Michael A. Chaney, White River Junction, Vermont, USA is associate professor of English at Dartmouth College and chair of the African and African American studies program. He is the author of Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative and editor of Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels.
Reading Lessons in Seeing stands out because it is unafraid to be
suggestive; it is evocatively and often quite beautifully written;
and it draws on critical theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis
with sophistication. Chaney argues that comics teach their viewers
how they ought to be read. In elucidating how comics form makes
abstractions of identity visible, he proposes, significantly, that
comics present a new compact of textual engagement.--Hillary L.
Chute, author of Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and
Documentary Form
Autobiographical comics foster empathy by placing the reader/viewer
in the perspective of the author/narrator, and when their views
differ a rupture occurs. Reading Lessons in Seeing focuses on this
moment of rupture and what it does to the reader's thinking.
Pushing us to uncover how an artist creates their art, their story,
Chaney excavates the form of the comics medium, showing us to read
'comics as thinking.' Chaney's observations of the tropes in
graphic memoir are as powerful as his analysis of the genre itself.
The graphic autobiography teaches us to 'see' and in doing so
ensures a more informed and developed reader in the end.--Jennifer
Caroccio "Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Volume 42,
Issue 1"
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