A Language of Scratches and Stitches: The Graphic Novel between Hyperreading and Print

Abstract

In one of the memorable media historical anecdotes of the electronic Stone Age that was the 1970s, security officials learned about haptic reading the hard way when the classified documents hastily shredded before the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran were painstakingly reassembled by hand. The unshredding was not done by intelligence officers but by specially hired local carpet weavers. As the deputy director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University commented, "for a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge." 2 The different time scales of abstract mathematical possibility and human activity are important elements of the unexpected reconstruction, yet the story reveals more than a case of absurdly patient reading. It is also a demonstration of the curious fact that if you cannot read a document with your eyes like an intelligence analyst, you may still be able to read it with your hands like a carpet weaver-a shift that acknowledges reading as a genuinely multisensory experience. The New York Times article mentioning the Tehran unshredding incident (on the occasion of the more recent electronic reassembly of Stasi files) calls the weavers' method "crude," a label both naïve and arrogant in equating predigital slow technologies with a lack of sophistication. 3 In fact, the role of touch in the embodied reading process can vary in subtle, often unconscious ways, although the significant cognitive consequences of this multisensory experience, which normally go unnoticed, may require cultural confrontations as bizarre as analysts versus weavers to appear.In the following pages, I will present graphic narrative as a site of reading that merits attention precisely because of the cultural contestation and rival practices it dramatizes in its embodied, multisensory reading process, though in this case we will abandon the different weaving (and unraveling) methods of text and textile for paper and screen. When viewed in a

What's Going On in a Graphic Novel?

“…Graphic novels are found in libraries of all kinds, including classroom collections, and there is a newfound acceptance for text that combines graphics with words (Chase, Son, & Steiner, ; Clark, ; Orbán, ). The graphic novel is also one of the fastest growing book formats.…”

E-Graphic Novels

“…A box of fourteen items printed under various formats and to be read in any order, Building Stories conspicuously foregrounds its materiality, its papery 'body' (Ghosal, 2015), while preempting any facile adaptation to digital screens, and further develops within its pages an overt critique of digital devices. At the same time, however, the multi-directional, randomaccess, interactive structure of Building Stories invites to forms of reading and viewing typical of new media and Ware's work epitomizes this co-mingling of print materiality and "hyperreading" that characterizes the graphic novel (Kashtan, 2015;Orbán, 2014). The quick emergence of the graphic novel in the cultural landscape and within literary culture might be related to this exploration of reading practices that, if not new, have been increasingly foregrounded by digital media.…”

First Impressions Matter

“…Despite (or perhaps because of) these negative connotations, graphic novels and comics continue to be part of the literary landscape for today’s students, both in and out of school (Chase, Son, & Steiner, 2014; J. S. Clark, 2013; Orbán, 2014). While graphic novels continue to be popular reading material for children and teens, they are simultaneously gaining traction in schools as free-choice reading material (Frey & Fisher, 2004), to support differentiation (Lu, 2010; Ross & Frey, 2009), and as whole class texts for both English language learners (ELLs; Monnin, 2010) and struggling readers (Carter, 2007a; Hibbing & Rankin-Erickson, 2003).…”