Thanks, cutiebunny (and the others who chimed in with applause). I'm very happy to be in an advance guard, helping start the serious study of what is clearly an important art form. Yes, of course, 95% of it is pure trash (I won't name specific series that IMHO push the curve on this front). But when there is such a concentration of effort in a short period of time, that fosters an environment in which really creative personalities can collaborate and produce genuinely cutting-edge work. I like to compare the recent "Golden Age" of anime/manga to the tremendous outpouring of drama during the Elizabethan/Jacobean period of English history. True it is that nearly all of it was forgettable trash, but without that 95% of dreck, a Shakespeare, or even a Marlowe would not have had material to polish or an audience to appreciate it.cutiebunny wrote:That's really neat, sensei. It's nice to see that, albeit slowly, that anime is beginning to really enter mainstream America and the academia.
I can only imagine what it might be like to watch anime and receive college credit for it.
Congrats on your publication! I'm guessing you'll be rewarding yourself with a nice CCS item, right?
It is, still, a very controversial study field in academia. I still recall the tart evaluation that I got from one student soon after I started using manga in the final unit of my mythology class: "I didn't come to college to read comic books!" Many higher-ups agree. I did teach a course on manga/anime at a major university as a guest professor. It went very well--students were engaged and taught me as much as I taught them. But, alas, so many of their friends went to the dept. to ask when it would be offered again that the powers that be got spooked. Worried that I might use this interest as a back-door to permanent employment, they made it very clear that this was a one-time offering, never to be repeated again.
Even as recently as this semester, when I volunteered at my campus to give a talk on the use of Western fairy tales in manga/anime, I found myself in front of an audience with no one to introduce me and no technical support. The IT office, asked to send someone to open the podium and help me set up the graphics integral to the talk, simply said, "This is not high on our priorities."
It's not a new story: even at my university the study of American literature was resisted until around 1900: books by native authors weren't literature, the elite reasoning went, they were just what students read on their leisure time.
Anyhow, thanks for the support, which is one reason why, in spite of a lot of official resistance, I still have faith that this body of art deserves serious consideration, and indeed rewards it.
I wish I could remember for sure, but it would be nice to see more universities offering these types of classes. ^^
