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

ABSTRACT

With 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual response
• multimodality
• reading
• graphic novels
• psychoanalytic theory

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education for their support of this research. I would also like to thank the brilliant preservice teachers I worked with in this project, especially “Maggie,” whose imaginative readings allowed me to theorize the possibilities of visual response for comics readers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Referring to the work of Kress (2010) and Nelson (2006), and “from a language and literacy learning vantage point,” Malinowski (2014) describes synaesthesia as “the site of ‘creativity’ in multimodal meaning-making, as semiotic material is reworked within modes (transformation) and refigured across them (transduction) in complex and creative processes of design” (p. 79). For Zoss (2009), transmediation refers to “a response composed in a medium other than that of the original text” (p. 184).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [#430-2016-00040].

Notes on contributors

David Lewkowich

David Lewkowich is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. His research interests include reading experience, comics and graphic novels, visual response, autobiographical inquiry, theories of memory and forgetting, teacher education, curriculum theory, and psychoanalytic theories of teaching, learning, and reading.