Toward A Decentered Conceptualization of Comics

This nexus lays out the various players in their various disciplines, contextualizing this project’s intervention. Against the various schema from comics studies, art history, and philosophy, I construct a concept of decentering that refuses to define.

Toward a Transparent I constructs two master metaphors with which to approach this heady material: parallax and periphery. Paradigm Shift locates our conversation within media studies conceived broadly, as a nexus of distinct disciplines: comics studies, a specific medium (From Defining to Decentering); art history, the traditional approach to visual phenomena (The Center that Is No Center); and philosophy, which questions the possibility of separating image from text (Getting Past Post-structuralism).

The Outside Is the Inside explicates Jacques Derrida’s statement that “there is no outside text.” The Given Is Not a Text explains how Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure acts as a rebuttal to Derrida. Opposition and Difference begins to excavate Lyotard’s concept of critical poetry and Visual Illiteracy transposes that concept onto comics, coupling it to Greg Ulmer’s post-criticism. Reflexive Figurality ties together some of these strings into the possibility and peril of metatextuality.

This nexus ends by putting Derrida and Lyotard into an imagined Conversation where each (productively) misunderstands the other.