Abstract:
Comics in all forms are enjoying ever-increasing popularity, both among the general reading public and as an academic field of study. They have also become increasingly relevant as a teaching tool—both for discussing literature and for learning language and culture more generally. But how exactly might we teach with them? To address this question, this lecture will provide tools, methods, and vocabulary for understanding, analyzing, and critically evaluating comics and other forms of graphic narratives. It will give an overview of the medium’s history, as well as the various forms and genres of comics, and explore the didactic potential of these texts in the context of an EFL classroom through a number of case studies and examples.
Bio:
Birte Wege is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. She wrote her dissertation on the graphic narrative documentaries of Emmanuel Guibert, Ho Che Anderson, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco; it was published as Drawing on the Past by Campus Verlag in 2019. Her current project examines robots and performance in American theatre. She has taught extensively on 20th- and 21st-century North American literature, theatre, and comics, as well as Foreign Language Pedagogy and didactics of culture.