“Mit vielen Kupfern”: The Second Kamchatka Expedition as multimodal discourse in the diaries of G.W. Steller and the comic strip by T.E.Bak

Abstract

The article discusses some literary incarnations of the Second Kamchatka Expedition led by V.Bering as stages of a multimodal discourse that corresponds to an important trend of literary evolution between the 18th and 21st centuries: the negotiation between the verbal and pictorial modes of representational design, particularly with respect to visual information. The study focuses on border cases of conditional literariness, in G.Genette’s terminology: nonfiction and comics. The diaries of an Expedition participant, German traveler and naturalist G.W. Steller, the illustrated editions of those diaries in three languages (German, English, and Russian), and the American cartoonist T.E.Bak’s graphic novel based on Steller’s narrative belong to different media, whose multimodality (the use of several sensorial and semiotic channels of communication within one art and/or medium) is explicit to various extent but crucial in terms of both authorial intention and readerly perception. The article lists three main functional types of visual data transmission (cartographic, panoramic, and experiential) in the documentary travelogue and the comic strip. A discursive continuity is revealed in how those modes and types combine from Steller (1774) to Bak (2013). Together, the two authors’ books exemplify a multimodal discourse, whose formal and medial properties are determined by their disposition to represent and transmit the experience of new land exploration. Such a task was natural for Steller the explorer, but Bak “inherits” it by virtue of discursive inertia despite his total lack of commitment to the goals of academic report writing.