NOTE: This webpage provides resources for this course. It is NOT the course syllabus and DOES NOT provide information about course assignments, requirements, or expectations. Please consult the course syllabus for these types of questions.


Defining Visual Culture
Visual Culture is a field of study within cultural studies focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images and their ability to communicate ideas quickly and effectively. Visual culture often overlaps with film or television studies and may include the study of video games, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and other media that employ crucial visual components.

In defining visual culture we can move from the narrow/specific to the more broad/general.

Narrow/Specific Definition
Visual culture is the tactic with which to study the genealogy, definition, and functions of postmodern everyday life from the point of view of the consumer, rather than the producer.

Middle Definition
A fluid interpretative structure for understanding response to visual media of both individuals and groups.

Broad/General Definition
Visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology (any form or apparatus designed to be looked at or enhance natural vision: oil painting to television to Internet).

Basis for Visual Culture
Visual culture is important because it provides the context for so much of our daily lives. This stems from two factors
  1. The remarkable human ability to absorb and interpret the ever increasing bombardment of visual information
  2. Growing tendency to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or cannot be seen

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Course Rationale
With growing attention on the power of visual images to communicate ideas quickly and effectively, there is much in our current cultural context that can be considered "visual." This course will focus on comics art, a visual communciation medium combining text and images through a long history of varied applications. One application in particular, graphic novels, is interesting for three reasons.

First, as a visual form featuring juxtaposed images and text, graphic novels promote the telling of all kinds of stories, from historical accounts to poignant memoirs, from biography to autobiography, from journalism to fantasy and science fiction, from humor to musings on modern life.

Second, these juxtaposed words and images invite readers to dwell, to reflect, and to meditate inside a communication space where the pace and tone of interaction with the medium are pliant and controlled by the reader/interactor. This intrinsically increased sensory relation to narrative components provides a level of intimacy with a medium unmatched by cinema, television, theater, audio recording, or prose-only text.

Third, through graphic novels some readers are exposed to some of the most beautiful and compelling visual rhetoric being produced by present-day illustrators, the kind of transformative, mind-changing epiphanial experience provided by great novels and books, and perhaps their only literary experience.

Such utlizations of graphic novels as an accessible and vernacular literary medium seems an appropriate and significant focus for a class exploring visual culture.

Course Structure
Reading several graphic novels, some theory about comic arts, and then talking about these readings and the concepts they inform. As always, look for various in-class assignments, and assigned projects (including a substantial Capstone Project) demonstrating your engagement and ability to work creatively with ideas explored in this course.

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Course Texts

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Course Resources
Comics: Collections in WSU Library
Two sets of comics collected by English faculty member Paul Brians, now cataloged and available through the Library's Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections. The online finding aid is listed under "Manuscripts" HERE
Click on "Brians, Paul Comics Collection, 1950-2004"

Or, go directly to the collection HERE

Comics: Additional Good Reads
Comics: General
Comics: Graphic or Visual Narrative/Language
Graphic Novels
Visual Culture
Visual Display of Information
Women Cartoonists
Online
Communication
Music Video