I thought I'd share some of my course materials with you in the hopes that you would have suggestions about how I could supplement them.
As part of my course, I'd like to show them how the image of American superhero evolved over the years. My hope is to get them to make a connection between the characters and the societies in which they were produced. I'd like them to be able to articulate how they connected with contemporary society's values, its desires and fears. I'd also like them to be able to critique those representations of the heroic, to determine whether or not they were effective, productive, positive.
I was thinking I would start with some basic 1940s war-time cartoons, such as Superman vs the Japanese Threat .
There are even more egregiously racist comic covers and panels from that period.
I know that none of those artifacts are exactly timely, but in the past I've found it helpful to introduce students to new processes via material to which they aren't particularly close, from which they can have some analytical distance. I guess I could bring it around by discussing their new rhetorical context, why they are still out there on the internet, why they're now presented as humorous when once they were deadly serious.
I was also toying with the idea of showing them the (amazing) opening credits from Watchmen, which are set a song that might be slightly familiar to some of you after today. My one concern is that it covers a lot of history in a very oblique way, so I might have to spend too much time teaching Vietnam, the Cold War, etc. So, I probably won't do that in the end.
I'm almost obliged to include the trailer for the Dark Knight, right? I think it's very interesting in that it's 80% Joker, which may suggest that villains are the new heroes.
From that, I was thinking of transitioning into sporting heroes. I was planning to segue by showing them adverts where the athletes seem larger than life or superhuman in some way:
- Nike "Fate" Advert
- Patrick "Chewing" Advert
- Nike "Good vs Evil" Advert
Anyway, these are just initial thoughts. I may change things a lot before the end.
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