Teaching Graphic Narratives (MMLA)

deadline for submissions: 
April 5, 2019
full name / name of organization: 
Dr. Alissa Burger / Culver-Stockton College
contact email: 

Teaching Graphic Narratives

Graphic narratives offer a wide variety of doubles and doppelgängers. Secret superhero identities and Gothic doubles create unique possibilities for exploring the self, power, perception, and the potential for other realities, while graphic narrative adaptations of a literary work highlight other ways of seeing and interacting with a text. Graphic narratives encompass worlds beyond fiction as well, with graphic memoirs and textbooks in a wide range of fields from rhetoric to literary theory, history, and science.

The Teaching Graphic Narratives permanent session of the MMLA is seeking proposals for the 2019 conference (Chicago, November 14th - 17th). Proposals should focus on pedagogical approaches to one (or more) specific graphic texts. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Doubles and doppelgängers in graphic narratives, including the Gothic double, twins, superheroes, and secret identities
  • Parallel realties and alternate timelines in graphic narratives
  • Graphic narrative adaptations of classic or other literary works
  • Graphic narrative-format textbooks in disciplines beyond literature as a new way of “seeing” previously textual content (i.e. Elizabeth Losh and Jason Alexander’s graphic format textbook Understanding Rhetoric vs. a traditional writing and rhetoric textbook)
  • Approaches and assignments that foreground critical comparison of graphic narratives to their film adaptations
  • Multiple ways of reading and responding to graphic narratives (i.e. critical analysis, students’ creation of their own graphic narratives, etc.)

Please send 250-300 word proposals to aburger@culver.edu by April 5th, 2019.