Academic Interest In Graphic Novels By Hillary Chute

Academic interest in graphic novels and comics has skyrocketed in the last few years. Increasingly, educational research is produced regarding the incorporation of comics and graphic novels in elementary and secondary classrooms to support a variety of literacies, including visual, textual, and technological. Dozens of lesson plans geared toward students in ESL (English as a Second Language), Advanced Placement, and Special Education programs utilize these works. Scholars in a range of disciplines—such as sociology, English literature, and history—use graphic novels and comics to investigate issues like cultural imperialism, traumatic historical events, and homophobia. Graphic novels form a subgroup of texts within the larger comics discussion. The exact criteria for works that fall under this label are unclear, although popular conception denotes that graphic novels are longer than typical comic books and often self-contained. However, the term is problematic. Despite their classification as “novels,” these books may be fiction or nonfiction. Many of the most highly acclaimed graphic novels are, in fact, autographics, autobiographical works like Persepolis, Fun Home, and Maus. To eliminate the contradictory nomenclature, this paper adopts the lesser known—yet more accurate—term graphic narrative, “a book-length work in the medium of comics” (Chute, “Comics as Literature?” 453) coined by Hillary Chute to include a greater range and variety of book-length multimodal texts. Comics are unique in that

Rather, the medium opens the opportunity to engage in more complex and nuanced engagement with the text by providing the basic forms of setting and characters as well as visually demonstrating the progression of events so that readers may immediately perceive and understand them, bypassing the interpretive and mental visualization processes and freeing readers’ mental