C LIT 396, José Alaniz. Spring 2014: TTh 1:30-3:20, GWN 201.
Traditionally, readers have not seen fit to associate comics with such “serious” genres as autobiography, memoir and war reportage. But in resisting its ghettoization as a mere “children’s medium” and in a bid for cultural/literary legitimacy, comic art over the last 40 years has produced numerous works devoted to weighty real-world subject matter, documenting religious conflict, family dysfunction, migration and the banal realities of daily life. Apart from interrogating and theorizing such matters as autobiography, literary realism and journalism in a verbal/visual medium, this course examines graphic narrative’s depiction of non-fiction topics in works by Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman, Justin Green, David B., Phoebe Gloeckner, Joe Sacco, Robert Crumb and others. Come see what happens when the comics get “real”!