Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor by Lynda Barry is normally marketed as a “graphic novel,” but it does not fit well into that category or most others that we have readily to hand. Most notably, this volume does not include panels and draws heavily on “quotes” from other material. Rather than the typical graphic memoir which is easily recognizable as a comix, this narrative seems to lean more heavily on the idea of the artist’s book over other precedents, such as colorful floppies or the underground movement. This paper will ask what Barry’s text owes to the legacy of artist’s books and handmade books as an artist exploring the peripheries of traditional comix through techniques such as collage and panel-less pages and what this suggests for the future of comix as books in the 21st century.
This question is especially important because Syllabus is invested in its status as a book; the form of the book is woven into the material presence, content, and interactions portrayed throughout Barry’s text. At the same time, comix are often left out of the discussion of the future of books and this text, in particular, is “bookish” in a way that does not resist or reject other technologies. Rather, Syllabus is Barry’s place for deeply engaging with the ideas of memory, understanding, image, and the relationship between cognition and the body as she seeks to share creation as a form of play with her students. I will treat Barry’s book as a how-to guide for understanding the book and physical practices of reading as she enacts them throughout Syllabus and consider it alongside the medium of the “comix book” to better understand if Barry’s text heralds a new type of comix or if other genres better help us understand this work.
About the presenterCatherine Ann Winters-Michaud
Catherine Winters-Michaud earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island in May 2020. Her dissertation, “The Mark of the Vanishing Reading: Interdiegetic Interaction in Multimodal Narrative,” argues that, though books and literature are changing, these changes focus on what needs books can fulfill, and that the reader is not an endangered species, threatened by changes in the media landscape, but is evolving and chooses to read print books when those books best fulfill their needs. Her research focuses on multimodal contemporary American literature and includes novels, comics, and other narrative literature. Catherine received her MA from Simmons College in Boston.