| 3 | 9/9 |
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| 9/11 |
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Looking ahead to next week, you should be working now and over the weekend on your literacy narratives and on your Sunday sketch assignment. Publish the essay to your site as a page (not as a post) then you should also write a post that provides a compelling overview of your essay and also reflects on the writing process. In that post, link to the essay’s page. Please post those and your sketches by Sunday night (I’d like to be able to pull up the sketch posts at the start of classes on Monday, so as long as they are published by the time I get to campus at around 8am on Monday, that’s great).
We will start class on Monday discussing how those two assignments went for you and what you got from them. I should have a conference sign up sheet by then, too, so that we can begin meeting individually by Wednesday. We’ll also circle back to the syllabus and go over how grading works as well as answer any other policy questions you might have. Then we’ll spend some time finishing our discussion of Allie Brosh’s two-part comic.
On Wednesday, we’ll spend a lot of class time on Randy Olson’s ABT thesis structure. You should be able to skim the Olson essay fairly quickly — the key idea is understanding the (bad) deductive structure that Olson describes and then his suggestion for improving it by utilizing a (good) inductive structure instead. I’ll post a student essay that I received in the past and we’ll spend a chunk of time in class with a hands-on activity restructuring that student’s argument into the ABT structure.
We’ll also look at two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, who drew the book as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation ever and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there.
Unflattening will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Be aware that this comic is quite a bit more dense reading than Brosh’s web comic or than you’ll find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little extra time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (Soon we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together?