Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Culver-Stockton College, USA. She teaches courses in research, writing, and literature, including a single-author seminar on Stephen King. She is the author of Teaching Stephen King: Horror, The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature.

Emphasizes pedagogical possibilities of multimodal literacy engagement, as well as key terminology and reading strategies to serve as a primer for those interested in incorporating graphic novels into their English classroom for the first time

Examines graphic novels as literature, their incorporation in education in general, and the unique benefits of using graphic narratives in teaching writing, rhetoric, and literary analysis

Argues that the graphic novel format helps to transform a novel into an artistic artifact, and thus appeals in part to the needs of our distinctly visual age

1. Introduction.- 2. Not Just Novels: The Pedagogical Possibilities of the Graphic Narrative.- 3. Understanding Rhetoric, Understanding Genre: A Rhetorical Genre Studies Approached Writing Course.- 4. Writing Through Comics.- 5. Teaching the History and Theory of American Comics: 20th Century Graphic Novels as a Complex Literary Genre.- 6. "What is the use of a book ... without pictures of conversations?": Incorporating the Graphic Novel into the University Curriculum.- 7. "Does Doctor Manhattan Think?": Alan Moore's The Watchmen and 'Great Books' Curriculum in the Early College Setting.- 8. "If He Be Mr. Hyde, We Shall Be Mr. See": Using Graphic Novels, Comic Books, and the Visual Narrative in the Gothic Literature Classroom.- 9. Teaching March in the Borderlands Between Social Justice and Pop Culture.- 10. Revising the Rhetoric of 'Boat People' Through the Interactive Graphic Adaptation of Nam Le's "The Boat".- 11. Performative Pedagogies and Performative Texts: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home as Compositional Model.