The ACME Speaker Series Presents:

“Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be.
Some Notes towards a Phenomenology
of the Nostalgic Feeling”
Giorgio Busi-Rizzi (UNIBO/KU Leuven)

 Mardi, 3 novembre 2015, à partir de 10h30
Séminaire LE
(ISLV – bât. A1, Place du XX Août, Liège)

(c) Seth

This presentation aims to conduct a survey of several graphic novels revolving around the theme of nostalgia and/or adopting aesthetic features that elicit it. I will start by reconstructing the historical evolution of the concept of nostalgia, following its metamorphosis from medical to psychological to everyday discourse, from a fully negative connotation to the richly nuanced semantics the term has nowadays, encompassing, at least in its extended use, the whole spectrum of feelings till the escapist jouissance of retro and vintage. I will then isolate a series of features that can help navigate through the concept of nostalgia, following some axes that help better understand its implications, and try to explain what seems to make comics so suitable to express or stimulate nostalgic feelings. Finally, I will briefly discuss the corpus of graphic novels I am currently researching on, quickly showing how, in my view, each of the selected work finds its own peculiar way to deal with nostalgia.

Giorgio Busi Rizzi is a PhD student with a joint supervision by the Universities of Bologna and Leuven. His research project focuses on nostalgia in a selection of graphic novels. He is interested in comics studies, narratology, humor theories and translation, and TV series.

The ACME Speaker Series is organized by the Comics Research Group ACME (http://www.acme.ulg.ac.be/) and sponsored by BeIPD-COFUND ULg.

The ACME Speaker Series Presents:

“The Comics Medium’s Dominant: A Narratological Perspective” -      A Conference by Steven Surdiacourt (KUL)

 Thursday, 23 April at 17.00. Location: Séminaire media (S. media), Bâtiment central (A1), Etage 2.

(c) Jamie McKelvie, page from Young Avengers, Marvel.

 In my paper, I will address the issue of the comics medium’s dominant, the problem of determining, in Roman Jakobson’s (1987 [1935], 41) words, which form of organization is the “focussing component” that “rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components” and thus “guarantees the integrity of the structure.” My starting point is the subquestion of the specificity of storytelling in graphic narratives, the question of what defines the articulation of narrative meaning in the medium of comics.

 I will show that comics are commonly understood as torn between the unifying forces of sequentiality and the centrifugal forces of segmentivity and tabularity. This has two important consequences. Firstly, by equating narrative and sequence, it obscures some of the most interesting aspects of storytelling in comics, aspects that set it apart from other medial forms of narration. Secondly, and even more importantly, this understanding both leads to and perpetuates the idea that comics are inherently defective, that the medium is not very well suited for storytelling as it continually threatens, due to its very form, to distract the reader, to interrupt the sequence.

 As I will argue however, the problem lies not with the medium itself but with the dualist conception of narrative representation that commonly underpins the theoretical reflection. It can be resolved by endorsing a new and radically different understanding of mimesis, dubbed “dual-aspect mimeticism” by Stephen Halliwell (2001). This different conceptualization of mimesis, based on the idea that the form and the content of the representation are inextricable, allows for a much more dynamic understanding of the comics medium’s dominant, which, in turn, enables a more accurate description of storytelling and, most crucially, a more favourable appreciation of the medium’s representational capacities.

The ACME Speaker Series is organized by the Comics Research Group ACME (http://www.acme.ulg.ac.be/) and sponsored by BeIPD-COFUND ULg.

Imaginings of the First World War in Comics: The Role of Image-Making in Une Aventure rocambolesque de Vincent van Gogh and Les Folies Bergère

Par Maaheen Ahmed (UGent)

Université de Liège, Friday 20 March at 10:30. Bâtiment central (A1), Salle 2E/1 – Salle Petit Physique

Famous modern painters, who moved away from the figurative impulse of traditional painting, play an important role in the World War One comics by Francis Porcel and Zidrou (Les Folies Bergère) and Manu Larcenet (Une Aventure rocambolesque de Vincent van Gogh - La Ligne de Front). In the former, Claude Monet is the protagonist of one of the several loosely interwoven storylines. In the latter, Van Gogh is, anachronistically, sent to the front line to paint. That a painter, and not a photographer, is ordered by the President to capture the essence of the fighting, just like scenes from the trenches alternate with scenes of an aged Monet painting in his gardens, question the role of art in such situations of extreme violence, testing the limits of mimesis, of realism as well as abstraction.

Given that these artists find themselves on the pages of a comic book, the questioning of the role of art, and of image-making in general, is self-reflexive. How can the all too familiar horrors of war be represented in a way that disrupts the aura of familiarity around them? Through giving into the unreal, these two comics seem to answer. Hallucinations, that are mostly nightmarish, allude to the scope of war's ungraspable horror. Images are thus made not only by hand, but also by the minds of the men at the front line. Whereas the soldiers' imagination disrupts the reality of the war being narrated, while giving visual form to the magnitude of the shock experienced by those thrust into it, the interspersing of Monet's and Van Gogh's trademark styles that thrive on color rather than clearly outlined forms also create ruptures based on the stark contrast between the distanced, abstract beauty of art and the immediate, existential horror of war.

This talk will focus on the function and nature of these images, drawn by the painters or imagined by the soldiers and, ultimately, the comics artists, comparing it with the trend of nouveau réalisme in comics (such as those by Jacques Tardi) but also turning to the discourses around shell-shock and the representation of the unrepresentable.

Maaheen Ahmed is a Flemish Research Council (FWO) postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University's English Department, as part of the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI). Her current project is on the portrayal of psychological damage in comics in both collective and personal contexts.

A Conference organized by the Comics Research Group ACME (http://www.acme.ulg.ac.be/) and sponsored by BeIPD-COFUND.

Building Stories, Un ‘objet culturel non identifié’? Chris Ware et le roman graphique à l’ère du numérique.

Par Benoît Crucifix (KULeuven)

 Université de Liège, jeudi, 26 février 2015, 15h00, Salle de cours du CIPL (A4)

Building Stories, le dernier ‘roman graphique’ de l’auteur américain Chris Ware paru en 2012, se compose non pas d’un seul livre, mais d’une multitude d’objets imprimés sous divers formats et réunis au sein d’une boîte en carton surdimensionnée. Dépourvu de mode d’emploi, le lecteur est invité à combiner ces différents fragments et à construire ainsi un potentiel récit. L’ouvrage présente un paradoxe apparent entre un hommage au support imprimé et un format qui emprunte aux pratiques de lecture généralement associées aux nouveaux médias. Cette double facette incite à une réflexion poussée sur la place de la bande dessinée dans son contexte culturel et médiatique, vis-à-vis de l’ère du numérique et de l’essor du roman graphique comme format éditorial culturellement légitime. Avec Building Stories, Ware offre une réaction productive à ces changements. Nostalgique invétéré, l’auteur se propose en effet de sauvegarder l’histoire matérielle de la bande dessinée et la diversité de ses formats; mais Building Stories avancent tout à la fois des modes de lecture caractéristiques des médias numériques, où le récit est dès le départ ouvert à de multiples agencements et variations, au gré des choix du lecteur.

 Benoît Crucifix a obtenu un master en langues et littératures modernes à l’Université catholique de Louvain, où il a rédigé un mémoire sur Building Stories de Chris Ware. Il poursuit un master spécialisé en études littéraires à la KU Leuven, tout en préparant une proposition de recherche doctorale sur le rapport des auteurs de bande dessinée à l’histoire de leur pratique. Sur le côté, il contribue régulièrement aux sites web Graphixia et du9.