Sébastien Conard:Naar een andere graphic novel: woord, beeld en verhaal in de striproman en de historische avant-gardes

Doctoral Project

Sébastien Conard, PhD in the Arts

How do words and images interact? And what defines a graphic narrative? To answer these questions, this dissertation first zooms in on the graphic novel as an offshoot of the alternative trends within the field of comics. The graphic novel’s context and history as well as its specific aesthetic and literary development are explored. Subsequently, the notion of graphic narrativity is further studied : what constitutes a (narrative) image, what does it mean to tell stories and so what is a graphic narrative? Concepts as symptom, event, montage and appearance are foregrounded at this point. Finally, a series of imagetexts stemming from canonical comics, graphic novels as well as the historical avant-gardes are analysed in depth. Experiments from Dada and Surrealism, and especially the collage novels of Max Ernst, are scrutinized.These telling imagetexts each in their own way expand common views of the verbo-visual possibilities in graphic storytelling, past, present and future. 

Supervisors:

  • Prof. dr. Sascha Bru (supervisor, KU Leuven)
  • Dr. Tom Van Imschoot (co-supervisor, KU Leuven/LUCA)
  • Mr. Olivier Deprez (co-supervisor, artist)

Research Unit: Image

Duration: 2010 - 2016