Our imagination, memory, and the ways in which we perceive, experience, and interact with the world are profoundly connected. Visual images are often perceived as central to imaginative processes and have been singled out as one of the reasons why memory and imagination are so densely entangled. Our thinking rarely stays on one track or in the confines of one modality, but memory and imagination, as well as verbal, visual, spatial, haptic, and bodily cognition constantly complement each other. Since comics also involve the interplay of realistic and fantastical expressions, as well as visual and verbal elements, they offer an excellent entry point into examining these issues. Moreover, understanding cognition not as a computational, but as an embodied process offers new avenues to explore comics artists’ and readers’ bodily engagement with the material, experiential, and narrative aspects of graphic storytelling. We are interested in understanding both how the artists’ creative processes work and how the readers’ embodied cognition is involved in their engagement with comics.
Questions under discussion include:
What are the cognitive affordances of form and materiality in reading and creating comics? How do the cognitive affordances of writing and drawing, text and image differ from and complement each other? What embodied aspects of cognition play a role in the creative processes of making and reading a comic? How can these processes be studied with the help of recent developments in cognitive theory, and how can they, vice versa, shed light on some basic tenets of cognitive science?
Programme
- 9:15-9:30 Welcome (Essi & Stijn)
- 9:30-11:00 Session 1
- Rebecca Suter: Flower and Dreams: emotive backgrounds and shared memory in Japanese girl comics
- Rebecca Scherr: Drawing Ground in the Graphic Novel
- Essi Varis: Line of Thought: Drawing as a Way of Thinking
- 11:00-11:30 Coffee break
- 11:30-13:00 Session 2
- Stijn Vervaet: Imagination and Memory in Aleksandar Zograf's Work: On Dreams, Things, and the Cognitive Work of Comics
- Mats Haraldsen: Imagining the Past of Others: (Post)memory and Comics
- Álvaro Llose Sanz: A memory problem: Metaphors of forgetfulness in Paco Roca's "Wrinkles" (2007)
- 13:00-14:00 Lunch break
- Afternoon session
- 14:15-15:15 Talk by Aleksandar Zograf: Creating Comics: Between the Observed and the Imagined (place: Scene HumSam)
- 15:30-17:30 Comics salon
Participants
- Rebecca Suter, Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Oslo
- Rebecca Scherr, Professor of American Literature at the University of Oslo
- Essi Varis, Visiting researcher at LCE, University of Oslo, and Researcher at the University of Helsinki
- Stijn Vervaet, Associate Professor of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies at the University of Oslo
- Mats Haraldsen, PhD Candidate in French Literature at the University of Oslo
- Álvaro Llosa Sanz, Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Oslo
- Aleksandar Zograf, Cartoonist
- Karin Kukkonen, Professor of Literature at the University of Oslo
- Ljiljana Šarić, Professor of Central European and Balcan Studies at the University of Oslo
The Workshop is arranged by
- Stijn Vervaet, Associate Professor of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies at the University of Oslo
- Essi Varis, Visiting researcher at LCE, University of Oslo, and Researcher at the University of Helsinki
There will also be a Conversation between Stijn Vervaet and Aleksandar Zograf at Deichmann Grünerløkka 15 September 7:00 - 9:00 PM.