Zoom reading group: On Nick Drnaso's Sabrina, Led by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: Jean-Christophe Cloutier, University of Pennsylvania

In 2018, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Drawn & Quarterly) became the first “graphic novel” to be longlisted for the Booker Prize, a move that many regarded as renewed legitimation of the comics medium’s literary potential. In her blurb for the book, celebrated novelist Zadie Smith called Sabrina “the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment. It is a masterpiece, beautifully written and drawn, possessing all the political power of polemic and yet simultaneously all the delicacy of truly great art.” Entirely devoid of narrative captions and yet steeped in psychological depth, Sabrina shares many qualities with the traditional realist novel, while also exhibiting a distinctly postmodern penchant for paranoia and anxiety. Through its pages, readers witness characters experience the conflicts and successes of ordinary life with an intimacy that nevertheless keeps readers at arm’s length. And yet, Drnaso’s muted panels convey disarming levels of suffering, depression, alienation, and grief that come to capture the political nihilism of the social-media era. In this Novel Theory reading group, we will explore what we find “novelistic” about Sabrina and how the comics form contributes to the unique ways Drnaso is able to represent “our current moment.”

About the Speaker

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches 20th and 21st Century North American and African American literature, comics and graphic novels, and archival research methods. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) and of a forthcoming study of Jack Kerouac’s oeuvre, Big American Writer: Jack Kerouac, Bilingualism, and the Archive (with Columbia UP). He has been lucky enough to teach comics since 2012 when he designed the first course on comics-as-literature at Columbia University during his doctoral studies.

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.