Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

This course will trace the rise of “comics journalism,” a term first coined and popularized by the Maltese-American artist Joe Sacco in the 1990s. Surpassing the political or editorial cartoon in both space and scope, graphic reporting is often aligned with subjective or opinion journalism, or “op-art.” It is rooted in long-form reporting, oral interviews, and embedded research—all communicated via the full arsenal of tools available in the comics medium. Like investigative journalism more broadly, graphic reporting covers the breadth of topics that affect modern life: from on-going wars and conflicts, to mass migration and the immigrant experience, to environmental disasters, trial reporting, the prison industrial-complex, and so on. Often approached as a predominately American phenomenon, practiced by first and foremost by Sacco himself, it is an increasingly dominant subgenre of French-language comics, as can be seen in the runaway success of
Le photographe
(2003-2006)
—
artist Emmanuel Guibert’s stunning, multi-album collaboration with the late photojournalist Didier Lefèvre, about the latter’s 1986 humanitarian mission through Pakistan and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the Afghan War (1979-1989)—and in a proliferation of French-language terms and formal prizes. While glancing at a prehistory of proto-forms (like illustrated news in the UK and the US or “printed literature” in Europe), this class will reconstitute a narrower French-language lineage of graphic reporting, through early children’s supplements, wartime comics propaganda, and postwar and present-day illustrated magazines.

This course also juxtaposes the work of active artist-reporters, with non-journalist illustrators whose work is adjacent to reporting. Class held in English, with primary and secondary materials in English and/or French (with English translation).
French majors and minors must submit papers in French, as must graduate students in the Department of French.
This class will also involve a few class trips (TBD, likely to the Museum of the Society of Illustrators and the Rare Books and Manuscript Library), as well as at least one in-person event at the Maison Française.

W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
Instructor: Aubrey A Gabel
CULPA: 2 Info
3 points

Details

CLFR GU4612

Annie Ernaux: Writing as a Knife

R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
Instructor: Thomas Dodman
CULPA: 2 Info
3 points

Details

CLFR GU4722

Radical Enlightenment Women

W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
Instructor: Joanna R Stalnaker
CULPA: 18 Info
3 points

Details

FREN GU4842

FRENCH FOR DIPLOMATS

MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
Instructor: Mohamed Yacine Chitour
Info
3 points

Details

FREN GU4995

Sexuality and the City

This reading-intensive seminar explores the interrelated histories of sexuality and the city in twentieth-century New York and Paris. The city has classically been represented as the site of sexual freedom and experimentation, but also of sexual disorder, immorality, and danger. We will consider how urban conditions and processes (from immigration, racial segregation, and the development of new forms of housing and mass culture to urban blight and urban renewal) shaped sexual practices, identities, communities, ethics, and people’s understanding of the boundaries between public and private. We will also survey how sexual matters (from the spread and reorganization of sexual commerce and the development of new sexual moralities to the formation of identity-based sexual communities and cultural movements and the campaigns of anti-vice activists) shaped urban processes and politics. We will pay particular attention to the critical role played by sexuality in constituting racial, class, and national hierarchies and to how questions of racial and class difference and inequality shaped discourses of sexuality. Methodologically, we will consider what we can learn from social and cultural histories, novels, and films, and how we can read them with and against one another. We will think about how the novels and films are historically shaped and situated and how they served as critical interventions in historical processes and debates. The course is grounded in New York, especially Harlem, Greenwich Village, and Times Square, and in Paris, especially Montmartre, Montparnasse, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and it explores multiple crossings and influences between the two.
The final paper will allow you to pursue your interest in a particular aspect of the history of sexuality and the city by reading (or viewing) and critically assessing additional texts on a subject of your choosing.