Kai Mikkonen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3875992 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kai Mikkonen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kai |
| FAMILY NAME | Mikkonen |
| SIGNATURE | MIKKONEN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Handbook of Narrative Analysis by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck
Reviewed by: Handbook of Narrative Analysis by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck Kai Mikkonen Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 424 pp. Like its first edition, the much-extended revised edition of Luc Herman’s and Bart Vervaeck’s Handbook of Narrative Analysis (hereafter HNA) seeks to serve many objectives at once. HNA is, first, a survey of major trends in narrative theory from …
The Rhetorics of Plot Function: Henry James's ficelle, Vladimir Nabokov's "Perry," and James Phelan's "Synthetic Function" Reconsidered
This article discusses the literary character's plot function as an element of the author's rhetorical strategy, and in relation to the reader's active role in responding to that strategy. The main focus will be on characterological instances in narrative fiction that facilitate the development of the novel's plot by way of the character's movement, perspective, or moving perspective. These considerations will be brought to bear on James Phelan's…
“The marquise went out at 5 o’clock”: Novel beginnings and realistic expectations
This paper poses the question of how the beginning of a narrative may (or may not) imply a generic frame. More precisely, the objective is to examine the way in which the given narrative mood (perspective, type of discourse) and the initial narrating instance (or narrative situation) relate to generic expectations. Specific attention is given to cues of realism in the openings of nineteenth-century European novels. The discussion critically asses…
Characterisation in Comics
This chapter focuses on the dialogue form as a key narrative device and technique, and examines the main compositional principles and narrative functions that characterize conversational scenes in comics. It discusses the function of speech balloons as metaphors for an utterance, &s;utterance&s; meaning here a specific piece of dialogue, voice, and turn-taking, and their narrative role in organising the time of the speech event and the order of i…
Narrative Agency (in Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood)
This chapter investigates how comics may prompt their readers to ascribe properties to characters. In this investigation, it considers the main parameters of characterisation, especially with regard to the characters&s; mimetic function, that is, how they can be perceived as possible anthropomorphic persons. Subsequently, the chapter discusses the way in which a character in comics may achieve a sense of psychological complexity. It argues that c…
Dialogue in Comics
Conversation is a basic element in the medium of comics, where much of the narrative appeal is derived from the interplay between dialogue and action. The speech balloon, a favoured visual symbol for voice and utterance in the medium since the mid-twentieth century, has become a symbol for comics. In Italian, famously, the word fumetto —the word for a speech or thought balloon—also refers to the art form itself, whether in the form of a comic str…
Focalisation in Comics
This chapter focuses on three issues pertaining to the presentation of minds in comics and graphic narratives: the mimetic aspect of the image, the problem of free indirect discourse (FID), and the interaction between visual focalisation and verbal narration in first-person narration. It discusses several examples that all portray characters in action within social environments. The showing of the characters and their actions from panel to panel …
Time in Comics
This chapter evaluates the relevance of the fundamental narratological distinction between story-time (the order of the events) and discourse-time (the order of their presentation) in the context of narrative comics. However, this framework needs to be related to the conventions and expectations of reading comics. It is not merely a matter of formal analysis. Also, Building Stories highlights the significance of these conventions through its grea…
Presenting Minds in Comics
It is in the nature of narratology to seek what is most universal, conventional, and general about narratives, and attempt to describe and analyse these features as effectively as possible. Yet, the relationship between what is general and what is unique, variable, or contra-standard in storytelling has also been one of the defining tensions throughout the history of this field. Thus, the impetus towards the generalisable has been regularly count…
Afterword
It is in the nature of narratology to seek what is most universal, conventional, and general about narratives, and attempt to describe and analyse these features as effectively as possible. Yet, the relationship between what is general and what is unique, variable, or contra-standard in storytelling has also been one of the defining tensions throughout the history of this field. Thus, the impetus towards the generalisable has been regularly count…
Graphic Style, Subjectivity, and Narration
The notion of &s;narrative agency&s; is name for such a global frame of narration, and it involves the question of the source of narrative discourse, that is, the conception of some agency or agent that is responsible for the selection, arranging, and distribution of the story material. This chapter analyses a palette of available theoretical options to address the question of narrative agency in comics, and then elaborates the question in an ext…
Narration as Showing
The continuing presence of a character or a group of characters in a sequence of images, acting out a situation, or participating in an event, is possibly the most conventional feature of narrative comics. In comics storytelling, the axis of action can also function as an important structural principle. In today&s;s longer comics and graphic novels, such as The Motherless Oven , which employ alternating perspectives, the logic of narrative space …
Picture Story and Narrative Organisation in Early Nineteenth-Century British Caricature and Comic Strips
Just as it is the task of the literary historian to evaluate in what way and how far the term “novel,” in the nineteenth-century sense, can be applied to an example from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so it is our task to determine how far the term “narrative,” as exemplified in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century strip, really fits a given sequence from an earlier period.
Character as a Means of Narrative Continuity
This chapter focuses on medium-specific features of style in comics, involving specifically two questions of graphic style: stylistic variation and mind style, which pose important challenges for the analysis of subjectivity in this medium. The question of the relation between two or more authorial subjectivities arises especially in cases where the writer and the cartoonist are different individuals with distinguishable styles and, subsequently,…
The Narratology of Comic Art
By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tra dition.This involves not just the exploration of those properties in com ics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures th…
The enchanted arrival: Passage into West Africa in the travelogues of Blaise Cendrars and André Gide
Out of Europe: The African palimpsest in Michel Leiris's L’Afrique fantôme
In his travel journal classic, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), after a year of travel through sub-Saharan Africa, the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris listed a group of texts under the simple heading ‘African imagery’. The author never explicates the meanings of the imagery thereby giving the reader the opportunity to reflect on their possible implications, or to leave them as they are. The aim of this paper is to examine the indications of…
The modernist traveller in Africa: Africanism and the European author's self-fashioning
The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the que…
The Narratology of Comic Art
By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tra dition.This involves not just the exploration of those properties in com ics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures th…
The modernist traveller in Africa: Africanism and the European author's self-fashioning
The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the que…
The modernist traveller in Africa: Africanism and the European author's self-fashioning
The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the que…
Out of Europe: The African palimpsest in Michel Leiris's L’Afrique fantôme
In his travel journal classic, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), after a year of travel through sub-Saharan Africa, the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris listed a group of texts under the simple heading ‘African imagery’. The author never explicates the meanings of the imagery thereby giving the reader the opportunity to reflect on their possible implications, or to leave them as they are. The aim of this paper is to examine the indications of…
The enchanted arrival: Passage into West Africa in the travelogues of Blaise Cendrars and André Gide
Characterisation in Comics
This chapter focuses on the dialogue form as a key narrative device and technique, and examines the main compositional principles and narrative functions that characterize conversational scenes in comics. It discusses the function of speech balloons as metaphors for an utterance, &s;utterance&s; meaning here a specific piece of dialogue, voice, and turn-taking, and their narrative role in organising the time of the speech event and the order of i…
Narrative Agency (in Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood)
This chapter investigates how comics may prompt their readers to ascribe properties to characters. In this investigation, it considers the main parameters of characterisation, especially with regard to the characters&s; mimetic function, that is, how they can be perceived as possible anthropomorphic persons. Subsequently, the chapter discusses the way in which a character in comics may achieve a sense of psychological complexity. It argues that c…
Dialogue in Comics
Conversation is a basic element in the medium of comics, where much of the narrative appeal is derived from the interplay between dialogue and action. The speech balloon, a favoured visual symbol for voice and utterance in the medium since the mid-twentieth century, has become a symbol for comics. In Italian, famously, the word fumetto —the word for a speech or thought balloon—also refers to the art form itself, whether in the form of a comic str…
Focalisation in Comics
This chapter focuses on three issues pertaining to the presentation of minds in comics and graphic narratives: the mimetic aspect of the image, the problem of free indirect discourse (FID), and the interaction between visual focalisation and verbal narration in first-person narration. It discusses several examples that all portray characters in action within social environments. The showing of the characters and their actions from panel to panel …
Time in Comics
This chapter evaluates the relevance of the fundamental narratological distinction between story-time (the order of the events) and discourse-time (the order of their presentation) in the context of narrative comics. However, this framework needs to be related to the conventions and expectations of reading comics. It is not merely a matter of formal analysis. Also, Building Stories highlights the significance of these conventions through its grea…
Presenting Minds in Comics
It is in the nature of narratology to seek what is most universal, conventional, and general about narratives, and attempt to describe and analyse these features as effectively as possible. Yet, the relationship between what is general and what is unique, variable, or contra-standard in storytelling has also been one of the defining tensions throughout the history of this field. Thus, the impetus towards the generalisable has been regularly count…
Afterword
It is in the nature of narratology to seek what is most universal, conventional, and general about narratives, and attempt to describe and analyse these features as effectively as possible. Yet, the relationship between what is general and what is unique, variable, or contra-standard in storytelling has also been one of the defining tensions throughout the history of this field. Thus, the impetus towards the generalisable has been regularly count…
Graphic Style, Subjectivity, and Narration
The notion of &s;narrative agency&s; is name for such a global frame of narration, and it involves the question of the source of narrative discourse, that is, the conception of some agency or agent that is responsible for the selection, arranging, and distribution of the story material. This chapter analyses a palette of available theoretical options to address the question of narrative agency in comics, and then elaborates the question in an ext…
Narration as Showing
The continuing presence of a character or a group of characters in a sequence of images, acting out a situation, or participating in an event, is possibly the most conventional feature of narrative comics. In comics storytelling, the axis of action can also function as an important structural principle. In today&s;s longer comics and graphic novels, such as The Motherless Oven , which employ alternating perspectives, the logic of narrative space …
Picture Story and Narrative Organisation in Early Nineteenth-Century British Caricature and Comic Strips
Just as it is the task of the literary historian to evaluate in what way and how far the term “novel,” in the nineteenth-century sense, can be applied to an example from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so it is our task to determine how far the term “narrative,” as exemplified in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century strip, really fits a given sequence from an earlier period.
Character as a Means of Narrative Continuity
This chapter focuses on medium-specific features of style in comics, involving specifically two questions of graphic style: stylistic variation and mind style, which pose important challenges for the analysis of subjectivity in this medium. The question of the relation between two or more authorial subjectivities arises especially in cases where the writer and the cartoonist are different individuals with distinguishable styles and, subsequently,…
The Narratology of Comic Art
By placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tra dition.This involves not just the exploration of those properties in com ics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures th…
“The marquise went out at 5 o’clock”: Novel beginnings and realistic expectations
This paper poses the question of how the beginning of a narrative may (or may not) imply a generic frame. More precisely, the objective is to examine the way in which the given narrative mood (perspective, type of discourse) and the initial narrating instance (or narrative situation) relate to generic expectations. Specific attention is given to cues of realism in the openings of nineteenth-century European novels. The discussion critically asses…
The Rhetorics of Plot Function: Henry James's ficelle, Vladimir Nabokov's "Perry," and James Phelan's "Synthetic Function" Reconsidered
This article discusses the literary character's plot function as an element of the author's rhetorical strategy, and in relation to the reader's active role in responding to that strategy. The main focus will be on characterological instances in narrative fiction that facilitate the development of the novel's plot by way of the character's movement, perspective, or moving perspective. These considerations will be brought to bear on James Phelan's…
Handbook of Narrative Analysis by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck
Reviewed by: Handbook of Narrative Analysis by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck Kai Mikkonen Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 424 pp. Like its first edition, the much-extended revised edition of Luc Herman’s and Bart Vervaeck’s Handbook of Narrative Analysis (hereafter HNA) seeks to serve many objectives at once. HNA is, first, a survey of major trends in narrative theory from …
Art (15 works) · Literature (15 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Comics and Graphic Narratives (8 works) · History (7 works) · Narrative Theory and Analysis (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Comics (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works)