Project 2 proposal

The second project asks you to write an interpretation of a graphic novel of your choosing. (See the assignment sheet below.) You may write about any of the texts we've read so far or (pending my approval) about a graphic novel not on our syllabus.

The first step in the process of writing your interpretation will be to compose a brief proposal, due Thursday, October 30. You'll share that document with me on Google Docs. And be sure bring your laptop to class so that you can share it with your classmates.

Your proposal should answer the following:

In the first paragraph: What is the title and who is/are the author/s of the text you've selected? Which among the larger cultural, philosophical, or historical questions raised by the text will you explore in your paper? Which specific verbal and/or visual strategies in the text will you focus your analysis on as you explore that question?

In the second paragraph: Which pages and panels will you examine as you conduct your analysis? Why these specific pieces of evidence, i.e., what makes them particularly useful for exploring the larger cultural, philosophical, or historical question you've identified in the text?

FSEM 1111-27 Project 2 Assignment (2014) by writRHET

Strange fruit

Billie Holiday performing the song "Strange Fruit," by Abel Meeropol. Here are the lyrics:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. 

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. 

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Homework for next time

By the start of next class, please read Incognegro and post to Google Drive a one-paragraph response to the following:

Before he sets out for Tupelo to rescue his brother, Zane Pinchback declares: "Race doesn’t really exist. Race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting. Playing roles. That’s what white folks never get. They don’t think they have accents. They don’t think they eat ethnic foods. Their music is classical. They think they’re just normal. That they are the universal and that everyone else is an odd deviation from form. That’s what makes them so easy to infiltrate."  

What does Zane mean by calling race a "strategy"? How does Zane's "strategic" definition of race differ from that of the white people he encounters?

Be sure to base your response on specific pages and panels of text, and be ready to direct us to them in class.

Maus thesis

For next class, finishing reading Maus, and then write the introductory paragraph to an (imaginary) essay responding to the question “According to Art Spiegelman, is morality possible during or after the Holocaust? If so, how? And, if not, why not?” 

Your paragraph should introduce and state your thesis, and your thesis should be based on your analysis of the last page of Maus, along with any other textual evidence you find relevant.

Please post your paragraph to Google Drive by the start of class.

Homework for next time

By the start of next class, please read Maus, Book II, chapters 1 and 2, and then write -- on paper -- a discussion question for the class. Your question should focus on the artistic and/or verbal artistry of a single panel, page, or two-page spread, and it should help us, as interpreters, to discover deeper layers of meaning in Spiegelman's book.

Maus homework

Check out pix of the cool Vladek doll made by Danielle Marlet.

There are TWO parts to the homework this weekend.

1. Complete a draft of your Project 1 artist's statement, and share it with me on Google Drive. Aim to write at least 500 words.

2. Read Maus, Book I, and then write 250 words or so in response to this prompt:

“Samuel Beckett once said, ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,’" remarks Artie, the protagonist in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and then adds “On the other hand, he SAID it.” 

Use this quotation to help you think about Spiegelman’s purpose in creating Maus. What do you think Spiegelman hopes to achieve by not only publishing to the world his family’s private experience of the Holocaust, but by doing so in the form of a text that, at first glance, might appear to be completely ill suited to the task representing a subject as horrifyingly real as genocide: namely, what they used to call a “funny animal comic”? In other words, how does this surprising choice of artistic strategy actually serve to develop Spiegelman’s deeper themes in ways that more conventional visual storytelling strategies would not?

Your response should focus on a single panel, page, or scene from the text. Don't forget to post it to Google Drive.

Also, if you enjoy Maus, then you’ll also enjoy this interview with Art Spiegelman.



And if you really enjoy Maus then you’ll really enjoy this two-hour lecture by Spiegelman.

Plan your process

By the start of next class, please post to Google Drive a detailed plan for completing your graphic novella by the due date, Nov. 21. Your plan should lay out, step-by-step, all the stages of the process you'll go through. And it should include dates that you commit to stick to.

Be sure to mark one of those dates (around the halfway mark) as a check-in date, when your project will be well enough along the road to completion that I can look at what you've got and give some feedback.

FSEM 1111-27 Project 1 Assignment (2014) by writRHET

More Fun Home(work)

By telling her story of self-discovery and -creation through reading, Alison Bechdel encourages us, her readers, to think critically about our own reading practices. Chief among the practices she highlights are (1) how we read of maps; (2) how we read collages; (3) how we read allusions (i.e., to other texts); and (4) how we read documentary evidence (e.g., photos, handwritten notes, official documents, etc.). For Bechdel, these reading practices -- each in its own particular way -- is a way for the reader to discover and to create his or her self.

By the start of class on Tuesday, please finish reading Fun Home; pick out ONE place where we, the readers, are asked to practice one of these reading strategies (or some combination of them); and then write two paragraphs in which you analyze the following:

1. How that map, collage, allusion, or document contributes to our understanding of Alison or her father's self-discovery or self-creation. 
2. What questions it raises about the discovery/creation of the selves more broadly -- for example, our own selves.

As always, please post your response to Google Drive.

Fun Home(work)

Yep, "Fun Home(work)" just may be the worst pun ever. But I couldn't resist. . . .

There are two things to do this weekend:

1. Please read chapters 1-4 of certified genius Alison Bechdel's, Fun Home, then write a discussion question for class. (Please write your question on paper: I'm going to collect them at the start of class.)

Your question can be about any topic from Fun Home that interests you. But please write a question that will help us to investigate the deeper significance of Bechdel's text. In other words, avoid purely factual questions (like “What's a 'girandole'?”) and purely evaluative questions (“Who's a better artist -- Bechdel or Tomine?"). Instead, try to craft a question that will help us dig really deeply into the text's themes and its artistry: that is, what it means, and how it creates that meaning.

2. Read the first project assignment carefully and write a 300-500-word pitch for your idea. The first paragraph should briefly sketch the plot of your story. The second should describe the larger theme your story will explore (or, as Alan Moore would put it, your story's "idea"). The third paragraph should describe the artistic strategies you'll employ: i.e., how will you use the visual and verbal resources of the comics page to tell your story and explore your theme in the deepest, most compelling way possible. (Please post your pitch to Google Drive.)

(By the way, if drawing really isn't your thing, there are a bunch of comics-making sites online that you may want to explore. I've linked to a bunch of them on our "making comics" tab.)

Finally, I thought some of you would be interested in this fascinating and all-too-brief interview with Bechdel, in which she talks about her creative process:

Shortcomings homework

By the start of next class, finish reading Shortcomings and post a paragraph to Google Drive in which you interpret the significance of one of its silences, gaps, or omissions.

The Last Saturday and Greek Myth Comix

I thought that you might like to check out these wonderfully imaginative examples of graphic writing as you're composing the first pages of the stories of your lives: The Last Saturday, by Chris Ware, and Greek Myth Comix, by Laura Jenkinson. Ware is one of the most astonishingly inventive visual artists working today; Jenkinson is a literature teacher whose stick figure renderings of classical lit are truly ingenious.

Alison Bechdel wins "genius grant"!

Alison Bechdel, creator of Fun Home, which we're going to read in a couple of weeks, just won a MacArthur Fellowship -- popularly known as the "genius grant."



More at Jezebel. . . .

What is the idea of Blankets + The (first three pages of the) story of my life

The (first three pages of the) story of my life

Imagine that your favorite comics company has asked you to create a graphic novel — the only catch is that you’ve got to sell them on your idea for it. Write a 500-word pitch for a graphic novel that captures the story so far — and the meaning so far — of your life. And then sketch out the first three pages of that graphic novel (i.e., the first “solo” page, and then pages 2 and 3 as a two-page spread).

Use Moore’s advice about generating ideas to help you start.

And remember: You don’t need to be an accomplished (or even a halfway decent) artist to do a terrific job with this assignment. If you draw your pages in stick figures, that’ll be fine. Just use what you learned about the visual possibilities of comics Scott McCloud to make those stick figures convey the genius of your idea.

Homework for Thursday

Please complete the "The (first three pages of the) story of my life" assignment that you started in class:

Imagine that your favorite comics company has asked you to create a graphic novel — the only catch is that you’ve got to sell them on your idea for it. Write a 500-word pitch for a graphic novel that captures the story so far — and the meaning so far — of your life. And then sketch out the first three pages of that graphic novel (i.e., the first “solo” page, and then pages 2 and 3 as a two-page spread). 

Use Moore’s advice about generating ideas to help you start. 

And remember: You don’t need to be an accomplished (or even a halfway decent) artist to do a terrific job with this assignment. If you draw your pages in stick figures, that’ll be fine. Just use what you learned about the visual possibilities of comics Scott McCloud to make those stick figures convey the genius of your idea.

Please bring your competed pages (or a Xerox thereof) to class, to hand in to me.

Also, read chapter 1 of Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings, and share a paragraph via Google Drive wherein you state (1) what you believe the central conflict of the story to be; (b) what themes (or, in Moore's terms, "ideas") you see emerging; and (c) what you believe to be the most visually interesting panel, page, or two-page spread.

The "idea" of Blankets

In Writing for Comics, Alan Moore defines what he calls “the idea” that of a graphic narrative as follows:

The idea is what the story is about; not the plot of the story, or the unfolding of events within that story, but what the story is essentially about. As an example from my own work. I would cite issue #40 of Swamp Thing, “The Curse”. This story was about the difficulties endured by women in masculine societies, using the common taboo of menstruation as the central motif. This was not the plot of the story—the plot concerned a young married woman moving into a new home built upon the site of an old Indian lodge and finding herself possessed by the dominating spirit that still resided there, turning her into a form of werewolf. . . . Most comic books have plots in which the sole concern is the struggle between two or more antagonists. The resolution of the struggle, usually involving some deux machine display of a superpower, is the resolution of the plot as well. Beyond the most vague and pointless banality like “Good will always triumph over evil” there is not real central idea in the majority of comics, other than the idea of conflict as interesting in itself.
    
Naturally, the idea needn’t always be a deep, meaningful and significant one. There are lots of different kinds of ideas, ranging from the “What if. . . ?" ideas that lie behind most science-fiction writing to the idea of everyday life as seen in the work of Harvey Pekar or Eddie Campbell. “What if . . ." ideas are the basis for most short science-fiction stories of the “future shock” variety, examples from my own work being short five-page items like “The Reversible Man” (What if people perceived time as running the opposite way?), “A Place in the Sun” (What if it were possible for human beings to live on the sun?”) or “Grawks Bearing Gifts” (What if a group of coarse and vulgar aliens did to our society what our society did to the Red Indians and other aboriginal tribes?). The nature of the idea isn’t really important, what is important is simply that there is an idea in there somewhere. It can be silly and frivolous, perhaps just a single gag idea, or it can be complex and profound. The only thing that the idea should definitely be is interesting on some level or another – whether as a brief entertainment designed to hold the attention for five minutes or a lengthier and more thoughtful work intended to engage the mind long after the comic has been put down. (7)

By the start of class on Tuesday, please read pp. 1–9 of Moore’s Writing for Comics (on Blackboard, in the Content folder), finish reading Blankets, and then share with me via Google Drive a 300–500-word response to the following: What do you believe is the main idea of Blankets? Be sure to support your claim be analyzing a panel, page, or 2-page spread from chapters VII–IX, using the terms and concepts we’ve been discussing in class.

Blankets for Thursday

By the start of class on Thursday, please read chapters IV-VI of Blankets, and then use any of Scott McCloud's concepts to write a 300-500-word analysis of a particularly interesting panel, page, or two-page spread from those chapters. McCloud introduces many, many concepts to explain how comics work, so you'll need to be selective: pick just one. Likewise, there's plenty of great material for analysis in Blankets, so you'll need to be judicious there, too. Less is more, so pick just one two-page spread; or better, a single page; or better still, a single panel.

Please share your writing with me via Google Drive. (Instructions are here.)

Our syllabus!

FSEM 1111-27 Graphic Writing Across Cultures Syllabus, Fall 2014

Buying your books

I've created an Amazon list of the graphic novels we'll be reading in our class. Of course, if you prefer, you can purchase our texts elsewhere (e.g., Barnes & Noble or the awesome (and local) Tattered Cover Book Store). But, whatever you decide , please make sure to order of ALL of your books now and to lay your hands on a copy Craig Thompson's Blankets RIGHT AWAY, as you'll need to read a portion of it for our first class.

Homework for Tuesday: Blankets and McCloud

For Tuesday, please watch Scott McCloud's TED talk (below) and read chapters I-III of Craig Thompson's Blankets. When you are done, use any of McCloud's concepts to write a 300-500-word analysis of a particularly interesting panel, page, or two-page spread from Blankets.

McCloud introduces many, many concepts to explain how comics work, so you'll need to be selective: pick just one. Likewise, there's plenty of great material for analysis in Blankets, so you'll need to be judicious there, too: analyze just one two-page spread; or better, a single page; or better still, a single panel.

Please share your analysis with me on Google Drive by the start of class. Instructions for sharing are here.

Scott McCloud on Understanding Comics from Jared Hester on Vimeo.