Courses

In the 21st century, we are accustomed to seeing historical violence represented in pop cultural forms, like graphic novels, manga, animated film, or even Tik Tok memes… But when Art Spiegelman first published the graphic novel Maus, he worried about the dissonance between its form and content: “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dream. And trying to do it as a comic strip!” Spiegelman alluded to several historical precedents for the novel’s unusual—or even problematic—form. Artists have long experimented with the relationship between image and text: from cartoons to caricatures, from woodcuts to wordless comics, or from calligrammesto ciné-poésie. When are these dual modes of representation complementary or in conflict? How has the language and subject matter of image-texts developed over time? In this course, we will analyze the French-language graphic novel as an important contemporary medium for the representation of history, politics, and violence.In the first half of the class, we will consider various historical modes of image-text forms, in the French context and beyond, including (but not limited to): Scève’s emblèmes, Hokusai’smanga, Goya’s woodcuts, and Töppfer’s proto-graphic novels; Daumier, Nadar, and Doré’s political cartoons; children’s comics (notably Tintin, Corto Maltese); and adult comics (Hari-Kiri, Charlie Hebdo, Métal Hurlant).In the latter half of the course, we will focus our attention on iconic and lesser-known French- and Francophone- graphic novels, attending to the particularity of this neuvième art. How does one study a popular medium that has not been canonized or is in the process of canonization? Why have bandes dessinées become an important site for representing and remembering historical trauma, from the Iranian Revolution and October 17th, 1961? Course is taught in French, with texts in French.