ENG 220
In her 1927 On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf laments that, “The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” (7). Nearly a century later, reliance on medical tools like the universal pain chart for assessing pain, as well as the many parodies of this chart, suggest that we still don’t have a mainstream, widely accepted form of language that accurately describes being ill.
Might comics and graphic novels, in their combination of images and narrative, be the form of communication Woolf was seeking to articulate the illness experience? This course focuses specifically on the field of graphic medicine, which examines the use of comics and graphic novels as a medium for communicating stories about medicine and the experience of illness. This study of graphic medicine offers a wealth of potentialities on ways to help expand one’s perspective and cultivate an open mind capable of respecting various ways of knowing and being.
The course is centered around reading comprehension and the ability to analyze and evaluate how meaning is made. You will be reading primary sources—comics and graphic novels—as well as secondary sources—analyses of those comics and graphic novels. Part of completing the reading will require you to use hypothes.is, which is a software you will access through our course D2L site that will allow you to annotate the assigned readings and see your classmates’ annotations, as well as mine.
In addition to these readings, weekly assignments may include shorter writing assignments. You will also be asked to complete longer writing assignments—a mid-term and a final—specific instructions for which you will receive as the term progresses.