Visual Narrative and YouTube, Part 2

In this excellent TEDx talk by Dartmouth College Associate Professor, Michael Chaney, he talks at length about the form and structure of graphic novels and how understanding these things allows us to make meaning of visual narrative and derive a fuller appreciation of it. One of the graphic novels he talks about at some length is Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. I've used this TEDx talk with students when teaching the graphic novel because it shows students how much depth we can get into in just the first two panels of the story!

Learning to See the Social: How to Read a Graphic Novel

Chaney also gets into the whole idea of how we tend to process cartoonish representations of the human form in a different way than we would still photography. Photography suggests an image captured in the a past that no longer exists. We know that something in a photograph is not happening to the person "in the here and now" because the photo had to have been previously taken. However, Satrapi's cartooning shows us a character that we, as readers, are willing to believe is in "the present" of the narrative. This is such an insightful idea and one that can generate really excellent discussions with students.

Chaney's talk and the ideas it raises also allow for a lot of cross-polination depending on the other writers your students are studying. For example, Margaret Atwood's poetry is filled with references to the problematic nature of photography: how photographs capture an instant in time, but don't tell us what happened to the subject in the time before or the time since the click of the camera's shutter. Think, for instance of "This is a Photograph of Me" or "Girl and Horse, 1928." Satrapi also focuses on photographs as a visual record, with a memorable full-page panel of her father taking photos of the violence, and other panels in which a character is looking at a photograph from the past and pointing out something about it.

Chaney's talk, then, is a wonderful starting point for such discussions. Be sure to check it out!

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