Lecture - Simone Castaldi (Hofstra University): A Walk Within Four Panels. A Methodological Approach to Teaching Italian Comics

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Dear friends and colleagues,
After the amazing discussion we had yesterday on the magazine Resist!, get ready for our last event of the Fall Term. The Transnational Comics Studies Workshop invites you to a lecture and workshop with Simone Castaldi, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Hofstra University.
A Walk Within Four Panels. A Methodological Approach to Teaching Italian Comics
Lecture: Thursday, November 30th, 3-5pm
Workshop: Friday, December 1st, 10-12pm
3308 Modern Language Building
This talk, covering the first 100 years of the history of Italian comics, focuses on four individual panels from four pivotal moments in the history of the medium in Italy: its infancy at the turn of the 20th century; the post-economic boom reconfiguration of the medium for an adult audience with the so-called "fumetti neri" (crime comics); the late-1960s birth of the auteur school and of a more literate and sophisticated readership; and the cannibalization of the historical avant-gardes of the postmodern, self-referential comics of the 1980s. Taking a moment of hesitation to focus on the reading instructions offered by a single panel, this kind of investigation encourages a deeper reading of the intimate structures that make up the panel as a basic unit of the comics' discourse. As a first step in the study of comics in a classroom setting, especially when students are confronted with a tradition whose history and culture is scarcely familiar to them, this kind of analysis consents to relate the study of the pictorial and micro-narrative elements within the frame to the cultural encyclopedia of the text, and to insert it within its historical background as a living part of a wider cultural context. As we investigate the panel's composition, the quality of the line, the indexical and symbolic value of its parts and their paradigmatic relations we lay solid foundations and prepare ourselves for a full reading.
This event is cosponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of History of Art, and hosted by the Department of German Languages and Literatures.
Please, shares widely and contact vinsalv@umich.edu for RSVP and info.

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