Drawing Medievalism: Dialogue with the Past through Comics

Charles Hatfield has characterized comics as an "art of tensions": text in conversation with image, layout in conversation with sequence, and images in sequential conversation with each other. Any comics maker works with such "tensions" (among others), but those creating within nonfiction historical genres—whether personal memoir, graphic history, or scholarly sequential art—confront another tension: that between perspectives of the present and an uncaricatured image of the past. Such a tension is central to the field of medievalism studies, which often highlights the blurred lines between imaginative creativity and detached scholarly study in the ongoing invention/discovery of the medieval past. Indeed, Richard Utz has called for medievalist scholars to embrace, rather than deny, our “own investigating subjects’ role in the long history [of medieval reception],” and comics seems to offer an ideal medium for doing just that. To consider this possibility, this presentation draws on examples from my own in-progress work of graphic nonfiction, A Comics History of the English Language, which features a cartoonized stand-in for myself, interacting with both students and subject matter. In the process of writing and illustrating this book, I have come to find such conversational possibilities of the comics medium to be at least as important as its graphic and illustrative resources—particularly in navigating a subject of such richness and risk.

Patrick J. Murphy is Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (2011) and Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.R. James (2017), both published by Penn State University Press. His current project is a work of graphic nonfiction, A Comics History of the English Language, which he is in the process of both writing and illustrating.

this seminar is free to attend, but booking in advance is required.