cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Purdue Comparative Literature Program
presents the 2010 Conference

Graphic Engagement: The Politics of Comics and Animation

Purdue University – West Lafayette, IN
September 2-4, 2010

Comics and film animation are potent media that can have an effect far different from that of more tradition forms of literature. They are composite texts whose mixtures of image, word, and sound offer a more immediate exchange between author(s) and audience, where the visuals directly confront us and demand a reader response in ways that prose narrative does not. The resulting effects can have profound ideological consequences. Either in the form of a comics memoir, a Disney adaptation, a superhero saga, or a single-panel cartoon, graphic narratives shape the way we frame ourselves in terms of gender, race, religion, class, and nationhood.

The Purdue University Comparative Literature Program will be sponsoring a conference devoted to this topic, welcoming papers that explore the ways in which comics and animation engage us politically. Our understanding of “political” is broad in scope, relating not only to affairs of state, but the praxis of graphic narrative and ways it impacts individual identity and community dynamics. Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Historical representations in graphic novels
• The appropriation of national myths and folktales in animated film
• Dynamics of humor and subversion in syndicated comic strips
• Imaging the ethnic/racial other in comics and other forms of graphic narrative
• Representations of gender and sexuality in anime and manga
• Personal memoir in graphic novels or animation
• The language of comics as a form of rhetoric
• Representations of trauma in graphic narrative
• Animation and its links to education
• Socio-political issues surrounding graphic novels and library cataloging
• Superheroes and the definition, or complication, of communal and national identity
• Graphic narrative as transnational discourse
• Political cartooning and its social impact
• Hollywood and comics
• Journalism, biography, and graphic narrative
• Using comics and graphic novels as children’s and adolescent literature

Email abstracts of 250 words, with a brief author biography, to:
graphic.engagement@gmail.com
Please include “Graphic Engagement Conference 2010” in the subject heading

Deadline for submissions is June 18, 2010

Hotel rooms have been set aside at the Union Club Hotel, Purdue Memorial Union
101 N Grant Street | West Lafayette, IN 47907 | (800) 320-6291
http://www.union.purdue.edu/HTML/UnionClubHotel/