Tag Archives: pedagogy

Comics Criticism 101: An Introduction

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This essay was written in my first-year composition course at the George Washington University. University Writing Program faculty draw on a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (my Ph.D. is in American history, with current research on abolitionist visual rhetoric) to teach students to “enter the conversation” of academic research—to do detailed analysis and to engage existing scholarship rather than simply regurgitate it. This particular assignment arose out of the cross-fertilization that Craig Fischer argues is emblematic of comics scholarship, where academics, fans, practitioners, and popular critics seed each others’ ideas and produce more interesting work.

I had been teaching a “five-page paper” version of this exercise, where students analyze specific visual elements of a chosen comic or graphic novel in order to develop a claim in response to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. This served as an introduction to comics (McCloud is great for that) but also to claim-making, because, as a foundational text, McCloud is the perfect foil: authoritative, comprehensive, and eminently fallible. Students always find interesting exceptions to his rules, new categories of panel transition or image/text interaction, and concrete ways to develop his vague generalizations.  But the papers still felt academic in the pejorative sense: they represented a school genre that addressed only the professor as audience.

To move away from that, I consulted the Comix-Scholars Discussion List, fishing for ideas about formal criticism in the blogosphere: hence Noah. Noah was very interested in the project, helped me rethink the genre of comics criticism, and very kindly loaded me up with examples, many of which went onto the assigned reading list as a diverse set of models we read and discussed in class. Students now have a broader range of rhetorical choices to make regarding introductions, integration of images, organization, descriptive language, and analytical tone—not to mention examples of how to make a claim that might matter to someone outside the classroom.

As a final gesture, Noah asked me if he could publish some of the best examples students produced. I am most grateful for his generosity and I hope you enjoy the ones we’ve selected. The students are excited about sharing their work and, I trust, will be watching the comments closely. Please welcome them to the conversation.

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Phillip Troutman is Assistant Professor of Writing at The George Washington University, trout@gwu.edu

Mamaskin

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I published this in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back. I was thinking about it again in the context of our ongoing discussion of comics, reading, Lynda Barry, and pedagogy (parts of said conversation being here and here and here. Anyway, I thought I’d reprint it, and then talk a little about how I wrote it and (generalizing wildly) about how people create.
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Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl named Lorna, who lived with her mother in a house in the woods. Lorna was so beautiful that everyone who saw her fell in love with her. This was a nuisance; she couldn’t go to the stream to get a drink of water without getting twenty marriage proposals, and it was hard to feed the hens when the lawn was covered with young men kneeling and weeping. Lorna got so fed up that she didn’t even want to leave the house, and when she did leave it she’d have to put a bag over her head, which made it hard to see. Her mother, who was old and wrinkled and had an odd sense of humor, would giggle when she saw Lorna walking around and bumping into things. But she did love her daughter, and she knew this sort of thing wouldn’t do for the long term. So she told Lorna, “When I die, and you must seek your fortune, take my skin and wear it to disguise your beauty.”

Eventually, Lorna’s mother died. Lorna did as she’d been told; she took her mother’s skin, clothed herself in it, and went off to seek her fortune. She enjoyed walking through the fields without a bag over her head and without having to dodge love-sick suitors, even though having to wear her mother’s skin was a little icky. Finally, after a long trek, Lorna reached a large castle. She knocked and the Prince who owned the castle came to the door. As it happened, he needed someone to watch his geese. Lorna took the job.

Lorna moved into a little hut near the castle. She might have lived happily ever after there tending the geese, except that her mother’s skin didn’t fit exactly right. During the day it was okay, but at night when she was trying to sleep it pinched and itched, and she discovered that if she wanted any sleep at all she had to remove it. So she put it at the foot of her bed. And in the morning the geese would poke their heads into her hut, and see her sleeping in her natural form. Then they’d fly into the air singing, “Honk! Lorna’s prettier than you think! Honk! Honk!”

One day the Prince happened to be up early wandering out in the fields. He heard the geese honking about Lorna, and he was curious. So he walked over to Lorna’s hut and saw her through the window just as she was about to put on her mother’s skin. “Oh, drat!” said Lorna. “Does this mean you’re going to fall in love with me now?” And of course it did. But the Prince was fairly handsome himself, and, to tell the truth, Lorna was tired of geese and of dead skin. So she married him, and after a while, as she got older, she grew less pretty, and started to look rather like her mother even without the skin. Eventually only the prince and the geese and her children loved her, and all the young men fell in love with somebody else. Which was perfectly all right with her.
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So…like I said, I wrote this a while back. It was originally supposed to be part of a Composition and Grammar textbook I was working on for high school students taking courses by correspondence. I was doing a unit on narrative and was having students do writing based on fairy tales. I would give them a bare bones outline of the fairy tale plot (one or two sentences), and then tell them to expand the story (into three or four paragraphs). I provided several examples of expanded narratives, and the story above was one such. (I think we didn’t use it because my boss at the time felt the whole mother’s skin thing was too creepy…and maybe she had a point.)

Anyway. Thinking about writing this, and the exercise it was a part of, made me think of this comment by Dan Kois about Lynda Barry’s pedagogy:

As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.

The exercise I was doing — asking students to expand a fairy tale — is basically an exercise that Barry says is unnecessary, if I understand Dan correctly. Barry’s saying that people naturally know how to tell a story in the time (or space) allotted. It’s not an issue of craft (that is, learned ability) because it’s natural, like falling in a lake. If you have ten minutes to tell a story, you tell it in ten minutes. Simple as that.

So were all my efforts superfluous? I didn’t think so then…and now that I have a son, and am subjected to his narrative efforts all the time, I’m even less convinced. If you listen to small kids tell stories, the thing you notice is that they don’t know how to do it. There was a horrible period there, for example, where my son was obsessed with Garfield. He wanted the strips read to him all the time (which was bad enough), but he also wanted to explain and relay the strips to others. And he just couldn’t do it. He could see the strip in his mind, and he generally got the words right, but he couldn’t figure out what needed to be told when and how to a person who hadn’t seen the strip. The narrative would start and stutter and stop and go back again, and miss the joke and then he’d start over and you just wanted to claw your eyes out and curse the name of Garfield forevermore.

My son’s much, much better at narrative now…but it’s not because he got in touch with his natural essence. It’s because he’s read a lot more, and listened to people talk a lot more, and has internalized (some of) the rules and codes for creating stories. And it really is often “rules and codes” — he and his friends tell stories to each other, and they are obsessive about breaking their stories into chapters…and almost as obsessive about repeating the same story in the same way as it was originally told to them. And…my son actually explained to me at length at one point how he was going to write the back cover blurb for his book. Which maybe means he’s being corrupted by corporate culture, but as a doting father, I prefer to believe that his command of point-of-purchase advertising is instead a sign of increased narrative mastery.

Be that as it may…I think my version of the “Mamaskin” story itself also suggests that narrative is less a natural reflex than an acquired skill. Specifically, the story is put together from other stories. The basic plot, as I said, is taken from a folk tale. My retelling is also informed, obviously, by my generalized knowledge of folk tales, and of folk tale adaptations. Specifically, it’s probably more than a little touched by Patricia Wrede’s YA feminist Enchanted Forest series, with the smart, capable Princess Cimorene, who starts young but as the series goes along gets older and wiser.

The end of the my story, though, comes from here:

He, the one they recognised, no longer thought–his mind being so occupied–that love might still exist. With all that was happening at the time it’s understandable that the only thing they would tell of later was what he did, the incredible action he performed, which no one had seen before: the gesture of supplication, in which he threw himself down before them, imploring them not to show love. Alarmed by this and shaking they raised him to his feet. They interpreted his
impulsive behaviour in their own way, while at the same time forgiving him. He must have found it indescribably liberating to find that they’d all misunderstood him, despite his desperately explicit manner.

It was likely they’d let him stay. As the days passed he came to see more clearly that the love they were so vain about and which they secretly encouraged in one another did not affect him. He almost had to smile at the trouble they took and it became obvious that their concern for him could not amount to much.

What did they know about who he was? He was now so terribly difficult to love, and he felt there was only the One who was capable of it. But He was not yet willing.

That’s the conclusion of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and one of my favorite passages in all of literature. And since I liked it so much, I stole it, which is more or less what writers do. (I also was thinking of this line from slightly earlier in Rilke’s narrative: ” The simple love of his sheep didn’t affect him; like light falling through clouds, it was scattered all about him and shimmered softly upon the meadows.” I love that.)

I’m not denying that there’s a personal element in my version of “Mamaskin” as well. Like Lorna (and lots of other people), I found marriage rather a relief. But I’d argue that (like Lorna’s again) the relief is itself a narrative one. When you’re in the story of romance, you’re in the story of romance; getting out of that is figuring a way to tell a different tale, which is closely related to living a different life.

Barry’s certainly right, then, that narrative is natural in the sense that it’s tied up with and into human lives. But the thing is that human lives aren’t very natural; we’re weird alien things, narratives grafted onto dyring animals. Figuring out what to do with this narrative that’s in us isn’t something you find naturally the way a bee locates a flower. It’s something you acquire like a baby learns to speak. That is, with a certain amount of struggle and tears, and with varying proficiency depending on numerous factors, including the quality of your teachers. Speech is a technology and a craft, and so, surely, is writing. And, as is generally the case with a craft, you get better at it by imitating models, practicing, and sometimes taking advice. There’s not any particular magic to it, except maybe the magic of not having any magic except the skins our parents have left us.

Caroline Small on Comics and Writing (again!)

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Caro keeps writing these massive comments that I hate to see buried in the threads. So I thought I’d highlight this one too. (I’d urge people to click over to the thread also, though. James Romberger, Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others also have many interesting thoughts.)
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Gracious! I couldn’t participate yesterday or Friday and it’s going to take me awhile to really catch up, but I think I need to jump into the James/Robert kerfuffle here because I think James’ real target is probably me. So I’ll try to clarify.

For me it is a question not of giving precedence in the creative process to one person or another, or even to one skillset or another, but just of teasing out all the different “crafts” that go into making a really extraordinary comic. The importance of visual craft is certainly indisputable. I mean no dismissal of it. But I think the craft of manipulating narrative is also very important, and — depending on the conception of the work — the craft of manipulating prose may also be important.

So the question for me isn’t which is more important, because I think that there is no right answer to that — creators can make choices about whether to try and balance them or let one be dominant on a case-by-case basis. That’s part of the craft of creating any work, choosing which elements to emphasize at which point.

But I also do think it is the case that, de facto, right now, advanced visual craft is consistently and significantly much more important to people in art comics — both creators and fans — than advanced narrative craft, even though some creators dismiss both. At the level of skill, James, as you rightly point out here and many other places, it is extremely difficult to find someone who is really gifted at both visual creation and narrative manipulation. The conditions for getting highly skilled at visual craft are more accessible to cartoonists than the conditions for getting highly skilled at narrative craft.

We’ve discussed this before: there are so many inputs to that — education, culture, aesthetic preference, history of the art forms — it’s just really rare that people are first-rate at both. Although I can make arguments for people here and there, I really can’t come up with anybody working right now other than Eddie Campbell who I think sails easily over my bar, except possibly Dan Clowes, who still isn’t quite in Campbell’s league narratively.

Given that difficulty of finding people who are good at both, and given the pressures of a commercial work environment, I think it’s logical that there aren’t many (any?) mainstream collaborations that have the seamlessness, the balance between the different craft inputs, of a tremendous literary/art comic like “Fate of the Artist.” I do understand what Gary and Brunetti are getting at with the notion that a single creator can integrate the disparate crafts in a way that’s very difficult for collaborators. A really seamless artistic collaboration probably requires a meaningful level of intimacy and honesty that seems likely hard to get in a really commercial environment.

I do understand the struggle here over who can and should get credit — without that intimacy and honesty, the more aggressive personality is probably going to be in the lead. But I think credit is a red herring when talking about issues of approach, because who gets credit would depend on how the approach played out in the specific work. Credit is specific; approach is general. I don’t think any particular imbalance is an inherent property of collaboration — look at John and Sondra of Metaphrog. I don’t have the sense that one of them is more “in charge” than the other. I think they are true collaborators. But that’s not going to be the case with all collaborators. They, like a lot of bands, get around the issue by giving themselves a collective name and emphasizing the group work.

I think it’s essential, therefore, that we bracket questions of credit and the relative importance of individual contributors when we think about the value and risks of collaboration in general. I think we need to look at the actual effects of the Gary/Brunetti approach in practice, not just the romance of it as an ideal goal: what so often happens in single-creator comics is that the elements of “architecture” typically associated with writing, the manipulation of narrative and the rudiments of fiction that Barth calls “craft”, get short shrift — often relative even to film and mainstream fiction, but especially relative to the types of narrative manipulation you see in the most ambitious prose writing.

This is partly because, I think, many cartoonists simply aren’t aware of how craft-intensive the manipulation of narrative is, or they think, like Dan says for Lynda Barry, that narrative is and should be something we do “naturally.”

Up to a point, the notion that human beings are storytelling creatures is true, with some caveats to what “natural” means, but narrative-minded Western humans have been stylizing that “natural” ability for at least a few hundred years now, so it’s a pretty aggressive choice to reject everything they’ve done out of hand. Not that you were defending that stance, James, but to privilege “naif” writing is to be extremely aggressively anti-writing, at least in the sense of what “writing” means to most people who spend a lot of time reading prose fiction.

I think Barry’s anti-Craft stance is much, much, much more harshly against writing than Robert’s is against visual art. I find it really hard not to get very personally offended at it, and the only reason I can avoid it is because it seems to have a psychological source rather than a political one. She feels excluded by formal writing, and so her response is to construct a pedagogy that excludes formal writing right back. That’s not personal against me. But I just don’t agree that either group needs to exclude the other, and I think she’s wrong to approach it that way.

This quote is a good place to expand on that point:

ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.

I’d be curious to hear Dan’s response to Noah’s form/content point, but my problem with this ties back into the Dickey book and the tangent with Charles about reading speed – you don’t develop intuition about story structure and novel-writing by reading how-to books. You develop intuition about story structure and novel writing by reading thousands of novels. How-to books just help make you more conscious of things you already know about and have experienced through tens of thousands of hours of reading prose books. Those how-to books resonate and make sense not because they show you something new, but because they articulate intuitions you already have as a reader. If you don’t have those intuitions already developed through that relationship with reading, those books won’t make sense. They won’t tie back into anything “natural” and they’ll feel horrifically artificial, like they are talking to someone completely different from you.

And if you don’t have that intuition, it’s going to be very hard to manipulate narratives and write in ways that speak intimately and in compelling ways to the people who have read thousands of novels. Those people SHOULD BE an audience for “literary” comics. But we often are not, because there is such widespread contempt for the writing we love among the comics community. It is a fierce exclusion, and one that feels very deeply personal. And it is a completely unnecessary exclusion — and I think often a completely UNINTENTIONAL exclusion, born of psychology and lack of experience and interest rather than actual dislike.

So although I want to qualify again that as a way of getting at inner process, Barry’s pedagogy sounds extraordinary, what I find so terribly off-putting about it, at least as presented here, is her seeming inability to see past the limitations of her own, “naif” or “brut” discourse to recognize how her pedagogy and its goals could work with rather than against more craft-intensive approaches to writing and more stylized approaches to narrative, how it could be welcoming to prose readers rather than exclusive of them.

There is no reason why comics cannot have both a brut, naif tradition and a full-range of more stylized traditions in narrative — the exact same way it draws from both naif and stylized traditions from visual art. There are brut visual traditions as well as artists who are as skilled as the best classical illustrators and painters, and comics welcomes them all.

But for writers, if you are interested in more stylized narratives, or in more academic ways of talking about and thinking about narrative, you are consistently marginalized — forced to defend your perspective against charges that it’s “anti-visual” or anti-artist, and, more aggressively, told you are insensitive to the history of comics or just plain uninformed. That type of assertion, like Barry’s “anti-Craft” language, are not “approaches” to making art when they are stated so baldly and with the intent to derrogate or exclude other approaches. At that point, they are just ways of policing the discourse community. And a strictly policed discourse community is not a fecund environment for great art — ask any anti-academic Modernist.

What I’d like to see is a more engaged recognition from within comics of the extent to which these ways of thinking about comics are schools or whatever that can co-exist and even overlap and inform each other. The “anti-Craft” approach Barry and others take is a school of cartooning and should be treated as such (someone mentioned James Kochalka’s term “cute brut” to me.) There is an “art school cartooning” that allows for naif narrative but requires more ambitious visual craft. I’m sure there are several more approaches that already exist within comics praxis, and there are definitely a number of approaches that hypothetically are possible but really do not exist within comics praxis.

If comics praxis is to expand to include the widest possible range of discourse communities in its scope — something which absolutely MUST HAPPEN before it can truly and accurately be considered a medium (rather than a genre) in praxis rather than in potential — comics practitioners, including critics, have to be able to talk about competing approaches as competing approaches, without bullying each other over the various ways that one approach excludes elements of the others. That’s the point of approaches — they select certain aspects to privilege and push aside others. But they do not do so universally — more comics like Eddie Campbell’s won’t mean there are fewer comics like Lynda Barry’s or Ariel Schrag’s or Seth’s. It will just mean the discourse communities who can find affinities with comics and make investments in comics will be bigger and more diverse, and that’s better for every cartoonist, no matter what his or her approach.

Dan Kois on Lynda Barry’s Pedagogy

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Dan Kois, who reported on Lynda Barry’s teaching methods in a recent New York Times article kindly stopped by recently in our comments section. Here’s what he said:

I wrote the Lynda Barry piece in the Times Magazine, and have been reading this comment thread with great interest.

With regard to Barry and craft, I think it’s useful to separate her writing and her teaching. I think Lynda’s comics and novels do demonstrate that she has an interest in, and a flair for, the crafting of stories and scenes in ways that your average fiction-MFA instructor, for example, would appreciate.

In her teaching, though — at least as I witnessed it, and as she discussed it with me over many, many hours — I would argue that Lynda is, indeed, determinedly anti-craft, and in that regard, very very different from any writing teacher I’ve ever encountered, including in MFA programs where I’ve been a student or an instructor. There was a whole section of the piece that got cut for space that talked about the way that Lynda’s class deals heavily in inner process — that is, *where the ideas come from*, not just *how you craft the ideas into effective prose* — in a way that is anathema to nearly every creative writing teacher I’ve ever encountered. As the novelist and teacher Madison Smartt Bell told me, “I avoid that stuff like the plague, because it’s just too dangerous to deal with.” But Madison is of the opinion — as am I — that Lynda has found a method to teach inner process that is a) not damaging to students or dangerous to her and b) surprisingly effective for nearly everyone who takes her class.

To the commenter above who wrote:
>>But once Barry helps students open themselves up to their creativity, she does also advise them on editing and refining their work.

That’s only true in a limited sense. She does discuss editing to some extent, but only in exceedingly broad terms. No students have their work edited in the class, because no students are allowed to discuss their work in the class, or even outside class, for the duration of the course. That’s a strict rule, and one that Lynda holds to herself; she wouldn’t even talk to me, a reporter, about any of her students’ work.

As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.

Now, do I think that Lynda has never once thought about story structure in writing her comics or (especially) her novels? No. (Though ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.) But I do think she holds firm in her teaching to a credo that for the students she’s working with, craft is not a useful thing to teach; in fact, craft gets in the way of the stories these students want to tell.

Caroline Small on Comics, Publics, and Reading

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Caroline Small had several lengthy and thoughtful comments on this post by Nate Atkinson. I thought I’d highlight them so that more folks can see them. I’m going to pick a couple, so it’ll be a little disjointed, but I think the points overall are clear (and you can always jump back to the thread to see the comments you’ve missed by Caro and others.)
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First this one.

I agree with Noah when he says this “it just seems like comics has gone the consolidation/subculture route for so long (as Nate admits) that further progress along that road threatens to become sclerotic.”

I think the problem is exactly that: the public (I like the lit theory word “discourse community”) is SO well defined and SO specific that it actually determines not only the conversation about the art but the art itself, rather than the other way around. The comics-reading public is a thing independent from the comics it engages with, that most comics self-consciously and intentionally appeal to, rather than an epiphenomenon of neutral people’s discussion about those comics. Perhaps that epiphenomenon was what the OLD TCJ did, creating that community. But that community’s been stable, with a clear discourse and assumptions, for a pretty long time.

Noah also accurately states my position on the accomplishments of contemporary film. I think at least some of the reasons for that, though, have to do with the phenomenon Nate describes and how that worked in the early days of cinema. I think the emergence of a discourse community about film was much less about subcultural identity and much more about legitimating film in a multi-media, multi-form artistic context. Cocteau is the archetype of this, his friendships with Picasso and Gide and Proust and Diaghilev and Radiguet (et al., et al., et al.) created a sense of what art was and was for that informed his films, and his films informed our sense of what film is. As such (and he’s only one example), films’ original genetic diversity is much more diverse than comics. So even when film gets more self-referential in the mid-century, it’s referencing something more inherently diverse.

And you can argue that comics draws heavily from fine visual art, which in some instances is true, but the thing about film is that it was all arts, including writing, including music. (Cocteau wrote for Stravinsky…) Even today’s screenwriting takes writing and literature seriously in a way that comics does not, although it’s certainly never been as important for film as for theater, where dramatists and directors are still pretty separate functions. Still, I’ve never heard film people or theater people make the kinds of claims you hear all the time in comics, that the expectation of competent, nuanced writing as a baseline expectation for any professional work makes someone “anti-visual.” Maybe it’s because even though there are filmmakers and dramatists who only make films and plays, there are greats in those fields who considered themselves primarily writers: e.g., Beckett produced both drama and fiction, Cocteau wrote novels and poems. Auster writes screenplays and novels. And in all cases their literary work is exceptional and standard-setting. It seems like the only great in comics I’ve ever heard say anything really valuing writing is Saul Steinberg, and you never hear modern day critics acknowledge Steinberg’s own preferences in that area – his visual acumen is always what gets praised.

So I think it’s not just that comics is less genetically diverse, but that the discourse community likes it that way. Warren Craghead and Austin English, for example, don’t get all that much attention from the TCJ-defined community (although there was a recent interview!), so the “public” isn’t getting defined in ways that include their perspectives in our sense of what comics are.

Which is to say that I agree with Nate that comics have been about the formation of a public first and an art form second, if at all. But this is why I like the term “discourse community” so much — I think that it’s never a seamless, painless transition from the kind of discourse that supports a subculture to the kind of discourse necessary to support an artform. TCJ is in a unique position to encourage and support that transition, but they don’t appear to really deeply want to. Being at the top of the heap in the subculture is a hard position to do it from — it’s asking a big fish in a little pond to swim into the waters where they’ll be a small fish again. I get why they don’t risk their position and their influence within the existing industry for that goal. But comics has so much extraordinary potential as an art form, it makes me sad that the most influential critical voice in comics doesn’t see it as a primary part of their mission.

And this one.

Here’s the Lynda Barry article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/cartoonist-lynda-barry-will-make-you-believe-in-yourself.html

Compare it to this passage from Don Greiner’s wonderful book on the pedagogy of James Dickey:

The prevailing tone of these classes is joy — joy in the art, in the language, in the writers themselves…Dickey is especially memorable on Yeats, Pound, Thomas, Houseman, Hopkins, Frost, Robinson, de la Mare, and Bridges…[The lectures] are in every way a testimony to a man engaged with the rigors of poetry. Yet they are also a testimony to a man committed to readers, committed, as it were, to passing it on.

Or, consider this essay by John Barth (in a rather spotty OCR from the original 1985 article: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-writing.html

[Writing] gets learned. Can It Be Studied? Boyoboy, can it ever. Since long before the invention of universities, not to mention university programs in creative writing, authors have acquired their authority in four main ways – first, by paying a certain sort of attention to the experience of life as well as merely undergoing it; second, by paying a certain sort of attention to the works of their great and less great predecessors in the medium of written language, as well as merely reading them; third, by practicing that medium themselves, usually a lot (Charles Newman, the writer and critic, declares that the first prerequisite for aspiring writers is sufficient motor control to keep their pens moving left to right, line after line, hour after hour, day after day, and I would add year after year, decade after decade); and fourth, by offering their apprentice work for discussion and criticism by one or several of their impassioned peers, or by some more experienced hand, or by both.

Those four obvious, all but universal ways of learning how to write correspond roughly to what I take to be the proper objects of study for all serious writers -their material (”human life,” says Aristotle, ”its happiness and its misery”), their medium (the language in general, the written language in particular), their craft (the rudiments of, say, fiction, together with conventional and unconventional techniques of their deployment), and their art (the inspired and masterful application of their craft and medium to their material). Not only does the first of these – the material – not imply a creative writing course; it is beyond the proper province of one, though the study of great literature is one excellent handle on ”human life, its happiness and its misery.” And real mastery of the fourth – the art, as distinct from the craft – is more the hope than the curricular goal of a sound writing program; it comes from mastery of the other three plus a dash of genius.

Barry’s course — which sounds wonderful in many ways — seems to correspond to the first item: the material. The article even says “Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft.”

But if you look at Barth’s breakdown, the craft is what makes stories into writing. Craft includes “the rudiments of fiction.” And a good solid understanding of the rudiments of fiction is what seems to be missing from an awful lot of beautifully drawn comics I’ve seen (not to mention an even greater number of pedestrianly drawn comics I’ve seen.)

Screenwriters study the writer’s craft; screenplays are fiction. But art comics writers tend not to — and they’re especially dismissive of that last one, submitting apprentice work for critique. I heard someone on a panel at SPX say that one of the problems with working with a big press is that the editors tried to edit the comic but you can’t edit a comic the way you edit a book, telling the cartoonist that the joke fails here or whatever. That attitude isn’t a property of comics — it’s a property of an immature writer, because EVERY writer can learn from readers.

I guess all this rambling is to set up two questions – isn’t there something comparable to the “workshop” in studio art, where your peers critique the ideas and execution of your work? It seems like there would be, so I can’t imagine that person was getting that notion from visual art, but maybe I’m wrong.

And, if anybody reading this studied comics in a formal curriculum somewhere, what did your program teach you about writing? Was your experience more like what Barry goes for in her course, or what Dickey describes in his?

And I’ll finish with this one.

Jeet, the comment about Barry not being interested in craft was on the first page of the NYT article on her class; it’s not an assertion I’m making about her work.

Perhaps the NYT writer misunderstood her, but I think it should be pretty easy to see how the description of the techniques and approach she uses appear significantly different from the kind of teaching one got from Professor Dickey (whose workshop _I_ took, as well as Dr Greiner’s — Greiner was the one, Noah, who made me read “The Sound and the Fury,” darn him!).

My criticism of teaching the psychology of creativity is this — that psychology, more than any other kind, isn’t the same for everybody. And an awful lot of literary creativity has tended to emerge out of the mindset of an advanced critical reader, not some playful wellspring of creative openness. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of “readerly” creativity. You see that in Dickey; you see it in Barth.

I don’t, however, see that in Barry’s pedagogy, which is why I said her teaching was about something different. And so I think you’re missing the point of the comment, which is not whether she is a good teacher, but whether there is a difference in discourse community there, and whether it can and should be bridged. Are you suggesting that Barry’s pedagogy is, in fact, within the discourse community of traditional creative writing? From the quotes in the article, it seems like Barry herself is resistant to that.

I don’t DISAGREE with Barry’s pedagogy, and certainly not for her goals, which it seems to fit well. I do think Barry’s pedagogy isn’t a substitute for Dickey’s pedagogy, and that a great writer probably needs some of both kinds.

Do you think Barry’s is a substitute, or do you think there’s value in both? Because the only thing that I DO disagree with is what sounds like her contempt for the more traditional pedagogy that writers like Dickey practiced. It works just like her comment on Franzen.

One of the wonderful things about Mr Dickey was that he could take a student from the backwater of South Carolina who’d never read anything but the Bible and the newspaper and make him understand why TS Eliot was poetry. And he didn’t do it through “inspiring their creativity;” he did it, as the excerpt I quoted says, through sharing his love of reading and through the idea that reading is a source of inspiration for creativity. Sometimes he turned those people into teachers and writers themselves — but he always turned them into readers.

Disrespecting that isn’t cool at all. Pedagogy doesn’t have to be “about” psychology to be effective psychologically.