Full Course Title:
Simple Complexity of 'Peanuts': Exploring the Perennially Popular Comic Strip
For nearly 50 years (1950 to February 2000), Charles Schulz wrote and illustrated a daily syndicated comic strip whose characters would become cultural icons, the most famous being Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Underlying the mass appeal, popularity, and inevitable commercial success and related merchandising was a thoughtful and literate sustained & sequential graphic narrative that dealt with complex, real-world adult topics and issues through the fictional narrative perspectives of young children, a dog, and a bird. In this course, we will examine and discuss the strip in aesthetic, narrative, and interdisciplinary contexts through such starting points as art, music, psychology, philosophy, religion, and history. Students will engage in both classroom and online discussions, and extensive individual and group research and writing.