Carleton University Winter 2018 Department of English READING COMIC-CON ENGL 4115A: Culture and the Text/ENGL 5900X Selected Topic in English Studies I Prerequisites for ENGL 4115: fourth-year standing or permission of the department. Prerequisites for ENGL 5900: graduate standing or permission of the department. Preclusions: None Wednesdays / 11:35-2:25 Location: 3202 Richcraft Hall (formerly River Building) Instructor: Brian Johnson Email:
[email protected] Office: 1917 Dunton Tower Phone: (613) 520-2600 ext. 2331 Office Hours: Mondays 12:00 pm-2:00 pm or by appointment Course Description Comic conventions and festivals have become ubiquitous in contemporary urban North American culture. As temporary annual hubs for the convergence of a variety of media industries, cultural producers, retailers, consumers, and fan communities, events like the San Diego Comic-Con International or the Toronto Comic Arts Festival play a critical role in the circulation and promotion of a geek culture that is not only consumable, but participatory, collective, and internally differentiated. At the same time, however, and like geek culture itself, Comic-Cons have also become objects of popular representation that magnetize an often stereotyped constellation of values and meanings. Our goal in this class will be to describe and analyze the cultural semantics of the Comic-Con sector in North America in order to better understand the symbolic roles these nodal events play within our contemporary cultural imaginaries. Our analysis will move along a dual track. On the one hand, we will examine representations of actual conventions, taking account of how organizers, attendees, and the press market, participate in, report, and reflect upon this genre of media event.