Bande dessinée et enseignement des humanités by Nicolas Rouvière (review)

This is a book far richer than its modest title might lead us to believe. Any fears that the reader is to be told how schoolchildren can read Tintin au Tibet in order to understand the cultural geography of China, or that Astérix is the perfect conduit for Caesar’s Gallic War, are soon put aside. The guiding premise is that an applied knowledge of bande dessinée can further our understanding of other domains, just as, say, the humanities can be relevant to medicine, or philosophy can be approached historically. The book broaches this from a specific pedagogical viewpoint: how can knowledge transfer of this kind usefully be related to education, from primary school through to university? To this end the three areas explored are the teaching of literature, of history, and of language and civilization. In addition, a preliminary section situates the evolving status of the bande dessinée (hereafter ‘BD’), historical attitudes of educators to the genre (generally negative), and an overview of post-1996 school manuals that draw on BD. Within this framework the eighteen chapters provide a variety of case studies that include formal analysis of how a BD functions in literary terms (Nicolas Rouvière), as a historical document (Joël Mak), and via cross-genre adaptation (Jean-Paul Meyer); the use of works by Joann Sfar and Yvan Pommaux with children of different ages (Angélique Perronet; Christiane Connan-Pintado); the specificities of BD versions of La Fontaine and of Proust (Brigitte Louichon; Guillaume Perrier); representations of the Holocaust (Sylvie Dardaillon with Christophe Meunier), the First World War via Jacques Tardi (Vincent Marie), and Second World War via contemporary collaborationist comics (Thierry Crépin); the teaching of French or Spanish language and culture abroad (Marc Blancher, Jean-Pierre Thomas; Tatiana Blanco-Cordon); and terrorism as a social phenomenon (Sylvie Martin-Mercier). The styles and theoretical approaches, ranging from descriptions of BD-based lesson possibilities to critical engagement with methodologies of representation, are a varied reflection of a selection of authors that includes known BD specialists, university semiologists, primary school teachers, and language instructors. The eclecticism and reliance on case studies as opposed to any attempt at survey coverage is an inevitable result of the original format of the scholarship presented, namely a 2010 conference at the Université Stendhal–Grenoble 3, whose theme, ‘Lire et produire des bandes dessinées à l’École’, might explain the book’s potentially limiting title. Nonetheless, shortcomings associated with the often disparate assemblages that can come of conference proceedings are amply rectified by the extensive and methodological bibliography and, above all, by Rouvière’s twelve-page Introduction, introductions to the four sections, and Conclusion. It is through these that we realize that this is a work that gives practical advice on how to use BD in the classroom, but which also, perhaps inadvertently, does far more: it posits BD as a cultural form, on a footing with many others, that is part of, as well as accessory to, the literary and cultural heritage enabling the exchange of human ideas.