The growing interest in graphic novels in popular culture further confirmed that there has been a visible shift in the way in which we consume and process information, and a movement from textual to visual narratives. Indeed, today we consume information at a much faster rate than ever before due in large part to our increased use of technology, where it has become the norm to process information in quicker clips using various modes of communication, often in combination with each other, such as text and graphic, or audio and visual. But while this readership could indicate a lack of attention span or a dumbing down of culture, and certainly comics have long been dismissed as lowly kitsch (Greenberg, Krauss), it was clear that Persepolis, like many other graphic novels, could not be categorized as unsubstantial either in content or form.
What the graphic novel highlights is that with the surge in multimodal dissemination of information, we are perhaps getting closer to a better means of comprehending information available to us that is less obtuse than language alone. By presenting information in multimodal means, which are based on the five senses rather than in just the codified system of language, we are more likely to understand what is presented to us as it is more closely linked to our nature as sensual humans.
Through the structure of its layout, including its 'boxes of time' (Chute and DeKoven), frames, gutter space, images, and onomatopoeic words, alongside text that is often handwritten and therefore offers a 'trace of the human' (Kittler), the graphic novel creates a new interface, so to speak, for what has long been considered a limited, static media. The graphic novel thus dismantles the idea of the obsolescence of the book in the age of new media, illustrating how the book can adapt to changes in readership, offer a challenge to its readers to learn to read differently, and perhaps more importantly, highlight that the book can be a platform encouraging a new means of interaction between media and user.
Erin La Cour is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) where she researches graphic novels and cultural memory.
33. Minimal and Maximal Reading – Rudi Laermans
Nowadays, information is not scarce – there is far too much of it, or rather, far too many information possibilities, as I will explain. But why speak of a surplus; what is actually lacking? The scarcest good in an information society is our vastly time-bound individual perception. We live in an attention economy, distinguished by intense competition among innumerable producers and mediators of information. Using every rhetorical ploy, they want to capture and modulate our perception, then aggregate it, creating momentary attention communities or publics. Nevertheless, attention depends on the individual observer: information is in the eye of the attentive beholder. Why does this, and not that, image, title, shape catch a person’s notice? It’s always an enigma in the end: time and again, we realize that the deeper logics of perception are non-observable. They escape us, although they fundamentally determine what we find interesting, attractive, seductive – in a word: informative. This awareness that our perception in general and attention patterns in particular are ultimately opaque to our consciousness, marks us as decentred subjects, no French philosophy needed.
Whatever the underlying motive, the contemporary information user actively considers, selects, retains, and perhaps also reads, in the genuinely hermeneutic sense of interpreting or deciphering the overall, or 'deeper', meaning of a series of words, images, or sounds. This level of reading differs from immediate sense making, or minimal reading, that simply recognizes what one already knows. On the other hand, the maximal reading that most reception theories suppose involves a short interruption, a moment concerned with the difference between something’s directly understood meaning ('I’m looking at a picture of a man') and one or more other possible meanings, or even absence of meaning ('why does the man wear these clothes?'). The search for an 'exact' meaning is commonly coupled with deciphering the intention of the information producer. Whereas minimal reading is user-oriented, maximal reading is author-centred.
In an environment saturated with information possibilities, we read both more and less. As the minimal mode of reading increases, its maximal counterpart becomes rather exceptional (and thus also more 'elitist', even among those holding a university degree). Many commentators decry this growing superficiality. Yet we also process more information in greater variety. It’s therefore wiser to say that we’re moving beyond 'the Age of Hermeneutics': deep interpretation of some texts is gradually superseded by flat comparison of more information. Readers turn into comparers, with resulting gains and losses. While we have more points of reference, we are less adept at savouring the richness of a singular bit of information. In an information-rich society, authentic astonishment also becomes a scarce good.
Rudi Laermans is professor of theoretical sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Leuven.
34. Reading Apart Together – Warren Lee
Books have in many ways become an integral part of my life; I have been in the book business now for forty years. I have done just about everything in the trade except operate a printing press and I have learned that books have souls; I know this because I know how difficult it is to throw one away, if it has reached that point of no return at the end of the value scale. There is a voice which keeps saying: 'Find a way to let me live on'.
I read for pleasure and I would rather read a hardbound book than a paperback, and, I love well designed books; books which become something more than just a receptical for words and pictures. Books which become objects of desire, for which collectors will do almost anything to own. A weakness that is well known to bookdealers and often used to profitable results.
It is the tactility of books which I feel will be their salvation in the onslaught of electronic paper, eBooks, and still unheard of new inventions. I was reminded of this only recently while sitting in the Eurostar coming from London . I had settled into my seat and taken out the book I was reading at that time; an English gentleman sat down next to me, opened his briefcase and took out his Kindle and also started reading. We were both seriously into our reading for some time but I found myself reflecting on our parallel situation. There came a point when I interrupted him to ask how he found the experience of reading electronically as compared to a printed book. He laughed and said: 'But I love books and I have a house full of them at home. I read and I travel a lot therefore I just cannot carry around the extra weight of real books, and my Kindle offers me a wide selection to choose from.'
We talked shortly about the pros and cons and then both retired again into our reading. I was happily reassured that the book will not be replaced, but will find its place in the onslaught of the electronic era.
Warren Lee is the owner and co-founder of the internationally renowned bookstore Nijhof and Lee in Amsterdam .
35. Unexpected Ways – Jannah Loontjens
How and where we encounter literature determines how we approach the text. Not only do our physical surroundings influence our reading experience, but also the framework in which a text is presented or discussed. If a novel is discussed by Oprah Winfrey, it is easily associated with therapeutic literature and a women’s audience; if the same novel is reviewed in the New Yorker it is taken to be more serious. Exposés of the author’s life are often associated with lowbrow forms, whereas highbrow outlets are assumed to focus on the work itself. This prejudice no longer reflects reality. Highbrow media also increasingly write about authors’ lives. Yet as long as such exposés are printed in, say, the New Yorker, they are not considered a disreputable way of approaching literature. In fact, all media increasingly scrutinize the lives of authors to the same extent as they scrutinize the lives of ordinary people in reality soaps and talk shows.