Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010343847 | BF241 S68 2015 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
On Order
Summary
Summary
The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.
Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.
In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls "flatness." Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott's novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of "upwards," Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.
Reviews 3
Publisher's Weekly Review
If Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics charmingly investigated the history, development, and formal features of visual narrative, Unflattening is its equally brilliant epistemological counterpart. With profound depth and insight, Sousanis looks at how the "unflattening" possibilities of this form of storytelling allow us to see the world from entirely new perspectives. Sousanis wrote this book as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia, but it avoids scholarly inaccessibility. Written with remarkable clarity and insight, its sometimes-haunting, sometimes-breathtaking illustrations prove the book's arguments about how visual information can shape our understanding. The one brief moment in which Sousanis moves from visual narrative to a page of illustrated dissertation provides a practical example of his point. Weaving together language, perception, and the theory of knowledge in an investigation of how the multidimensional possibilities of graphic storytelling can awaken us to ways of knowing from multiple perspectives, Sousanis has made a profound contribution to the field of comics studies and to semiotics, epistemology, and the burgeoning study of visible thinking. Essential reading for anyone seeking to create, critique, or consider the visual narrative form. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Choice Review
For more than two decades, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) has been the cornerstone of nearly every syllabus for courses on comic books and graphic novels. Though nothing can usurp it, Sousanis's Unflattening now provides the answer to the question, "What next?" Unflattening will no doubt become an essential teaching tool for helping students--especially undergraduates--think about comics, graphic novels, and other media in which words and images combine. With a goal of "providing an elevated perspective from which to illuminate the traps of our own making and offer a means to ... step out," Sousanis (comics studies, Univ. of Calgary, Canada) wishes to "unflatten" readers, allowing them to resee, unsee, or see differently. The book was originally Sousanis's PhD dissertation, and as a new way of conducting academic discourse--one that weaves a rich tapestry of theory and intertextuality beyond the cage of language and the limited pedantic form of the "essay"--the book is potentially revolutionary. Rather than obfuscation and hoarding of knowledge, there is a generous opening outward into ever-deepening complexity. This is a book that wants to teach, a book that will be talked about and belongs in any forward-looking library. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Rebecca Joann Baumann, Lilly Library, Indiana University
Library Journal Review
Sousanis's lofty goal here is to explore the way human beings throughout history have created meaning and knowledge from images and visual cues. Moving through science, philosophy, literature, various art forms, and even ancient myth, Sousanis weaves a complex and ultimately exhausting web of theories and speculations about the human mind and how it processes the world. He draws upon an often impressive range of illustration styles ranging from the desolate and simplistic to the incredibly intricate but never manages to rise above a sort of dreary, self-serious, and overly academic tone. Open to a random page, and you're likely to find something intriguing; read too many pages at a time, and it starts to feel overwhelming and not in the way of an exciting sense of discovery as much as a difficult slog. Verdict This title might be of interest to fans of hard-core philosophy and PhD students, and it could draw an audience of prospective graphic artists, but casual readers will find little to sink their teeth into or enjoy.-Thomas L. Batten, Grafton, VA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
