| 2 | 9/2 |
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| 9/4 |
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If you are looking for the welcome post, where you’ll find your homework discussed and where you’re supposed to leave a comment, you should click on the link earlier in this sentence to go there.
(Note: I fixed the error on the schedule page around the Labor Day holiday. My apologies for the confusion. I spend a lot of time planning out the syllabus, the schedule of readings, and the assignments and they are all interlinked with each other, so sometimes I make mistakes as I am shifting and rearranging all of that during the planning phase. If you catch mistakes around dates or whatever, always feel free to let me know and ask for clarification.)
I will not publish a post like this one every week, but generally on Thursdays or Fridays I will try to look ahead to what’s on the schedule for next week. I’ll copy & paste in the relevant cells from our schedule table, as I’ve done at the top of this post, and then I’ll try to briefly point out things you might overlook or questions I want you to consider as you read. I might also preview how the class discussions will go in the coming week.
Tuesday
The Andrea Lunsford reading about Rhetorical Situations provides a good introduction of some of the key terms we will use in our analyses this semester. It should be a relatively quick read for you and will probably go over terms like genre, audience, and purpose, that you are already familiar with but might do so in a slightly different way than you’re used to. We’ll apply some of those rhetorical terms to the reading by Allie Brosh and then see how that helps us to think about what she’s doing in her comic. Note that “Adventures in Depression” is a webcomic, which includes some prose writing along with drawings. You might think about whether this even is a comic, as I began to define the medium in our first class, or whether it’s something else.
I meant to spend a little more time on the first day showing you how this class website works and pointing you towards starting your own sites and why I want you to do that. We’ll circle back to that some in class on Tuesday — which is also my way of letting you know that if you’re confused by the website sign up stuff or the instructions on making an Avatar, don’t get too worried about it. You won’t really be behind if that’s something you complete after that discussion.
Also critical note: do not pay anything to WordPress for your site! WordPress is a free, open-source software but when you’re hosting the site on their servers (as you will) it follows a “freemium” model where the basic website is free but they will try to upsell you on “premium” features. For this class, you do not need any of those premium features. In the last couple of years, they have made it a little extra confusing during sign up so that if you’re not paying attention you end up on a screen that makes it look like you have to pay to launch a site. You do not need to pay anything for a basic website. If it looks like you do, look again more carefully and somewhere there will be a button to just proceed with the free service.
Thursday
Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics was an extremely important early critical examination of the medium of comics. I’ve assigned you the first chapter of his book, written in comic form, that attempts to understand what comics are and how they work. Note that you only need to read chapter 1, which ends at page 23, but chapter 2 is also included on the PDF that I uploaded to the library. Consider chapter 2 as optional additional reading — there’s a really good discussion in it of the ways in which we identify with the characters in a comic because of the ways they are simplified in drawing that might be useful in later discussions. We’ll discuss more of McCloud’s work later this semester.
We’ll also finish our discussion of Brosh as we turn to the second half of “Adventures in Depression.”