...If This Be To Increase the Sum Total of Human Wisdom!

Welcome to the blog for the American University course LIT 308/608, Studies in Genre: The Graphic Novel. Our course title is problematic in various ways, and I invite you to reflect on both its shortcomings and its accuracies. To help focus our thinking about the potential meaning behind the ungainly term "graphic novel," I encourage you to follow this link to a copy of Eddie Campbell's Graphic Novel Manifesto, a not-altogether-serious document that is also not altogether kidding. One point in particular deserves special notice:

6. The goal of the graphic novelist is to take the form of the comic book, which has become an embarrassment, and raise it to a more ambitious and meaningful level. This normally involves expanding its size, but we should avoid getting into arguments about permissible size. If an artist offers a set of short stories as his new graphic novel, (as Eisner did with A Contract with God) we should not descend to quibbling. We should only ask whether his new graphic novel is a good or bad set of short stories. If he or she uses characters that appear in another place, such as Jimmy Corrigan's various appearances outside of the core book, or Gilbert Hernandez' etc. or even characters that we do not want to allow into our "secret society," we shall not dismiss them on this account. If his book no longer looks anything like comic books we should not quibble as to that either. We should only ask whether it increases the sum total of human wisdom.

Let's try to keep that last question in mind as we interrogate our various graphic novels this semester, starting with Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. (And it couldn't hurt to read some comments from Yang himself on his publisher's website; click here to do so, and scroll down to see Yang's comments on the origins of his story and some additional cartooning featuring the Monkey King. You should click here also, for Yang's discussion of the use of stereotypes in his work.)