Introduction
摘要
This chapter places the aesthetics of space within current conversations in comics studies and introduces methodologies from literary studies and aesthetics to complement the existing approaches. Developing a more complex theoretical foundation for analyzing space in comics, and specifically medievalist or historicized space in comics, this chapter starts with the work of comics scholars such as Geraint D’Arcy (Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics, 2020) and blends in Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958) and Tonino Griffero’s work on “new phenomenology” aesthetics of built and natural spaces, as well as theories generally used in film and media studies to describe affect, atmosphere, mood, and color. The analysis includes soundscapes, landscapes, built spaces, “pathic aesthetics,” poetics of space, and historicized space through a phenomenological approach. This chapter establishes that the elements of space—described through poetics or aesthetics—play a role in the narrative and are not arbitrary or purely decorative, taking the foundational concepts from the introduction and complicating them. This is achieved by demonstrating how poetics can be applied throughout the corpus of comics which are examined in closer detail in the following chapters.