Unflattening

Sousanis, Nick

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0674744438 ISBN 13: 9780674744431

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2015

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.

Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.

In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

Recensione:

Chosen as one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by The Independent

Chosen as a comic book of 2015 in the Irish Examiner.

"An important book, Unflattening" is consistently innovative, using abstraction alongside realism, using framing and the (dis)organization of the page to represent different modes of thought. The words and images speak for themselves and succeed on their own terms. I couldn't stop reading it." --Henry Jenkins, author of "Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society""

Ranging across a wide range of disciplines the arts, the sciences, popular culture, critical theory Sousanis argues that the verbal and the visual are inextricably entwined in the production of knowledge... It is a book that is dense with the syntheses of ideas, nimble, far-reaching and impossible to summarize. It liberates itself from the standard layout of panels within frames, teaching the eye and mind to read the unfailingly intelligent black-and-white artwork in unconventional and new ways. Unflattening deserves a place as a compulsory textbook in schools. - -- New Statesman

L'autore:

Nick Sousanis is a comics artist and an educator. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies at the University of Calgary.