Check out this seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2010 Conference:
Comics Boundaries: Graphic Narratives through a Cosmopolitan Lens
* Seminar Organizer: Giuseppe Gazzola, SUNY Stony Brook; David M. Ball, Dickinson College
Comics are heralded as a putatively “universal” language, one that can be intuitively seen and read across cultural boundaries. They have nonetheless been shaped by specific social and national locations, and as such, are particularly illustrative of the promises and limitations of intellectual cosmopolitanism. The popularity and production of comics around the world have generated a keen heterogeneity of forms, idioms, and graphic geographies, a heterogeneity that remains largely unaccounted for in contemporary comics criticism and theory.
The recent critical interest in graphic narratives in the past few years has motivated renewed attention to long-held and long-unanswered questions about the medium. Most centrally, foundational questions about comics continue to frame as well as generate conversations among critics: What are comics? Do they represent a hybrid medium or a unique field of study? How do they define generic expectations, or rather are they confined by those expectations?
The goal of this seminar is to reframe these longstanding debates through a cosmopolitan lens; we believe that such critical impasses can be productively addressed through a multinational and multicultural approach to graphic narratives. Achieving a cosmopolitan turn in comics criticism allows for new approaches to many of these topics, including:
* How is cosmopolitanism represented in comics, and is this cosmopolitanism the main current or an undertow in the production of graphic narratives?
* Do national identities shape genre expectations and formal innovations, or are such boundaries being transgressed by contemporary graphic authors?
* How are visual grammars and compositional languages formed in different cultural locations? Are universal vocabularies or comics creoles establishing themselves?
