Let's make some sense of this
Thanks to Brian Lewis, who loaned me his (autographed!) copy, I've just read Fun Home by Alison Blechdel. It's fantastic. Very carefully structured and complex memoir dealing with her father's death, his sexuality, hers, and the events surrounding all of that. It's very literate, both in the steady stream of explicit literary allusions and in her skillful writing, yet it's very much a comic grounded in the mechanisms of that medium.
Given the central place that homosexuality holds in the book, I've got to be prepared for resistance if I teach it. Not that this should dissuade me in any way--I just have to be savvy about planning for that and being ready to deal with it.
But I have to think about balance in the course, and that means I can't have too many memoir / autobiography / fictionalized autobiography pieces. That's an important genre within comics, but there's more than that out there.
That makes this a good time to jot down the list of Really Obvious Titles to maybe Include in the Course:
Maus
Jimmy Corrigan
It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
Persepolis
Watchmen
Palestine (or something else by Sacco)
Blankets
Ghost World (though I think I'm more likely to do Ice Haven)
American Splendor
Combine that list with Understanding Comics, throw in some webcomics and any one of the titles I've been putting on the "short list" here and it's already a pretty full class. So obviously I've got a lot more than I can use. Now some things can go in my other classes. I want to avoid duplication in my own classes, although I can't avoid duplicating with some of the other people who are using comics. Well, I can, but I don't want to say that this class will never tackle Persepolis just because a few people may have read it in another class.
I need to look back at the documents from the last time I taught a full lit class and get to thinking about how the whole thing might look. I should hear next week if I got approved for my professional development money, and if so, I get to go on a comics shopping spree. Yay!
Given the central place that homosexuality holds in the book, I've got to be prepared for resistance if I teach it. Not that this should dissuade me in any way--I just have to be savvy about planning for that and being ready to deal with it.
But I have to think about balance in the course, and that means I can't have too many memoir / autobiography / fictionalized autobiography pieces. That's an important genre within comics, but there's more than that out there.
That makes this a good time to jot down the list of Really Obvious Titles to maybe Include in the Course:
Maus
Jimmy Corrigan
It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
Persepolis
Watchmen
Palestine (or something else by Sacco)
Blankets
Ghost World (though I think I'm more likely to do Ice Haven)
American Splendor
Combine that list with Understanding Comics, throw in some webcomics and any one of the titles I've been putting on the "short list" here and it's already a pretty full class. So obviously I've got a lot more than I can use. Now some things can go in my other classes. I want to avoid duplication in my own classes, although I can't avoid duplicating with some of the other people who are using comics. Well, I can, but I don't want to say that this class will never tackle Persepolis just because a few people may have read it in another class.
I need to look back at the documents from the last time I taught a full lit class and get to thinking about how the whole thing might look. I should hear next week if I got approved for my professional development money, and if so, I get to go on a comics shopping spree. Yay!
posted by Carl at 5:53 AM
0 comments
