How Japanese Comic Books Influence Taiwanese Students A
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Reading Comic Books Critically: How Japanese Comic Books Influence Taiwanese Students A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Education by Fang-Tzu Hsu 2015 © Copyright by Fang-Tzu Hsu 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reading Comic Books Critically: How Japanese Comic Books Influence Taiwanese Students by Fang-Tzu Hsu Doctor of Philosophy in Education University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Carlos A. Torres, Chair Education knows no boundaries but hot button topics, like comic books, demonstrate school, teacher and parent limitations. Japanese comic books (manga) are a litmus test of pedagogical tolerance. Because they play an important role in the lives of most Taiwanese teenagers, I give them pride of place in this dissertation. To understand Japanese comic books and their influence, I use Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy to combine perspectives from cultural studies, comparative education, and educational sociology. With the cooperation of the administration, faculty and students of a Taiwanese junior high school, I used surveys, a textual analysis of five student-selected titles and interviews with students and educators. I discovered that Japanese manga contain complex and sometimes contradictory ideologies of ethnicity, gender, class, and violence. From an ethnic perspective, although students may glean cultural content from manga heroes and their retinues, people of color and non-Japanese Asians are either caricatures or non-existent; although Taiwanese teenager readers seem unaware of this. From a gender standpoint, neither the female characters’ provocative representation nor the male characters’ slavering responses to it raise students’ and teachers’ concerns.
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