Synopses & Reviews
Review
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 < i=""> Understanding Comics <> and < i=""> Making Comics <>
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 < i=""> Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society <>
Review
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)
Review
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. Matt Finch
Review
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. Brooklyn Rail
Review
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!) Jan Gardner - Boston Globe
Review
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. Douglas Wolk - New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked in meaning-making? In this experiment in visual thinking, drawn in comics, Nick Sousanis defies conventional discourse to offer readers a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.
Synopsis
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 always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become 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 type 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 of "upwards," Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.
About the Author
Nick Sousanis developed and teaches a course on Comics in Teaching and Learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is an instructor of Reading Graphic Novels at Parsons The New School for Design.