The Civil War remains a momentous event not just in the history of the United States but in its literary history. American literature has long been divided into ante-and postbellum canons. In this class, we’ll discuss literary, journalistic, and photographic representations of the Civil War as we consider why 1865 endures as a significant date in our national literary production, whether it should remain one, and what these questions can tell us about our broader study of literature and its relationship to historical events. On what side of 1865 do we situate texts like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 but revised repeatedly until Whitman’s death in 1892, or writers like Frederick Douglass, whose first two autobiographies came out in the decades before the Civil War, but who remained an important writer and speaker long after the war had ended? With what other authors should we group Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” written in 1891, long after Melville had stopped published his antebellum fiction. In addition to these questions of periodization, we’ll engage a diversity of critical approaches to these materials—race; gender and sexuality; trauma; disability; environment; and others—as we begin to interrogate who we our as critics and scholars of literature.

Using Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do as our seminal graphic memoir, we work together and alongside other scholars to understand how visualized narratives intersect with origin stories. Just as in superhero comics, Bui believes that knowing her origin story will help her answer questions about her identity and purpose. But, the simplistic idea that we can only understand our future by understanding our past is fraught with silence, displacements, incomplete histories, and fractured memories. So, how does Bui employ the graphic memoir to capture this difficult and possibly cathartic process? This sharp focus on Bui’s text allows us to unearth the historical context, artistic intentions and elements, as well as the secondary materials needed to fully appreciate her complex work. Refining our practices of close reading, research, and writing prepares students for their own independent projects where they can pursue questions about other graphic texts of their choice.