Author’s Roundtable: Thomas A. Bredehoft, “The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus”
Response by Shawn Gilmore
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
posted under
comics
,
Shawn Gilmore
,
textual production
,
Thomas Bredehoft
by Unit for Criticism
"Comics: Immedia et Realia"
Written by Shawn Gilmore (English)
The arguments that Thomas Bredehot puts forward in The Visible Text provide a new and valuable model by which we might reconfigure our notions of the long history of textual production, while also quite usefully highlighting the tension between the textual and paratextual components of various text objects, exposing the linked and shifting relationship between production and reproduction within various eras in the history of print. As a scholar of comics and graphic narratives, I am drawn to Bredehoft’s rather bold claims about the role that comics play at the end of his genealogy of textual forms. So, in what follows, I want to briefly highlight what I read as the key to Bredehoft’s conception of comics, and then move (somewhat tendentiously) to two challenges that this definition poses if we are to move forward with his schema in mind.
Bredehoft’s argument dismisses some traditional assumptions about the aesthetic logic of comics—including the basic assumption that comics are imagetexts and the more foundational assumption that comics constitute a medium—as he carefully delineates comics from the logic of both the facsimile and the edition. Instead, he draws comics into a long history of printed textual works, focusing on the contiguity of their printed forms (including comics books and graphic novels) with previous modes of textual production. What differs with comics, argues Bredehoft, is the relationship between text and paratext, held together by a unified material publishing form—in short, that comics artists are able to blur the typically fixed relationship between text and paratext, which allows them to integrate their work in ways that sets their comics apart from the markers that establish the legitimacy of traditional textual categories, such as the facsimile or the edition.
Read more