Viewpoint in Joe Sacco’s Graphic Novel Palestine and its Arabic Translation: A Cognitive Multimodal Analysis

Abstract

Comics scholarship has been treated as a lower form of reading as it has received low-cultural esteem until the 1990s. McCloud claims that comics compared to prose text have long been treated as “crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” (1993, p.3). It could be argued that comics has been an understudied area owing to their visual nature. They are commonly considered less ‘literary’ than traditional written prose texts or inferior to them (Eisner, 2008). They were regarded as more suitable for kids and teens because “comics as a reading form was always assumed to be a threat to literacy” (Eisner, 2008, p. xv). However, eventually this medium has become culturally legitimized with the emergence of more important work in the field of graphic narrative, and now it is well-recognized as a form of visual-verbal literature. Many studies have adopted narratological approaches to graphic narrative as they have started to explore and foreground the impact of this medium complexity (multimodality) on storytelling (Stein & Thon, 2013, pp.2-3). The emerging connections between comics studies and narrative theory has led to the emergence of the burgeoning field of comics studies today.