 So my topic today is, if you can't hear me, just, I don't know, gesticulate. My topic today is narrative world making in words and images. And have a brief synopsis here. Is the screen visible enough? So I'll start in the first part by talking about a two-sided approach to narrative world making. On the one hand, thinking about stories as a target of interpretation. On the other hand, thinking about stories as a resource for sense-making. And then in the second part, I'll move into a discussion of a particular aspect of stories viewed as a target of interpretation, namely building or co-constructing story worlds across media and genres. And then in the third part, I'll look at some specific case studies that I hope help illuminate the general issues that are covered in the second part. So moving from an illustrated poem to fictional graphic narratives to graphic life-writing or using the comics medium to tell the one's life story or the life story of someone else. And also some graphic narratives that explore non-human experiences of non-human characters. So this brings me to part one, the two-sided approach. And it also gives me an opportunity to plug the book Michael kindly mentioned, which is coming out pretty soon, storytelling in the sciences of mind. And in this book, I sort of develop in more detail this two-sided approach. I'll just outline briefly here. So this larger study aims to develop strategies for investigating what sorts of mental states, capacities, and dispositions may provide grounds for or conversely be grounded in narrative experiences. That's the double-sided list there. And it also tries to promote dialogue between the study of storytelling across media. On the one hand, an inquiry into the scope and nature of intelligent behavior on the other hand. And so overall, the goal is to develop a transdisciplinary approach that moves beyond any kind of one-way importation of ideas from the sciences of mind into scholarship on narrative. So instead of having just the unidirectional borrowing, the aim is to create two-way transfers so that ideas developed by narrative scholars can inform research on the mind narrative nexus just as work in cognitive science can. So multiple disciplines can converge on these large-scale, complicated problems. And to develop this approach, I focus to reiterate on two aspects of engaging with narratives. The first, I call worlding the story, which is viewed as a target of interpretation. Second, I call storying the world, and that's looking at narratives as a resource for sense-making. The process of worlding the story entails using textual designs and narratives, designs whose structural will vary across different storytelling media as affordances for acts of narrative world-making as means for exploring imaginatively inhabiting narrative worlds of various kinds. And this part of the study focuses on topics like basically the topic for tonight's talk, narrative world-making and the different affordances presented by media and genres used to tell narratives. I look at sheets like perspective taking in narrative worlds, how the vantage point on events shapes one's engagement with the narrative. I look at characters, categorization processes and concepts of person, how our interactions in everyday life give us an understanding of persons that shape how we approach characters and narratives, whether fictional or non-fictional. And more generally, making sense of stories entails using these textual designs in various media to explore these different dimensions of mentally configured worlds or story worlds, temporal and spatial and participant-related dimensions. So interpreters will specify or fill out these dimensions in more or less detail to the extent required by their purposes engaging with the given text. So it's not that we maximally fill out every detail, every time we engage with every story, but we do so more or less depending on our purposes in engaging with the narrative. And as we fill out the dimensions, we frame provisional answers to questions like this. How does the time frame of events in the story world relate to that of the narration or world-creating act? Is it retrospective telling or simultaneous or prospective? Where did the narrative events happen relative to the place of narration for that matter relative to the interpreter's situation? How exactly is the domain of narrative events spatially configured and what sorts of changes take place in that configuration over time? Now turning to the second part, that explores the converse issue, namely how the process of building narrative worlds itself scaffolds efforts to make sense of experience. So assuming that we've already co-constructed or in the process of co-constructing a narrative world, how do we leverage that to interpret what's going on? And here I do try to avoid hyper-extended claims about the power of narrative that you sometimes see surfacing in the literature. Narrative is the key to everything. And in that connection, for example, I acknowledge the importance of pre- or non-conceptual modes of interpersonal attunement rooted in embodied experience. So I draw on work in phenomenology and in developmental psychology, which suggests that to use the term of Colin Travarthan, there's a primary inner subjectivity, a dyadic relationship between an adult caregiver and a child that involves timing of gestures and eye gaze, which is an embodied practice, which would seem therefore to precede our narrative abilities. So narrative can't quite be the primordial tool used to make sense of self and other. More generally, I distinguish sense-making activities to which narrative centrally contributes from those that are more contingently associated with stories and not to mention those that are inimical to being captured in narrative terms at all. Very large, very fast, very small things. So this part of the book includes sections that explore narrative embedding, how frame tales allow knowledge of non-proximate events to be distributed in space and time, how by telling a story within the story, you can laminate with the here and now, other places, other times, how stories of transformation provide templates for intelligent activity. We're talking a little bit more about this in connection with my case studies in just a second, and how storytelling constitutes a resource for folk psychology. The indigenous methods we use to make sense of our own and others' minds. And to linger on that last point for a second, in context in which persons' reasons for acting remain under-specified, potentially indeterminate, given the available pragmatic cues. We don't quite know why someone has done something or why someone did something. Stories provide a critical resource for interpreting the conduct of self and other. By enabling tellers to manipulate temporal relationships among events, very perspectival stances, and frame what happens in light of what might have happened, or could possibly happen, stories furnish a powerful resource for sense-making, allowing what goes on to be dovetailed with the intentions, desires, and experiences of persons, or more broadly, intelligent agents. And at an even sort of larger macro, super personal level, we can use stories to intervene in a field of discourses or a constellation of ways of seeing. We can also intervene in a set of competing narratives, as in courtroom trials or political campaigns or family disputes. Okay, now this brings me to part two. That specific aspect of stories viewed as a target of interpretation, namely building story worlds across media and genres. And it might help if I start with the definition of story worlds. So I characterize story worlds as more or less fully fleshed out models, enabling interpreters to frame inferences about the situations, agents, and occurrences either explicitly mentioned in, or implied by a narrative text or discourse. And reciprocally narratives draw on one or more semiotic environments, whether spit, spoken, or spit, spoken, written, or sign language, or some combination thereof, or pantomime, or various kinds of static or moving images, to scaffold engagements with such model worlds or story worlds. In other words, as we engage with a narratively organized discourse, we construct a narrative world, reciprocally tellers of stories, try to facilitate that constructive process. So this means that structuralist narratologists, going back to the sort of early days of the discipline, narratologists like Claude Bramond or Roland Bart, or Zveton Todorov, A.J. Grimas, failed to come to terms with two dimensions of narrative that constitute key concerns here. The referential or world-creating potential of stories, and issues of medium specificity, or the way storytelling practices might be shaped by the expressive capacities of a given semiotic environment. The structuralist neglect of issues of narrative reference can be traced back in part to the exclusion of the reference in favor of signifier and signified in the Saussurian language theory that the original narratologists treated as paradigmatic. By contrast, over the past couple of decades, the referential or world-creating potential of stories has come to be one of the most basic and abiding concerns of narrative analysis, whether the worlds at issue are the imagined autonomous worlds evoked by fictional texts, where the worlds about which non-fictional accounts make claims that are subject to falsification through cross comparison with other examples. I'll come back to this issue of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction in a moment. For now, let me just stress that a root function of narrative is arguably world creation and world exploration, with storytellers and story interpreters using any number of media, from podcasts to print texts, to build up on the basis of narratively organized discourse, a chronology for events, a broader temporal and spatial environment for those events, an inventory of the characters involved, and a working model of more or less disruptive or non-canonical occurrences that constitute a core feature of narratives, which may in turn be more or less reportable within a particular discourse context or occasion for telling. But though narrative provides means for creating, transforming, and aggregating story worlds across various media and setting, different kinds of narrative practices entail different protocols for world-making, with different consequences and effects. It is not just that the worlding of the story unfolds differently in different narrative genres, for example, fictional versus non-fictional narratives. What's more, the attributes of specific storytelling media impinge on the world-making process. Again, research developments that post-state structuralist narratology can shed further light on how medium specificity affects the process of narrative world-making. So we can draw, for example, on Cress and Van Luwen's work on multimodality, for example, their book from 2001, Multi-Modal Discourse, and they distinguish between modes and media. So modes are resources for designing expressions. As they put it, modes are semiotic channels or environments. That can be viewed as a resource for designing expressions within a particular type of discourse. Media are, as they put it, means for producing and distributing the expressive designs at issue. So media are the material resources used in the production of semiotic products and events. Conversational storytellers, for instance, typically use two semiotic modes to design verbal as well as visual, that is, gestural expressions in narratively organized discourse. But what's more, communicative interactions of this sort can be remediated through audio or video recording. And this recording can undergo further remediation if they are cast in the form of a print transcript for purposes of analysis, say. Sorry, lost my place. In such contexts, the medium chosen can affect whether the original multimodality of conversational interaction is preserved or lost. Thus, an audio recording of face-to-face storytelling not only remediates the interaction, but transforms it into a monomodal design. The reverse is true when a novel or short story is remediated as a movie. Extrapolating from these general considerations, the slides that follow outline a taxonomy of story kinds. This taxonomy factors in differences in the semantic complexity of story worlds, as well as the distinction between endophoric and exophoric strategies for narrative world-making. By that, I mean when you're telling a story in a place where the events are purported to have occurred, you can use objects and places in the here and now as anchor points for the world-building process. You can refer to those anchor points. If you're telling the story remotely, you can't use such grounding objects or places, and you have to rely more on mental modeling. So, endophoric versus exophoric captures those differences. Overall, these next slides suggest how story logic, the process of building and interpreting narrative worlds, can be articulated as multi-modal expressive systems, systems that may recruit from any number of information tracks. So, here we have the simplest case, which would be if I'm, say, using a print text, a single-channel narrative text to evoke a single reference world, say, a kind of delimited sequence of events that's being factored into the larger, emergent world that is being constructed over the process of engaging with the narrative as a whole. So, if I use print text to describe my travels to Raleigh, that would fit this case. Now, mono-modal environments can be more complicated, though. You can have more than one reference world. So, this would be the structure you get in a print text that involves narrative framing. So, you've got the reference world associated with the frame tail, the reference world associated with the embedded story or story within the story. You have to integrate those reference worlds into a composite model of the story world that, again, is being constructed on an emergent basis as you work your way through the discourse. Now, you can also have multi-modal narration, where you've got more than one semiotic channel. This is the simplest case of that, where, say, you have a graphic narrative which involves an image track and a verbal track, and they both converge on the same reference world, a sequence of events that you're factoring into the larger story world. Or you can have this migraine-causing structure which involves multiple semiotic channels that are each indexed to more than one reference world. So, in a film, for example, the image track can show what the character is perceiving in the here and now, as well as remembered images from the past. The soundtrack, meanwhile, can use diagetic sound to convey what the character is hearing in the present, but also remembered sounds. And then you get this kind of crosshatch structure with a very complicated process of integration of reference worlds that leads to this emergent model of the story world. Now, moving from medium and mode, questions of medium mode to questions of genre, we can note that narratives of all sorts enable interpreters to co-construct and imaginatively relocate to story worlds. But in the case of fictional narratives, these worlds remain autonomous, and the Lubavir and Dolegel's phrase sovereign. In other words, when it comes to fictional worlds, it would be a category mistake to try to falsify represented situations and events by way of cross-comparison with other accounts. In engaging with a fictional narrative, co-fiction interpreters orient to it differently than they would if they took it to be an historical account that might potentially be falsified through due diligence, that is through discovery of a competing account of what happened. The facts that make up the story world of a fictional account are neither true nor false, but instead fictional. And orienting to the text in an appropriate manner requires making a determination of the generic category to which, one infers, the story's creator or creator's intended it to be assigned. And so we arrive at something like David Gorman's definition of fiction. Fiction is one kind of intendedly but non-deceptively untrue discourse. This separates fiction from lying, where you're being intendedly untrue but you're also being deceptively untrue. It also separates out fiction from close cousins like metaphor, where if you say something like, you are the cream in my coffee, you're violating Grice's maximum quality, you're not being truthful, but you're not exactly creating a fiction. It also separates fiction from irony, where if you say something like, yeah, narratology, piece of cake, if you're being sardonic. Then, again, you're being intendedly non-deceptively untrue but it's not really fiction in structure, fictional in structure. So in short, the uptake of a narrative entails ascribing to its teller or tellers a communicative intention pertaining to its generic status, with that ascription then regulating the protocols for world-building used to make sense of the text. And this brings me to my specific case studies and I hope an opportunity to show more pictures. And actually, I sort of admitted reading some texts when I put up my synopsis slide, so maybe I'll read it here, sneak it in. As I move through these case studies, I do hope to highlight their relevance for considering emerging genres, forms, and narratives in new media environments to the topic of our conference, because I'll be talking about how older medial forms, word image pairings, graphic narratives, come to be deployed in new generic contexts and for innovative storytelling purposes. So as I work through this sequence, I hope those kinds of issues come into play. Now, all the texts that I discuss in this section use word image combinations as affordances for narrative world-making, means for exploring and inhabiting story worlds. But I've chosen disparate exemplars of this category, suggest the range of world-building practices available in a given storytelling medium, and for that matter within a particular genre in a given medium. So, first two case studies, talk about strange pairings, include William Blake's 1794 illustrated poem A Poison Tree, and a sequence from the Incredible Hulk comics. There's more that connects them than might meet the eye. And these case studies reveal the range of ways in which words and images can be used to build fictional worlds. My third case study encompasses two non-fictional autobiographical accounts, Mary Fleener's Life of the Party from 1996, and Jeffrey Brown's Clumsy. These case studies together show the diversity of practices in non-fiction storytelling, life stories in words and images. I should also note that Clumsy is part of the famous Girlfriend trilogy, which also includes unlikely and AEIOU. So, just in case, need to full reference. And then I'll close briefly with a discussion of a few graphic narratives that focus on non-human animals. Exploring up this question, how can narrative world-making be used or leveraged in those kinds of stories to model species of mind, ways of experiencing the world across species boundaries, in ways that might resonate with work in fields like cognitive ethology. Taken together, these example narratives rely on, to different degrees and in different ways, on word-image combinations as resources for world-building. In my first case study, a Poison Tree, a single image accompanies a verbal track that includes multiple situations and events. By contrast, in the fictional and non-fictional comics I discuss, sequences of panels encapsulate time slices of an unfolding story world with the design of panels as well as panel sequences affording a more or less detailed, ground-level representation of characters' experiences in the narrative world. So, this brings me to Blake's text first. This is one version of the original illustrated poem. It's a little hard to read the text there, so I created this transcript and put it side-by-side with the image of the poem. In 1788, Blake invented a method of creating and reproducing designs like this, verbal-visual designs that he called illuminated printing. And he probably developed this because it cost about one fourth of engraving, which was, I think, a different method at this time. This method was also called relief etching where he took a plate of copper and sort of burned away the parts that weren't supposed to show in the design. He used this method to create this version of a poison tree, which is just one among multiple versions of the poem from Blake's songs in Innocence and Experience, which he kind of put through different versions, organized the poems in different ways, used different color schemes, and so on. Now to borrow a term from Lessing, what we seem to have here is a pregnant moment, a static visual image that acquires narrative force or energy by virtue of its place in a larger story arc, a story arc that is external to the image as such, but used to position it in an unfolding narrative trajectory. When set within the context afforded by the verbal tract, which is about not expressing one's anger, it leading to poisoning effects of the other. When set within the context afforded by the verbal tract, the image tract captures the moment when the narrator gladly sees the death of his enemy. But where exactly do we situate this moment in time? Having initially used the past tense to locate the narrative events in a timeframe earlier than the present moment of telling, in line 15, the narrating eye, the self that tells, switches to the present tense. In the morning glad I see the self stretched beneath the tree. Not only does this tense shift suggest that the narrator's glimpse of the dead foe constitutes, that it constitutes an especially salient event, that being one function of tense shifts in narrative according to a number of analysts. And I add in parentheses that I don't think it's as simple as needing to get the rhyme scheme to work out. I think there's something more complicated going on with the tense shift here, in other words. So not just marking salient events, but also the use of the present tense here creates a context in which aspects of the current moment of telling can be blended with past occurrences. The morphology of English verbs does not distinguish between the simple present and the historical present. Rather a discourse context must be used to determine which functional interpretation of the tense marking is preferable. Blake's narrative exploits this feature of the language, that is the way English present tense verbs can both signify the here and now and presentify what is past to construct the foe's death less as a localized incident than as a complex event structure distributed across timeframes. In other words, the moment of seeing can be situated at multiple points in time with the figurative historical present reading of C, locating that perceptual act in the past and the literal interpretation of C anchoring that act in the current moment of narration and potentially in all moments that have led up to and will extend beyond the present. We can call this second gloss of the verb C an eternal present rather than historical present interpretation of the tense. More than this though, Blake the way Blake coordinates verbal and visual designs in the poem contributes to the temporal unmooring of the foe's demise. The scene of the foe's death visually presides over or dominates the entire time span covered by the poem's 16 lines. The branches of the poison tree not only stretch over the full extent of the foe's supine body but also encompass the whole of the text. The placement of the image after the conclusion of the poem suggests that the effects of this death rather than being encapsulated within the current speech event as a past moment recounted by the narrator flow forward continuously into the future. In concert with the poem's tense patterning, the visual design of the text inhibits knowledge about the position of events along the timeline stretching from past to present to future. Attempts to parse the temporal logic of the text generate an unresolvable question. Exactly where in time can the narrator's perception of or effective response to the death of the foe be situated. Now we move to the next case study, Hulk. Not often paired with William Blake but should be more often. Now this is a page from the April 1968 installment of the incredible Hulk comic series and it also raises questions about narrative worldmaking in multimodal environments. Because this page features a sequence of word image combinations, however the key issue is no longer where to place a pregnant moment in a larger story arc instead of putting a single image into dialogue with the verbal track, this page is organized in the form of sequences of panels that represent multiple time slices of an emergent story, enabling interpreters to use the visual cues to explore that world incrementally on a panel basis. The result attacks that foregrounds questions about how to use word image combinations to map out events along an unfolding storyline. Or timeline. Centering on a character originally created in 1962, the incredible Hulk series portrays the experiences of Robert Bruce Banner, a nuclear physicist from Dayton, Ohio, who grew up in an abusive home. Banner's exposure to gamma rays has led to his bifurcation into the normal human Banner and his alter ego, the creature known as Hulk. Here's the cover of this particular issue of Hulk. This shows actually the reverse transformation where he goes back to being Banner. The page we're looking at actually goes in the other direction. Shockingly, when Hulk was first created he was blue. But then order was restored in our universe and he became green and that's the trademark color that stayed with him forever after in subsequent versions like from the early 70s up to this day and of course in our focal page as well. Sudden surges of adrenaline transfer Banner into this creature, a green behemoth who can lift 100 tons and withstand up to 3000 degrees of heat Fahrenheit. This April 1968 installment re-explores the events surrounding Banner's initial exposure to radiation and subsequent transformation into the Hulk. As the sequence suggests popular comic storytelling styles like those used in Hulk, no less than norm challenging narrative representations like Blake's activate complex sense making strategies strategies that fall within the purview of research on worlding the story. Now for one thing this sequence reveals how visual verbal designs can interact with the organization of a narrative. That is it's structuring into a frame and framed level or an embedded story to trigger influences about narrative participants and events. So in this page there is a frame narrative being told by Oldar the witch her narration is in rhyming couplets in yellow rectangular text boxes at the tops of panels. Her narration is actually embedded in a larger narrative frame and in what you see are the incidents that her narration evokes, the story world that her telling evokes. By contrast the rounded white speech balloons that you see in panels are used to mark the characters utterances situated at the level of the story within the story within the story. So we get a complex crosshatch structure like this shown in the earlier figure where both the image and verbal tracks are indexed to multiple reference worlds. More generally this page from Hulk points up the story shaping power of media when it comes to heuristics for narrative comprehension. A key issue is how readers engage in panel by panel mapping procedures. Using verbal visual designs to trace Banner's metamorphosis into Hulk. In essence understanding this transformational process requires projecting word image complexes along an inferred timeline. Interpreters can in this way balance constant and variable features across panels to compute a trajectory of change rather than inferring a wholesale substitution of narrative agents. So for example the background in the sixth panel on this page has the same watermelon color and striated texture as that contained in the first panel. While the purple color of Hulk's pants always stylish in the final three panels recalls the purple pants that Banner's wearing in the third frame when he's being examined by the doctor. Here the visual logic of the page reinforces the causal and chronological links suggested by old R the witches frame tail. The panel representing Banner's transformation into Hulk in panel six visually recalls the panel in which Banner's exposed to the gamma rays that cause the transformation panel one. While the purple pants establish participant continuity the color marks Hulk as a different version of Banner linked to him through a process of transformation rather than an altogether different participant. So in short to explore the who dimension of the Hulk story world the dimension concerned with participants their reasons for acting and so forth interpreters can project patterns of verbal and visual cues onto segments of an emergent story arc. Even where explicit verbal indicators about the temporal position of events are absent the rendering of a character's appearance or of the setting can suggest the position of a given scene or occurrence on the overarching timeline. The story worlds of Blake's a poison tree and the Hulk comics though taking shape and text that afford dramatically different navigational strategies nonetheless share the attribute of being fictional worlds. By contrast Mary Fleener's life of the party and Jeffrey Brown's clumsy fall within the domain of autobiography or rather memoir and thus the genre of nonfiction versus fiction. These texts suggest how contrasts among narrative genres correspond in part to differences in the world making practices that they enable. At the same time Brown and Fleener's texts highlight the diversity of the narrative strategies being leveraged for the purposes of what I'm calling graphic life writing or the use of words and images or comics narration to tell one's life story. As Philippe Lejeune and Dorit Cohn have argued autobiographies are narratives for which questions about truth value are indeed pertinent. Because of what Lejeune describes as the autobiographical pact interpreters and producers of autobiographical discourse share the assumption that there's a homology between or among the author, narrator and protagonist so that's the autobiographical pact you assume that the author is identical to the narrator who's identical to the protagonist except older than the protagonist. This homology distinguishes autobiographies from first person fictional narratives like Conrad's Heart of Darkness or from fictional autobiographies like say David Copperfield by Dickens. In such fictional texts in parallel with autobiographies the narrating eye, the self who tells can be viewed as a later incarnation of the experiencing eye the self told about but in contrast with autobiographical accounts in narratives like these the narrators claims about earlier experiences cannot be assumed to be ones that the author would himself or herself endorse as true but in texts like Sleaners and Brown's how do the specific attributes of graphic narrative shape the design and interpretation of discourse to which readers can orient in accordance with the autobiographical pact put another way in graphic life writing what protocols for world making constrain but also enable how an author narrates her own self becoming in my two example texts Sleaners and Brown's methods of imploding the events that make up their lives imply different models of the self which dovetail with the contrasting expressive styles used by the authors in Sleaners text the self is shaped by key episodes that function as turning points in an unfolding life story conversely the story of the self's emergence encompasses these episodes in the same way that extult structure is more than the sum of its parts in parallel with this model of the self as accruing complexity experiences, memories relationships, values over time Sleaner uses a visual style that is comparatively Baroque individual pages contain shifts between more or less proximal views of the scene she represents and also use a striking Picasso like technique that Sleaner has termed Cubismo to figure intense feelings in mental states as exemplified by the third fifth and sixth panels on this page taken from the hush yuppies episode of life of the party which actually centers on a character who combines a foot fetish with a addiction to cocaine so you can imagine the interesting combinations that occur now the third panel portrays Mary's angry reaction to Jack's drug use while the fifth and sixth panels show Jack experiencing the effects of cocaine overall the narrative shifts in perspective more or less detail portrayals of what's going on and expressionist Cubist renderings of mental states allow Sleaner to mark individual track changes in the relative salience and emotional impact of events both over the course of a given episode like here and also across larger temporal spans as the narrating eye interpreting events through retrospective telling goes on to reevaluate them differently than the experiencing of the dead in the past episode internal fluctuations fluctuations are evident on this page where Sleaner uses the Cubismo technique to register how for different characters events have a different experiential quality or texture likewise the skulls appearing in the mirror in the fourth panel as Jack leans down and does cocaine there's skulls in the mirror there they reflect the inference that Jack's drug use is tantamount to death though it's unclear whether this assessment should be attributed to the experiencing eye the narrating eye or both for its part this next page taken from turn off that jungle music which is about Sleaner's family's racist attitudes shows how the emotional valence of events can change over longer stretches of time and you can't quite read the narration at the tops of the panels but the second panel portrays a very young Mary as frenetically excited by the display of the latest hit records at the end of aisle 13 in the neighborhood grocery store whereas the narrating eyes report in that very small text mentions only that Mary noticed the records so there's a discrepancy here between these two evaluations and it underlines the temporal and effective distance between the narrator and protagonist meanwhile the self-figured in Brown's serially linked micro sequences is always only emergent a fragile vulnerable achievement with Brown's highly incremental method of emplotment suggesting the need to reevaluate this precarious accomplishment of self on almost a moment by moment basis in the image track likewise Brown's drawings are stripped down minimalist, his characters long thick limbs and extended torso recalling stick figures rather than cubist portraits this page from clumsy shows Jeff is inconsolably lonely and anxious even after a drawn out phone call with Teresa with whom he hangs up only after being prodded to do so and even then only very reluctantly whereas Fleener uses variations in drawing style to indicate the fluctuating salience and emotional impact of events Brown confines himself almost exclusively to medium distance views of the scenes he portrays as suggested by this vignette in Brown's minimalist style explicit indicators of the emotional value of events are limited to section titles here I'm sorry and the character's facial expressions and comments as they react to what's going on whereas Fleener draws on a large repertoire of perspective marking techniques as well as direct verbal assessments by the narrating eye to indicate the relative significance of events in Brown's text what might be termed the amplitude of changes in perspectives is smaller and his account also lacks direct ex post evaluations of events by the older narrating self so once again exploiting a full range of verbal visual affordances to enable narrative world making in graphic life writing Fleener's and Brown's text suggests diversity of world building practices not only in one in the same storytelling medium but also within a single genre within that medium now just some brief comments about world making and graphic narratives that feature non-human characters and this grows out of a larger project on storytelling practices in different media vis-a-vis broader assumptions that feature experiences and status of non-human animals and I've set up here this continuum of strategies for presenting non-human experiences and on the left you've got coarse-grained non-detailed presentations of how non-human beings might experience the world and I've termed those kinds of representations animal allegory the animals are being used as stand-ins for human situations, events and experiences so you go all the way over to the right you get this technique labeled Umbelt Exploration borrowed the term Umbelt from the pioneering ethologist Jacob von Uckstuhl who talks about the Umbelt as the world as it's phenomenally experienced by an organism as it interacts with its environment and different kinds of creatures and organisms have different Umbelt depending on their structure and how they take advantage of affordances in the environment and so different kinds of narratives ranked or arranged at different points along this continuum here's a more dynamic representation this suggests that any given narrative can contain or exploit more than one of these modes but one of the modes is likely to be preponderant in that narrative and again you can kind of differentiate stories and declines by virtue of these sorts of emphases now some brief illustrations of the four modes listed animal allegory are practiced in Spiegelman's mouse so there's no real detailed engagement with the cats and mice shown in this scene they are used as allegorical methods of exploring human conflicts so here of course we've got the conflict between Jews and Nazis in the Second World War and in the Holocaust in particular and Spiegelman's using these animals to telegraph that structure of conflict which is fundamentally a human one now here you get move a little bit rightward along the scale and you get pride of Baghdad from 2006 which explores the NATO led bombing of Baghdad in 2003 and how the bombing affected a pride of lions in the zoo, Baghdad at that time and the final panel on this sequence you can see a kind of off-kilter perspective suggesting the impact of the bombs on the lions but by and large it's a fairly anthropomorphized view so you've got the lions having human speech abilities, their faces are drawn with human expressions, their family structure is like a human nuclear family which isn't really how lions congregate moving a bit to the right still farther on the continuum you get to zoomorphic projection so called and this is where a human character is being used to stage or model non-human abilities or capacities there's a series called Animal Man which goes back to the 60s Danny Baker is the hero and he has the ability to acquire non-human attributes and capabilities so here he dives into the water encounters an eel and can then use electric shock to sting a criminal as a criminal is trying to escape and then as you go all the way over toward the right you get a science fiction text like we3 from 2005 this is a text about three house pets that are stolen and transformed into biogs, biologically technologically enhanced weapons it's a dog, a cat, and a rabbit and they are used by the CIA and the military for various missions a premise of this science fiction world is that there's an elaborate speech synthesis system so that the animals reactions to the world can be captured through this system so it's not really an anthropomorphic projection exactly as in pride of Baghdad we're going to simulate how the non-human characters might be reacting to what's going on so to sum up the variety of textual designs that I've touched on suggest something of the range of construction methods that stories can set into play as readers, viewers, listeners, or interlocutors engage in practices of narrative world making in Blake's Poison Tree a single image provides a snapshot of the story world whose structure and history the verbal track figures in more detail yet the snapshot metaphor should not be taken to literally here since the poem's visual design stands in a complex relationship with its verbal components what is shown recontextualizes rather than merely illustrating what is said even as what is said constrains how the image contributes to the reader's efforts to world the story in my other case studies the key issue is how to map out relationships among verbal and visual designs across panel sequences as well as within individual panels in the page from Hulk word-image combinations enable readers to world the story by distinguishing the hierarchy of narrative levels and situating changes to participants within that larger structure in Fleener's text fluctuating degrees of visual complexity along with multiple textual layers provide a scaffolding for the interpretation and evaluation of past events Fleener's emphasis is on how past experiences intelligible because of their place in the larger unfolding of a life have made the narrating self who and what she is in Brown's narrative by contrast the sparseness of the visual and verbal tracks coupled with the highly incremental mode of narration suggests that even when micro-analyzed the past cannot always be fully understood from the vantage point of the present finally narrative world-making in animal comics underscores how world-building practices relate to larger assumptions and norms including those bound up with what might be termed folk ethologies or cultures indigenous ways of understanding and orienting to non-human animals so thank you very much