“Shaded memories”: visual-verbal language as a way of functioning polyphony (based on A. Kühn’s graphic novel “Lichtung”)

The aim of the research is to identify the specifics of the visual-verbal language of the graphic novel within the context of the category of polyphony. The article examines the unique subject-image structure of the graphic novel “Lichtung” (2018) by the German artist Antonia Kühn (b. 1979). The work is analyzed in the context of a generation of artists who emerged on the European “9th art” scene in 2010. This generation is defined by a new “visual-verbal” language compared to the graphic novels of the 2000s. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, features of the ballad and the polyphonic novel have been identified within a modern graphic novel at the level of its subject-image structure. As a result of the study, it was established for the first time that through the implementation of three types of communicative strategies of the Romantic ballad within the narrative whole, the combination of lyrical and epic positions of the narrator, and the absence of information about the fictional world that is not mediated through the characters’ consciousness, “Lichtung” constitutes a polyphonic graphic novel, the structural basis of which is formed by an initiation plot.