This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 Sep 2008, by Nele Noppe.
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28 Sep 08
Angela Becerra VidergarProf discusses a new course on Comics and Graphic Novels. Focus is on history and cultural background.
courses literature comics graphic novels graphic narratives education sexuality webcomics
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Anthony Enns, cultural theorist
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“There are many different ways to teach (this course),” says Prof. Enns. “One obvious (way) would be to take a strict literary approach—read more highbrow comic books and make an argument for comic books as literature… If you were going to teach the course that way, I think you would probably not bother to teach superheroes. I think that would be a mistake. “So much of graphic material is made up of the superhero genre. It would be wrong to just ignore it.”
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“Is Wonder Woman a strong feminist figure, or is she a kind of a sex kitten? … (William Moulton) Marston, the creator, was really into S and M, he loved being tied up … there’s some aspect of sexual titillation to the Wonder Woman character.”
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He is bemused by the Robin-less state of most modern Batman literature; the Boy Wonder was conspicuously absent from blockbusters Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. “(Frank) Miller’s Dark Knight Returns turns Robin into a woman… (Miller) really tries to avoid the whole Batman/Robin relationship.”
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- a possible unit on Donald Duck. The problem isn’t Donald’s lack of pants; rather, it’s the imperialist ideology he presents.
- “Babar is often read as a parable about colonialism,” Prof. Enns explains. “Babar is educated in Europe and that’s the reason why he’s the king of the elephants.”
- Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winner Maus, a Holocaust fable told, like Orwell’s Animal Farm, through the use of animals-as-people. “I’m going to look at it through this question of racial representation. The choice to represent Jews as mice and Nazis as cats… It’s offensive, but in an intentional way… it’s impossible to accuse Maus of being Nazi propaganda. That’s silly… but (Art Spiegelman) is definitely playing on the history of Nazi propaganda.”
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It’s really going to be more like sociology or anthropology. Cultural studies ask the question of ‘what do comic books reveal about the culture that produced them?
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“Pop culture says more about us than our highbrow culture,” he continues. “If you go back to the 18th century, the tools that dentists use say more about class differences than any of the great works of literature the culture produced.”
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25 Sep 08
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