The Graphic Novel
Class Information
Instructor: Stratton, Matthew
CRN: 56634
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50am
Location: Olson 146
GE Areas: Writing Experience Visual
Description
In this course we will take questions of aesthetic, literary, historical, and political value seriously as we critically survey venerable and brand-new masterpieces of the narrative comics known controversially as ?graphic novels.? We will read a variety of different graphic novels, histories, and memoirs to approach an organizing question: what are the possibilities and potentials for sequential visual images to represent individuals, communities, and history itself in adequate, accurate, and ethical narrative forms? We will develop a critical vocabulary and analytical approach to these works that is up to the unique challenges and opportunities that they afford readers, writers, and artists. Along the way, we will take up attendant questions that lie at the heart of literary study more broadly: how do different genres and different media invite, assume, or demand differing accounts of mind, perception, body, and world.
This course fulfills the Writing Experience GE and will offer explicit instruction in how to write cogent analytical prose, as well as feedback on your writing that is designed to make you a more persuasive, powerful writer.
Texts
La Perdida, Jessica Abel
Nat Turner, Kyle Baker
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Charles Burns, Black Hole
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Art Spiegelman, Maus