Dr. Polak talks about empathy in reading comics, how narratives of violence can lead readers to consider ethics, and the tricky bits of graphic memoir.
Listen to more
The interview audio is available here at the New Books Network podcast.
What we talked about
How the gutter creates ‘room to imagine connections’ and where empathetic or imaginative collaboration come into play.
How reading poetry teaches us to read comics.
How comics can help us feel ‘with’ rather than giving into the impulse to seek self-identification.
How the depiction of fictional atrocity affects how we consume real-life accounts of atrocity, and vice versa?
How Dr. Polak uses her expertise in this historiographic methodology inform her own comics and graphic memoir work.
About the scholar
Dr. Kate Polak is a writer, artist, performer, and scholar specializing in comics, poetry, 21st century women writers, and the literatures of genocide. She is an Instructor and research associate in the English Department at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches writing and literature, focusing on poetry, the representation of violence, and graphic narrative. Her book, Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, was nominated for an Eisner Award.
About the book
The book investigates the intersection of ethics and empathy in graphic narratives from autographics to historigraphic metafiction, through the following framing questions. First, how do writers and artists use the form of graphic narratives to critique the ethical dimension of reader’s empathetic engagement with characters set in a historical event? Second, how are readers’ affective engagements with graphic narratives complicated by focalization and point of view? Third, how does the depiction or implication of violence in visual form complicate the reader’s ethical relationship to focalizing characters? Fourth, what can fictional graphic narratives offer in discussions about affect and ethical engagement with texts that deal with real-world violence? Finally, she seeks to explore how fictional graphic narratives that depict historical realities engage the reader differently than the well-researched genre of autographics. This book’s most important questions surround how we receive and interpret representations of history, considering the ways in which what we think we know about historical atrocities can be at odds with the convoluted circumstances surrounding violence. Beginning with a new look at Watchmen, and including examinations of such popular series as Scalped and Hellblazer as well as Bayou and Deogratias, the book questions how graphic narratives create an alternative route by which to understand large-scale violence. Ethics in the Gutter explores how graphic narrative representations of violence can teach readers about the possibilities and limitations of empathy and ethics.