Nick Sousanis is an Eisner Award–winning comics maker and Associate Professor in Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs an interdisciplinary Comics Studies program. His comics have appeared in Nature, the Boston Globe, and Columbia Magazine.
Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening is a complex, beautiful, delirious
meditation on just about everything under the sun; a unique and
bracing read.
*Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Making
Comics*
Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening is a genuine oddity, a philosophical
treatise in comics form. ‘Flatness,’ for Sousanis’s purposes, is
not the quality of abstraction that Clement Greenberg lauded in
modern art, but the lamentable condition of the inhabitants of
Edwin A. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’: the inability to understand that
there might be more than one can immediately perceive. The solution
he proposes is admitting visual elements, and especially drawings,
into the intellectual domain of language. (Psst—he’s talking about
comics!)
*New York Times Book Review*
Ranging across a wide range of disciplines—the arts, the sciences,
popular culture, critical theory—Sousanis argues that the verbal
and the visual are inextricably entwined in the production of
knowledge… It is a book that is dense with the syntheses of ideas,
nimble, far-reaching and impossible to summarize. It liberates
itself from the standard layout of panels within frames, teaching
the eye and mind to read the unfailingly intelligent
black-and-white artwork in unconventional and new ways.
Unflattening deserves a place as a compulsory textbook in
schools.
*New Statesman*
Although the implications are profound, Unflattening is less an
insurrection than a carefully argued case for rethinking our
priorities about art and learning. Unflattening is above all a
humane piece of scholarship which challenges our assumptions about
perception.
*Brooklyn Rail*
If you prefer your mind-melt, dimension-bending comics with less
costumes and melodrama, Nick Sousanis’ cerebral exploration of
psychology and perspective offers a refreshing palate cleanser…
Presented with a visual vocabulary that will blow readers minds in
the most scholarly way possible.
*Paste*
Sousanis’s drawings are first rate and his writing style
economical. To demonstrate how introducing new vantage points
expands our thinking, he explores a range of philosophical
concepts, calling on Plato, Copernicus, and even the ‘fifth
dimension’ explored in the TV series The Twilight Zone.
*Boston Globe*
If Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics charmingly investigated the
history, development, and formal features of visual narrative,
Unflattening is its equally brilliant epistemological counterpart.
With profound depth and insight, Sousanis looks at how the
‘unflattening’ possibilities of this form of storytelling allow us
to see the world from entirely new perspectives… Written with
remarkable clarity and insight, its sometimes-haunting,
sometimes-breathtaking illustrations prove the book’s arguments
about how visual information can shape our understanding… Weaving
together language, perception, and the theory of knowledge in an
investigation of how the multidimensional possibilities of graphic
storytelling can awaken us to ways of knowing from multiple
perspectives, Sousanis has made a profound contribution to the
field of comics studies and to semiotics, epistemology, and the
burgeoning study of visible thinking. Essential reading for anyone
seeking to create, critique, or consider the visual narrative
form.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
An important book, Unflattening is consistently innovative, using
abstraction alongside realism, using framing and the
(dis)organization of the page to represent different modes of
thought. The words and images speak for themselves and succeed on
their own terms. I couldn’t stop reading it.
*Henry Jenkins, author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and
Meaning in a Networked Society*
An incisive meditation on the relationship between text and
images.
*New York Observer*
Entirely non-narrative, the book takes on the dichotomy between
words and images in Western thought and argues that both are
simultaneously involved in the production of meaning. Executed in
sharp black-and-white diagrams, and abstract and geometric images,
this scintillatingly intelligent book succeeds in the great feat of
holding the reader’s attention not through a story but through
ideas. Sousanis’s own book is the perfect illustration of the
inextricability of the verbal and the visual.
*The Independent*
Unflattening will no doubt become an essential teaching tool for
helping students—especially undergraduates—think about comics,
graphic novels, and other media in which words and images combine…
The book is potentially revolutionary… This is a book that wants to
teach, a book that will be talked about and belongs in any
forward-looking library.
*Choice*
[This] will alter your perceptions, of comics, of art, of how to
see and process your world and your ideas. Sousanis is relentlessly
innovative in his solutions to picturing his concepts and in the
process provides irrefutable proof of the efficacy of the medium to
explain engagingly and memorably… It also uses two dimensional
words and images to encourage us to broaden our horizons and deepen
our understanding, in other words to perceive in multiple
dimensions. And yes, reading comics re-wires your mind.
*paulgravett.com*
Unflattening is Nick Sousanis’s meditation on the nature of
learning and visual communication… At a time when graphic
literature has become widely accepted as a medium for fiction and
memoir, Unflattening breaks new ground in the use of visual
narrative for the expression of abstract ideas. Beautifully drawn
and brilliantly conceived, Unflattening is an instant classic.
*Forbes*
Sousanis’ investigation into the connection between word and image
could not have been presented in any other way… [He] presents a
philosophical and reference heavy treatise in a compelling and
accessible manner.
*Irish Examiner*
Frankly, genius.
*Print*
Sousanis has achieved something powerful—a book that goes beyond
just saying a thesis to actually showing one.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
There is much in Unflattening that will interest and stimulate
thought for higher education scholars, teachers and students… In
this beautiful and complex book, Sousanis grapples with core tenets
of Western knowledge: who are our heroes, and why do we valorize
their charts and grids so much more than, for example, the oral
traditions of Pacific navigators who could read the stars? It is a
beautiful book and a complex book that defies categorization—that’s
why I recommend it.
*Higher Education Research & Development*
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