Organised by the University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' Centre for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the 2002 UF Comics Conference, the Will Eisner Seminar. This is a new conference on the art and literature of the comics medium.
Bringing together artists and academics, the seminar will be held at the Univeristy of Florida on February 20th and 21st, 2002.
Participants for the Seminar are artists Will Eisner, Joe Sacco, Eddie Campbell, Daniel Clowes, and Terry Zwigoff, along with comic scholars Thomas Inge, Rusty Witek and Donald Aut.
Since the 1827 production of "Monsieur Vieux Bois" the graphic novel has been perceived as a hybrid cultural form. With the juxtaposition of words and pictures, the intersection of literature and art, the blending of high satire and low caricature, the modern graphic novel has always been an intermediary description, seen as either a valorization of comics or as a bastardization of literature, or even both at once. As the contemporary comics medium has moved from pamphlets and albums towards longer, more sustained narratives, the graphic novel has opened up a variety of new artistic pathways, in terms of both diegetic and stylistic possibilities. Artists and writers have engaged and modified serialization and sequentiality to suit new needs, new audiences, and new modes of visual narrative.
This seminar will focus on the material history, contemporary production, and critical reception of this diverse form, and allow graphic novelists and academic critics to discuss what the graphic novel is, what it can do, and where, as a form, it is heading. The seminar hopes to engage with some of the critical and commercial problematics the graphic novel produces for the language of comics, as well as examine the relationship of graphic novels to other forms of art and entertainment. Particular topics and concerns will include:
- Language(s) of visual narrative in the Graphic Novel
- Poetics, Semiotics, Play: Theoretical approaches to Graphic Novels
- Graphic Nivels as Journalism and History
- Hollywood and the Graphic Novel
- Graphic Novels within the development of the comics medium
- Satire, Caricature, Critique: political aspects of the Graphic Novel
- Narrative and Style: textual production within the Graphic Novel
- Collaboration and Influence: Graphic Novels and plural authorship
Papers that address the theme of the seminar are welcome, but those relating to any aspect of the graphic novel will also be considered for panels.
Submitted papers no longer than 2500 words or 25 minutes approx.
Abstracts up to 250 words by 30th of January, 2002.
Submissions by email to donault@english.ufl.edu or post.