reading the world with graphic novels

Louann ReidCLAS Conference

2009

The World?

• http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world.html

The Rhetoric of Maps

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is . . .

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Jamaica Kincaid

• In the world of literature that I grew up in, there was only one literature—that of the people of England. As far as I was allowed to know, a literature belonging to other people did not exist. I grew up in a small patch of what was then the British Empire, an island in the West Indies. To me (and to all the people like me) England and its people and what happened in that place to those people were real and everything else mattered only to the degree that England and its people were affected.

Not England, But . . .

Jamaica Kincaid

• What good would it have done me to know of the world, the larger world, the world beyond England and its people, the world of other people both different from me and the same? I can only speculate that such exposure to other people and other cultures might have made me a different person. To have learned that the place where I originated was of some value—human value—would have nourished that delicate thing inside of me, my sense of being.

What’s Available

Focalization

Gerard Genette: terminology for point of view is confusing◦ Who is the character whose point of view orients

the narrative perspective?

◦ Who is the narrator?

Instead, we should ask “Who sees?”and “Who speaks?”

The reader watches with the character’s eyes and is thus inclined to accept the vision presented by the character.

Readers are subjected to the ideology of the text through focalization. They take on the attitudes of the character “who sees.” They need to know this and, when necessary, resist or as bell hooks and Ruth Vinz suggest “talk back.”

The Metamorphosis and Maus

http://sites.google.com/site/crossingboundariesclass/