Recommended Reading: English Language Notes 46.2: "Graphia: The Graphic Novel and Literary Criticism"

University of Colorado, Boulder professor (and my former chair at USM) William Kuskin edits this issue of English Language Notes, which deals specifically with the graphic novel and how its best home may be situated in the realm of Literature Studies.

Kuskin joins Charles Hatfield, Johanna Drucker, Jan Baetens, and other talented intellectuals from the U.S. and abroad to illustrate how the hardbound (or at least compared to its soft-pamphlet brethren) graphic novel is literally/literarily bound to the histories, legacies, and theories of the book. Each essay positions graphic novels in or around the ethos of the book and literary theory while also touching on other notions that have posited the graphic novel elsewhere/elsewheres (film, art, media studies) and while making sure to expressing the unique values of the medium. The limits of narrative, linearity, and form of traditional print-based texts, other types of visuo-verbal discourse emanating from the page, and the graphic novel medium inform each other, comment on one another, and in many ways, transform one another as the authors place them in proper relationships.

I enjoyed the issue very much and recommend it to anyone interested in comics studies. I happen to be reading it alongside the new Comics Studies Reader and Theirry Groensteen's The System of Comics, and I find this joining to make for an even more satisfying intellectual endeavor, especially when I compare Groensteen's thoughts (in both the Reader and in Systems) on how comics, or the 9th art, as they call it in France, needs to be considered as its own, unique system, with its scholarship drawing from but not concreted in any number of studies, to ELN's situating graphic novels and its scholarship in literary traditions and thought. Both make compelling arguments on their own, of course, but they're particularly intriguing when paired.

You can order your copy of the "Graphia" issue of ELN by visiting here. It's worth at least twice what you'll pay for it and will make for many exciting conversations among those interested in comics and with those more traditionally literary-minded folks whom may not yet know what to make of them.