4 Responses to “MUST READ: Kate Chopin’s THE AWAKENING by Nick Bertozzi”

1. Karen Says:
   09/2/09 at 12:04 pm

   Oh man. I really hope he finishes it. I LOVE that novel, and this looks like a killer adaptation.

2. Lit-major Says:
   09/2/09 at 2:45 pm

   But the style is so wrong for the tone of the book, which isn’t especially visual to begin with…

3. Shaenon Garrity Says:
   09/3/09 at 3:41 am

   Whoa, I drew a comic adaptation of a scene from “The Awakening” in high school for an English assignment. It wasn’t pretty like this.

4. Brian Fies Says:
   09/3/09 at 6:01 pm

   I think as a personal analytical experiment by Bertozzi, it’s great. But as a real work of graphic literature ready to be added to every college syllabus, I have the same objection to this that I do with most other adaptations of prose novels: they can’t help but be a thin “Classics Illustrated” version of the original while adding little in return. The density of information conveyed is too different, particularly in turn-of-the-century (or earlier) novels in which the richness of the prose is part of the reading experience. Sometimes a picture’s worth a thousand words and sometimes it’s not. A student who read this instead of the original would miss a lot, including the author’s fundamental tool: her use of language to paint the pictures she wants you to see, not Bertozzi.

   Comics do a lot of things well, and a few things no other medium can. I don’t think this is one of them.

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