Dummy Guide to Graphic Novels

For the duration of this course only, the following is available as an idea on how to incorporate Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics with studying a Graphic Novel.

Thanks to Pauline!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/48867356/Persepolis%20booklet%202011%20first%20half.docx

PLA options

Novels:

- Zora Neale Hurston:

Dust Tracks on a Road

Their Eyes Were Watching God (use of [African-American] vernacular)

- George Orwell

1984

- Cormac McCarthy

The Road

Plays:

- Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot

- Edward Albee

Long Day's Journey into Night

- David Mamet

Glengarry Glen Ross

American Buffalo

Others:

- Martin Luther King

Speeches

A possible PART 4 list

3x PLA

PLA Ian McEwan Cement Garden

PLA Scott Fitzgerald Great Gatsby

PLA Anthony Burgess A clockwork orange

FW: Part 3 - Literature: texts and context

Part three

 

Question - Look at the way 19th and 20th century people viewed sexuality.

 

D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's lover/poems

Madam Bovary -  Flaubert or The unbearable lightness of being - Milan Kundera

Bram Stoker - Dracula

 

In addition:
- The learning outcome: Consider the changing historical, cultural and social contexts in which particular texts are written and received

Students can answer the first part of the question (in which they are written) by analysing the works and their backgrounds and then comparing them.

The second part of the question ("in which they are received") can be answered by analysing the reception of 'Dracula' and the reception of the Vampire when it was published and comparing that to how their own society (meaning now) views vampires and the novel. You might even go as far as to discuss the function of the novel in society (sexuality/erotica = dracula = undead = eternal damnation -> example??)

All of the above will, obviously, be linked to sexuality and taboos of the periods that you're talking about.

part 3

Learning outcome number 1
We are focussing on the role of the individual and family in society and the impact of prevailing values and beliefs.

Our text: Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
\
A. Do some research on the Shakespearean era (late sixteenth/early fifteenth century). Every student gets a specific area to focus upon. One focuses on family life, the second on the position of women and the third one focuses on minority social groups. During the lesson the ‘experts’ are put together in groups of three and share their knowledge.
Afterwards the groups will do a small presentation (5 minutes) giving the teacher the option to add information.
A websites you could consult:
www.elisabethan-era.co.uk

B. Contexualizing (background information). Done by the teacher.
Schama’s History of Britain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrn6R1AdLI0
And the film Shakespeare in Love.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138097/
C. Reading Romeo and Juliet together and linking it to the information found by the groups (see A).
D. After covering Romeo and Juliet, it can be linked to The Kite Runner.

Part 3-Works list

Night by Elie Wiesel [Free choice]

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink [PLT]

1984 by George Orwell [PLA]

To read it in this order would serve two purposes: (1) Reading Night first would incite powerful empathy in the students for the Jewish in the Holocaust, and then following it with The Reader would show the other side, surprising the students when they have empathy for the Nazi side, and (2) Reading 1984 last would be a great segue into part 2--looking first at language of propaganda and advertising

Loss Of Innocence (part 3, sample)

Part 3: Loss of Innocence

Learning outcome: Understand the attitudes and values expressed by literary texts and their impact on readers.

Area: context of reception, including individual reader, influences the way a text is read

Warmers

- Q and A Ryan Commission Report http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jHqndf9Kx4

- Philip Larkin “This Be the Verse”: http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm

- Carol Ann Duffy “ We Remember Your Childhood Well” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/poetduffy/werememberrev1.shtml ; including lessonplan)

Main Works

PLT: The Story of Zahra, H. Al-Shaykh (Lebanon, 1980)

PLA: The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (USA, 1850)

SFS: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Roddy Doyle (Ireland,1993) and/or Notes on a Scandal Zoe Heller (UK,2003)