In her recent monograph Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016), Hillary L. Chute asks: “Why, after the rise and reign of photography, do people yet understand pen and paper to be among the best instruments of witness?” (2). And “why [are there] so many difficult and extreme world-historical conflicts portrayed in the form of comics […]?” (3). Chute suggests that it is the peculiar, medium-specific ways in which comics – or graphic narrative, to use a more inclusive term – create storyworlds and narrate events in a visual-verbal fashion that may explain the prominence of documentary graphic narratives.
In this course, we will explore Chute’s claim that such documentary, and often autobiographical, graphic narratives are particularly suited to, and have a particular way of, telling stories about world-historical conflicts. We will do so by focusing on experiences of war and migration and by studying how these experiences are rendered in graphic form. We will seek answers to difficult questions about the ethics of graphic representation and will immerse ourselves in contemporary comics theory and theories of ethics.
- Dozent/in: Daniel Stein