Comic Books and Graphic Novels: Delinquent Reading After Modernism

Catalog description

This course is aimed at graduate students with interests in modernism and visual studies, media theory, and graphic narrative/sequential art (especially those keen to teach, create, or write about the medium). In the first place, it'll be a chance to read deeply in theories of image/text interfaces across media. We'll read comics for their poetics of radical spatial redistribution; study the simultaneous emergence of the juvenile delinquent as legal category and the broadsheet comics that obsessed Joyce and others; ask how caricature and cartoon inflect modernist representations of personhood or plot. Focusing on BIPOC creators and queer reception histories, we'll learn from comics the art of scribbling all over normative practices of literary consecration, abusive rationalization of literacy, and hegemonic flows of cultural capital.