Professors Study Funny Papers

The decades-long push to make English Departments more relevant has only succeeded in marginalizing them. “The energy around comics and the relation of comics to the question of narrating lives in our contemporary moment are palpable,” Hillary Chute asserts in Profession, a journal published by the Modern Language Association of America (MLAA). “This is especially the case in our profession.”

“Literature syllabi at the college and graduate level now often include comics texts, and teachers across the country are developing all sorts of comics courses (this coming spring at the University of Chicago, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and I will be coteaching a mixed undergraduate course called Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography).”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.