| 3 | 9/10 | Sousanis, Nick. “The Importance of Seeing Double and Then Some” and “The Shape of Our Thoughts,” from Unflattening.
Stitches — rest of “I was six” and “I was eleven” (64-156) |
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| 9/12 | Dan Roam, “First Draw a Circle, then Give it a Name” (chpt 3) from Draw to Win
Stitches — “I was fourteen” (157-242) |
Literacy Narrative, part 1 | |
| 9/15 | Sketch 2: Sunday Sketches |
Remember to post your avatar for sketch 1 over the weekend! My hope is that by Monday afternoon, all of your sites will be syndicating to Student Work page and all of your avatars are loaded onto the Student Sites page. If you still haven’t commented on the “Welcome” post with your WordPress address and replied to the student information form, let me know what help you need to get that accomplished.
I forgot to mention the additional readings for this week in class, but you should all be checking the schedule and or checking in with these week ahead posts.
These two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Sousanis drew Unflattening as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there. His comic short story “A Life in Comics” is something of a literacy narrative about Karen Green, a librarian at Columbia University’s Butler Library, who is the first Curator for Comics and Cartoons there.
Be aware that this comic is probably a little more dense reading than you’re find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (In week 4, we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together? Is it different than what happens in Stitches?
We’ll also spend some time discussing the end of David’s sixth year and his eleventh year in class on Tuesday.
On Thursday, you’ve got a very short reading from Dan Roam‘s book Draw to Win to go along with Stitches. Roam is a corporate trainer who publishes books and presents workshops on business communication and marketing, focusing on visual clarity for communicating complex information effectively. We’ll also be doing some drawing in class.
Your first major assignment is also due on Thursday. I’ll begin meeting with you individually to give you feedback on those drafts starting on Friday and stretching into the next week. I’ll have a Google doc published before class Thursday where you can sign up for a time slot (so if you haven’t given me a gmail address yet by responding to the information survey, please do so now so that I can give you access to the document!)
