A Theory of Narrative Drawing

by Simon Grennan

This book offers an original new conception of visual story telling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form. The book identifies and examines key issues in the field, the relationships between vision, visualization and imagination; the theoretical remediation of linguistic and narratological concepts; the systematization of discourse; the production of the subject; idea and institution; and the significance of resources of the body in depiction, representation and narrative. It then tests this new conception in two original visual demonstrations clarify the particular dialectic relationships between subjects and media, in an examination of drawing style and genre, social consensus and self-conscious constraint. The book’s originality derives from its clear articulation of a wide range of sources in proposing a conception of narrative drawing, and the extrapolation of this new conception in two new visual demonstrations.

289 pages, Hardcover

Published June 29, 2017

Reviews

[Barbara M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did a quick reading of this - and definitely have to read it a second time. So this is just a first impression. After the first reading, I would like to give 3.5 stars. This book is really dense, maybe a bit over-theoretical in the parts 1 to 2. Am not sure what to make of the bashing of Neil Cohn's "The Visual Language of Comics" (2013). Cohn's book does indeed seem hastily written in parts, has some annoying errors when it comes to using linguistic terms etc. - but it has inspiring parts as well. This might be a bit too much attention to details on my part here, but when criticizing, it should be done properly and take the reader along. Having that said, it is problematic to have important information "hidden" in footnotes without referencing them. Brennan writes: "Beyond his curious definition of grapheme, noted earlier, Cohn doesn't analyze the structural relationship between cognitive lexicogrammar and the visual arrays of writing." (p. 39) Contentwise, I couldn't agree more - but Grennan's very well justified criticism on said curious definition of grapheme is to be found in footnote 56 on page 31 - in a paragraph that does not mention Cohn at all but rather states a correct definition of grapheme. This might confuse readers who are not avid footnote readers. I learned a lot from reading Grennan's book - and I was really fascinated by his drawing demonstrations in part 3 and 4. In my opinion, they are artistic research at its best. Would have liked a conclusion to the whole book in the end. Will write a a real review after there second reading.

[Eszter Szép]

It was a challenge to read this book because the language is very difficult, but there are a lot of summaries and a great deal of repetition in it, which are always welcome and which are terribly useful. This is a VERY interdisciplinary PhD thesis/monograph, which made me watch some TED talks and read the bios of a number of authors I haven't read before, and in general reminded me to my MA classes in literary theory :) . I think a longer intro, a conclusion, and a glossary would really have helped the reader (me, at least) to see the relevance of the diverse theoretical chapters well in advance and also in retrospect, because the chapters themselves use an IMMENSE amount of theoretical knowledge from multiple fields. (WOW!!!) The first 160 pages are there to provide a theoretical foundation for the two drawing demonstrations, which are EXTREMELY interesting. The second part (Narrative) is basically a summary of what philosophers have said on subjectivity and which have relevance to Simon's project. I enjoyed reading that part, maybe because I had to read these guys at uni - oh the joy of recognition :)
p 148 is his model, up to that point everything is kind of like a long intro
I love the way Simon considers drawing an intersubjective, embodied, socially and historically embedded venture -- it is similar to my PhD thesis :)
I also like that he likes the same guys that I like :), namely Philip Rawson, Mark Johnson, Bakhtin.
This book is more about narratology, semiotics, theories of subjectivity, Jauss, speech acts, the body, phenomenology -- all of which are turned into practice in the last two sections -- and also provides detailed criticism of comics scholars like Neil Cohn, Groensteen and Marion.

[Toad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book for my dissertation, it was so fun to learn more about my hobby and it helped build up my art for my dissertation so much. There were so many examples that helped me analyse style and format and just what made art tell a story.