“Thrilling Adventure Stories” and Naked Ladies:
Narrative Designs, Visual Idioms, and Cultural Contexts of Comic Books

While the term “graphic novel” may serve to settle the qualms of those who fret over the question of whether works such as Maus, The Sandman, or Little Nemo in Slumberland can be read alongside texts that enjoy the imprimatur of “literature,” in this class we will call a comic book a comic book in order to unpack the baggage that comes with the term – visions of legions of readers united in a state of permanent arrested development, the inky imprint of mass production and consumption, the sense that if you can’t resist reading one in public, you’d best tuck it between the pages of the Times Book Review – and to illustrate key issues and concerns that subtend the act of reading, the processes of canon formation, the pleasures of texts, and the possibilities of interpretation. We will focus on the work of writers and artists whose innovations have transformed the narrative and visual idioms of the comics, and study the ways in which the interplay between word and image in comics can literally as well as figuratively draw out ideologies ranging from investments in national identities to the dictates of compulsory heterosexuality.

A key element of our work will be an exploration of the ways in which comic books provide new ways of seeing, reading, and interpreting other literary texts. For example, we will study comic book bildungsromans in relation to critical conversations in autobiography surrounding the constitution of subjectivity, and question how this critical discourse is in turn challenged and invigorated by texts that cast themselves as “autobiofictionalography” and that literally as well as figuratively break the frame of conventional memoirs. Our initial point of orientation for Bechdel’s Fun Home and David B.’s Epileptic will be the texts’ rearticulation of gothic literary conventions and visual idioms which draw our attention to the architecture of the interpretive frameworks we take to word and image. To fully attend to the resonance and dissonance between word and image in the texts we will be studying, we will draw upon work of critics such as W. J. T. Mitchell, bell hooks, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Anne Rubenstein, Charles Hatfield, Gene Kannenberg, Scott McCloud, Richard Reynolds, and Art Spiegelman.

Ho Che Anderson, King
David B. Epileptic
Lynda Barry, Down the Street
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Jaime Cortez, Sexile
Samuel Delany, Bread and Wine
Phoebe Gloeckner, A Child’s Life
Alan Moore, From Hell
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Joe Sacco, Palestine
Craig Thompson, Carnet de Voyage
Chris Ware, “Thrilling Adventure Stories”

*Class has a limited enrollment of 15