| 7 | 10/7 |
|
Sketch 6: What’s in your bag? |
| 10/9 | Spinning — chapters 9-10 & author’s note (319-94) |
We’ll spend about half of class on Monday discussing Hillary Chute’s essay, which is pretty dense academic prose so leave some extra time for it. We’ll very much focus our discussion on the first 13 pages (up to the section break “CONTEMPORARY COMICS: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND AVANT-GARDE CONTEXTS”).
Here’s a list of some of the key terms, concepts, and/or claims that you might focus on and try to define for yourself:
- conceptions of the unrepresentable (in traditional prose vs. in comics)
- materializing or retracing trauma
- how are comics not only about events but also, explicitly, about how we frame them
- to be traumatized is to be possessed by the image of an event
- the risk of representation
- what does it mean to literally reappear at the site of an author’s inscriptional effacement? What does “inscriptional effacement” mean?
- the idiom of witness
- comics as a metaphor for memory and recollection
- comics as, perhaps, the only space for women to show you what it means to live outside stereotypes and delusions
- aesthetic intimacy
- the hand of a particular creator
- comics represent time as space; comics choreograph and shape time
- the diegetic horizon of each page of a comic
- how do comics “detain” a reader on the page?
- comics “enables an excess of representation” but it also “offers a constant self-reflexive demystification of the project of representation”
- comics’ hybridity
- the intimacy of reading handwritten marks on the printed page
- comics look like what it is
- comics is both a sophisticated and experimental form and it refuses the status of art objects — it is both “high” and “low” art
I will also distribute tracing paper in class on Monday. If you are absent or if you need more, I’ll leave additional tracing paper in the mail slot just outside my office door (Callaway N205A). We’ll talk briefly about the Tracing Pages assignment due after fall break on Monday, then pick that discussion up again on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, we’ll finish Spinning.