The Graphic Novel

Catalog description

This course considers the defining attributes of the graphic novel—its formal limits, its contentious history, and its explosive potentials—in order to interrogate the unique ways in which this medium combines text and image to tell stories that are unimaginable in other venues. Though graphic novels have been long associated with the relatively narrow interests of twentieth-century “pulp” literature and comics—and have existed both alongside and in opposition to the counterculture and the avant-garde—the early twenty-first century has witnessed the gradual mainstreaming of the form. And just as the term itself has shifted from a defensive euphemism to a marketing label, so too has the audience for graphic novels (or comics, comix, pictorial literature, sequential art…) grown more diverse: more varied in its interests and tastes; more sophisticated in its hybrid literacies; more receptive to the medium’s assimilation of new genres, experiences, and perspectives. By learning about the unique formal elements of this medium—the conventions that dictate how meaning is created through the juxtaposition of words and images—students will analyze the unique dynamics that govern our interpretation of graphic novels; meanwhile, they will consider how those dynamics have been shaped by the wider cultural developments that have defined the century-long history of this medium. To focus our work, we will follow the insights of acclaimed comics creator Art Spiegelman: “What is most interesting about comics for me has to do with the abstraction and structurings that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed. In a story that is trying to make chronological and coherent the incomprehensible, the juxtaposing of past and present insists that past and present are always present—one doesn’t displace the other…” (Spiegelman, MetaMaus 165). Spiegelman urges us…