SCHC 353 H01 23709

EngLit, HistoryCiv, Humanities, AIU

Notes:

A chimera in Greek mythology is an awe-inspiring monster composed of hybrid parts from different animals. This class will explore chimerical books that take their own parts from two or more genres—a technique postmodern literature is famous for. We’ll look at theories about monstrous modern chimeras from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, and read comic book fusions, hypertexts, transformable books, “differential” books that exist in multiple media simultaneously, artists’ books, altered books, palimpsests, photojournals, eco-texts, and many more! The Latin root for monster is “monstrum,” which can be translated as “a sign, portent, wonder, warning, monstrosity, marvel.” What new sign systems, warnings, and revelations do these books offer contemporary readers? Some of the print or e-books we may cover: Shelley Jackson’s hypertext narrative of body parts in my body: a Wunderkammer; Sophie Calle’s photographic detective chase in Suite vénitienne; Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, a coming of age graphic novel spliced with legendary monsters and a Transformer toy; the metafictional children’s book Chloe and the Lion, whose illustrations come from a range of animation styles and whose “monster” keeps getting rewritten; Rosmarie Waldrop’s A Key into the Language of America, a modern palimpsest of traumatic history adapting Roger Williams’s 1643 book of the same title; Claudia Rankine’s prose poetry, photos, and artwork in Citizen: An American Lyric, Giovanni Singleton’s concrete poetry explosion in American Letters, and R. Sikoryak’s Constitution Illustrated, where every article of the Constitution is illustrated by a different comics scene modeled on famous pages from Golden Age superhero comics to Dilbert, Bugs Bunny, Lumberjanes, Phoebe and Her Unicorn, and lots of others. Assignments: There will be two papers and a creative assignment in the class, as well as required discussion posts for each new book.