrasis as Literary Criticism on Graphic Narrative

Abstract

This article is projected to examine the legitimacy of literary discourse regarding the study of comics or graphic narrative. Graphic narrative, as an inclusive term encompassing comics and the graphic novel, has been left on the mere periphery of serious literature or dominant literary discourse, or simply denied its legitimate status. Against this main stream, Hillary Chute, in her recent studies of graphic narrative including Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (2017) along with the scholarly minds sharing her critical and theoretical insights, has created a different kind of flow constantly disrupting the establishment of literature. The critic has opened up the possibility of serious critical discourse regarding graphic literature with the particular notions of materiality, immediacy, and ekphrasis. Materiality involves hand-drawn images or visual devices, and verbal elements imbedded on the pages of graphic story-telling. The visual is stylistically blended with the verbal, constituting the visual narrative around frame, panel, gutter, tier, etc. In the process of creating comics, the author undergoes the experience that involves their own bodies with pen and canvas. So, how the author fabricates the form of graphic narrative depends on their own particular style of recognizing and enacting materiality. We also need to understand that the embodied materiality prompts the immediate experience of the reader just as N. Katherine Hayles explains the concept as “the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies.” The reading experience of encountering the materialized text evinces the efficacy of directedness or immediacy. Graphic narrative presents to the reader a direct and immediate experience with its visual and mechanical means and its rules of linguistic usage. Therefore, Chute’s critical strategy of graphic narrative comes down to the idea of rhetorical ekphrasis which is concerned with descriptive aesthetics. That means that ekphrasis is postulated here to illuminate the critic’s particularized surface-reading experience as their criticism of the visual narrative instead of symptomatic-reading.