Courses in the FIG:
UGST 109 FIG Seminar
Monday/Wednesday | 16:00-16:50 | 16469 | 1 Credit
Visual Culture is a First-Year Interest Group seminar designed to help you transition into life at the University of Oregon while building skills you will use across your college career. In this course, we explore the university—and the world around it—through the images, screens, spaces, and media that shape how we see, interpret, and understand our surroundings.Using the UO campus and Eugene community as a living laboratory, you will encounter visual culture in many forms: films, comics, photography, paintings, museums, libraries, and everyday campus spaces. Along the way, you will learn how scholars analyze images and media, and you will practice thinking critically about how images produce meaning, shape perception, and circulate across different cultural contexts.Just as importantly, this course is about you: how to read and make images thoughtfully, how to reflect on your position as a viewer and learner, and how to navigate the academic and social resources that support your success at UO. This seminar connects directly to your FIG‑linked courses and introduces you to the habits of inquiry and collaboration that define university learning.
COLT 103 Introduction to Comparative Literature
Arts & Letters (>1); >GP; >IC | Monday/Wednesday | 12:00-13:20 | 11566 | 4 Credits
+Dis | Friday | 10:00-10:50 | 11567
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.
ENG 280 Introduction to Comic Studies
Arts & Letters (>1) | Monday/Wednesday | 10:00-11:20 | 12065 | 4 Credits
+Dis | Friday | 11:00-11:50 | 12068
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.
