Goodbye Comics, Hello Games (Discourse Chronicle)
Comments(8) [As a second-year PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at BGSU, my cohort is currently selecting committee chairs for our Prelim exams, which means we are beginning to develop potential dissertation topics. For many years, I imagined pursuing a dissertation arguing that modern comic book crossovers are remediated Greek myths reproduced in a multimodal format and understanding how that changes our literacy practices, but after six years and much deliberation with professors and soul-searching…I am leaving comics behind.
During my coursework as a first-year PhD student, I felt if I wanted to write a dissertation using comics, then I should distance myself from that subject as evidence that I am about more than Rhetoric, Composition, and Comics. Professors confirmed my feeling and I began pursuing papers addressing possibilities using video games and I received a much more positive response, but other signs also contributed to my decision:
- I received encouragement from Cynthia Selfe (a living legend rhetoric and composition professor) at last year’s CCCC conference about a paper I plan on submitting to Computers and Composition.
- Watson and CCCC (two major league conferences for rhetoric and composition scholars) accepted proposals from me about video games and composition.
- I cannot imagine new project possibilities for comics beyond the dissertation.
- I realized that I want my professional identity to be a teacher-scholar and not a scholar-teacher.
- Video games are far less personal than comics to me.
Another major reason I am happy and comfortable with leaving comics behind is my composition students. I always love teaching students about writing well and I constantly try incorporating their literacies into my pedagogy. As a younger self, I struggled with writing well, but I loved doing it and that love predates other interests I hold. Now I am pursuing arguments showing how students improve writing through gaming and reading comics becomes a favorite hobby again. BK]
category: Comics, Gaming, Life, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology
A tough decision, but you have to got with what works for you. May it bring you all manner of success (you’re not abandoning comics altogether, though are you? We’re still going to see you at PCA?).
No, Kate, I will not leave comics completely behind since I am giving a paper at BGSU’s The Comic Book in Popular Culture conference. However, my scholarly pulse with comics will not be as strong. I’ll still be at PCA to give The Korvie back, but I will probably not present in the Comics area. I do plan on continuing to support Comic scholars who cheered me on so far such as yourself and Gene, Jason and Nicole, Amy, Frenchy, and others, though.
Cool. Well, people move around at PCA. Rogers has been doing some video himself now and then. You know you can always find us at the bar!
Woah, that’s an important decision. Both could be under the umbrella of cultural studies, so overall you’re shifting your medium but not necessarily throwing out your approach or your ideas. Remember a few years ago the debate about whether Lara Croft had the kind of star power that could take the ability of the Olsen Twins to look cute and blink at the camera and turn that into a multi-million-dollar empire? Or the way advertisements use the achievements of athletes to sell very loosely related products, and those advertisements in turn add to the appeal of the sport… my (rambling) point is simply to affirm that, just as your ideas about heros can apply to Superman and Death of a Salesman, they can also apply to Half-Life 2.
Thanks, Dennis. Yes, cultural studies still plays into my interests, but my primary lens is rhetoric and composition, which allows things to become more fine-tuned for me. Now my ideas are focused upon understanding writing better and improving it, or figuring out pedagogical applications for technology, rather than preaching a message that “this is cool” as we talked about last year at C’s. I feel like big things are going to happen for me, but I needed to expand my horizons first.