The thorny path of the Graphic Novel in my classroom
So far, bringing my personal library in the classroom to share with my students has been great. I see a lot more students reading that usually just sit around and stare at the ceiling. The graphic novels and Manga have been a HUGE hit, especially with the boys. I get a real laugh out of it, they're always like "YEAH PICTURES," like they're somehow getting out of reading by choosing a comic book.
Silly boys.
Anyway I've had a lot of students asking me to bring in MORE comics, but I've run out of things to bring. I went through my whole collection, and while I have somewhere around 150 of them, only about 40 of them are classroom appropriate. Mostly because of nudity. It's not that students wouldn't enjoy things like Fables or Chobits or Neon Genesis Evangelion, and it's not that (at 13-14), they wouldn't be able to understand them. No, it's because of tits and penises (peni?).
It's funny, because Young Adult literature (marketed to 12-18 year olds) is actually pretty filthy these days. I don't know if it was always like this, but Breaking Dawn sort of broke the "glass ceiling" so to speak when it comes to sex in these books. It's not okay to describe it in extreme detail of course, just like it's not okay for there to be a lot of f-bombs, but sex can happen. And teens LOVE IT. Because they know that stuff is out there. Some of them are even sexually active at this point (which is HORRIFYING but true). I was told by a Professor I had that when it comes to YA lit, you have to sell the sex and violence. Students love sex and violence, and they will devour books based on that alone. And if the sex scene is one page out of 1000, well, you just tricked a teen into reading a book that they probably loved.
But the abstraction of iconography lends a sort of protection to literature. It's okay to read the word "boob". It is not okay to SEE a boob. Even if it's a highly stylized boob that in no way reflects reality.
We talked about this in my Graphic Novel class that I took, about how the immediacy of the medium makes things that much more offensive, that when you read words on paper there is enough abstraction that you become once removed from what you're "seeing". "Penis" is not offensive, it's a word. A drawing of a penis is somehow profane.
Anyway that's what I've been thinking about lately.
Silly boys.
Anyway I've had a lot of students asking me to bring in MORE comics, but I've run out of things to bring. I went through my whole collection, and while I have somewhere around 150 of them, only about 40 of them are classroom appropriate. Mostly because of nudity. It's not that students wouldn't enjoy things like Fables or Chobits or Neon Genesis Evangelion, and it's not that (at 13-14), they wouldn't be able to understand them. No, it's because of tits and penises (peni?).
It's funny, because Young Adult literature (marketed to 12-18 year olds) is actually pretty filthy these days. I don't know if it was always like this, but Breaking Dawn sort of broke the "glass ceiling" so to speak when it comes to sex in these books. It's not okay to describe it in extreme detail of course, just like it's not okay for there to be a lot of f-bombs, but sex can happen. And teens LOVE IT. Because they know that stuff is out there. Some of them are even sexually active at this point (which is HORRIFYING but true). I was told by a Professor I had that when it comes to YA lit, you have to sell the sex and violence. Students love sex and violence, and they will devour books based on that alone. And if the sex scene is one page out of 1000, well, you just tricked a teen into reading a book that they probably loved.
But the abstraction of iconography lends a sort of protection to literature. It's okay to read the word "boob". It is not okay to SEE a boob. Even if it's a highly stylized boob that in no way reflects reality.
We talked about this in my Graphic Novel class that I took, about how the immediacy of the medium makes things that much more offensive, that when you read words on paper there is enough abstraction that you become once removed from what you're "seeing". "Penis" is not offensive, it's a word. A drawing of a penis is somehow profane.
Anyway that's what I've been thinking about lately.