New Fall 2023 Visual Cultural Studies Seminar at SDSU with MALAS: #nakedsouls24: Comics, Animation, Psychoanalysis

ECL 157: Comics and History | MALAS 600D Naked Souls 

#nakedsouls24: Comics, Animation, Psychoanalysis

T/Th 11-12:15 GMCS 333; Professor William Nericcio

old onto your hats (and iphones!) as we bravely go where no one has gone before...  Ok, so you know that’s hype: a total and spectacular exaggeration, the ravings (potentially) of a madman or a bonkers professor! But maybe, just maybe, we can actually do it?  Imagine exploring the world of comics, streaming animation, digital storytelling, and AI-designed narrative in a course with the Department of English and Comparative Literature, now known as ECL at SDSU! 

“Holy Robot Algorithms, Batman!” “Holy #nakedsouls23, Robin.”  

In this class, we will peruse worlds illustrated and cinematic, literary and philosophical, as we sample some of the most outrageous storytelling from the 20th and 21st centuries.

And while we will be concerned with "history" and "comics" throughout the term, this class will not strictly be a history of comics, a survey of the evolution of men in tights and women in spandex! We are more concerned with the souls of this characters, the naked contours of what we can call the mind or the psyche!

The souls we meet will be “naked,” not naked as in the “clothing optional sense” (though there will be a little of that) but naked in the original sense of the word, that speaks ... 

“of things, ‘without the usual or customary covering,’ from Old English. Applied to qualities, actions, etc., ‘mere, pure, open to view, unconcealed,’ from c. 1200; phrase the naked truth, from early 15c...” 

For the stories we read and the characters we meet will be very much unconcealed, revealing the secrets of their lives and their souls as can only be found in Literature, comics included. 

We will learn that "Literature" is the antithesis of the world of bullshit we are presently immersed in on television and social media, where fake news and filters are the name of the game. Our naked souls will be raw, eccentric, controversial, and neurotic. The required works are still being nailed down, but will include the singular amazingness of comics and art by Rene Magritte, Jules Feiffer, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller & David Mazzucelli, Carlos Fuentes, and Jason Adam Katzenstein, among others!

William "Memo" Nericcio, a Tejano Cultural Studies Professor from Laredo, Texas, began his career as a Latin Americanist focused on novels of the 20th century by Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. From his first Assistant Professorship at the University of Connecticut he moved to SDSU in 1991, where his work has expanded into critical studies of film, mass culture, television, and cutting-edge Latinx fiction. With a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, Nericcio presently directs the MALAS Cultural Studies MA @SDSU and also runs SDSU Press, the oldest independent scholarly press in the California State University system. His latest book, co-authored with Frederick Luis Aldama, Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, appears December 2019 from the Ohio State University Press.