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Spring 2012
English 98/198
2 Unit(s)

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About the Course:

You’ve been stunned by Watchmen. You’ve read the graphic novel, were possibly let down by the film, and practice your Dr. Manhattan and/or Rorschach impersonation(s) in the shower, like me.

Just kidding.

Maybe.

Or, you’ve never read the novel and don’t mind the plot being given away during your first read-through. Either way, join me, and together we will beat this steroid-brute of a book into submission.

We will analyze Watchmen intertextually, not because the supplementary texts have influenced the graphic novel (though some have), but because, through comparison, they can elucidate aspects of Watchmen that may be latent in the graphic novel but still not evident without comparison. These texts will include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth; Melville’s Moby-Dick; McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, The Sunset Limited, and The Road; McCloud’s Understanding Comics; Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke; Hitchcock’s Psycho; Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran. We will also read excerpts from texts about heroic types, like Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (or we may simply discuss the heroic types in class) and apply those concepts to moments in Watchmen.

Finally, most of what we’ll read in class has in some way influenced Watchmen, yet we will also read anachronistic texts. Though we will analyze Watchmen in its historical context and the ways it uses allusions to transform its antecedent texts, the purpose of this course will be to expand our understanding of intertextuality beyond the concept of influence to uncover endless transactions of meaning between text and intertext that no amount of historicizing can fully account for.  

How to Enroll:

The first class-meeting will be Thursday, January 26th at 5 in 123 Wheeler. There is a limit of 35 students. If the number of students who attend the first class-meeting is 35 or less, I will distribute CCNs at the end of that meeting.