01   MTH2   CAC  72664  JACOB  HH-A5

02   TH2  CAC   73368  FERGUSON  MU-114

01- Literature and Visuality in the Nineteenth Century

This course will focus on the relationship between the literary and the visual in the nineteenth century: a relationship that gets more complex thanks to a boom in new visual technologies and practices of looking. Besides a range of technical improvements in practices of printing, circulation, exhibition and display, the nineteenth century also saw the birth of photography.

In order to track the transformations that occur in the discourse of visuality we will explore the following topics:

• The status of sight in Romantic poetry.
• Point of view in the realist novel and its connections to photography and film.
• Visual culture and the Museum.
• The relationship between the visible and the invisible in the Victorian gothic
• Literature and photography.
• Copyright and ownership of texts and images.

02- Graphic Selves
When Art Spiegelman’s Maus II, a work about his father’s experience during the Holocaust, was included in the New York Times fiction  bestseller list, he wrote a letter to the editors complaining of a “problem of taxonomy,” slyly requesting a “special nonfiction/mouse category.” Spiegelman’s problem will be ours this semester: what do we call texts that mix words and pictures—“literature and visual culture,” or “graphic narratives,” or “graphic novels,” or “comic books,” or “sequential art,” or “cartoons,” or “comix”? More importantly, what do all these labels tell us about how we should read these texts—are they like novels, or like movies, or like art, or like something else entirely? In addition to the problem of taxonomy, we will consider the problem of identity, focusing primarily on contemporary graphic narratives that deal with the themes of self, memory, and consciousness. To aid with this, we will cover some critical theory from Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault, McCloud and others. Our aim will be both to understand “how” graphic narratives work and to see what they can do that other media cannot.

Weekly reading responses, presentations on secondary research, and two papers.
Texts may include Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, David B.’s Epileptic, and Pekar and Brabner’s Our Cancer Year.