Because we won’t have much time in discussion to talk about Neil Gaiman’s work, feel free to comment here or post any questions you have.
Further to Sian’s question today in lecture: is the The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes a text worth teaching in a literature course?
5 Comments
March 23, 2008 at 11:44 am
Sandman is worth teaching, considering that Neil Gaiman is a legitimate novelist who has done several novels, rather than being a comic writer. I feel that Sandman is more like a comic(graphic) trapping that wraps around a collection of intense short stories. Why would short stories be banned from being taught in a literature class, then?
March 26, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Thanks for the comment Kavin. I wonder why we might be more accepting of Hinds’ version of Beowulf than a contemporary creative construction in comic form (and yes I realize the alliteration).
Secondly, your point about genre raises some interesting questions – can we accept any form that tells a narrative so long as we can reframe it in the vein of being something more familiar to the world of literary studies?
Are comic depictions new literary ground or a remapping of what’s already in existence?
March 27, 2008 at 11:00 pm
A question for more general discussion….
What do you make of Death’s comment on p.225 when Dream tells here that Burgess was trying to capture her: Dream says “it was not ME they wanted. It was you.” Death just shrugs it off saying “yeah. I know.”
Any ideas or interpretations of this panel?
April 12, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Ok, don’t know if people still reading this.
Have you guys noticed the words on the picture, “i’m in ur storiez deconstructin ur heroz?”
This actually originated from an internet “meme” called “I Am In Your Base Killing Your D00ds”. This meme originated from somethingawful.com and was the caption on a screenshot of the video game Starcraft. Somethingawful.com soon spread this meme to a large part of the North American internet space (with the help of 4chan.org), and it became quite legendary.
A meme is a self replicating ideas that transmits through people, and as in this case, it also transforms into different variations, burning into the consciousness of some internet users.
The reason why I’m posting this is because I’m quite interested in the internet culture, as I believe the internet is a major component of the modern popular culture; it is worth studying as an university course, even.
April 15, 2008 at 12:03 am
Kavin,
The internet is changing the way academics work and think about the world, so the internet is a hot topic of debate, particularly in the world of OpenAccess (where researchers and scholars can make their work publicly available on the internet instead of behind subscription only websites that limit the circulation of knowledge).
I’m particularly interested in how the internet as a means of communication is changing the way we think about knowledge and what this might mean for the social sciences and the humanities. If you’re interested, I can send you the link to a wiki that was developed for a summer course on scholarly publishing I took last year and you can see the result of academic and internet interaction – it’s almost too exciting for words!