Comics and Cognition : Toward a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics

Comics and Cognition develops an analytical approach to multimodal communication in comics through insights from embodied cognitive science, especially cognitive linguistics and visual psychology. Mike Borkent extends previous cognitive poetic frameworks to the study of multimodality in comics, providing a cohesive analytical framework that connects comics to other literary and artistic interests. His approach highlights the embodiment of cognition, a process which structures knowledge in long term memory, and activates it through perception, mental simulation, and blending. These cognitive processes allow readers to make impressions, predictions, inferences, and eventually conclusions about a text. Many of these layers of reader comprehension are unconscious but emerge into a conscious experience of the multimodal text with a richly construed and nuanced texture.

This book unpacks the dynamic interplay between the reader and the multimodal text throughout the processes of reading, including opportunities for interaction, interrogation, and improvisation of meaning derived from the reader's embodied and textual experiences, tackling crucial features of the comics form, and their impact on such issues as viewpoint, temporality, abstraction, metacommentary, and transmediation. The proposed multimodal cognitive poetics applies to narrative and art comics, in both print and digital media.

Mike Borkent is an independent researcher and former lecturer at the University of British Columbia. He co-edited Language and the Creative Mind and has published a range of articles and chapters on comics, visual poetry, and Canadian and Indigenous literatures from a cognitive poetic perspective.