ENG 2226 - The Graphic Novel

Credits: 4
Ever since Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus won the Pultizer Prize, graphic novelists have experimented with the serious storytelling capacity of long-form comics. The results - for power, variety, and sheer fun - represent an important contribution to literature. Autobiographical comics such as Maus, Fun Home, and Perepolis present provocative subject matter including faith, family, and politics. Many
works, fiction or nonfiction, take up stories of sexual identity and teen angst, sometimes in a very explicit fashion. Still others - like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman - provoke a serious, postmodern engagement with superheroes and fantasy. Students will learn technical approaches for analyzing these texts, paying particular attention to word-image fusion and to the relationship between visual elements and narrative structure. Students will practice mapping out pages and explore options in world-building and self-representation. Works will be studied in their cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts. Some limited examination of Japanese manga.
McDaniel Plan: Creative Expression