Dr. Kaushal Desai

Overview of Research

My PhD research focuses on the application of New Historicism as a critical approach to the study of graphic novels. The study explores how history, culture, politics, and social ideologies manifest in the graphic novels of three prominent creators Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, and Alan Moore. My PhD research entitled “Manifestation of New Historicism in Select Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Alan Moore”

New Historicism, suggests that literary texts are embedded within historical and cultural contexts, influencing and being influenced by contemporary discourses. This research investigates how graphic novels act as historical artifacts, reflecting and reinterpreting past events through visual storytelling and narrative techniques.

This research contributes to the discourse on literature, history, and visual culture, reaffirming that graphic novels are not just entertainment but powerful mediums of historical reflection and cultural commentary. By applying New Historicism, the study positions these works as critical narratives that challenge, reconstruct, and reinterpret history through artistic expression.

The findings of this research offer valuable insights for scholars, educators, and students interested in literary criticism, historiography, and graphic novel studies.

Previous research work at a glance...

M.Phil (2015-2016)

Graphic Novel

A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Graphic novel has a depth contents and powerful expansion of meaning in the literature. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work.

For the purpose of Researcher’s Research, the novels that He takes up are Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and other Tenement Stories, And Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. These graphic novels minutely narrate the story of historical issues.

In the late 19th century with visual techniques that would become comic conventions. Within this larger historical context, Graphic novels can be seen both as an ancient medium that combines words and images, two of the primal building blocks for communication, and as a modern medium that continues to develop and evolve. The depth to understand the historical and cultural meaning, Graphic novels expanded it with visual techniques and it comes up as a complete book.

The term graphic novel is contentious. From the 1970s, as the field of comic studies was first emerging as an academic discipline, scholars and others have attempted to define the word comics and to generate a critical terminology appropriate to support that definition. The debate over so-called graphic novels touches upon this complex situation. (Britannica)

Theory of New Historicism

For this present point first I have read the general information and details by surfing on Google. Though, I had studied this theory in my masters and master of philosophy. It is very important to check the Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory again for this section of reading of New Historicism and here I’m penning some points which will help me to relate my topic to explore it well.

New Historicism

Critical approach that developed in the 1980s, mainly through the work of Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943)
New Historicism aim simultaneously to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
Basic principle is to "parallel" reading of literary and non-literary texts
Identifying what other literary and non-literary texts the public had access to at the time of writing the text (to understand the relationship between a text and the political, social and economic circumstances in which it originated)
The text and co-text seen as expressions of the same historical moment

What New Historicists do?

They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former the light of the latter
They try thereby to 'defamiliarize' the canonical literary text, detaching it from the accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new
They focus attention on issues of State power and how it is maintained, on patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of colonization, with its accompanying 'mind-set'
They make use, in doing so, of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook, especially Derrida's notion that every facet of reality is textualized, and Foucault's ideas of social structures as determined by dominant 'discursive practices'

PhD Research Proposal of Kaushal Desai (PPT)My PhD research proposal entitled “Manifestation of New Historicism in Select Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Alan Moore”. Right now I am pur…