'Arts of time and space': the perspectives of a teenage audience on reading novels and graphic novels

Abstract

This paper explores the different claims teenagers make about their experience of reading novels and graphic novels using empirical data gathered through interviews and reading group discussions. Employing theories of reader response (Iser, Fish, Eco), multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen), as well as theories of how comics work (McCloud, Groensteen), it argues that the students perceive differences in the areas of participation, imaginative engagement, control and temporality. Reading graphic novels, it concludes, offers these teenagers 'choices', not just in the reading process but in terms of the physical event of reading itself. These 'choices' offer potentials for reading which need to be explored further in educational contexts.