Reading the Signs: Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding, Baseball, and the Graphic Imagination

Abstract

Although not a graphic novel, graphics are integrated into the fabric of Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding (2011). By graphics, I mean the juxtaposing and mixing of alphabetical and pictographic designs, and I argue that the novel engages with the graphic imagination by including graphic dynamics to convey complex meanings through the conjunction of difference and identity in inscription and visual form. In a keyboard character or a letter there are, for instance, complicated dimensions in the relationship between the printed letter and its meaning, thus revealing a rhetoric whose graphic and textual nature allows meaning to emerge in ways that move beyond the utterances of speech and reflect the visual baseball sign system.