Anderst, Leah. "Feeling With Real Others: Narrative Empathy In The Autobiographies Of Doris Lessing And Alison Bechdel." Narrative 23.3 (2015): 271-290. Academic Search Complete. 5 Dec. 2016.
This is an article providing literary criticisms of autobiographies written by Doris Lessing and Alison Bechdel, particularly in how they present narrative empathy in their texts. Empathy in literature can produce a number of responses in the readers and influence their view of the world. This is somewhat similar to reader response criticism, which studies the effects that a story has on readers when they make a personal connection to the text. I believe that these ideas play a large role in establishing relatability within a text, regardless of format. However, one of the texts discussed in the article is Fun Home, which I decided to incorporate into the discussion aspect of my project. Anderst discusses narrative empathy as a method for training readers to understand the experiences of others and find common ground between themselves and people of different backgrounds. Gray, Hillary. “The History of Graphic Novels.” Graphic Novels in the Classroom, University of Illinois , 2010, courseweb.ischool.illinois.edu/~gray21/GraphicNovels/index.html.
This source is a website created for the Illinois School Library Media Association 2010 Conference. It offers information about the history and background of graphic novels, showing briefly how they grew from comic books and, on other pages of the website, how graphic novels can fit into lesson plans for teaching English, history, and social studies. In addition to the overview information, the website features a number of links to other resources and lists graphic novels that the author deems appropriate for various classroom age ranges. Before delving specifically into my research topic, I would like to use this source as a way to provide context for the graphic novel format and to offer some explanation of what it is, as well as where it has come from. This source also contributes to the section of my website concerning the benefits of teaching and reading graphic novels.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1993.
This book is a guide to understanding comics language, presented in comic book form. Each chapter focuses on a different aspects of how comic books work, discussing things such as the passing of time, use of transitions between panels, lines and the style that goes into them, and even the steps that many cartoon artists go through. This source is part of what motivated me to pursue this topic, because it taught me much of what could be accomplished through the graphic novel format. It is also important in providing evidence for one of the key benefits that I discuss in the research section of my project: creating images universal enough to apply to almost any reader’s life. I consulted it heavily while initially thinking about and outlining this project.
This periodical, which was published in Education Digest last year, reiterates much of the information communicated by the other sources in a concise space. Watts comments on the recent popularity of contemporary graphic novels, discusses their value as elements of school curriculums, and approaches the concept of visual literacy which I go into throughout the main body of my research section. The remainder of the article is a useful source for developing my discussion of how graphic novels advantageously use an effective blend of text and imagery to give stories a new format. I decided to look at this source while working on a few areas of my website, since I want to provide a more comprehensive resource covering the graphic novel format in the spectrum of young adult literature.
Rationale
Last semester, spring 2016, I took the Graphic Literature class and learned about how the medium has grown and evolved over time. As someone who grew up without having any exposure to graphic novels, I found the course content to be very interesting. Through the class, I was able to read a variety of graphic novel works, and toward the end of the semester I conducted some research on how Alison Bechdel's Fun Home as a graphic novel could serve as a particularly useful tool for LGBT youth living through experiences that Bechdel has shared and written about. As someone who has lived through a few of the events discussed in her memoir, I viewed the assignment with personal interest. I chose to consider my own feelings of relating with the text alongside how this might impact young adult literature as a whole. The key factor of the paper that I constructed was that comics language of creating imagery simple enough to be recognizable to a wide audience (like saying that a stick figure could represent any person) allows for people to see themselves in her experiences and find comfort in the process. This is an idea that I revisited on this website.
While considering this new project, I decided to shift the focus somewhat from my previous project and make it relevant to the discussion that goes on within the LIT 270 classroom. A number of my examples dealt with young adults being able to take the author of a graphic novel memoir as a sort of role model to offer advice and show readers that they aren't alone in their experiences. Young adult literature, in its larger reach, seems to do a lot of this through its works and prominent themes. As I outlined and continued my research, the concept of graphic novels as a particularly useful format for fostering relatability split into a few specific ideas that led to my general conclusions. Scholarly sources regarding graphic novels approach a range of topics, which made it slightly difficult to find examples that directly correlate to the focus of this project.
The visual literacy, a key component of the comics format, is a way to impart powerful images while also recreating scenes that might strike the reader as familiar. Visual and textual literacy, when combined, create a work that is more accessible to the masses and thus a better conduit for exposing readers to relatable texts. Finally, the effect that this format has on minority authors and readers has a lot to do not only with relatability in general, but connects to some of the specific details that we have discussed in the classroom of everyone having different experiences but managing to use young adult literature in a way that allows any person to gain insight into the lives of others. The website ended up being an explanation of why graphic novels are beneficial for the young adult literature genre, with some suggestions of texts to read that support this case. Toward the end of developing the project, partly due to how busy the end of the semester becomes, I felt myself running out of things to add to the discussion without losing my focus. The website, as it exists currently, could certainly be more thorough in its discussion, but I decided to conclude it in at its current stage in order to avoid making the text too extensive.