Religion and Comics - A Critical Introduction
About the course
The course looks at how comics can be used to reinforce, reject, reconstruct, or manufacture meaning in relation to social formations and structures that some of us call religious or existential. The course studies not only comics texts themselves but also rhetoric on the topic of religion and comics from fan and theological contexts, among others. A primary aim of the course is to foster critical understanding of how comics and their reception can be vivid, and sometimes contentious, sites for the creation and negotiation of understandings of religion. As a field of cultural production and consumption, comics provide excellent examples of the ways in which popular cultures can help to manufacture and police the borders of what gets classified as religion, why and by whom, and how those borders shift and warp. Although comics are often thought of as entertainment, they are deeply political documents that are part and parcel of the everyday power struggles surrounding meaning and acceptance in societies and cultures all over the world. This course helps the student to understand and interpret these struggles.
Course content
The course aims to enable the student to develop an understanding of how popular culture in the form of comics can actively contribute to the construction or formation of religious and existential worldviews. Another aim of the course is that the student develops theoretical perspectives on critical religious studies in relation to comics studies.
The course offers an overview of the field of religion and comics and introduces scholarly tools for the interpretation of comics in relation to religion and identity, power, gender, and myth, among other things. The course emphasizes that comics do not only give expression to pre-existing forms of religion, but rhetorically construct ideas and understandings of what religion can be. With the aid of critical religious studies and comics studies, the course discusses different forms this meaning-making can take in both production and reception contexts, what consequences it can have, and how one can understand comics in relation to religion. Examples from different genres and geographic comics cultures are discussed in relation to content, reception, and relevant contexts.
Entry requirements and selection
Entry requirements
General entry requirements + Civics 1b or Civics 1a1 +1a2, English 6
Selection
66% Upper Secondary Grades - 34% Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test (SweSAT)
Course literature
Current literature list is available in the syllabus for the course
Course evaluation
Malmö University provides students who participate in, or who have completed a course, with the opportunity to express their opinions and describe their experiences of the course by completing a course evaluation administered by the University. The University will compile and summarise the results of course evaluations. The University will also inform participants of the results and any decisions relating to measures taken in response to the course evaluations. The results will be made available to the students (HF 1:14).
