Analysing comic strips as a mode of cultural production and cultural dissemination

Abstract

Culture is an important determiner in any cultural production in general and comic strips in particular. Comic strip offers itself as a potent field of research as it is a combination of two types of cultural codes-language and the illustration. But unfortunately, preliminary reading for this research led to the conclusion that there is an acute paucity of material as well as scholarship in this area. Therefore, it was felt that a research work on the analysis of cultural codification in the form of text-image combine in comic strip and the corresponding responses thus evoked in the reader from the semiotic point of view would be beneficial not only in opening new vistas in literary appreciation and interpretation but would also relocate significance to a hitherto neglected realm. The thesis is based on the hypothesis that comic strip is a mode of cultural production and cultural dissemination. The hypothesis also includes the idea that such a text perpetuates a tacit hierarchy and propogates a politics of marginalisation and cultural domination through image- text combine more effectively. The research focuses on two vernacular Bengali comic strip Nante Fante and Handa newlineBhonda as praxis areas of case study and a comic strip from Tripura and about Tripura Senapati Ray Kachag and analyses how the dissemination of cultural biases gets reflected in the illustration and newlinelanguage text combine of comic strips during the presentation of a subordinate or marginalised character. The thesis therefore attempts to read the image text combination of comic strip as a tool of disseminating newlinenot only the cultural context in which it is produced but also as a means of hegemonisation through its apparent innocent mould and aims at arriving at the formulation of a working theoretical model to analyse the same. The subsequent chapters read themselves as the various stages of this research newlineundertaken and formulating a theoretical model and then application on comic strips, especially Nante Fante and Handa Bhonda.