Blog Post 14: The Last Blog Post on Earth

Hi everyone,

Again, really nice job in our draft critiques today. As I mentioned at the end of class, here’s a final thread of the semester, for some open-ended thinking about the last section of Jimmy Corrigan. There’s lots to be said here about some of the things that we’ve traced throughout the text — questions of history, representation, race, form, space, time, memory, and the city, to name just a few — as well throughout the course. So feel free to raise anything that seems important and worth discussing to you in this section through some attentive close reading, and we’ll spend some time Friday thinking about this section and how it fits into our thinking over the semester.

Reminder (slightly different from our usual blog schedule): your response should go in the comments section for this post — click the “Leave a Comment” link at the top of the post. It should be at least 250 words, and is due by midnight on Thursday, December 8th. 

 

 

Blog Post 13: Form and Function

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a nice, restful break, and that you’re making your way back to campus feeling ready to roll for the rest of the semester. As a reminder, we pick up on Wednesday with the next chunk of Jimmy Corrigan (up to the splash page of the black-and-red face), and with Professor Krefting sitting in to observe us. There’s a lot to think through in this section of the text — so since we spent our first day largely figuring out it works formally and temporally, let’s use this blog post to start thinking about what Ware is doing in larger cultural terms through form, narrative, and visuality in the novel.

For your post, you should focus on showing how one small section of the text (try to cite and locate it as precisely as you can without page numbers) illuminates a particular cultural question or issue. What you choose to write about is up to you, but it should look beyond some of the psychology or emotion of Jimmy as a character we looked at last time to think about something larger — you might think about what’s at stake in the novel in terms of architecture and space, or history, or the Superman/superhero mythos, or anything else that seems significant to you. What does Ware seem to be showing and thinking about your chosen issue? How does the form and visuality of the text speak to that thinking?

Reminder: your response should go in the comments section for this post — click the “Leave a Comment” link at the top of the post. It should be at least 250 words, and is due by midnight on Tuesday, November 29th. After class on Monday, you should return to this  thread and post a response to one classmate’s post by class time Friday the 2nd. If you have any questions, let me know via email.

Blog Post 12: Endings

Hi everyone,

Since Wednesday is our last day with Gloeckner’s text, I thought it might be useful to use this blog post to reflect on how the narrative ends. In focusing on the end here, you might think about any number of questions and issues: how does this ending extend, or recast, or complicate some of the things we’ve been thinking and talking about so far? What new concerns and issues come up, and what seems significant about them? What does the ending of this narrative mean in terms of the text’s diaristic form, or in terms of Gloeckner’s (or Minnie’s) identity as a (developing/established) cartoonist? You’re free to take up any of these questions, or to follow your thinking in another direction that interests you — just make sure that you ground your thinking in some citation and close analysis of the text from this last chunk.

Reminder: your response should go in the comments section for this post — click the “Leave a Comment” link at the top of the post. It should be at least 250 words, and is due by midnight on Tuesday, November 15th. We’ll be starting Jimmy Corrigan on Friday, so no response post this week.

Blog Post 11: Diary, Girl, Cartoonist, Comic, Memoir, Novel

Hi everyone,

Our next section of Gloeckner’s text introduces a range of new issues, both thematic and formal and somewhere in between. So this blog post is another open-ended one, as long as you ground your discussion in some citation and close analysis of part of our reading for Wednesday — use your post to show how the material you focus on is raising larger issues within the text that you see as significant.

Reminder: your response should go in the comments section for this post — click the “Leave a Comment” link at the top of the post. It should be at least 250 words, and is due by midnight on Tuesday, November 8th. After class on Monday, you should return to this  thread and post a response to one classmate’s post by class time Friday the 11th. If you have any questions, let me know via email.