Course Description
The study of comics as a narrative medium. This course gives attention both to the aesthetics of comics as a whole and to specific genres and cultural developments in the medium.
Athena Title
Comics and Graphic Narratives
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will develop a critical understanding of comics as a narrative mode, learning the specific terms and concepts that best describe the medium. Students will engage in analysis of long-form graphic narratives, addressing their formal, thematic, cultural, and narrative dynamics. Students will produce twenty to twenty-five pages of writing. This requirement may take different forms from one term to the next: short essays followed by a long essay, medium-length mid-term essays, annotated bibliographies, and other research projects. These assignments may or may not be accompanied by final exams. All writing assignments will encourage students to interpret comics in a critical manner specific to the medium and sensitive to the ways it interacts with other literary forms, with the history of its own medium, and with broader historical forces.
Topical Outline
The choice of topics may vary from year to year, but will usually include most or all of the following: the pictorial vocabulary of comics, word/image relations, the overall formal/spatial dynamics of the medium, the various cultures and sub-genres of comics in the United States and elsewhere, the relationship of comics creation to genre and to autobiography, the cultural status of comics and artists' responses to this status as it has changed in recent decades.