Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom

This collection highlights the diverse ways comics and graphic novels are used in English and literature classrooms, whether to develop critical thinking or writing skills, paired with a more traditional text, or as literature in their own right. From fictional stories to non-fiction works such as biography/memoir, history, or critical textbooks, graphic narratives provide students a new way to look at the course material and the world around them. Graphic novels have been widely and successfully incorporated into composition and creative writing classes, introductory literature surveys, and upper-level literature seminars, and present unique opportunities for engaging students' multiple literacies and critical thinking skills, as well as providing a way to connect to the terminology and theoretical framework of the larger disciplines of rhetoric, writing, and literature.

This collection highlights the diverse ways comics and graphic novels are used in English and literature classrooms, whether to develop critical thinking or writing skills, paired with a more traditional text, or as literature in their own right. From fictional stories to non-fiction works such as biography/memoir, history, or critical textbooks, graphic narratives provide students a new way to look at the course material and the world around them. Graphic novels have been widely and successfully incorporated into composition and creative writing classes, introductory literature surveys, and upper-level literature seminars, and present unique opportunities for engaging students' multiple literacies and critical thinking skills, as well as providing a way to connect to the terminology and theoretical framework of the larger disciplines of rhetoric, writing, and literature.

1. Introduction.- 2. Not Just Novels: The Pedagogical Possibilities of the Graphic Narrative.- 3. Understanding Rhetoric, Understanding Genre: A Rhetorical Genre Studies Approached Writing Course.- 4. Writing Through Comics.- 5. Teaching the History and Theory of American Comics: 20th Century Graphic Novels as a Complex Literary Genre.- 6. "What is the use of a book ... without pictures of conversations?": Incorporating the Graphic Novel into the University Curriculum.- 7. "Does Doctor Manhattan Think?": Alan Moore's The Watchmen and 'Great Books' Curriculum in the Early College Setting.- 8. "If He Be Mr. Hyde, We Shall Be Mr. See": Using Graphic Novels, Comic Books, and the Visual Narrative in the Gothic Literature Classroom.- 9. Teaching March in the Borderlands Between Social Justice and Pop Culture.- 10. Revising the Rhetoric of 'Boat People' Through the Interactive Graphic Adaptation of Nam Le's "The Boat".- 11. Performative Pedagogies and Performative Texts: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home as Compositional Model.