Frederik Byrn Køhlert | Edinburgh Napier University (original) (raw)

Books by Frederik Byrn Køhlert

Chicago occupies a central position in both the geography and literary history of the United Stat... more Chicago occupies a central position in both the geography and literary history of the United States. From its founding in 1833 through to its modern incarnation, the city has served as both a thoroughfare for the nation's goods and a crossroads for its cultural energies. The idea of Chicago as a crossroads of modern America is what guides this literary history, which traces how writers have responded to a rapidly changing urban environment and labored to make sense of its place in - and implications for - the larger whole. In writing that engages with the world's first skyscrapers and elevated railroads, extreme economic and racial inequality, a growing middle class, ethnic and multiethnic neighborhoods, the Great Migration of African Americans, and the city's contemporary incarnation as a cosmopolitan urban center, Chicago has been home to a diverse literature that has both captured and guided the themes of modern America.

Autobiography is one of the most dynamic and quickly-growing genres in contemporary comics and gr... more Autobiography is one of the most dynamic and quickly-growing genres in contemporary comics and graphic narratives. In Serial Selves, Frederik Byrn Køhlert examines the genre’s potential for representing lives and perspectives that have been socially marginalized or excluded. With a focus on the comics form’s ability to produce alternative and challenging autobiographical narratives, thematic chapters investigate the work of artists writing from perspectives of marginality including gender, sexuality, disability, and race, as well as trauma. Interdisciplinary in scope and attuned to theories and methods from both literary and visual studies, the book provides detailed formal analysis to show that the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of comics can help artists push against established narrative and visual conventions, and in the process invent new ways of seeing and being seen.

As the first comparative study of how comics artists from a wide range of backgrounds use the form to write and draw themselves into cultural visibility, Serial Selves will be of interest to anyone interested in the current boom in autobiographical comics, as well as issues of representation in comics and visual culture more broadly.

The Chicago Literary Experience is a concise literary history of the city of Chicago. Taking as i... more The Chicago Literary Experience is a concise literary history of the city of Chicago. Taking as its thematic starting point the city's famous World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the book provides an account of the city's rapid and in many ways unprecedented development from trading post to metropolis, and examines the many literary responses to this new urban environment. By contextualizing literature written about the city in these formative years, the book shows not only how the city influenced its writers, but also how these writers struggled to transform their urban environment into literary forms. Covering such aspect as the emergence of the novel of the businessman as cultural hero, the humorous newspaper columns of the late nineteenth century, and the Depression-era revitalization of Chicago literature from its ethnic neighborhoods, the book moves beyond the obvious "classics" and rediscovers a vibrant literary tradition that restores almost-forgotten writers such as Eugene Field and Floyd Dell to their place in American literary history. Given the historical approach and the breadth of material covered, the book will be valuable to anyone wanting to understand how American literature in this defining period moved from the farm to the city-and what happened to it once it had arrived.

Authors discussed include Jane Addams, George Ade, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Eugene Field, Henry B. Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, Jack London, Frank Norris, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright.

Articles by Frederik Byrn Køhlert

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 2020

In Sick, his 2016 memoir about suffering from a mysterious illness, Gabby Schulz depicts himself ... more In Sick, his 2016 memoir about suffering from a mysterious illness, Gabby Schulz depicts himself as experiencing extreme pain, which he depicts on the page in the shape of monsters and gargoyles tormenting him. Under the pressure of a rising fever, Schulz eventually achieves a clarity of vision that allows him to see that the illness he suffers from is inseparable from his complicity as a white man in the many injustices of Western culture. This essay reads Sick as an extended meditation on racial whiteness, and argues that because whiteness in many comics is often naturalized as nothing more than an absence of signification on the typically white page, it mirrors the way racial whiteness has historically been conceptualized as invisible and universal. A horror story with whiteness as its monster, Sick works to make whiteness visible through drawn depictions of white racial identity mor- phing into increasingly disturbing images of the death and destruction upon which it rests.

SubStance, 2017

This article suggests a deep relationship between comics and anarchism. The examination of this f... more This article suggests a deep relationship between comics and anarchism. The examination of this fundamental relationship serves to illustrate how similar organizational and communicational principles are embedded within these two apparently disparate forms of human expression, and therefore also makes an argument for why an understanding of the history and form of comics is incomplete without a consideration of anarchism, and vice versa. In order to provide an example of how the two traditions have fruitfully cross-pollinated each other, I end by offering an examination of several anarchism-inflected underground comix from the American counterculture years and beyond, including a reading of perhaps the most explicit attempt to bear out this relationship in practice, namely the four-issue series Anarchy Comics (1978-1987). In my reading of Anarchy Comics, additionally, I expand my analysis beyond narrow structural concerns and discuss various other anarchism-inflected strategies of visual narrative available to comics makers, including such punk-inspired techniques as collage and the satirical redeployment of corporate comics and cartoon characters for subversive purposes. While my focus in what follows is thus largely on formal features, my argument ultimately aims to illuminate the relationship between comics and anarchism at the levels of both form and content.

South Central Review, 2015

This article explores the relationship between autobiography, trauma, and comics in the work of P... more This article explores the relationship between autobiography, trauma, and comics in the work of Phoebe Gloeckner, and demonstrates through close readings how the visual and fragmented comics form can be mobilized both for therapeutic purposes and as a means to assert agency for a victim of trauma. Comics autobiography, crucially, externalize the self as a drawn visual representation on the page that is self-evidently other to the contractual author. This splitting of the subject into a narrating author and a narrated visual representation on the comics page is congenial to the representation of traumatic memories, which theorists have long recognized to be manifesting themselves as the intrusion of visual snapshots into normal consciousness. The comics form, further, functions as a kind of visual scriptotherapy, which allows the author to dissociate the traumatic memory onto the page and create a narrative from a series of disjointed memories. Readings of selected passages from Gloeckner’s two books A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl illustrate how her use of the comics form take advantage of its inherent ability to present traumatic memory and construct a literal eyewitness in the reader. Finally, the article argues that the form’s ability to establish narrative from fragmented, repetitious, and disjointed images allows Gloeckner to organize painful memories into a coherent sense of self, and in this way work through her trauma.

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2014

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2012

The comics of Julie Doucet can be productively interpreted in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's explorat... more The comics of Julie Doucet can be productively interpreted in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's exploration of the carnivalesque and its aesthetic expression as grotesque realism. By employing subject matter and a visual style grounded in the grotesque, Doucet's comics challenge normative notions of the female body through a process of resignification based in parody and unruly embodiment. These ideas connect to theories of resistance and subversion as articulated by Judith Butler, among others, as well as to formalist theories of style and the ways comics produce meaning and identification. Close readings of Doucet's stories demonstrate how her comics perform a feminist critique by redeploying masculinist tropes belonging to ‘high’ culture as grotesque images in the ‘low’ form of comics. The combination of grotesque subject matter and an untraditional visual style serves to critically unsettle the visual pleasure associated with representations of women in comics.

Book Chapter by Frederik Byrn Køhlert

Chicago: A Literary History, 2021

With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics, 2020

Linking theory and practice, Frederik Byrn Køhlert and Nick Sousanis offer myriad examples of wha... more Linking theory and practice, Frederik Byrn Køhlert and Nick Sousanis offer myriad examples of what their co-teaching approach with and through comics looks like. Sharing prompts, students’ work, and their pedagogical decisions, Køhlert and Sousanis give readers a peek under the hood of what their comics pedagogy looks like within traditional English settings.

The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself, 2019

This chapter examines Julie Doucet and Michel Gondry’s collaborative comics/video hybrid My New N... more This chapter examines Julie Doucet and Michel Gondry’s collaborative comics/video hybrid My New New York Diary, which consists of drawings made by Doucet and a short film by Gondry. After outlining the claims made on behalf of the two forms in terms of their perceived ability to represent reality and “truth,” the chapter argues that the collaboration is a highly experimental engagement with issues such as realism, authenticity, and autobiography that playfully unsettles each category through a shrewd employment of the medium-specific properties inherent to comics as well as cinema. By calling the relationship between reality and representation into question, the hybridity built into the project serves not only to challenge accepted models of autobiography and author ship in comics as well as film, but also to interrogate issues of mediated autobiographical absence and presence more broadly.