Visual Literacy Handout

Visual Literacy - Graphic Canon Volume 2 

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
                                                                                                                                        - Mark Twain

What? This heavy book is filled with snippets of graphic versions of the classics that we have all had the privilege of reading: Edgar Allen Poe, The Scarlet Letter, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Picture of Dorian Gray, and Huckleberry Finn. The book shows a sample of what is out there in the classics transformed to graphics.

Why? I chose this text because I was looking for interesting ways to teach classic novels and get students excited about seeing them in new ways. More specifically Huckleberry Finn because it is a story that we’ve all read and can remember the torture of reading this. Learning the classics can be super annoying as a teenager, but it is still a very important part of culture and this culture educates you and broadens your mind. As outdated as these novels may seem to our students, they teach timeless lessons that still apply today.

How? Ways to use the Graphic Canon to inspire…

1.      I think it would be fun to have students in a class each take a chapter or two and transform it into a simple graphic novel or scene and create a complete graphic novel unique to each class.

2.      The graphics and simple text of the graphic novel can help simplify the story and help draw emotion that may otherwise get lost in our literary application. Pictures help with textual understanding.

3.      I would love to have my class read both the graphic novel version and the original version and do a comparison of the texts. Different things will stand out in each version. The graphic novel will miss details of the original and the graphic novel can offer understanding that was overlooked by the reader in the original text.

 Why not? Problems that I can see arising with creating a classroom graphic novel: not everyone is artistic and not everyone does their homework. Other problems could be the “Why? Why do we have to read this old book?” There are great articles on the web about the “why”. It’d be worth a google (starting here).