New Books Network Podcast: „Who Understands Comics? Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension“

Das Buch von Neil Cohn – bei uns als eBook im Bestand – wurde im Okto­ber 2023 im New Books Net­work Pod­cast vorgestellt:

Draw­ings and sequen­tial images are so per­va­sive in con­tem­po­rary soci­ety that we may take their under­stand­ing for grant­ed. But how trans­par­ent are they real­ly, and how uni­ver­sal­ly are they under­stood?

Com­bin­ing recent advances from lin­guis­tics, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, and clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy, Who Under­stands Comics?: Ques­tion­ing the Uni­ver­sal­i­ty of Visu­al Lan­guage Com­pre­hen­sion (Blooms­bury, 2020) argues that visu­al nar­ra­tives involve greater com­plex­i­ty and require a lot more decod­ing than wide­ly thought. Although increas­ing­ly used beyond the sphere of enter­tain­ment as mate­ri­als in human­i­tar­i­an, edu­ca­tion­al, and exper­i­men­tal con­texts, Neil Cohn demon­strates that their uni­ver­sal com­pre­hen­sion can­not be assumed. Instead, under­stand­ing a visu­al lan­guage requires a flu­en­cy that is con­tin­gent on expo­sure and prac­tice with a graph­ic sys­tem. Bring­ing togeth­er a rich but scat­tered lit­er­a­ture on how peo­ple com­pre­hend, and learn to com­pre­hend, a sequence of images, this book coa­lesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broad­er inter­dis­ci­pli­nary view of visu­al nar­ra­tive to ask: Who Under­stands Comics?

In this inter­view, Dr. Cohn dis­cuss­es some com­mon mis­con­cep­tions about comics, the abil­i­ty to read and make comics, and how draw­ings are at the core of so many cre­ations.

Who Under­stands Comics? was Nom­i­nat­ed for the 2021 Eis­ner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work.

Dr. Niel Cohn is cur­rent­ly an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at the Tilburg cen­ter for Cog­ni­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Tilburg Uni­ver­si­ty, in the Nether­lands, Neil Cohn is an Amer­i­can cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist best known for his pio­neer­ing research on the over­lap in cog­ni­tion between graph­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion and lan­guage. His books, The Visu­al Lan­guage of Comics (2013) and the 2021 Eis­ner-nom­i­nat­ed Who Under­stands Comics? (2020), estab­lish a foun­da­tion for the sci­en­tif­ic study of comics‘ struc­ture.

Eliz­a­beth Allyn Woock an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Eng­lish and Amer­i­can Stud­ies at Palacky Uni­ver­si­ty in the Czech Repub­lic with an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary back­ground in his­to­ry and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture. Her spe­cial­iza­tion falls with­in the study of com­ic books and graph­ic nov­els.