Year: 2018
Type: book-review
Abstract: Is it possible to teach high school students philosophy in a comic art format?Doesn't the graphic or comic format mean that the content will be "dumbed down"?Alternately, is it possible that at least some ideas can be better understood using both pictures and words?Nick Sousanis, a post-doctoral fellow in comic studies at the University of Calgary, makes a strong case for the latter in his book Unflattening.Douglas Wolk, in his May 2015 review in the New York Times, calls this work "a philosophical treatise in comics form."It is, I would agree, a philosophical treatise.The concept of Unflattening is a novel way to explore the many facets of flatness and its undoing."Flatness" is one dimensional, whereas "unflattening" reveals multiplicity.So, what is flat?And why does it need to be unflattened?And why should the reader care?Is this worthy of a philosophical treatise?And is a comic arts format a good way to address this concept?The first chapter begins with a presentation, in words and drawings, of the flatness of the social and cultural world into which we are born.Two captions on the page state that "the enclosures become internal" and "what is outside is replicated inside" (Sousanis, 2015, p. 11).Chapter one is followed by an interlude that begins with a short quote from Herbert Marcuse.It reads as follows, as Marcuse put it, "reduced to the terms of this universe, they exist as no more than shades, insubstantial and without agency" (Sousanis, 2015, p. 21).This interlude extends flatness as a social condition and cultural construct to flatness as a perspectival plane and uses an unnamed but illustrated Hermes as a vehicle for transcendence.Agency and its relationship to the flattening and unflattening is one of the important themes that is explored throughout the book.
Source: Journal of Teaching and Learning
Author: Richard Morehouse
Institution: Viterbo University
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2882996740