Taking Advantage of Novel Alternatives

While I love to read classic novels that are normally studied in English classes I believe that our Literary Kinds class is special. This class has provided me with an opportunity to re-evaluate what a "genre" can be, and to be honest I think this will be one of the few English classes that doesn't mandate reading actual books. I think that we should take advantage of the opporunity to study different variations of text because we may never get a chance to do so again. 

At first I was not intrigued by studying graphic novels, however after researching it a bit I have come to realize that it may in fact be a great idea! It could be the best of both worlds--allowing us to physically read a book with a new twist--pictures to go along with the text. For me this is something completely new and different (I realize it may not be to others), and I think that taking a few weeks to study an alternative text would generate great classroom discussions. Maybe we could take a more artistic approach to analyzing the texts--instead of discussing word choices and syntactical issues we could talk about why the author chose specific images or means of artistic expression and how this may reflect author's intent or anticipated audience. I think it would be interesting to deal with similar issues that we tackled with blogs and alter them in order to apply such issues to the graphic novel genre. 

Following the development of the graphic novel maybe we could segue into a study of films based on graphic novels and how the motion pictures have been adapted and shaped into a sub category of graphic novels? I think this would be an interesting and alternative way in understanding how things grow and move in accordance to the changing technology and audience preferences.