...but what has he done lately?

Chris Ware has been collaborating with "This American Life" producer Ira Glass to tell the story of the death of one of Chicago's most beautiful urban monument in Lost Buildings. There's a Quicktime preview that is just stunning.

(Also worthy of note: a few years back, Glass interviewed Ware for a short segment about superheroes.)

- posted by Mike @ 9:33 PM

 
Thesis Weirdness: An introduction

Still worried about your thesis? Will it be interesting and original enough to fill out 10 lucid pages and meet my draconian standards? An English prof at my alma mater has written a remarkable online handout that discusses Five Ways of Looking at a Thesis. Why not give it a look?

- posted by Mike @ 9:22 PM

 
Bored by your peers? Branch out!

Much to my colleague Annette's delight, Eric recently initiated a cross-class conversation with Gina, whose blog is linked over at ThoughtMeat. Remember that there are more blogs than just your peers' to respond to, as you roll in those bonus journals!

- posted by Mike @ 6:43 PM

 
Bonus blogs, bonus points math updated!!

Even though journals are no longer a requirement in this course, I hope that you have recognized the real-life value of practicing writing and that you will continue to write on a near-daily basis not because of the bonus points but because you genuinely enjoy writing.

Here, though, are the rules governing the awarding of bonus points for your writing:

1. For your journal to qualify for bonus points, it must be posted on a blog. (Go to Blogger.com to set one up.)
2. The same standards apply that have always applied for determining whether a journal receives a check, a check plus, etc. To wit, the journal must analyze another writer's argument (e. g. a classmate's blog entry) and develop an argument based in part on that argument in order to receive a check. Check plus journals demonstrate a measure of insight and/or creativity.
3. I will eventually--though possibly not before the end of the semester--review your bonus blogged journals and award them their grades.
4. Journals that earn check minuses will not give you any bonus points. Check journals will confer 1/3 of a point of extra credit. Check plus journals, 2/3. This means that if you post three times a week until the end of the semester you could earn between 4 and 8 extra credit points, which is fairly ridiculous.

Bonus journals do not have to be posted three times a week, etc. You can post them whenever you want, and however many of them you want. You might, for example, take to posting one journal a day during the week, or you might post two position papers a week, or you might write journals whenever you happen to have free time. Like the writing we do in our daily lives, you can choose the occasion and the quantity of your work.

If you're concerned that your bonus journals aren't meeting the threshholds of at least a check, let me know and I'll take a look at what you have posted so I can give you a preliminary evaluation.

- posted by Mike @ 8:23 AM

 
On Procrastination

I am going to begin returning papers in the order I received them. This means that the first students to get their papers in will receive their papers back from me today, while some of you probably won't see your essays returned until a week from now. While this system is less than ideal, I feel it's probably the fairest thing I can do.

As before, if you're interested in seeing your grade for this essay just shoot me an email answering these questions:

1. What did you learn about essay-writing in the process of writing this essay that you are going to carry into your last essay for this class?
2. What's one major component of your essay-writing strategy that you plan on changing?

- posted by Mike @ 1:02 PM

 
"Reading Comics: The Invisible Art"

Friday's reading--which we may or may not get to, depending on how long we spend finishing up our discussion of Jimmy Corrigan--is not online, as the course calendar declares. Instead, I handed it out to you in class last week on Monday.

- posted by Mike @ 3:49 PM

 
Annotating yo' bibliography

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I am asking you to bring to class (if you can come in that optional day) or email me before class the paper topic you have chosen to write on and a working hypothesis for how you'll approach that topic. Your hypothesis should be a working thesis that helps guide your research. Here's an example topic/hypothesis:

I want to look at how Jimmy Corrigan's formal similarity to earlier comics--particularly Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley--helps explain why Chris Ware wrote such a difficult-to-follow story. I'm hypothesizing that Ware wanted to make his story difficult to understand because it imitates a certain difficulty people could have in understanding how life works.

The Monday after Thanksgiving, the second piece of this puzzle is due in: a roughly pagelong bibliography that lists at least three strong scholarly sources that you will be able to lean on when you write your final essay. These sources should be listed in the appropriate MLA format, and should be followed by a paragraph that explains

1. The thesis of the article or book;
2. How you plan to incorporate that argument into your own;
3. General evidence that you have at least skimmed and thought about the text.

A good example:

Raeburn, Dan. Chris Ware. New Haven: Yale U. P., 2004.

Raeburn's summing-up of Ware's career identifies several categories of artistic influence that explain the major design and narrative decisions in Jimmy Corrigan. In particular, Raeburn's broad discussion about the influence of Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, and other early 20th century comics supports, in general terms, my claim that the visual style of JC is a composite of earlier comics. More interestingly, Raeburn suggests that the character and narrative design of these early comics were just as important to Ware as their visual design. Just as we can see the pages of Jimmy Corrigan imitating the visual style of Frank King, likewise we can see "Jimmy Corrigan as a cipher meant to fit any of [Ware's] own many moods" (13-14) like the open-ended characters of comics like Krazy Kat. Consequently, I'm thinking about refocusing my thesis on how Jimmy Corrigan's interaction with these visual cues from 80 years ago reflects his approach to their aesthetic and ethical cues as well. I'm becoming interested in how Ware drew from these comics but even more in how he used them to write a substantially different story.

- posted by Mike @ 7:28 AM

 
Do you want to be researched?

Bonnie, an undergraduate Writing Fellows attached to the Writing Center, is conducting some research on how prepared first-years are for the introductory composition work of English 100, and she's looking for one or two students who're willing to be interviewed about their Eng100 experiences. If you're interested in helping her out, shoot her an email at bjwilliams2.

- posted by Mike @ 10:03 PM

 
Study questions: Jimmy Corrigan
These can also serve as journal topics. Up to you.

1. One of the most consistent errors in contemporary comic book criticism is the assumption that the artist's style is unintentional; critics often assume that comic book artists have chosen their medium because they are thoroughly inexpert at the demanding techniques of more conventional two-dimensional art. As Ware's self-portrait, to the right, begins to suggest, Ware is a flexible artist conversant in a variety of imitative and expressive styles. Why, then, did he choose to compose Jimmy Corrigan in an "artless" ideogrammatic style?
2. The narrative structure of Jimmy Corrigan is so convoluted that Ware uncharacteristically relents at the end of the first 100 pages, giving his readers an accurate--if ironic--summary. What is the book's underlying structure? That is, how does Ware layer these different stories, and why does he make them difficult to follow?
3. Dan Raeburn, a friend of Ware's and the most articulate critic of Jimmy Corrigan, sees the use of color as one particularly unifying force in the text. How do you see color working in Jimmy Corrigan? What other elements suggest a textual unity?

- posted by Mike @ 8:05 PM

 
A quick request

If you're still emailing your journals to me, please use the subject line to tell me what date that journal is for. Example: Journal 8 November.

- posted by Mike @ 9:19 PM

 
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Comic Book on Earth

Beginning Wednesday, we will spend four or five class days on Chris Ware's revolutionary Jimmy Corrigan. JC is the centerpiece of the third unit, being not only the focus of two weeks of our coursework but also three student presentation slots and the main topic of the final essay. If you haven't bought yourself a copy of this book yet, please do so post-haste.

If you're interested in having a sense of how Ware revolutionized the medium, you might read chapters 3 ("Blood in the Gutter") and 6 ("Show and Tell") of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. (If you didn't have the foresight or the cash to buy a copy of UC at the beginning of the year, there are still two copies available in our libraries.)

If you're curious about other revolutionary comics (doubtlessly you have oodles of free time) you might look into Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning Maus (volume II especially) and George Herriman's abstract serial Krazy Kat. Daniel Clowes is considered Ware's most important colleague; you might be familiar with Clowes's Ghost World, although his David Boring might be more important for a study of Jimmy Corrigan. Wisconsinite Chris Thompson's recent Blankets, although not similar in style to Jimmy Corrigan, is often considered its artistic successor. There are plentiful copies of all these works in our libraries.

- posted by Mike @ 10:13 AM

 
Fresh Meat

Your peers in section 018 have begun posting blog-journals of their own. Bored of your classmates? Check out the blogs linked to ThoughtMeat.

- posted by Mike @ 6:40 PM