NEO-POST-URBAN-NOIR GRAPHIC NOVELS AND CRITICAL LITERACY: The Hard Connection

This chapter explores issues in critical media literacy centering on a discussion of comic books and graphic novels, particularly Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Miller, 2005). The discussion includes the entanglement of graphic novels within the context of consumer culture and commodification, the questions surrounding the “legitimacy” of such texts, the impact that these artifacts of popular culture have on the identity formation of youth, the reactions of students to the use of graphic novels in the classroom and the exploration of the issues of race, class and gender that are raised as result of the study of graphic novels in the classroom. It does mean that the so-called ‘literary canon’, the unquestioned ‘great tradition’ of the ‘national literature’ has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time (Eagleton, 1983, p. 11). The theoretical perspective of this study is a combination of critical theory and literary criticism. The serious study of the history, development and reception of graphic novels is enriched by the application of such theoretical perspectives, places them within a 21st century context and makes connections between popular culture, youth and critical pedagogy. Put another way, for radical literacy to come about, the pedagogical should be made more political and the political more pedagogical. In other words, there is a dire need to develop pedagogical practices which bring teachers, parents, and students together around new and more emancipatory visions of community (Giroux in Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 6).