English Literature 3771
Avi Sato ([email protected])
There are few places where "literature" meets "pop culture" but the graphic novel is certainly one of them, whether we call it a collection of drawings, manga or comic, the merger between images and storytelling is a medium that, while it has been around since before written language, has found a new way of connecting with its audience over the past century or so. Visual elements can do things that traditional novels, poetry and non-fiction works simply can't do and, when combined with the written word, the result is a powerful fusion of styles that has the power to tell stories in a way that traditional media cannot emulate and to attract a huge segment of the population for whom pleasure-reading is not part of their lives, while still captivating a literary audience. The language of visual literature has shifted dramatically in the twenty-first century and we are going to investigate what's been done and what's been done differently in the past decade of graphic lit.
We will be meeting three times a week for ninety minutes each session. These will all be seminar blocks - Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 14.30-16.00.
Note, this course outline has been updated since this instructor last taught it and scheduling information reflects its last instance, not its next.
This course focuses on you achieving the following. By the end of this course, you should be able to…
During the course, you will be able to demonstrate…
This is a seminar course. This means that you will be responsible for participation at a level of engagement and depth in keeping with the level of this course. You will be called on occasionally to answer specific questions but most of your participation will be because you decide to contribute something. If you don't contribute in class, it will be you who misses out on improving your understanding. You will not be graded on your talking but the effect will be visible in how well your submissions engage with what we have discussed. Relevant discussion is encouraged and some of the topics will be those about which strong views are held but it is expected that you will be mindful of the emotional effect of your words.
While there will be the occasional supplementary piece assigned and distributed, this course uses fifteen graphic texts. It is my assumption that you will have read each of these completely at least once, start to finish, and to have studied several pages in detail as to their visual style and content. You don't have to purchase each of them but, in the interest of fairness, I encourage you to buy as many as you are able. I have several copies of each, as does the department - the library may also have several but I wouldn't count on them being available. If you wish to get together with other students and share the cost of the books, that has worked well in the past for these courses, as long as you take responsibility for reading the work before class.
It would be great if you could bring them to class with you but it's more important that you could let me know whether there will be enough copies to share and look at or if I will need to provide copies on the day -- no need to do this at the beginning of the course but the week before, I'd love to know who's got their own copy, in the interest of saving trees. Everything we study will be displayed on screen but it's not always a great idea to rely on the technology to work. I am not going to ask who has read the works. If you haven't, you won't be able to contribute constructively to the discussion and I would ask you not to try to fake it. You are welcome to attend anyway. We will not be talking about every page in each work but we will talk about the book as a whole and then do some close investigation and analysis of specific pages -- this means, in short, don't just flick through the books, assuming an overall understanding of the plot and style will cover it.
ISBN numbers may vary by edition, printing or format. You are welcome to acquire the electronic versions of any of these but I will give you the code for the paperback, when possible, more as a way of being standardized than as recommending that format. The dates are given as the date of the edition, not the date of the original pressing, although this is often the same. If you have access to another edition, that's perfectly fine as long as the content is largely the same -- many of the more popular works have been issued in various editions and it's mostly the cover art and additional content that shifts from one to another.
Any supplementary works will be provided electronically at least one week before the class discussing them and you will be expected to have absorbed them and be prepared to comment and engage in discussion. It is further expected that you will have read (completely) the work to be discussed in a particular class, although it is not necessary that you have a copy of the work with you. While all discussions will be accompanied by the work being showed on the screen or distributed on paper, it would be helpful if you brought any copies you might have access to to reduce the amount we are relying on seeing details on the screen.
Each pair of seminars will be divided into four pieces, each lasting approximately three quarters of an hour -- two pieces per scheduled class. The first piece will be a general background discussion of the work and anything that is related to its understanding other than its actual content -- the author, illustrator, translator, anyone else who is significant to the creation of the work, this will form the first bit of the discussion. That will be followed by an introduction to the circumstances -- the social environment, cultural norms, geopolitical and socioeconomic details that may be useful to think about. The first segment will also (and likely for the largest part of this segment) focus on your emotional reactions to the work, either as a whole or specific pieces within it. This is not a discussion of the technical details of the work, just a way into an understanding of the emotional reaction that has been created.
The second piece will be more specific and will look at the target audience, assumptions about the work, compositional style and visual language. The third piece (first half of the second class) will be a discussion of the words and the individual visual symbols used, their context, their meanings and how they shape the cohesive understanding. The last piece will be a combination of two things, depending on the work. In some cases, it will focus primarily on specific details and look at the combination of words and images, how an individual page or spread, for example, works together to tell a story, provide answers to a question, create an emotional reaction, etc. In other cases, it will look at the relationship between the language of words and the language of images as a more general, theoretical framework and discuss it in the context of contemporary culture, both ours and that specifically of the work in question.
Classes without specific works assigned will usually involve discussion topics and this will be linked to short samples from work that is not in the reading list -- some of this will be extremely current, things that are recently published or even pending publication, some will be independently-created or unpublished like photographs of visual art, refugee camp walls' graffiti and voiceovers for graphic media presentation being two that may appear in the context of text-visual art. The final classes will be revision and you are encouraged to have your own questions ready to get the most out of the class and end the term feeling successful.
We are not going to be looking at these works in either chronological or alphabetical order. They are given alphabetically in the materials list for the sake of simplicity but they will be grouped loosely by theme and style to make it easier to transition from one to the next -- while chronological organization is typical of literature courses, since these are all works from within a very condensed period of time, there's no real time-focused difference and the publication date has little meaning in the context of how long each took to create and find publication.
This is the first course in a pair. While you are encouraged to take both, they are both stand-alone in their content and discussions. What I should point out is that the second course takes up some of the same social and cultural topics in greater depth.
Introduction and discussion of the assignments of the course. If we have time, we will look at a few excerpts from graphic novels that I will share in class and talk about what makes graphic literature different from other forms of literature and why contemporary graphic lit is remarkably different from that of only a decade or two ago, not to mention from the early twentieth century. Why "if we have time"? That will depend on how many questions there are about the course content and assignments because it's best to get those out of the way so there's no confusion later about expectations and grading.
What does contemporary mean in the context of literature in general, graphic literature in specific and does this vary across cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic or other socially-divergent lines?
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata
What is the place of politics, extremism, tribalism, gender, race and minority in graphic literature? How does this relate to its place in popular culture?
Waves by Carole Maurel and Ingrid Chabbert
Plum Village, An Artist’s Journey by Phap Ban
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
Is social media graphic literature? Memes? What about television and movies, especially when they are subtitled? Can we look at these media using the same tools as for graphic lit? For literature in general? Or are they so different they require a whole different approach?
Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol
Paper Girls by Brian K Vaughan
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas by Yoru Sumino
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
What impact does society have on this genre of work? What can be published? What can be shared? What can become popular? Inversely, what impact can graphic lit have on society? Is it revolutionary? Can making art be more than just revolutionary in the academic sense?
Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
Jerusalem by Guy Delisle
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
A Bride’s Story by Kaoru Mori
This class will be open to general questions related to the final assignment and revision of already-submitted work. I will encourage discussion of new topics and provide other sample work with whatever time is not used for these questions. If we have time, the question we will be focusing on is this -- with the assumption of a 100% literacy rate (whether that's true or not is a different discussion) in a modern, digital-focused world, what's different about the connection between visuals and words now that we have become separated from the notion that writing is only for the educated?
This document was last updated on 2020.1.13 and corresponds to the upcoming version of this course. For earlier course outlines, please get in touch directly as only the most recent version will be displayed here to avoid potential confusion.