Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form - Rilegato

Chute, Hillary L.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674504518 ISBN 13: 9780674504516

Casa editrice: Belknap Pr, 2016

Riassunto

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.

Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman’s first “Maus” story about his immigrant family’s survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa’s inaugural work of “atomic bomb manga,” the comic book Ore Wa Mita (“I Saw It”)—a title that alludes to Goya’s famous Disasters of War etchings.

Chute explains how the form of comics—its collection of frames—lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness.

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Recensione:

Like her subjects in their interpretations and experiences of mass murder and war, with "Disaster Drawn" Hillary Chute becomes a compelling witness to the most killing century in history. But she doesn't simply witness; she sees and makes us see: the art, the artistry, and the artist[...] Her chosen illustrations don't merely accompany her text; they illuminate it. She has the power to move as well as to propel us to fresh thinking about images and their effect on us. An insight on every page, it's frightening, it's powerful, it's essential is what would be said of Disaster Drawn if it were advertised on a billboard. Engaging both literature and history in the unexpected medium of comics, Chute draws her own verbal pictures so effectively she becomes as much an artist as those she is writing about." --Peter Davis, Academy Award-winning filmmaker of "Hearts and Minds" and author of "Girl of My Dreams""

"An intriguing study" --New Statesman

"Hillary Chute puts forward a convincing and comprehensive argument that comics as a medium are perfectly poised to act as a form of witnessing, as a means of engaging and prodding history [...] Usually I judge a book on how long it takes me to read it, and Disaster Drawn took a staggering five months. Often this would be a bad sign, but there is a more pragmatic reason for my slowness at turning the page, I was so drawn in by the stories such as Keijii Nakazawa that I had to pause and go read his, and the other featured artists' comics. So, through one book review, I ended up reading twenty." --Jame Walker, The Spokesman

L'autore:

Hillary L. Chute is Professor of English at Northeastern University.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Belknap Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674504518
• ISBN 13: 9780674504516
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 359