While reading literature is often understood as a solitary, contemplative, or escapist act—something we do privately, quietly, even secretly—we will see in this class that literature is also a profoundly social act.

Comics have often treated as fringe culture. Since the emergence of the “graphic novel,” how did comics’ literary and cultural fortunes rise so dramatically?

Global empire and capitalism built the foundations for climate change. How do we unbuild them?

What does the explosion of genre fiction with literary aspirations mean for the status of contemporary literature? Which genres define, and allow us to speak to, our literary and historical moment?

What if literary worldbuilding isn’t just backdrop for characters or settings in which plots unfold but key to how we make meaning, and better worlds, with literature?

When we communicate about food, we aren’t just eaters but social beings.

If rhetoric can be understood as the theory, practice, and art of ethical communication, then developing rigorous modes of communicating climate change is now one of its central tasks.

Beginning in the 1980s, and never letting up since, the “graphic novel” has been redefining the comics medium and literature alike.