The History Salesman, or How (not) to Teach History via Graphic Novels. Part Two

Abstract

This is the second part of a paper examining and assessing, as a tool for education, the published volumes of the graphic novel adaptation of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari’s popular science book on world history.

In the first part, which appeared in the previous issue, we briefly entered the decades-long debate on the educational benefits of graphic novels and comics as cool media in the McLuhanian sense. In stating our position, we started from the insights and aims of Paolo Freire’s radical critical pedagogy but we also considered the most recent contributions to the pedagogy of comics and graphic novels. Subsequently, we reconstructed the hard-to-sart publishing history of Harari’s best-selling books including Sapiens and Sapiens. A Graphic History. We showed them to have been lifted on the recently detected rising tide of demand for “brainy books”. However, we found this explanation incomplete, requiring further factors to be provided during analyses in the other two parts.

In the second part, appearing here, first we survey the reception of Harari’s oeuvre in three scenes: among the global political, business and cultural elite, on the part of the Hungarian print and electronic mass media, and finally, among the general reading public both worldwide and in Hungary. We also start our critical assessment in this part, from comics studies and educational angles, showing some excellent narrative, artistic and didactic techniques applied by the creators. We proceed in our analysis along the following lines: the narrative structuring, world building and handling of time in the work; the characters depicted; the genres and popcultural references; humour and self-references; and finally the intended audience.

In the final part of the paper, we continue our analysis by providing philosophical and ideology critical assessments of the original book. We explore its vision of humankind, society, and history, its fundamental philosophical premises as well as the ideological commitments of the book, which we see as one of the most characteristic contemporary representatives of the mainstream liberal vision of history. We also examine how, during its rendition into the new genre of discourse, graphic novel, the above mentioned features of Harari’s original book change: whether they get amplified, distorted, lost or absorb new difficulties and contradictions. We focus on the overt purpose of, as well as the detectable hidden agenda behind, the change of medium, and how successfully they are met in the books. We also show examples of where and how the educational purpose aiming to reach younger generations turns into more or less concealed propaganda.