World Literature and Graphic Novel Syllabus

Last semester, I taught a course entitled The Reverberations of World War II where students read works by Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Magda Szabó, Intizar Husain, and Yasa Katsuei. The course focused, specifically, on the lead up to the war (Katsuei), the war itself (Seghers, Serge, and Szabó), and the aftermath of the war (Szabó and Husain) across the world from Korea to France to Hungary to Pakistan. This semester, I am teaching a similar course, but instead of focusing on World War II, I am using graphic novels and extending the course to look at various events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from World War II to the Iranian Revolution to the Chechen War and beyond.

Course Overview:

When we think about literature, we typically think about merely texts — novels, poetry, plays, and possibly essays or memoirs. However, how often do we think about graphic texts and the ways that they can convey meaning through the juxtaposition of words and images? Can graphic texts have the same impact as “literature”? Can they achieve this? The editors of The Power of Comics and Graphic Novels: Culture, Form, and Context argue

At their best, comics can accommodate content as profound, moving, and enduring as that found in any of the more celebrated voices of human expression. Comics can attract creators who aspire to art…