‘Dispossession’: uses of encumbrance and constraint in visualising Trollope’s style, in a new graphic adaptation of his 1878-79 novel ‘John Caldigate'.

This paper will discuss my adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878-79) as a new graphic novel, Dispossession and its French edition Courir deux lièvres. Trollope’s writing style formalises his approach to plot, succinctly tying style to genre. In the plot of John Caldigate, the narrator both consistently avoids making definitive statements about events and character traits and avoids presenting a definitive opinion. Although Trollope eschews visual description, the continual, rhythmic presentation of one opinion after another brings about a distinctive and relatively complex spaciotopia, in which the reader feels positioned relative to the diegesis. In retinoscopic terms, this could be described simply as a spaciotopia produced by continually repeating a limited number of changes in point of view. From an analysis of Trollope’s writing style emerges the question of style in the drawn adaptation, answers to which finalise the governing constraints of its drawing style: how does Dispossession employ and/or depict equivocation in the style of its facture, distinct from the depiction of the plot? More simply, the changes made to Trollope’s plot in the adaptation emerged according to principles extrapolated from the habits of contemporary readers. The paper will explore how important plot elements or absences, significant for Trollope’s readers in the 1870s, required alteration or transformation, in order to maintain or heighten the meaning of the plot for 21st century readers: the elision of characters, changes to names, the legal process of restitution after miscarriages of justice, the significance of a straw hat and, most visibly, the presentation of new aboriginal Australian characters and the use of the Wiradjuri language. Citing both positive and critical media reviews of Courir deux lièvres from earlier this year, the paper will finally suggest that these approaches to word/image adaptation in the context of markets for graphic novels in English and French negotiate existing terrain for understanding Trollope, by bringing new habits of reading to an experience of his work and to ideas of the nineteenth century

Journeys of the self: Marion’s partial ‘mediagenius’ and the motive reader in comparitive theories of intersubjectivity.

Phillipe Marion uses the neologism ‘mediagenius’ to describe the way in which stories specify themselves though the systematic, discursive relationships that constitute communications registers, by means of what Jan Baetens calls ‘style’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘medium’ (2001). In Marion’s sense, comic strips have a specific mediagenius that is quite distinct from the mediagenius (the ‘style’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘medium’) of other narrative registers, such as movie or writing. The most discussed element of comics’ mediagenius is the notion of ‘graphiation’, a term that Marion uses as a drawn equivalent for the concept ‘utterance’ in linguistic narratology: graphiation is the comics register’s specific bundle of actions, traces and constraints that conjures its relationships between producers, situations and readers. However, graphiation fulfills only one function in the mediagenius of comics proposed by Marion, outside which, with increasing adoption in scholarship, the term is closing itself down, becoming a sign for the recognition of authorial subjectivity, understood as drawing style. Adopting this use of graphiation as a shorthand for recognising subjectivity, this paper will examine in some detail Marion’s conception of comics’ mediagenius as an encompassing theorisation of intersubjective communication, at the level of register, with particular focus on the narrative function of reading as a journey of the self. The paper will then compare comics’ mediagenius systematically to three other theories of intersubjective communication devised by Valentin Volosinov (1929), Martin Barker (1989) and Nick Crossley (1996), using the comparisons to index broader topics facing the study of narrative drawing, in particular the possibilities suggested by recognising relationships between genre and embodiment; relationships between embodiment, motion and representations of time; and relationships between trace and the acts of recognition and misrecognitio

The facture of ‘Dispossession’: trace, colour, light and time in a new graphic adaptation of Trollope’s 1879 novel ‘John Caldigate’.

This paper will discuss my forthcoming adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878) as a new graphic novel, Dispossession. Produced in the context of an academic conference on Trollope in 2015, the new graphic novel functions as a research outcome in the sense that its academic audience is a ‘knowing one’, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term (Hutcheon 2006:122). This audience will both expect to read the graphic novel as the product of a self-aware relationship with Trollope’s novel and make demands upon the new graphic novel that derive from its members’ own, particularly focused, experience of Trollope’s novel itself. As a result, the process of making the adaptation has distilled questions about the act of novel/comic adaptation itself that have enabled the emergence of a methodology for the adaptation process and aimed to produce the new book as a comprehensible response. Two questions have guided the adaptation: 1) What results if the existing generic constraints of graphic novels are self-consciously reformed in the process of adaptation, and the protocol for the new book derives from an analysis of Trollope’s text relative to the behaviours of its time and ours? And 2) How can Dispossession employ and/or depict equivocation in the style of its facture, distinct from the depiction of the plot? Following Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of translation, the process of creating Dispossession approaches Trollope’s text as the source of a protocol or set of governing rules, including an apprehension of the reading behaviours of his contemporaries and of contemporary graphic novel readers (Benjamin 1969:70). As a result, the relationship between novel and graphic novel constitutes both the process and product of adaptation as an experience for a knowing reader. This paper will summarise the rationalisation of methods of facture in response to the guiding questions. In particular, it will consider the ways in which specific historic depictive regimes represent specific diegetic meteorologies, and how these are associated with both historic periods and particular places. In terms of drawing style, the challenge for this adaptation lies not only in identifying the existing different behaviours of novels and graphic novels, but in meaningfully producing a new style of drawing relative to an existing writing style. It is not the task of comparing an existing style of drawing with Trollope’s writing style, but one demanding the speculative creation of new rules within which to draw. As Dispossession also has a research function, the process of meaningfully inventing a new style also demands comprehensive rationalisation. I will discuss how Trollope’s writing style formalises his approach to plot, tying style to genre. In the plot, the narrator both consistently avoids making definitive statements about events and character traits and avoids presenting a definitive opinion. Instead, information is derived from a number of different, and sometimes contradictory, sources and accumulates gradually. Trollope utilises this technique with great consistency. From an analysis of Trollope’s style emerges the question of style in the facture of the adaptation, answers to which finalise its rules of facture: how does Dispossession employ and/or depict equivocation in its facture, distinct from the depiction of the plot? To answer this question, the paper will discuss the broader temporal implications of relationships between types of plot and drawing regimes, considering in detail differences in anaphoras, special locations and discursive traditions using examples of types of facture from 19th century and 21st century narrative drawing

Drawing 'Dispossession': A New Graphic Adaptation of Anthony Trollope's 'John Caldigate'.

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in European Comic Art. Grennan, Simon. 2014. Drawing ‘Dispossession’: A New graphic adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel ‘John Caldigate’. European Comic Art, 7(2), 4-30. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/eca.2014.070202A paper in the journal European Comic Art

Dispossession: Storyboard, Anaphora, Rhythm and Stage in a New Graphic Adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1878-79 Novel 'John Caldigate'.

IAWIS/AIERTI Conference Dundee 2014 Session Proposal: Dr Simon Grennan, University of Chester ([email protected]) Individual Papers Panel Session Theme: Visual Literacies / Literary Visualities (in the Digital Age) Session Title: ‘Graphic adaptation and historic literary fiction: re/vision, remediation and discovery.’ Although comic strip adaptations of historic literary fiction are commonplace, in the great majority they have been historically motivated either by pedagogy or by hagiography. The pedagogic approach assumes that narrative drawing is more accessible to children than text. The hagiographic approach assumes that the source text is an original to which adaptations must aspire by overcoming the limits imposed by their own media Increasingly, a number of comic strip adaptations of historic fiction have appeared to interrogate the process of adaptation from literary text to narrative drawing itself, turning the adaptation process into a method of enquiry into some of the central issues of both remediation, narrative drawing and historiography: the relationships between specific texts and new images and concepts of authenticity, record and narrative voice relative to history. Such approaches to the adaptation of historic novels make visible the ways in which the process of adaptation itself engenders a fuller understanding of historic texts and their production. Frequently, they visibly manipulate the reading experience through techniques of juxtaposition, anachronism and visual revision, prompting reflections upon the impact of diverse media on the practice of history, for example: Marcel Broodthaers 1969 ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hansard’, Dino Battaglia’s adaptations of Maupassant stories and Catherine Anyango’s 2010 ‘Heart of Darkness’. This session will aim to focus in detail upon a) both the technical processes of adaptation, or the ways in which new technologies inform the development of approaches to historic texts, and b) upon the conceptual strategies and rationales of adaptors. As a related topic, it will also hope to discuss current trends in the understanding of the roles of contemporaneous illustration in historic literary fiction. The session’s central questions and consequent call for papers will focus upon i) comic strip adaptation’s rationalisation of visual equivalents for literary narrative voices, ii) upon the influence of moving image conventions on storyboards, points of view, pace and information management and iii) upon conceptions of time revealed in contemporary adaptations of nineteenth century novels in particular. Confirmed individual presenters: Professor Jan Baetens (KU Leuven) Dr Simon Grennan (Chester University) Frederik Van Dam (KU Leuven) Expressions of interest in the call for individual session papers has been made by: Emeritus Professor David Skilton (Cardiff University) Peter Wilkins (Douglas College, Vancouver) Dr Ian Hague (Comics Forum) A further call for individual session papers will be made

Misrecognising Misrecognition: the Capacity to Influence in the Milieux of Comics and Fine Art

A conference paper presented at the University of Amsterdam Comics Conference 2015This paper will consider some of the relationships between subjects, social institutions, media and ideas that characterise differences between the environments in which both comics and fine art are produced, used and become comprehensible. It will outline a specific theoretical framework encompassing these differences, describing the discursive co-dependency between forms of media, the uses to which they are put and the habits of thought and expectation engendered by these uses. This encompassing theoretical frame draws in particular upon Althusser, Bourdieu and Hodge and Kress, describing these relationships as ideology, deriving from Karl Mannheim’s and Marx and Engels’ critiques of ideocracy, the promotion of or resistance to ideas on the grounds of the degree to which they reproduce or contradict a dominant social structure. Utilising examples in the productions and social histories of fine artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Billy Childish, Raymond Peittbon, Lichtenstein and Manet and comics artists Grennan & Sperandio, Janette Parris and Gary Panter, the paper will explore how the relationships between the dominant ideas of one group of people, and the world experiences of other groups, include misrecognition. Those ideas that dominate social discourse in any particular circumstance are not actively misrepresented by the dominant order, according to this model, but rather misrecognised and either overlooked or accepted by others for whom they are materially disadvantageous. Referring to social studies of the fine art world by Zolberg, Danto and Dickie, and to Beaty’s recent commentary on the roles of fan culture, authorlessness and the dynamics of ‘outsider’ status, in creating the social environment of comics, the paper will finally suggest that the degrees and types of this misrecognition constitute two distinct, though continually developing, sets of social constraints that underwrite the possible meanings and uses of comics and fine art, by continually substantiating the histories of their own milieux

Plot, picture and practice: comics, picture books and illustrated literary fiction.

Reporting on a January 2012 joint session of the Modern Language Association of America’s Division on Children’s Literature and the Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives, co-convener Charles Hatfield stated, “Scholars of the picture book (Nodelman; Spaulding; Nikolajeva & Scott; op de Beeck) have noted the aesthetics and reading demands of comics. Conversely, comics theorists (McCloud; Varnum & Gibbons) have suggested formal likenesses between [them] —including shared aesthetic resources, the relevance of word/image theory to both, and the growing prominence of comics in children’s publishing and reading instruction.” Session contributor Perry Nodelman stated that the formal definitions of each register continually contradict and confound each other, whilst Phillip Nel theorised that differences between picture books and comics result from particular author poesis, generating clustering, but not absolute, habits of form. Developing this idea, Joseph Thomas noted that each registers’ governing conventions also dictate and direct the uses to which picture books and comics are put. Relationships between form and the conditions of production and use of books that utilise text and image also form the axis of a more recent paper by Joe Sutliff Sanders, who writes, “Despite the obvious differences between [picture books and comics], nearly all of the formal terms most commonly used to define one can also easily be applied to the other. Still, in one of the common observations about both forms—that words and images work together to create meaning—lies the first step in a path toward distinguishing the two.” (84) These formal terms include the identification and generalisation of different types of plot transition (page to page in picture books, panel to panel in comics), the distribution of plot events, the frequency of page turns, the distribution and types of information provided by text and images and the shapes, proportions and production materials of both registers, to note only a few. I should say immediately that this paper will consider only three types of book in which text and image are utilised to present the diegesis: comics for children and adult readers, picture books for children andIllustrated literary fiction for children and adult readers. Although some of the terms of my discussion plausibly find application in all text/image productions, for the purpose of this paper, I will set aside, for example, contemporary digital applications and 16th and 17th century emblem books to focus on the implications of making distinctions between these three

Rationalising practice as research: making a new graphic adaptation of a Trollope novel of 1879.

In the United Kingdom, practice-based research has been the subject of pedagogic debate for over a quarter of a century, in particular in the context of both the study methods and the adjudication of higher research degrees. However, there is still no agreed pedagogic definition of practice-based research in the visual and performing arts in Britain (Candy 2006:03). A report of the country’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, revised in 2008, could not identify ‘…any established or accepted prior definition…’ (Rust, Mottram and Till 2008:10). The term ’practice-based’ is widely used to describe the use of practice as a method of research, and its products as research outputs in themselves, not requiring the mediation of a text (Candy 2006:01). The term ‘practice-led’, on the other hand, refers to the processes and products of practice as topics for theoretical analysis utilising text, so that ‘…the results of practice-led research may be fully described in text form without the inclusion of a creative work.’ (Candy 2006:01). There is not a dearth of definitions, however, but rather a wide variety, predicated upon the developing programmes of individual places of study. Candlin identifies an extreme diversity of required research outputs, from the visual-only outputs required by Leeds Metropolitan University’s PhD by Visual Practice on one hand, to the requirement at the University of Hertfordshire for a written thesis of eighty thousand words to accompany visual material, on the other (Candlin 2000). The diversity of definitions of both methods and outputs is derived as much from a continuing debate on theoretical questions, arising out of debates about the practical issues of teaching and assessing research degrees. Three theoretical questions underpin the debates. First, are non-text outputs, artefacts, and the methods of their production, able to communicate knowledge rather than simply constituting knowledge? Second, by what criteria can this knowledge be adjudicated within an academic environment? Third, what is the status of these outputs and methods relative to the production of text

Comic strips and the making of meaning: emotion, intersubjectivity and narrative drawing.

This study argues that the experience of reading comics is comprehensible as a series of intersubjective relationships represented in physical form. Considering concepts of self-conciousness, perception, embodiment and social experience, it develops a narrative model that brings the physical forms of self-expression into a series of relationships generated and made meaningful to embodied subjects. I seek to develop the theoretical work of a minority of comics narratologists. In particular, theorists who focussed on the relationship between content, form and enunciative context, rather than focussing on the study of enunciation alone. Following cultural theorist Martin Barker, I adopt a crossdisciplinary theoretical approach, which considers the relationship between the ideas, forms and methods of one discipline and another. However, I adopt an interdisciplinary method in two practical Drawing Demonstrations, that makes instrumental use of studio methods in solving two theoretical problems. I argue for practice-based research as problem solving. My argument has a main axis: readings of philosophical descriptions of self-consciousness and perception on one hand, and readings of the work of narratologists who focus on the relationship between histoire and discours, on the other. My argument establishes a set of theoretical predecessors in works that I bring together for the first time. This constitutes a new set of ideas from which my argument derives. This set has not been compiled before in English language comics narratology. The model of narrative that I describe is also original, although correlates to the work of other narratologists. Also original are my analysis of the theory of 'mediagenius' and conditions of intersubjectivity and my analysis of comic strip artist Matt Madden's work in terms of concepts of self observation. My two Drawing Demonstrations provide an original model of practice-based research following a problem-solving approach. In approaching comics narratology as a relationship between histoire and discours, this study develops Barker's approach. It provides opportunities for comics narratologists to reconsider the application of both the approach and the ideas that it represents