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Unflattening

Amazon.com Price:  $16.45 (as of 18/04/2019 21:31 PST- Details)

Description

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.

Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is all the time an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. At the same time as its vibrant, constantly morphing images from time to time serve as illustrations of text, they more steadily connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references all through the book. They grow to be allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.

In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the kind of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept that of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are steadily unable to see past the boundaries of our current mind-set. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we most often apprehend.


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