Sight Lines

For the past few years, I've included at least one graphic novel in my undergraduate syllabuses, and inevitably students tell me near the end of a given course that Watchmen or Persepolis was one of the highlights of their term: they didn't expect to find this sort of idiomatic pop culture among the highfalutin and ancient material they associate with capital-E English capital-L Literature. And discovering that you could get credit for reading comics seems temptingly easy and vaguely (if safely) subversive. I admit I exploit graphic media as a selling-point for my classes-to make myself appear, well, cooler than I really am and maybe boost my teaching ratings: it's a ploy aimed at my lateteen, video-savvy target market, and I offer up visual culture as a kind of seductive eye candy, a gateway drug into the harder, more thoroughly textual stuff, like capital-P Poetry.