Sorry for the wait, I’m afraid that I got rather busy, then sick, then busy catching up from being sick… it’s been hectic. I’ve got a few things in progress on this blog, and the lack of recent progress is due entirely to the busy-sick-busy-ness of my recent life. I haven’t forgotten any of it, though, I promise.
To pick up on the theoretical syllabus for an anime course that I’ve been making, my thoughts have been running along the lines of “how would I organize the class?” I don’t mean in terms of class discussion versus lecture versus Blackboard postings, I mean how will I set up the course so that it builds to a conclusion in a natural manner. I could (easily) go into a classroom and lecture on Miyazaki one day, cyberpunk anime the next, production methods in class on day three and so on until three months pass and the students have learned a smattering of this and that but don’t have a coherent body of work to take with them in the future.
I’m leaning toward using the question “what do anime tell us about Japan?” as an organizing principle. Now, I’m a bit leery of that, for a number of reasons. But I think that it fits into the real world of college (i.e. department structure, diversity and other class requirements) very well, and I think it would let me tie together a number of disparate issues that I think ought to be covered.
I considered other organizational structures, but they feel off to me in various ways. For example, I could start with early animation and move my way up through time to today, looking at what issues were covered when and how alongside evolving production techniques. That has the benefit of giving students a better basis for judging whether a work is derivative or actually represents something new and interesting. However, that also limits discussion in a number of ways, and emphasizes technical aspects, like the CGI or hand-drawing debate, over the issues discussed in individual works.
So, back to the theoretical syllabus as it stands. Focused on seeing what anime tells us about Japan, we start of reading a chapter of Peach Girl in class on the first day and then watching the first episode of the anime version. Right off the bat, we’re both problematizing the idea of judging anime without knowledge of the materials on which it was based (assuming it isn’t an original). Then we segue into talking about what the anime tells us about Japan/life in Japan. We can start with simple things – school uniforms, how people refer to each other. But that sets us up for the semester: What do we learn about Japan through anime? If its students wear uniforms, why is that? What does that tell us about the society? In turn, what do the things we learn about Japan tell us about the United States and our lives here?
Hopefully, that will get them thinking.
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