ENGL 938: Reading in All Directions: Comics and Graphic Narrative
“Reading happens in all directions,” says Hilary Chute about the study of comics and graphic narrative. In this course, students will learn to read images and texts from all directions: up, down, horizontally, vertically, across panels and jacket flaps, in seriality on paper, and digitally on the web. The seminar will read primary sources in relation to comics scholarship, visual culture & rhetoric, history, photography, artistic creation, and contemporary theories (addressing race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, trauma, affect, the postcolonial, other). Foundational questions include: What are graphic narratives? How do you analyze them? How is analyzing this medium different from analyzing literature or film? What issues benefit the most/least from comics’ unique format? How is race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, history (public and private), heroes, and trauma imagined and thus imaged in graphic narratives? Requirements: short informal papers, formal research paper, class presentations, leading class discussions, an annotated bibliography. Possible texts and their major themes:
Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters (a Holocaust mystery; queerness, belonging)
Lewis, Aydin, & Powell’s March (Book III, Civil Rights Movement in 1963; Selma and voting rights march; Freedom Riders)
Johnson & Pleece’s Incognegro (undercover journalism in the South; race and gender passing in the early 20th century; lynching)
Tomine’s Summer Blonde (comics shorts from his Optic Nerve: Asian Americans in contemporary America)
Hernandez’s Is This How You See Me? (Latinx; queer studies; Los Angeles)
Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (inertia and depression, Italian and Irish immigrants; fathers and sons; black Americans; the World’s Fair)
Takei’s They Called Us Enemy (Japanese American internment)
GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (second-generation Vietnamese Americans; refugees; the Vietnam War)
Lefevre’s The Photographer (Doctors Without Borders; the many wars of Afghanistan; the U.S. and rise of the Taliban)
Sacco’s Paying the Land (the Dene Nation of Canada’s Northwest Territories; land; oil; residential schools for Indigenous Peoples)
Two of the following three superheroes for comparison and contrast: Wilson’s Ms. Marvel: No Normal (Pakistan American hero); Starr & Miner’s Super Indian vol. 1 (Native American hero); Yang & Liew’s The Shadow Hero (Chinese American superhero)
Two of the following three superheroes for comparison and contrast: Wilson’s Ms. Marvel: No Normal (Pakistan American hero); Starr & Miner’s Super Indian vol. 1 (Native American hero); Yang & Liew’s The Shadow Hero (Chinese American superhero)