Reading the Signs: Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding, Baseball, and the Graphic Imagination

Citation

Edwards JD (2018) Reading the Signs: Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding, Baseball, and the Graphic Imagination. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59 (5), pp. 509-518. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1427547

Abstract
Although not a graphic novel, graphics are integrated into the fabric of Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding (2011). By graphics, I mean the juxtaposing and mixing of alphabetical and pictographic designs, and I argue that the novel engages with the graphic imagination by including graphic dynamics to convey complex meanings through the conjunction of difference and identity in inscription and visual form. In a keyboard character or a letter there are, for instance, complicated dimensions in the relationship between the printed letter and its meaning, thus revealing a rhetoric whose graphic and textual nature allows meaning to emerge in ways that move beyond the utterances of speech and reflect the visual baseball sign system.

Keywords
Baseball; graphics; Chad Harbach; signs; sports

Journal
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Volume 59, Issue 5