A cognitive linguistic approach to describing the communication of mental illness in comics

This thesis examines the ways in which subjective experience is communicated through comics about mental illness and how such communication can be described and analysed. I chose to focus on comics about mental illness to draw on my own lived experience and because of their common thematic focus on subjectivity. I applied a mixed methods approach, using personal reflection, qualitative analysis of discussion group data and intuitive linguistic analysis.

The central analysis focuses on three contemporary comics that tell stories about experiences of mental illness: Lighter than My Shadow by Katie Green, Tangles, by Sarah Leavitt, and The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon. I propose a means of describing comics based on aspects of cognitive linguistics, including Text World Theory and cognitive grammar. Given its grounding in aspects of cognitive psychology such as attention, focusing, scanning and construal, cognitive grammar provides a common rubric for engaging with the text, images, and composition of comics. I supplement this approach with aspects of Text World Theory, which provides a framework for describing the interface between the content of comics, the context of their production and reading, and how these two aspects of communication relate to one another.

In carrying out this analysis, I used data from reading group discussions of the three comics to guide the focus of my analysis and to supplement my own interpretations with the more naturalistic reading experiences of reading group participants. This led me to focus on aspects of reading including discourse structure, agency, multimodal metaphor, archetypal roles, perspective, event structuring, and reality conceptions. As well providing developments to the application of cognitive linguistics to multimodal communication, my overall findings point to the importance of alternatives to verbal communication, such as comics, as means of differently framing the conceptualisation of experiences of mental illness.