Terry Harpold proposes reading ecocomix with an eye to our own roles in the story…
The Middle Voice of EcoComix:
Reading Philippe Squarzoni’s Saison brune
Terry Harpold
March 25, 2021
4 PM (EST)
To register and access the Zoom webinar, use this link
French graphic journalist Philippe Squarzoni’s Saison brune (2012, 2019), published in English translation as Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science (2014), is one of the most compelling ecocomix of recent memory. The book is noteworthy for the scientific rigor of its discussion of effects of anthropogenic global warming, and for Squarzoni’s sober reflections on his personal contributions to the growing crisis. In this talk I discuss the book’s distinctive, self-aware narrative presentation. I propose that visual and structural elements of the image-text are comparable to markers of the verbal category of natural languages known as the middle voice. These elements are cues for the book’s reflexive ethical argument: that the author and reader (Squarzoni, you, I) are called to bear witness to our complicity in the causes of climate change, and to confront imaginative and practical limits to our efforts to mitigate its effects. Squarzoni’s use of a comics middle voice has, I suggest, wider significance for the reception of autobiographical comics.
“The Middle Voice of EcoComix” is part of the speaker series “Francophone Artists, Bandes Dessinées, and Diasporic Graphics,” sponsored by the France-Florida Research Institute.
How to Attend
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About the Speaker
Terry Harpold is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida and Founder and Director of the Imagining Climate Change initiative. His research and teaching interests include environmental humanities, critical plant and animal studies, science fiction and film, image-text studies, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008) and co-editor, with Daniel Compère and Volker Dehs, of Collectionner l’Extraordinaire, sonder l’Ailleurs. Essais sur Jules Verne en hommage à Jean-Michel Margot (2015). Recent essays by Harpold have appeared in journals such as Galaxies, Science Fiction Studies, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as Los viajes extraordinarios de Jules Verne (2018), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), and EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels (2020). He is currently working on two long-form projects, Des leçons d’abîme, on image-text relays in Jules Verne’s illustrated fiction, and Beware the Blob, on the abject and the formless in contemporary climate fiction and film.
This event is free and open to the public.
“The Middle Voice of EcoComix” is sponsored by The France-Florida Research Institute. For more information, visit the FFRI website.