Description
"The Visual Translation of Paul Auster's City of Glass"In 1994, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli were asked to adapt Paul Auster’s City of Glass as a graphic novel for Neon Lit, a series of comic versions of urban crime fiction. However, as Art Spiegelman, the series’s co-editor, points out in his introduction to the 2003 edition of the resulting graphic novel, Auster’s text “is a surprisingly nonvisual work at its core, a complex web of words and abstract ideas in playfully shifting narrative styles.” Defined as a postmodern detective novel, Auster’s text, exploring identity, authorship, and language through embedded narratives, fictitious authors, and uncanny coincidences posed such difficulties that the artists struggled at first to prevent their adaptation from becoming an illustrated story rather than a visual translation. This paper will look at their approach to translating Auster’s words into pictures, taking in the variety of visual styles and imagery employed, but studying in particular the use and manipulation of comic conventions such as word balloons and the comic page’s panel layout, analysing Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s “regular grid of panels . . . : the grid as window, as prison door, as city block” (Spiegelman), and the effect of breaking with this grid. The paper will go on to show how Auster’s text both challenges and is challenged by the new visual language it is cast in, arguing that the graphic translation is, as Spiegelman suggests, “a strange doppelganger of the original book,” which tails, but does not mirror, it.
Period | 2005 |
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Event type | Conference |
Location | Liverpool, United KingdomShow on map |
Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Paul Auster
- Graphic Novels
- Adaptation