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A very brief update on sabbatical goings on, as summer approaches and the horizon of the new school year inches closer (time dilates in strange ways when you’re away from the regular clock of the campus… were I teaching presently, I’d feel as though summer was light years away). My time has been divided between finishing one book and starting another, and I’m thrilled to say that Northwestern University Press has offered an advance contract on my monograph ten years in the making: “False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism.” There are still plenty of hurdles to clear, the nearest ones being a May 15^th deadline for the completed manuscript and a successful review over the summer, but I couldn’t be happier that NUP is considering my work for their list.

The title of the book is purloined from a late F. Scott Fitzgerald essay called “One Hundred False Starts,” where he rifles through his notebook and meditates on all of the failed ideas he had for new stories and novels. These failures by essay’s end come not only to define Fitzgerald’s understanding of the process of writing itself, but they often constitute some of his greatest literary achievements (his modernist masterpiece Tender is the Night cites “One Hundred False Starts” in several key, unacknowledged ways). This rhetoric of successful failure is one I trace back as far as the 1850s and still see exerting a crucial influence even in contemporary literature (Exhibit A: Chris Ware). I haven’t talked about this project much here—I find it easier to blog about those things I’m not currently wrestling with in the moment—but once the manuscript is in, I’ll dig through my notebooks, à la Fitzgerald, and talk about the scraps of ideas that didn’t make the final cut for my own book.

I’m also turning my attention to a new project on comics and modernism, and have participated in panels at the Modernist Studies Association, American Comparative Literature Association, and (in May) the American Literature Association to talk about George Herriman, Richard F. Outcault, and Lynd Ward respectively. I’m in the fun, early stages of this project, blocking out chapter ideas and taking a deep breath before diving head first into the archive of late-19^th- and early-20^th-century newspaper comics. For now these papers have served as a welcome respite from the final throes of manuscript editing before my deadline in less than six weeks.  

In other exciting news:

–My review of Richard Gooden’s William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words finally made it into print in the pages of Modern Fiction Studies. You can read it, with an institutional subscription, here.

–MFS also published a review of The Comics of Chris Ware by leading scholar in the field of graphic narrative, Hillary Chute. It’s a tough-minded, but also a very positive take on the value of the book as a whole, and you can read it here.

–Another book project, this one edited by Jane Tolmie under the very clever and contemporary title of Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, is forthcoming in 2013 with one of my essays from the University Press of Mississippi. I talked about this essay in an earlier post, and have an advance copy of Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, on my nightstand and ready to destroy everything I thought I knew about Fun Home before my revision deadline. Also: Jane has convinced the talented Sarah Leavitt, author of Tangles, to do the cover. I can’t wait to see what this looks like.

There are a few other items in the pipeline, and hopefully I’ll have another exciting news item or two before the summer is out, but those are the major dispatches from Sabbaticaland. Now, to disappear into the archive again and emerge, six weeks later, complete manuscript in hand…

I just had the opportunity to speak at the 2012 MLA in Seattle on the topic of “Visual Studies in the English Classroom,” a panel sponsored by the Society for Textual Scholarship. Like many things MLA this year, the focus was distinctly digital, and I presented the collaboration Elizabeth Lee and I have been working on for a co-taught, cross-disciplinary Mosaic set of courses on “Transatlantic American Modernisms.” In particular, I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to ways in which students visualize what they learn, both as a conceptual tool and a memory aid, especially for memories with a longer horizon than a single semester. To accomplish this, Elizabeth and I want to map the students’ research, and take them to the two cities that will be the focus of our classes together: New York and Paris. You can see a PDF and view a PowerPoint presentation of what was said, and a working (if crude and unfinished) example of what this mapping project would look like is here. When it happens, I think it will be an engaging new way to approach texts and ideas that I’ve been teaching my whole career.

I delivered this paper alongside some amazing colleagues who are engaged in similar work. Ryan Cordell gave a fascinating paper on mapping the republications (and paratexts) of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad,” offering the beginnings of a quantitative account of the groundbreaking research from scholars like Meredith McGill. Using census data, he also gave an account of the geographical reach of different religious denominations in the mid-19^th-century (spoiler alert: Methodists and Baptists are all over the map, Unitarians not so much… standing on its head the outsized role of Unitarian thought in the 19^th-century canon). Most compellingly, Ryan was able to demonstrate that the “The Celestial Railroad” itself moved along extant railroad lines, that for all of the story’s ambivalence about technological change, technology was also the current that distributed the text around the country. What this might mean for our reading of the story itself is still in the works, and this challenge for the digital humanities to move from context to text is something I’ll be excited to see the digital humanities as a field wrestle with in the coming years (it’s as viable a critique of our plans as well, and while I make the claims for serendipity and unexpected proximity, how such an argument would look fully fleshed out isn’t something I’ll have access to until after the class is taught… it’s my hope that this class will produce exciting new research possibilities as well). You can read, and see, Ryan’s research here.

The other two papers were in part about curricular innovations, one at a major research university and the other at a liberal arts college smaller than Dickinson. Stephanie Murray talked about the BXA Program at Carnegie Mellon, where B stands for Bachelor’s, A for Arts, and the X for the variable between them. Students in this program are encouraged to think across disciplines and divisions with respect to the arts, and the program serves as a laboratory, or framework, for self-designed majors that don’t then exist on their own islands within the university (a major drawback I’ve seen for students pursuing self-designed majors at Dickinson, compelling as this work has been).

Perrin Kerns and Jay Ponteri spoke about digital storytelling and the Text:Image concentration in the English Department at Marlyhurst University in Portland. Perrin performed her own argument, producing a video as her paper and talking about the ways in which their focus on visual and digital literacies has led to a joint venture with the Art and Interior Design department at Marlyhurst (English has a Text:Image concentration, Art an Image:Text one). Jay talked about the ways in which student creative work is crossing these boundaries as well. The whole department was in the room; it sounds like an heady place to teach, collaborate, and learn.

In these two papers I was struck mostly by how other institutions have come up with structural and curricular responses—no doubt with their own complexities and complications—to the difficulties and rewards of transdisciplinary and co-taught projects. Precepting at Princeton back in the day, and wheedling my way onto American Studies team teaching assignments as the only viable way for me to get experience designing syllabi there, has meant that I’ve taught collaboratively since the start of my career (heck, even the teaching I did in Japan was with two teachers always in the room). Having had the chance to team teach with the incomparable Sharon O’Brien last spring, and planning this Mosaic with Elizabeth over the past year, has only ratified my conviction that my students and I both learn more not only when the structure of the class is dialogic, but when the instruction is as well. In conventional classes, this means bringing in guest speakers, placing classes together in the same room, and getting students out of the classroom and into the exhibition space/performance hall/public lecture as often as possible. I’m still hatching plans for co-taught classes in early American literature, image and text studies, Faulkner, and a raft of other possibilities, but have found that I have to essentially reinvent the wheel each time I do this. I’m inspired—not this year, or before the tenure process is completed, to be sure—to think about what a structural response to transdisciplinary, co-taught work might look like at Dickinson beyond simply cross-listing courses. How do you privilege, and incentivize, curricular innovation in structural ways without placing undue strain on the conventional disciplines (whose structures I admire, and whose boundaries can act as viable generative devices for students’ learning… something often lost in the millennial fervor around the digital humanities and interdisciplinarity)? Is this possible in a time of limited resources, and what do we trade in order to let such models flourish? Who’s with me?

***

Corollary: Stanley Fish and Kathleen Fitzpatrick on the changes wrought to the profession by the digital humanities. Responses here (all of Pannapacker’s missives from the conference are must reads) and here and elsewhere, coming to the interwebs near you.

Double bonus: The intrepid editors and contributors of The Comics of Chris Ware head to Fantagraphics. Pictures ensue.

 

In between long meditations on the literary history of failure in America I’ve managed to squeeze in some thinking about graphic narratives during the first months of the sabbatical. I was asked to write a biographical essay on Chris Ware for The Literary Encyclopedia, a relatively recent online venture that seems incredibly promising as a resource for students. My essay went up today, and you can link to it here: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12910 (an institutional subscription might be necessary).

All of this after a remarkable evening at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where I had the chance to see Ware, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and comics historian John Carlin discuss their approaches to the craft of comics. Dickinson had invited Spiegelman to visit campus as our Morgan Lecturer last year, but it was my first time hearing either Ware or Panter in person. The occasion was the exhibition of German-American comics and fine artist Lyonel Feininger, author of the important early comics “Wee Willie Winkie’s World” and “Kin-Der-Kids” and a seminal figure of the Bauhaus school. I’d first encountered Feininger’s work in Carlin’s wonderful Masters of American Comics volume, and was immediately struck by his work as an important link between the history of comics and the history of modernism. Feininger was exhibited at the 1913 Armory show that served as one of the fulcrums of American modernism, and it has dawned on me that the history of these links–between comics and artistic modernism as well as comics and American literary modernism–has yet to be written. Perhaps this is a project for the not-too-distant future.

I’d hoped to ask a question in this vein in person, but the room was packed with folks, many of whom were aspiring comics artists themselves (and the questions quickly drifted in their direction). As a whole, the conversation seemed awkwardly poised between a discussion of CW’s AS’s and GP’s accounts of their own craft and a discussion of Feininger (a reasonably full audio of the event is here). Given that I’ve read so many of Ware’s more general interviews as part of my research for the book, I’d really hoped for a sense of his thoughts of Feininger’s work, but it wasn’t to be. I was struck by how much ambivance, even animosity there was toward art school (Spiegelman never attended, Ware came close to getting his degree at the Art Institute of Chicago but balked at giving a final oral presentation); do creative writers share the same ambivalence about the MFA? Perhaps my favorite moment from the conversation was when Carlin cued up an animation that Ware had done with John Kuramoto from the “Building Stories” novel-in-progress what I take now to be a stand-alone project (but with almost direct parallels to the couple on the second floor of “Building Stories”) for what seems to have originally been an abortive project with Wired Magazine (you can watch their earlier collaborations here and here). It was exciting to see new material from “Building Stories,” the first incarnation of what became “Touch Sensitive” and while it doesn’t look like this animation will be coming to an iPad anytime soon it’s now available exclusively on iPad via McSweeney’s app (the perils of prognostication). It was fun and exciting to watch Ware playing with the boundaries of his comics in a new medium. Extra bonuses: I managed to awkwardly introduce myself before the talk and the Whitney had a nice, healthy stack of The Comics of Chris Ware at the gift store register. I couldn’t resist snapping a quick photo:

 

also, additional extra bonus, a reproduction of the stylin’ Americana wallpaper in the original Whitney exhibitions of the 30s:

… on the writing of an encyclopedia article I’m hoping to finish today, but have probably delayed until at least tomorrow by writing this instead. In no particular order:

–both the ever-brilliant Benj Widiss, and I, independently, considered taking a research trip to Austin to read Ware’s early comics for The Daily Texan. This would have been an amazing road trip. If anyone wants to send me a dispatch from Austin, I’m all ears.

–I should also probably make it to Omaha one of these days.

–”Rusty Brown,” when it’s finished, is going to be huge. The Pierre to Jimmy Corrigan‘s Moby-Dick. I mean that as the highest form of praise.

–I saw what I thought was a reference to ACME Novelty Library 21 and my pulse actually quickened. I realize I have no idea what it might even begin to look like.

–I’ve been meaning to write up an account of my colloquium trip to Yale to talk about ANL 20 with the architecture Master’s students there… I’ll get on that soon, and I wonder if any Ware ended up in any of their completed projects (visual accounts of crimes committed on the same day).

–I’d like to live in a Chris Ware-designed house, but I imagine the roof would leak, literally and metaphorically.

–Amidst the process of reimagining how I sell my book ms to publishers I came across this blurb for ANL 16: “After four years of almost exclusively repackaging his sophomoric early work for the book trade, the children’s entertainer and award-winning calligrapher F. C. Ware returns to his groundbreaking 1990s cartoon series “The ACME Novelty Library,” a nearly decade-long publishing experiment which more or less single-handedly demonstrated the redemptive power a fancy paper stock or a little gold foil might exert over an otherwise dull, dry visual narrative. This semi-annual periodical originally serialized his surprisingly undismissed “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth,” and now, with the 16th issue, Ware rejoins the proud, vital esthetic forum of the American comic book with his ongoing serial “Rusty Brown,” a love story concerning the ambitions and mistakes of seven consciousnesses at a private school in Omaha, Nebraska, all revolving around a universally reviled child-and absolutely certain to be a favorite with readers of all tastes and biases. As told through the eyes of someone absentmindedly watching a television sitcom circa 1975, this first installment begins one January morning of that same year and describes everything of importance right up to and including the ring of the first period bell before eventually spiraling off into 1955, 2004, and toward the planet Mars, amongst other interesting and exotic time periods and locales. Riveting, fast-paced, and irresponsible, “Rusty Brown” distills the confusing and indulgent storytelling technique that led Mr. Ware’s work to be referred to as “nearly impossible to read” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. (In addition, Mr. Ware promises parallel serialization of his other work-in-progress, “Building Stories,” which is actually a much better and more interesting project.) Though originally released by alternative comics vanguard Fantagraphics Books, this new sixteenth issue is the first to be entirely produced, printed and published by Mr. Ware alone; limited to a single press run, once it is sold out, pulped, and/or burned, neither of these narratives will be available again until “Rusty Brown” and “Building Stories” are eventually edited, collected and remaindered as hardcover books. Thus, be the first in your mercantile district to own this first chapter of what years from now is sure to be a tart, possibly insincere reminder of the fragile economy and mental disposition of the early 21st century. 64 pages, full color, 9″ x 7″”

–where to begin? the rhetoric of failure, obviously, but also the masterful account of a project that’s been spooling out over the last six years. Is it too much to hope for a 7-year timeline like JC? I adore the idea of this being read literally. Early on in the process of editing the Ware book I had a vision of a Ware-designed cover that would encourage the reader not to read the book. This idea was not publisher approved.

Okay, back to work. I realize I’ve promised a blog post about ENG101 and the gender climate at D’son for 4 months now, although I do have the excuse that the narrative exploded on me… I need to get back to that.

I’m not one for overly planned class discussions. I already tend to talk way too much in what I hope will become a dialogic classroom, and the methodological structure of the English major at Dickinson allows me the luxury to privilege method over content any day of the week. Not that I don’t feel obligations to the American literary canon (whatever notion of it might be left standing), but as long as my students can read carefully and thoughtfully after 101 and write the rudiments of a thesis-based literary critical essay, I’ve done my job (a luxury not available to colleagues in many other disciplines or at other institutions). Would I like my students to have read Franklin before Fitzgerald, and Douglass before Morrison? Sure, but given the demands of where and what I teach, this doesn’t seem like the most pressing goal given the intellectual triage that needs to be done. All of which is a long way of justifying why I don’t stage manage my 75 minutes with students; at times the conversations can be chaotic, or potentially digressive, but they are consistently interesting and surprising, and they ask my students to do the intellectual heavy lifting during classes. I can count on one hand the number of formal lectures I’ve given in the Dickinson classroom in four years.

An interesting exception to this was my “Gender in American Fiction” 101 course last semester, which I cross-listed for the first time with the Women’s and Gender Studies major (a measure of just how much energy surrounds WGST: when I taught this three semesters ago=9 students, this time around=35 students). WGST, which describes itself on facebook as “Women’s and Gender Studies: the intersection of feminist activisms and academics,” has positioned itself as speaking directly to the gender climate on campus (a climate that is far from ideal, if also representative of problems across college campuses). They’ve (we’ve?) really managed to bring a renewed focus to questions of privilege at Dickinson, and while I rarely see my role in the classroom as advocating for student activism (I never expect students to agree with me… I spent my early career at Princeton training the next great conservative minds in my classrooms), this past semester brought an interesting mix of student activists, enthusiasts about American literature, students trying out a potential major, and folks looking for a distribution requirement. To speak to these many constituencies, I got in the habit of 10-15 minute provocations at the beginning of class hoping to spur classroom-to-campus reflections in a series of weekly “gender journals” I assigned over the course of the semester. These ranged from the role of fraternities and sororities on campus, to the question of whether or not transsexual athletes should be allowed to play on gender-segregated sports teams, to the choice of men’s and women’s Halloween costumes. These were lively, engaged, often frustrating conversations that would frequently spill over the time I’d planned for them, and, much to my surprise, necessitated the kind of stage-managed efforts I usually eschew in the classroom.

I’ll talk briefly about two such discussions (in two parts). One was an attempt just to take a survey of student attitudes in the class using polling technology that allows real-time, anonymous feedback on questions (I’d first seen this as an MLA delegate, and was immediately struck by the potential for pedagogical uses in the classroom). I asked a series of exceedingly broad questions, polling the students first in August and then again in December. Here are some of the results:

August 2010: Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Yes: 38%

Yes, but…: 38%

No, but…: 11%

No: 14%

December 2010: Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Yes: 45%

Yes, but…: 34%

No, but…: 14%

No: 7%

August 2010: Are men and women treated equally in America?

Yes: 3%

No: 97%

December 2010: Are men and women treated equally in America?

Yes: 0%

No: 100%

August 2010: Are men and women treated equally at Dickinson?

Yes: 27%

No: 73%

December 2010: Are men and women treated equally at Dickinson?

Yes: 9%

No: 91%

August 2010: Is homophobia a problem at Dickinson?

Yes: 91%

No: 9%

December 2010: Is homophobia a problem at Dickinson?

Yes: 88%

No: 13%

Obviously, one of the things I was trying to speak to was the ways in which—at Princeton much more perniciously than Dickinson (“we don’t haze in the eating clubs: you can choose not to eat the goldfish/be passed naked up the staircase/third-floor bicker”)—students are willing to see inequities in power in the wider world but not in their daily lives on campus. The question on gender inequities, especially in August, speaks to this persistent belief at Dickinson as well (and shows the greatest movement of all of the questions I asked).

But what I’m most struck by in these numbers is how static they are across the three months of the semester (moving in the “wrong” direction, based on my own personal beliefs, in the last example). When given anonymity, only one or two students, unless multiple students are moving in equal numbers in opposite directions, really allowed themselves to think differently on these major questions. I wish I was more surprised than I am that this is the case.

In part, the students I teach seem much more fully formed than I at least felt when I was 18. But I wonder if it isn’t the degree of ambivalence I feel about changing their minds in the first place that thwarts such change (as opposed to the related, if more foundational (in my opinion) work of teaching them to think critically). To do this work, I often find myself ventriloquizing positions I personally find loathsome as a means to disrupt critical consensuses in my classrooms, all of which may (productively?) confuse the clarity of my own positions on these absolutely critical issues. One exasperated student, around the time of midterm evaluations, blurted out in class: “We want to know what you think about these issues!” At the time, I took the complaint as a compliment on my own ecumenicism, but perhaps it speaks to a blind spot in my role as a contributor to the project of WGST on campus. Yet on the other hand the evaluations for the class were the strongest I’ve seen at the 101 level; they found the class successful, despite the fact that it didn’t change their minds in some more fundamental, or easily measurable, way.

I’m uncertain whether or not this means that I’m comforting the comfortable, swimming upstream against an increasingly strong current, or something else entirely. If anything, I hope these more staged moments are productive failures, and perhaps their results need more than the three months of a semester to be felt.

Next: the Balkan states of the Dickinson Cafeteria.

 

This is a slightly longer version of my opening remarks at the 2011 MLA roundtable on teaching life writing. More links and resources will be included in the coming days… many thanks to Lenny Cassuto and those intrepid enough to make it to the graveyard shift of the conference…

I’ve been tasked with teaching life writing in the form of the graphic novel, and I’d like to talk briefly about the challenges and rewards of the medium, give examples of some syllabi and practical tips for incorporating graphic narrative into your classroom, and offer one brief example of the possibilities it offers for undergraduate pedagogy. The first point I’d make is that comics are a distinct medium that overlaps significantly with conventional literature and film but requires that we see and read simultaneously, complicating both activities. Consequently, much critical ink has been spilled over the vexing question of terminology—even the very term for the medium is up for grabs: comics (the term largely favored by practitioners), comix, graphic narrative (the term I find the most apt), graphic novels, and sequential art all having made significant claims—and while these debates shouldn’t discourage the teaching of graphic narrative, even a short introduction to the language of panels and closure can prove clarifying for a classroom discussion of comics. To this end, I would recommend Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, an introduction to reading the medium itself rendered in graphic form, usefully performing many of its central claims. While McCloud is not an academic, he offers a hands-on, approachable model for students. When he’s wrong, he’s productively wrong, and students can begin to formulate their own notions of how comics work by debating McCloud’s broad and sweeping claims. I augment Understanding Comics with other glossaries of literary, art historical, and film theoretical vocabulary, with the expectation that working with comics will productively complicate all three. To this end, in classes where graphic narrative is at the center of the syllabus, I begin the semester with a definitional exercise, asking the class to build a glossary the entire group will later use throughout the remainder of the semester. (You can view this assignment here: Assignment 2 expectations. As an experiential learning approach, I’ve also had students try building their own comics through the use of the Comic Life program, the results of which can be seen here.) As with the teaching of film, you may find that students have an intuitive grasp of the medium that is at the same time largely uncritical, and while many students will need to be reminded that comics can, in fact, yield intellectually rich, epistemologically complex, and rewarding readings, they will also respond enthusiastically to this new field for critical thinking and analysis.

To demonstrate this, I’d like to talk about a specific text, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Bechdel is hardly sui generis as a graphic memoirist in this respect—I suspect many will already be familiar with the work of Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi—and memoir has emerged as a powerful subgenre in the recent rise of graphic narrative, including the confessional work of artists like Joe Matt, Julie Doucet, and David Heatley. There is a great deal of work in this emerging medium for the teacher of life writing to get excited about, and for critical introductions to the range what’s out there, I’d recommend the scholarship of Charles Hatfield, recently published volumes by Hilary Chute and the MLA Guide to Teaching series, and the forthcoming collection Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art.

I teach five courses a year at a small liberal arts college which requires what my colleague Wendy Moffat calls “shuffling the deck,” finding ways to re-teach texts and at times entire units in new and productive ways. Fun Home has been exemplary in this regard, serving to complicate the sex/gender binary in the final week of the semester in a “Gender in American Fiction” 101 course, stand as a cross-cultural example of the graphic bildungsroman in a first-year seminar on “Graphic Narratives in a Global Frame,” introduce the changing twentieth-century notions of American masculinity and femininity in an upper-level course devoted to discursive formation and change, and function as a crucial intertext to critical theorists of sex and gender in the first half of a two-semester senior sequence.

I’d like to conclude, however, with a reading of a single panel in Fun Home as a model for how graphic memoir might look in the life writing classroom [...]

[This reading will appear in the aforementioned forthcoming volume, deities of the publishing world’s timetable permitting, in the near future... stay tuned]

… by linking to the productivity and thoughtfulness of my colleague, Claire Bowen, who is hopelessly creative in the classroom.

http://arcade.stanford.edu/syllabus-lunch-room

This just in from the Hooded Utilitarian, one of the most reliably compelling places to go to hear smart things said about comics. There are several references to essays in our book, which is always exciting to see.

I’m teaching “Graphic Narratives in a Global Frame” in my first-year seminar this fall and am trying to get them to think about cultural contexts in the comics they read (almost all of them, I get the sense, voraciously and well beyond whatever syllabus I might come up with). Of course, I’ve picked a series of writers (artists, comics creators, graphic novelists, whatever the right word is…) they are largely unfamiliar with: Chris Ware, Shaun Tan, Guy Delisle, Marjane Satrapi, Hayao Miyazaki (surely the most popular of the lot, I expect a flood of final papers on “Spirited Away”), Alison Bechdel, and Taiyo Matsumoto, among others. In this sense, the class is little different from my other courses on (also for lack of a better term) conventional literature; to expect students to be familiar with either Henry James or Alison Bechdel on the first week of classes seems an equally unlikely proposition. Of course, on one level, this speaks mostly to the texts I choose and the largely modernist standards of evaluation I stubbornly (anachronistically?) prize: psychological complexity, formal innovation, conspicuous difficulty, inter alia. That such standards easily transcend the putative high/low divide is the subtext of much of the semester, although it feels like we’ve only been able to approach these questions with glancing blows (what this might mean for modernism, and its aftereffects, is a topic for a sequel to my book on failure that I’ll probably never write).

Where my graphic narrative classes differ significantly from my other teaching is in the avidity with which my students (and these first-year students in particular) read comics. Several already have blogs about what they read and many of them seem to have forged friendships based on that reading, which trends by a wide margin toward manga. All of them are creating comics throughout the semester—you can see and comment on the results here—and with a few exceptions, the comics they reference are ones unfamiliar to me. Plenty of factors are at work here: I’m a latecomer to reading comics seriously, by the time manga really exploded in America I was traversing a different set of canon wars in my undergraduate English department, and there is a generational divide (a very productive one, I suspect) felt more keenly in this class than in any other I’ve taught. There’s also something to be said about the sheer profusion of graphic narratives in the American marketplace as well, something Art Spiegelman alluded to when he visited campus last year and spoke (with an interesting mix of wonder, elation, and a twinge of horror) about his absolute inability to keep up with where comics are going. I think this is mirrored in the music and film industries as online forms gain a firmer foothold on both the production and dissemination of cultural work, where micro-genres emerge and social networks allow us to tend smaller and smaller gardens of  our interests and passions and cultivate micro-communities of like-minded readers, viewers, and listeners.

I’m not sure this is the whole story, though. I can see a lot of crossover between traditions in the comics we’re reading together—manga artists reading French bande dessinée, American auteurs reading both and being inspired in turn, and the big publication houses trying to capitalize on these various appetites among comics consumers—and a willingness from this (admittedly unscientific) group of readers to read widely. Even though I don’t catch the references in most of my students’ comics, they do, rarely feeling the need to even explain them to one another. Perhaps comics are alone in this, and pop music, film, conventional literature etc. will continue to trend toward smaller and discrete audiences. The accelerating overlap between these media would seem to signal otherwise. No doubt it’s too early to tell. Clearly, though, I’ve got some catching up to do.

This is my first chance to pause and reflect on the new semester (read: procrastinating on fellowship applications) and I’m struck by the transition to reading and teaching full time after a week of faculty computer camp (the grandly titled Willoughby Fellowship) and the mad dash to complete my summer check list (mostly document writing on the not-so-trusty laptop). When the dust had settled, I’d gone almost three weeks without reading a sustained narrative, or really reading much of anything other than Word documents and webpages at summer’s end. During computer camp we were encouraged to have eight windows open while learning new things, tweeting comments mid-stream, filing bookmarks on delicious, and generally trying to drink from the technology fire hydrant. After a week of this, 8:00-4:00 every day, I felt as if my brain had been fried, not so much from the difficulty of anything we learned but from the constant multitasking and social networking. If this is the new literacy, it’s going to take many years before I feel literate—just in time for all of the technologies to have changed.

Move forward to this week, where I then asked my students to cultivate the ability to read Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, all 600+ pages of its finely tuned psychological calibrations and social minuets. When asked to describe James to an uninitiated reader, the first word out of my class’ collective mouths, almost in unison, was: LONG. I came to realize that what I had asked my very talented students to do was simply another version of the request asked of me the week before, adapt to a new form of literacy after having been bathed in the ambient world of the digital media to which I’d just been subjected. I, too, found myself readjusting to the dilated sense of time captured in the novel—even though this is my fourth or fifth reading of Portrait, I could feel the weekend bending around the reading experience in a palpable, physical way—an experience I find infinitely more pleasurable than the manic, hyper-saturated, false adrenaline you get after writing 50 emails or spending much too long on facebook (not that there isn’t a different pleasure here as well). I suppose James is as foreign to my students as their emerging forms of literacy are to me, and growing more so in exponential leaps and bounds.

This isn’t to say that we live in a fallen world, that digital literacies are no true literacy, that kids today don’t respect their elders, etc. I think there are real opportunities for teachers to take advantage of the ways in which our students write today. Automatic writing exercises, for example, are much more successful now than they were 10 or even 5 years ago as smart phones had yet to dominate the market the way they do today. Conversely, I’ve long held that physical books are among the most robust and versatile media out there—the codex has done well for the past two millennia, and I don’t anticipate it going anywhere. What I can imagine happening is a threat to the kind of narratives James is interested in telling, that the languorous details that so confused even his contemporary readers are becoming increasingly illegible to minds (even the finest among them) trained to read in such measurably different ways. I suspect these are facilities we can still teach our students to acquire, but when will the bar be too high? Or the rewards too obscure?

• WP Themes

  • Activate
  • Blindigo
  • Blue Zinfandel
  • Eye Candy
  • Detour
  • Frequency
  • Gladiola
  • Radiance
  • Vertigo
  • Vertigo Squared
  • Wonderland