Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Maaheen Ahmed, "Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures" (UP of Mississippi, 2016)
Description: Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures (UP of Mississippi, 2016) examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader--or listener or viewer, as the case may be--is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than clo...