32.779, Calls: Philosophy of Language, Psycholinguistics / Punctum (Jrnl)

Wed Mar 3 21:46:51 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-779. Wed Mar 03 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.779, Calls:  Philosophy of Language, Psycholinguistics / Punctum (Jrnl)

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================================================================

Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2021 16:46:29
From: Evangelos Kourdis [ekourdis at frl.auth.gr]
Subject: Philosophy of Language, Psycholinguistics / Punctum (Jrnl)

Full Title: Punctum 

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Apr-2021 

The Social, Political and Ideological Semiotics of Comics and Cartoons

Special issue of Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics

Editors: Stephan Packard and Lukas R.A. Wilde

What more can semiotics do for comics? As early as the 1960s and through to
the first decades of the 21st century, comics studies have attracted a large
and perhaps disproportionate amount of attention from analytical semiotic
approaches that foreground description and theory building: Their combination
of pictures and text offering a challenge to any attempt towards a systematic
theory of signs, and their experimental treatment of their semiotic inventory
as well as the genres, imageries, and conventions of other media and art forms
inviting descriptive scrutiny as well as playful engagement. Scott McCloud’s
famous Understanding Comics (1993), both praised and criticized for its
essentially semiotic approach, provided the foundation for the rise of
sequential comics studies. Even the relatively more practice-based earlier
work of Will Eisner (Comics & Sequential Art, 1985), on which McCloud built
his own, focuses on a description of formal semiotic and semantic
relationships. Thierry Groensteen’s Système de la bande dessinée (1999), on
the other hand, elaborated a semiological approach to the comics images’
’iconic solidarity.’ For semantics rather than syntax, Umberto Eco’s treatment
of Superman (1962) had already extended a semiological perspective to
examining plot and character.

The influence of these authors might wrongly cloud the plethora of early
international contributions to a semiotic study of comics, including Ullrich
Krafft’s Comics lesen (1978), Ursula Oomen’s Wort – Bild – Nachricht (1975),
Daniele Barbieri’s Il linguaggio del fumetto (1990), and Anne Magnussen’s
Peircean approach in Comics & Culture (2000, with Hans-Christian
Christiansen), among many others. Natsume Fusanosuke’s and Takekuma Kentarō’s
collection Manga no yomikata (漫画の読み方 1995, roughly: How to Read Manga)
inspired a similar Japanese wave of formal-aesthetic and semiotic reflections
of writing, images, and abstract line-art in the manga tradition, although
this has hardly been noticed internationally due to a lack of translations.
More recently, the multimodality approach of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) has
given rise to new methods, such as Janina Wildfeuer’s empirical discourse
analysis of comics (2018ff.), Paul Fisher Davis’ multimodal
systemic-functional linguistics (2019), or large-scale formal corpus analytics
(cf. Alexander Dunst, Quantitative Analysis of Comics, 2018). Simultaneously,
the combination of semiotics and cognitive linguistics has opened new venues,
such as Neil Cohn’s description of distinct visual languages of comics (Cohn
2013).

And yet, many of these approaches have been accused of treating their subjects
with arbitrary abstraction and an overload of theory, neglecting political and
material conditions of comics production, contents, distribution, and fandom,
and reproducing distinctions of class, race, and gender by elevating the body
depictions of a popular genre to the metaphysical dignity of seemingly
ahistorical semiotic principles (cf. Horrocks 2001; Frahm 2006). In the face
of this criticism, we contend that a semiotic approach to comics studies
always has and can continue to engender a thorough and critical engagement
with comic books’ social, political, and ideological dimensions.

The naturalization of 'improper,' comical, and deformed shapes in comics can
be exposed at the very heart of its ideological tendencies and implicit
traditions. Carefully examining the cartoonish depiction of bodies and
stereotypes against the political history of caricature offers insight into
the reproduction processes that structure these comical signs.

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