Jesse Prevoo - Stylistics in Comics - How Style can influence meaning in graphic narrative and visual communication

In the study of literature, it is common practice to indicate changes in style, language, dialect or idiom and take these changes into account when analyzing texts. These things can tell us something about the text (when it was written, who the writer is, etc.) as well as about the story itself: who is speaking, to start. It can also indicate things about the character: his level of education, or her level of maturity, for instance. Through using a different language/dialect, it becomes possible to identify the character who is narrating/speaking. In Comics Studies, it seems, there is a lot less attention for these kinds of changes in style, while the impact these changes have can be just as great, and the information we can gather from the style of a text is very important in understanding the text. In this presentation, I will discuss how style can influence the narrative and message of a story, how the style of a text can convey information and how different styles within a single narrative influence the interpretation of the story – for better or for worse – by conveying information about narration, focalization and the likes.