QUIRKY CURRICULUM Professor’s class gets graphic
From Red and Black (University of Georgia): QUIRKY CURRICULUM: Professor�s class gets graphicChris Pizzino has a cure for American culture � more comics.
University professor Chris Pizzino teaches two classes extolling the virtues of the graphic novel and science fiction. MICHAEL BARONE/Staff
�The anti-comics prejudice is out there,� said Pizzino, assistant professor in the University English department. �You pick it up as you go, even if you were never told it in no uncertain terms. It�s in our cultural DNA and we�re having to do some intellectual gene therapy to change how people think about comics. So that�s what I want the comics class to do.�
Pizzino, who has taught a recurring class on graphic novels in past semesters and is now teaching a class on science fiction, said he developed an interest in studying the subjects when he realized their potential for scholarly inquiry.
�Such choices don�t always arise,� he said. �I�m actually very fortunate, here at the University of Georgia, to be able to teach these classes because they�re not on the books that colleges and universities have been very supportive of making part of the English curriculum. I�ve definitely spoken to colleagues at other universities who have met some form of resistance about this. And for the science fiction, the same.�
Though Pizzino has not received resistance from professors, he said some students have come in with misguided expectations for the comics class.
�Every once in a while, someone will take the comics class out of a kind of whimsical curiosity, thinking that it�s just going to be pure fun,� he said. �And most of those people are happy to discover that they are having fun but they�re also learning to read comics. I haven�t yet had anyone turn bitter when they discover this class is going to be work as well as fun.�
And people�s understanding of comics as a lower literary form, and their urge to hide that interest as they grow older, is something Pizzino said he understands.
�I think I absorbed what was in the air,� Pizzino said. �I�ve always read comics, and then like a lot of people of my generation I kind of quit for a while and then came back to them. I came back to them to find they had been changing and were changing before my eyes in terms of the kinds of comics that were being produced.�
It�s this use of the medium as a literary form, and the cultural attitudes surrounding it, that drives Pizzino�s research � as he is working on a book entitled �Arrested Development: Comics at the Bounderies of Literature.�
�I feel that the barrier is much lower for science fiction as a narrative mode than it is for comics as a medium,� Pizzino said. �Although science fiction is definitely put down, it�s never had to undergo the legacy of censorship that comics have undergone.�
Science fiction also enjoys a higher status in American culture because certain works in that genre, such as �Fahrenheit 451� and �Stranger in a Strange Land� have become cultural touchstones to non-fans of the genre.
�At various points in American history, various science fiction novels have come to be very important to different sectors of Americans,� Pizzino said.
Still, despite the significance that science fiction and graphic novel works have had in American culture, Americans still reject science fiction and comic �nerds.�
That stigma of over-enjoyment, of loving sci-fi and the graphic novel a little too much, is something Pizzino rejects.
�I guess in the eyes of some Americans there�s something uncool about excessive enthusiasm about anything,� he said.
But a secret love of comics and science fiction is something Pizzino believes is starting to be drawn out of people by modern cinema.
�We�re seeing a lot of closeted nerds now decloseted by going to movies,� Pizzino said. �And people around the world went to see �Inception,� which was a very nerdy movie to the tune of $800 million,� Pizzino said.
Using the tools of scholars before him, and the cultural value of both comics and science fiction, has become the main method Pizzino uses to spark a love for both genres in his students.
�Comic scholarship has been going on in a serious way for, depending on how you measure the time, a few years, or a decade, or more,� he said. �The comics class is very much about either
introducing a type of literacy that people may not be very familiar with or reintroducing a type of literacy and getting people to see it anew � [and] that it gives the same pleasures and challenges and rewards as any other kind of literature.�
But though he said he believes comics and science fiction are not as valued as intellectual forms, it�s become more than a topic of conversation.
In a way, it is the conversation.
With the larger advent of sci-fi pop culture, enthusiasts everywhere are �coming out of the closet.�
�Although comics are definitely seen by many in a sort of lesser light, they�re also very much a part of cultural parlance,� Pizzino said. �Even people who say they�re not science fiction nerds probably use some term every day that came from a science fiction text. They go to see science fiction films. We�re all nerds now, to some degree or another.�
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