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DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2024/2025

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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures : English Literature

Postgraduate Course: The Graphic Novel: Narrative in Sequential Art (PG Version) (ENLI11230)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Literatures, Languages and Cultures CollegeCollege of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) AvailabilityNot available to visiting students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryThis course explores the graphic novel form as an effective and impactful mode of intermedial storytelling. From illustrated memoirs of asylum, and to trans comics of teen superheroes, our course texts reflect the graphic novel's long history of making visible stories deemed 'unnarratable' in mainstream dominant discourse. Through a diverse reading list spanning a wide range of cultural contexts from nineteenth-century Russia to the Ivory Coast of the 1970s, the course probes how the graphic novel form can speak to an array of urgent political crises and social injustices, including war, colonialism, rape culture, institutional racism, gendered violence, ecological devastation, the exploitation of labour, and anti-immigrant discrimination. The course is ordered by genre, meaning that, whether through the figure of the detective, the superhero, the worker or the handmaid, each week we look at a specific example of a prevalent genre in the graphic novel market and consider how these visual renderings can correspond to or challenge scholarly orthodoxies across Literary Studies more broadly. Drawing also on Adaptation, Film, Comics, Gender, Postcolonial, Environmental and Queer Studies, we work collaboratively to think about the kinds of bodies, affects and story-worlds emerging from that ever-evolving intersection between word and image which is uniquely enacted by the graphic novel form.
Course description Strong emphasis will be placed on the textual properties of the graphic novel course texts, and how words and images interact with one another on the page to create narrative meaning. Students will therefore be able to draw upon existing skills in textual analysis and critical thinking, and develop transferable, interdisciplinary skills in visual analysis and criticism. In addition, students will encounter new critical models on sequential art, focused around the potential of narrative drawing for creating unique stylistic effects and characterisation, and the way in which time, space, embodiment, identity and relationality are represented differently than in printed texts.
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements Students on LLC MSc programmes get first priority to this course. If you are not on an LLC programme, please let your administrator or the course administrator know you are interested in the course. Unauthorised enrolments will be removed. No auditors are permitted.
Course Delivery Information
Academic year 2024/25, Not available to visiting students (SS1) Quota:  15
Course Start Semester 1
Timetable Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) Total Hours: 200 ( Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 196 )
Assessment (Further Info) Written Exam 0 %, Coursework 100 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment) 4000 Word Essay (100%)
Feedback Not entered
No Exam Information
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. Construct original, clear and coherent arguments about the evolution of the graphic novel as a genre from models within literature and the visual arts
  2. Analyse graphic novels using recognised methods of literary criticism and sequential art criticism to substantiate and illustrate those arguments
  3. Evaluate established conventions within different subgenres of sequential art but also recognise the ways in which graphic novels depart from those conventions
  4. Orally present the results of research undertaken individually and as part of a small group, respond critically to such research undertaken by others, and critically evaluate the importance of such material for an understanding of the chief themes of the course.
Reading List
Essential Texts:

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1-12
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Maus
Ducks
Aya: Life in Yop City Vol. 1
Galaxy: The Prettiest Star
The Russian Detective
The Handmaid¿s Tale: The Graphic Novel
The Best We Could Do
Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
KeywordsNot entered
Contacts
Course organiserProf Michelle Keown
Tel: (0131 6)50 6856
Email: michelle.keown@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: pgordysh@ed.ac.uk
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