Inventing Comics: A New Translation of Rodolphe Töpffer's Reflections on Graphic Storytelling, Media Rhetorics, and Aesthetic Practice

by Rodolphe Tïpffer, Sergio C Figueiredo (Editor)

Overview

In English and French

In recent years, graphic novels have gained a renewed interest from a host of scholars in a diverse range of fields, including rhetoric and writing, media studies, literary studies, visual communication, graphic arts, and art history. While many of these studies reference Rodolphe Töpffer as the inventor (or, “father”) of the genre, his scholarly work addressing the theoretical foundation and significance of graphic novels has remained unavailable to English-speaking audiences. Inventing Comics fills this gap by presenting a translation of two essays by Töpffer that place the invention of graphic novels at the intersection of rhetoric, philosophy, aesthetics, and civic life.

In his role as a professor of rhetoric and belle-lettres at the Academy of Geneva, Töpffer not only wrote popular fiction (graphic novels, novels, plays) but also a host of scholarly works addressing the relationship between aesthetics and poetics. Pulling from Töpffer’s scholarly corpus, Figueiredo argues that Töpffer’s invention of graphic novels was the manifestation of a much broader media theory, one that engaged with the social, cultural, political, and technological shifts accompanying the Industrial Revolution in the early- and mid-nineteenth century. While Figueiredo’s primary focus is to situate Töpffer in the histories of rhetoric, media studies, and the emergence of what Gregory L. Ulmer has called the apparatus of electracy, these essays also resonate with affect theory, apparatus theory, art history, graphic novels, literary studies, philosophy, sensory studies, and writing studies.

About the Editor and Translator
Sergio C. Figueiredo is Assistant Professor of Media and Rhetoric in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. He received his PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University, and his MA in English from Marshall University. His research focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory, media studies, and electracy. His work has appeared in Textshop Experiments, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Journal of Visual Literacy, and In Media Res: A Media Commons Project. He serves as a Fellow with the Global Art and Ideas Nexus, contributing to the organization’s e-Magazine, Esthesis, and special programs, including the Critical Conversations series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602358706
Publisher:	Parlor Press
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Series:	Visual Rhetoric
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Translator’s Introduction: “Rudolphe Töpffer, Media Rhetorics, and Electracy”

Part 1: Essai de Physiognomonie

Introduction to “Essai de Physiognomonie”

“Essai de Physiognomonie”

Chapter 1: Advantages Specific to Graphic Literature

Chapter 2: Similarities and Differences with Parody

Chapter 3: How Graphic Literature Can Independently Cultivate an Advanced Culture in the Arts. Advantages of the Autographic Method

Chapter 4: Advantages and Properties of Line Art

Chapter 5: Of a Method that Demands a Basic Understanding of Physiognomy, Apart from the Study of Drawing

Chapter 6: Similarities, and Where this Method Leads

Chapter 7: Differences Regarding the Principles and Results Between Phrenology and Physiognomy

Chapter 8: Two Orders of Expressive Design in the Human Head: Permanent and Non-Permanent

Chapter 9: On Combining Expressive Signs

Chapter 10: On Permanent Expressive Signs

Chapter 11: On Non-Permanent Expressive Signs

Chapter 12: On Conforming Physiognomic Signs, and Conclusion

Part 2: “Essai d’Autographie”

“Essai d’Autographie”

Part 3: “Of a Genevan Painter”

Introduction to “Of a Genevan Painter”

“Of a Genevan Painter”

Works Cited

Index