CFP: Comics and/as Multimodal Rhetoric

Publication
Special Issue of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics
Spring 2019
Guest Editor: Dale Jacobs
Stichtag: 2018 08 01

In “The Critique of Everyday Life,” their introductory essay to the first issue of The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Christina V. Cedillo and M. Melissa Elston write, “Multimodal practices not only facilitate communication; they also transmit values and traditions.” Like other multimodal texts, comics act as such sites of communication and complex rhetorical practice, with meanings, values, and traditions continuously negotiated between comics creators, publishers, and readers. Comics provide a rich terrain through which to explore the ways in which multimodal rhetorics and literacies are and can be enacted in everyday life.

This special issue will examine the rhetorical uses of comics and the rhetoric surrounding comics in order to think through important questions of multimodality and rhetorical theory. To that end, we might consider for what rhetorical purposes are comics used? In what rhetorical situations? With what audiences? What happens, for example, if we consider diverse texts such as Wimmen’s Comix, Love and Rockets, Captain America, Maus, Dykes to Watch Out For, or The Cross and the Switchblade through the lens of multimodal rhetoric? What if we were to think of the processes of creating and reading comics as fundamentally rhetorical? In other words, how can comics complicate our ideas of rhetoric and how can rhetoric complicate our ideas about comics?

Through this special issue of The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, we seek to explore broadly how we can think about comics and/as rhetoric. Articles in both prose and comics form are welcomed. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Specific comics as rhetorical texts.
  • The comics form and its affordances as part of a rhetor’s available means.
  • Comics and the rhetoric of seriality.
  • Comics and/as political rhetoric.
  • Comics and/as cultural rhetoric
  • Comics and/as religious rhetoric.
  • Graphic medicine and/as rhetoric.
  • Comics and rhetorical genre theory.
  • Comics and the intersection between material and multimodal rhetorics.
  • Comics and the creation of discursive space.
  • Comics and the rhetorical creation of knowledge.
  • Comics and the rhetorical construction of identity.
  • Comics and/as collaborative rhetoric.
  • Comics, rhetoric, and critical multimodal literacy.

Timeline
Full-length submissions due August 1, 2018
Submission determinations sent by November 1, 2018
Revised Manuscripts due February 15, 2019

Contacts
Direct queries about the special issue and full-length manuscripts in .doc or .docx formats to Dale Jacobs at djacobs[at]uwindsor.ca. Direct general questions about the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics to journalofmultimodalrhetorics[at]gmail.com. Visit our website for more information: http://multimodalrhetorics.com/cfps.

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