School Books: Summer and Fall

Designing courses is a great excuse to add books to the library! 

I'm teaching sports literature online this summer and will be teaching it again in the fall. As the summer version only lasts six weeks, it has a truncated number of texts: Friday Night Lights, The Game, In these girls hope is a muscle, and Last Shot.

In the fall, the line up includes:  Queen’s Gambit, Beer and Circus, Crossover, Never Ran, Never Will, and How soccer explains the world. I hope they will provoke questions about what constitutes a sport, gender in sports, college athletics, and the link between sports and the larger society.  

I'm also teaching graphic novel this summer and again in the fall. The summer syllabus includes: Understanding Comics, Maus, Batman:death of the family, Saga, ElfQuest, and He-Man: Eternity War. The fall line-up will pick up The Snagglepuss Chronicles, The Dark Knight Returns, Belonging, and possibly Rat Queens.

We will be tracing the following themes as we read: how comics portray history, the evolution of the superhero and supervillain, portrayals of gender, and comics “growing up” (taking on a childish theme and writing it for adult readers). I wish we had time to explore all of the cool new offerings in the infinitely-expanding world of the graphic novel, but I hope these texts will serve as touchstones.