Graphic Novels and Animation

Catalog description

Fulfills the non-British literature requirement for English majors. Also counts towards the new Media Studies minor and fulfills the YC Writing-Intensive requirement. Theme, idea, form, aesthetics, and craft in the evolving genres of the graphic novel and animation. How do and should we read, watch, and analyze comics and animations, and how do they approach and make contact with us? We will try to understand the nature of their expressive potential and also how they democratize art production by way of the technologies that bring them to life. Comics, graphic novels, and animations can be ordered according to traditional sub-genres such as comedy, tragicomedy, family memoir, historical fiction, etc., so we will discuss how this new medium innovates traditional categories. Among a number of other concerns, we will deal with the question of why artists in the 20th and 21st centuries have so often turned to these media when narrating stories about the Holocaust, nuclear destruction, and human rights crises, and, on a smaller scales, stories about individual loss, emancipation, and growth. We will also try to understand the cultural politics of the super-hero phenomenon as well as the insistent tension between the utopian and the dystopian impulses in graphic novels and animations. Prerequisite(s): BUS 1010 or FYWR 1020 .