Winter 2015 Course List
AAD 252 Art & Gender*** Voelker-Morris, Julie
This course explores issues associated with art, gender, and society by considering how gender is relevant to the creation, study, and appreciation of art and culture; introducing and addressing socio-cultural factors influencing roles of women and men in the arts, culture, and society; discussing gender as a vehicle for understanding artistic creation and select artistic mediums–including the visual arts, comics, theatre, film, music, architecture, and media/advertising–in community and cultural contexts; examining underlying social structures that affect how art and artists have been defined; and, asking students to identify and articulate personal critical perspectives regarding issues of art and gender.
***On-line course
ARH 399 History of Manga Walley, Akiko
What is Manga? How does it work? This course traces the history of Japanese Modern Comics Book (Manga) from the Nineteenth Century to present.
COLT 370 Comparative Comics: “Introduction to Comics Theory”
Gilroy, Andrea
Despite the fact that critics and scholars across the globe have been writing about comics for decades, many people were surprised to hear that at the University of Oregon, Department of Comparative Literature now offers comics-dedicated courses and you can even minor in Comics and Cartoon Studies. In “COLT 370: Introduction to Comics Theory,” we will delve into the existing and interesting theories that create the foundation for comic studies. How do we read comics? How do comics create meaning? How important are images in comics? Words? What even counts as comics in the first place? By reading theory alongside comics from different genres and national/linguistic backgrounds, this class will introduce newcomers and comics fans alike to the exciting and challenging world of comics theory.
JPN 407 Sem Vampire in Anime Harrison, LeRon
The vampire is taken as a standard character in Western culture. At this point in time we have no problem seeing stories and novels as well as television shows and movies where vampires feature prominently. But with that acceptance comes an unspoken assumption that the vampire is something inherently Western, that is, it is a creature that was created in the West, functions in the West and seemingly has little or no connection with the East. In light of that preconception stories that are created in the East and feature vampires have largely fallen out the scope of the emerging field of vampire studies.
One area of Eastern cultural production that has a history of producing stories is Japanese anime. From the 1980s onward the vampire has appeared in a number of animated series. This raises a number of
questions: How has anime treated the vampire in animated series? In what ways have they maintained, altered and omitted elements of existing vampire mythology? How does Japanese understanding of the supernatural play a role in the depictions of vampires? How should we see and think about the vampire as a character if we include the vampires that appear in anime?
This course will take these questions as a departure point for examining the vampires that appear in four anime series—Shiki, Hellsing, Black Blood Brothers, and Trinity Blood—and vampire literature from the West alongside scholarly works on the transformation of the vampire in Western culture and the development of the yōkai (supernatural
creatures) in Japan at roughly contemporaneous times.
ENG 385* Graphic Novels and Cultural Theory
Saunders, Benjamin
*Restricted to College Scholars.
Popular genre fictions stand among the most vividly emblematic of modern literary forms, and (in hindsight) are often more sociological and psychological revealing than even their creators intended. In this class we will consider comic book adaptions of the most successful forms of genre fiction— SF, Crime, Western, Horror and Romance stories. We will compare texts from the 1940s, the 1970s, the 1990s, and the present, and explore the shifting representations of politics, gender, sexuality and race in these mass cultural products. We will also consider the specific ways the comics’ medium responds to, incorporates, and occasionally improves upon the conventions of rival narrative forms such as prose fiction and film.