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 and literature, who create works of complexity, passion, and depth. (1)

No matter how hard we try, we can never be truly objective in our reporting of events. Our influences creep into the ways we remember and describe what happens in the world; however, journalism attempts to be as objective as possible. With that in mind, we will begin this course by looking reading Joe Sacco’s Journalism, a collection of comics journalism pieces that Sacco did between 1998 and 2011 in various outlets. His pieces cover everything from the war in Chechnya to African migration to Europe. Sacco admits that comics journalism cannot truly be objective. He writes, “There will always exist, when presenting journalism in comics form, a tension between those things that can be verified, like a quote caught on tape, and those things that defy verification, such as a drawing purporting to represent a specific episode.”

These tensions will carry over to the other works we will read over the course of the semester when we examine graphic memoirs such as Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Marjane Satratpi’s Persepolis, and Mana Neyestani’s An Iranian Metamorphosis. Each of these works tell personal stories, relying on fact and the author’s perceptions of reality. Krug asks, when working to come to terms with Nazi reign in Germany that ended long before her birth, “How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?” Likewise, Neyestani explores how one word that he wrote in a cartoon that appeared in an Iranian newspaper could lead to his imprisonment and riots, leading to an examination of the intersections of art, law, politics, and authoritarianism in Iran’s Islamic Republic.

While in rehab after surviving an assassination attempt, Salman Rushdie reflects back on why he writes. After the publication of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie says, “I learned that, through literature, I could repair myself.” That is what Satratpi, Krug, and Neyestani do in their memoirs, but this exploration extends to the “fictive” works we will read this semester: Rutu Modan’s The Property and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s The Waiting. Speaking with her publisher, Modan points out the characters in The Property are an amalgamation of family members and that the work deals with memory and the ways that we remember and forget the past. On forgetting, she says, “I believe forgetting is important, too. If you can’t forget, you can become very angry and ungenerous, which isn’t a pleasant way to go through life.” Like Modan, Gendry-Kim talks about the ways that her own mother and individuals she interviewed impacted The Waiting. She tells Asian American Writer’s Workshop, “The Waiting is partially my mother’s own story. couldn’t be 100 percent faithful to her experiences because I wanted to protect my family and myself. So I decided to interview two people who were reunited with their families. I combined those interviews with the testimony of a friend’s mother and the testimonies I found in other works, and all these sources helped me shape the story.”

One course, no matter the discipline, can cover every aspect of a topic. We cannot cover world literature from the Renaissance to the present in its entirety, so we have to narrow our focus to specific themes and/or time periods. As such, we will focus on the twentieth century, looking at ways that individuals remember the past and report on events. Specifically, we will look at World War II, the Korean reunification, the Iranian Revolution and protests in Iran, the War on Terror, Palestine, and more. While we will use graphic novels as the fulcrum for exploring these events, we will also read a few short stories that we can connect with each of these historical moments.

Primary Texts:

· Gendry-Kim, Keum Suk. The Waiting.
· Krug, Nora. Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home.
· Modan, Rutu. The Property.
· Neyestani, Mana. An Iranian Metamorphosis.
· Sacco, Joe. Journalism.
· Satratpi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.

Secondary Texts: I will provide these

· Abraham, George. “in which you do not ask the state of israel to commit suicide.”
· Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis.”
· Seghers, Anna. “A Man Becomes a Nazi.”
· Seghers, Anna. “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip.”

Assignments — Throughout the semester, we will have both in-class and online assignments. These will include posting topics online, answering questions, or other such activities. There will be small group discussions during classes and other activities that will be part of this grade

Discussion Boards — You will be in groups for the discussion boards. Every two weeks, you will be required to post a question or observation about the readings for that week. You must also respond to two people’s posts on the forum to receive full credit for the assignment. For some weeks, I will have guided prompts.

Response Papers — During the course of the semester, you will write two short response papers. These will be 750–1000 words each. You will be required to respond to one or more of the readings in the course and to use the text(s) to support your argument.

Research/Reflection Paper — For this assignment, you will write about the construction of your graphic narrative or graphic narrative script. You will write about why you chose to construct the narrative in the way you did. You will discuss what informed your narrative. You will explore how the course and source impacted your narrative, discussing how it is connected to one or more text we read in class and to scholarship that we have examined. The paper needs to be 1,000 to 1,5000 words in length, and it must contain 3 secondary sources that illuminate your construction of the graphic narrative. The secondary sources should be scholarly articles, essays, or book chapters.

Graphic Narrative or Graphic Narrative Script — At the end of the semester, you will have a choice to either construct a ten-page graphic narrative or a ten-page graphic narrative script, either on your own or collaboratively. For the graphic memoir, you will create, based on what we have studied during the semester or another historical even that interests you. This can be done without any ability to draw. For example, you can use page layouts from online and incorporate pictures. For the graphic narrative script, you will write out — with breakdowns, dialogue, and description — a ten-page horror graphic narrative. I want to give you a choice between which one you would like to do. I will share with you example scripts for reference. We will present these during the final exam session. I will share examples that I have done.