SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Barbara Postema's Narrative Structure in Comics

 

From the RIT website:

In Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragment, Barbara Postema seeks to explain how comics communicate and create meaning, with an emphasis on two aspects of comics. She first examines the pictorial quality of comics, which receives more emphasis than verbal/textual elements. Her second focus is upon the storytelling and narrative qualities of comics, as well as the literary explorations they provide. The "narrative structure" refers to the potential of images, the story telling capacities of panels, and the sequence of panels, in addition to the more traditional narratological concepts. Overall, the author presents a credible rationale for the way in which comics structure their narratives. At every level of communication, comics rely on gaps or absences to create meaning and guide the reader to a meaningful experience.

 

---

Dr. Barbara Postema holds a PhD (2010) from Michigan State University, an M.A. (2000) in Comparative Literature from the University of Warwick (UK), and an M.A. (1998) in English Language and Literature from the University of Amsterdam.  At the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Dr. Postema holds a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013 - 2015), working on her new scholarly book project "Telling Stories Without Words: Visual Communication in Silent Comics," under the supervision of Dr. Irene Gammel.