PLCAF Event: Comics as a Way of Thinking with Nick Sousanis In-Person
Peninsula Libraries 8th Annual Comic Arts Fest and Burlingame Library present
Comics as a Way of Thinking with Nick Sousanis
Author Talk and Comics Workshop
Nick Sousanis, author of Unflattening and professor of Comics Studies at SFSU will present on his experiences writing and drawing his doctoral dissertation entirely in comics form. In this presentation and workshop, Nick will explore the importance of visual thinking and comics-making as both an educator and artist. Nick will also lead us in a quick comics-making workshop to put comics as a way of thinking into practice. Materials will be provided, just bring a willingness to play! You are also welcome to bring your favorite notebook or drawing utensil.
Limited space available, registration required.
Register now to be automatically entered into a drawing to win a signed copy of Unflattening!
Four winners will be chosen and announced at the event.
Peninsula Libraries Comic Arts Fest events are happening at participating libraries for the entire month of April!
About Nick Sousanis
Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor in Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he started and runs an interdisciplinary Comics Studies program. He is the author of Unflattening, originally his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote and drew entirely in comics form. Published by Harvard University Press in 2015, Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Association Humanities award for Scholarly Excellence and the 2016 Lynd Ward prize for Best Graphic Novel. Sousanis’s comics have appeared in Nature, The Boston Globe, Columbia Magazine, and MIT Technology Review. More at http://www.spinweaveandcut.com or @nsousanis
About Unflattening
The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.
Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.
In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.