Forthcoming
Announced and planned Academy seminars. Registration opens on this site prior to each module's first session.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp quipped that America's only works of art were "her bridges and her plumbing." A century later, Neil Kendricks, Film Curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, argued that "jazz and comics" should be included in this list of uniquely American aesthetic idioms.
In this Academy module, we will follow Kendricks' lead and read the comic book or "graphic novel," like jazz music, as revealing both a secret history of our world and the history of a secret world: from the cartoon mirror of the "world of being" in stories about superheroes, monsters, and other fantastical creatures, to the "world of becoming" glimpsed only in the creative process, imaginative acts, and desire's perseverance.
We will address such questions as: How do comics, as sequential art, work? What is the relation between color and line, the continuous and the discrete, image and text, graphic and explicit, comics and the comical? When and how do comics reflect dominant values and ideals, and when and how do they challenge or subvert them? Where do comics position their readers/viewers, and where do they position their creators? Why do images have the power to appeal to or appall us? And what are the links between comics and other art forms?
Structure
This module will consist of (mostly) bimonthly sessions. In the first session, I will provide an orientation to the overall module and then lecture on the next session's readings.
Each session thereafter will have two readings — a comic paired with a critical or philosophical essay — and will be organized into two parts: in the first part, an open-ended conversation about the session's texts; in the second part, a lecture on the upcoming session's readings.
Policies
To register for this module, submit an interest form on this website via the Register page.
Participants are expected to read each session's materials and come prepared to discuss them. You must interact during each session to receive the code for the module's proof-of-participation NFT.
The content in these comics may be sensitive or disturbing. To encourage candid study, we observe a policy of non-attribution: you may publicly discuss themes and arguments raised in a session, but should not attribute them to another participant. Learning must include margins for uncertainty, indelicacy, mistake, and dissent.
Proposed Schedule