Academic Team:
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins (kkelp@uoregon.edu)
FIG Seminar Instructor
Helen
FIG Assistant
Meet your FIG Instructor and Assistant!
Courses in the FIG:
UGST 109 FIG Seminar
TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 1 Credit
How can we use images to understand and challenge the world around us? This FIG will explore how visual media and graphic narratives popularize and subvert representations of race, gender, and ethnicity. How do films, photographs, and graphic narratives produce imaginaries that influence the ways we see the world and each other? What are the ethics of representation and how can artists and authors influence popular perceptions? Using contemporary media and comic books we will consider how we interpret images and visualize community and difference. We will have opportunities to work directly with artists to discuss their methods and reasons for the work they produce. Likewise, we will look into the business aspects of visual media. We will engage in collaborative and individual creative, hands-on activities complemented by opportunities for self-reflection.
ENG 280 Intro to Comic Studies
Arts & Letters (>1)| TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 4 Credits
This course provides an introduction to the analysis of comics and graphic narratives in terms of their poetics, genres, forms, history, and the academic discipline of Comics Studies. Our multifaceted examination will balance close readings of primary texts with in-depth research and analysis of the development of the form in U.S. culture. By reading a range of comic-art forms (the newspaper strip, the comic book, the graphic novel, etc.), informed by several examples of contemporary comics scholarship, we will investigate the medium’s complex interplay of word and image as well as the role of cultural factors in the publication history of comics
COLT 103 Visual Culture
Arts & Letters (>1)| >GP | TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 4 Credits
The "Introduction to Comparative Literature" series (COLT 101, 102, 103) introduces students to the study of world culture. Each course emphasizes the richness and complexity of world culture, covering a broad array of works from classical Greece to the modern Caribbean, from Shakespeare to the Kenyan essayist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o. However, where COLT 101 and 102 focus primarily on written texts, COLT 103 introduces students to the study of Comparative Literature by considering visual culture from across the world. "Visual culture" is a term that has been used within the discipline for several decades now, and includes topics in world film and digital media; performance and live culture; and, finally, texts that combine word and image (e.g. graphic novels and photojournalism). In many ways the study of visual culture now represents the cutting edge of Comparative Literature as a discipline. COLT 101, 102 and 103 complement each other, and may be taken individually or out of sequence. COLT 103 satisfies both the University's Arts and Letters requirement and the International Cultures multicultural requirement.