Author: Cheryl Lynn Ross

Peer-Reviewers: Kathryn McClain and James Fleury
Website Developer: Kristen Figgins

Adapting and Visualizing a Legend: Teaching Yu the Great

Course: Com 6: Myths and Legends

Course and Lesson Description: 

This lesson is designed for an undergraduate Comparative Literature course at the University of California, Davis: COM 6 “Myths and Legends,” which focuses on ancient works and their adaptations. These stories, intriguing on their own terms, have inspired countless adaptations in literature, visual arts, and film; in the course, we study both ancient narratives and modern works that adapt or allude to these ancient touchstones. Students in the course come from the Colleges of Letters and Science, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biomedical Sciences, and Engineering; they are typically fulfilling a General Education requirement in Arts and Humanities, and some are majoring or minoring in Comparative Literature.

The course is organized into four units. The first unit sets out definitions and examples of key course terms: myth, legend, adaptation, and allusion. This unit also clarifies the course’s comparative framework by studying the myth of Persephone. We start with a classic presentation of this story, Ovid’s “Story of Proserpina” from his Metamorphoses. The next two works show how Persephone’s story originally emerged from a very different focus on Demeter and her cult, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the foundation of which is presented in “The Homeric Hymn to Demeter.” This ancient version of Persephone’s story is then compared with a contemporary animated video of Persephone’s tale, adapted for a young adult, modern audience. The unit concludes with Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, a 2006 film that weaves fantastic, mythic content—including allusions to Persephone’s experience—into the grim fascist context of Franco’s Spain seen through the eyes of a rebellious young girl. The second unit features the mythical setting of the Underworld and focuses on intrepid travellers—ancient, medieval, and modern—to this rich and forbidding territory. The third unit focuses on an archetypal character, the Trickster, as seen in traditional Native American and Norse myth, medieval romance (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and contemporary superhero film (Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight). 

The materials presented in this lesson plan comprise part of the fourth unit of the course, on Creation and Origin myths. The class guided by this lesson plan studies Babylonian and Hebrew creation stories and flood narratives. The Chinese legend of Yu the Great — an engineer who controls floods through canal systems — provides a provocative comparative framework for students, as they notice both similarities in traditional stories of great floods but also differences in the depiction of human agency: ancient Near Eastern characters such as Utnapishtim and Noah are passive recipients of divine direction, while Yu and his father Gun actively seek solutions and work to manage flooding. 

Immediately after this lesson comes a class on climate fiction, where we analyze a contemporary Chinese novella, Gu Shi’s City of Choice, which alludes to the figures of Gun and Yu in a dystopian narrative about sustained flooding and human efforts to control it through Artificial Intelligence. [Link added upon publication!] 

Lesson Plan Summary:

This lesson plan focuses on the ancient Chinese legend of Yu the Great from an adaptation perspective. After a short lecture introducing the legend itself and its early adaptations (including examples), the class moves into active engagement with a transmodal adaptation of ancient Chinese legend in the graphic-novel medium using Paul D. Storrie and Sany Carruthers’s Yu the Great: Conquering the Flood (2007). The materials provided facilitate a “showing vs. telling” analysis to help students understand visual interpretations of written source texts.

The planned class consists of an introductory lecture, a worksheet-guided small-group activity, a plenary group discussion, and a homework assignment to prepare for the next class. The materials guide students through the stages of an 80-minute class meeting: 

• Adapting Tradition (lecture: “Adapting and Visualizing a Legend”: 15 mins): Comparing an ancient source for Yu’s legend, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, with Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, a later version emerging from a different historical context and focusing on different aspects of the characterization of Yu; 
• Medium-Specific Meaning (small group work, guided by a worksheet, “Graphic Novel Analysis”: 40 mins): Analyzing the depiction of Yu’s legend in visual form in a graphic novel, with a focus on showing versus telling; 
• Deepening Understanding (plenary group activity: 20 mins): Review and elaboration of issues raised during small group work; 
• Bridging to Next Class Session (take-home reflection: “From Ancient Engineering to AI”; 5 min introduction at end of class): Connect knowledge gained and compare the Yu legend with its reflection in contemporary climate fiction novella.

Learning Objectives:

• Compare different versions of the Yu legend to explore adaptation within this tradition. 
• Investigate the importance of historical, philosophical, and political context in adaptation.
• Unpack a transmodal adaptation of the Yu legend in graphic novel form, focusing on how the work shows rather than tells its story.
• Initiate consideration of narratives through the generic lens of climate fiction.

Required Text: 

Paul D. Storrie and Sandy Carruthers, Yu the Great: Conquering the Flood (Lerner Publications Company, 2007) 

Lecture: “Adapting and Visualizing a Legend: Yu the Great”  

The lecture is intended as a preparatory overview of the material to be addressed in class. It serves to introduce students to the evolving legend of Yu and some of its sources; to engage with the question of how the legend was adapted across different historical contexts; and to open up to a discussion of the legend’s visual adaptation through the graphic novel.  

Worksheet: “Graphic Novel Analysis” 

1: Visual Language and Tone – topics:

• Visual Metaphor
• Line-work
• Color Palette
• Panel Layout
• Showing vs. Telling

2: Characterization – topics:

• Composition
• Physicality
• Expression
• Narrative Perspective

Final Workshop Activity: Creative Synthesis 

Prompt: Storyboarding a “Modern Historiography” version of the Yu legend

Plenary Discussion:

This set of discussion questions is designed to synthesize the 80-minute lesson plan.

1. The Mechanics of Adaptation: Telling vs. Showing

• Physicality vs. Prose: In Sima Qian’s written records, we are told about Yu’s dedication; in the graphic novel, how does the artist use physicality and expression to show the toll of his 13-year labor? What is gained and what is lost in the shift from telling to showing?
• Gutter Space: Does the use of “gutter” space — the literal gaps between panels — allow the reader to participate in the creative and interpretive act of adaptation more than a finished prose text does? 

2. Visual Language and Characterization

• Environmental Tone: Looking at your worksheet notes about line-work and color palettes, how did the artist use these visual tools to establish a specific tone for the “Great Flood” that words alone might struggle to convey? 
• Contrasting Agency: What are the primary visual differences in how Yu and his father, Gun, are situated in their landscapes? What do these visual choices tell us about their different approaches to the flood compared to the “passive” figures of other flood narratives, such as Noah or Utnapishtim? 

3. Modern Contexts and Creative Synthesis

• Modern Historiography: Based on your storyboard sketches, what is lost and what is gained when we adapt a mythological “hero” into a contemporary hydraulic engineer managing a real catastrophe? 
• Contextualizing the Graphic Novel: Recognizing the importance of context in interpreting the various ancient strands of the Yu legend, what context(s) should be invoked in analyzing the graphic novel version of Yu’s story? 
• The Transition to Cli-Fi: Given our upcoming discussion on Gu Shi’s City of Choice, does the legend of Yu remain a story of human triumph, or does the scale of the modern environmental crisis make his “conquering” of the flood feel different? 

Take-Home Reflection: “From Ancient Engineering to AI”

This assignment prepares students to bridge the gap between this class and the next, moving from the Yu legend to its use as an allusive component in the climate fiction novella City of Choice. This content is a homework assignment: students are asked to complete this work outside the classroom and bring it to the next class meeting.

Assignment: Write a 300-400-word reflection connecting today’s analysis of Yu the Great: Conquering the Flood to our next reading, Gu Shi’s City of Choice. 

Prompt: In today’s lesson, we explored how the graphic novel uses visual language to “show” human agency and physical labor in the face of environmental disaster. In City of Choice, Gu Shi alludes to Gun and Yu but replaces traditional labor with Artificial Intelligence and dystopian decision-making. 

1. Compare Yu’s human agency in the graphic novel with the role of humans in Gu Shi’s narrative. 
2. Does the shift from physical engineering (canals and dikes) to digital engineering (AI) change the “moral” of the Yu legend for a modern reader? 

Author Bio

Cheryl Lynn Ross is an award-winning educator and Professor of Teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Davis. With over thirty years of experience teaching Classics, mythology, and modern literature, she specializes in developing high-engagement curricula that bridge the gap between ancient texts and modern popular culture. Her scholarly work focuses on early modern and contemporary literary receptions and adaptation theory, ranging from the anti-authoritarian themes in the films of Guillermo del Toro to the staging of myth in modern musicals like Hadestown.

Professor Ross is particularly interested in utilizing film, graphic novels, and creative writing as tools for critical analysis. This pedagogical approach is exemplified in her lesson plan on the Chinese legend of Yu the Great, which guides students through a transmodal analysis of an ancient flood narrative alongside a contemporary graphic novel and climate fiction that adapts the Yu legend. By emphasizing “showing versus telling” and the role of human agency in environmental crises, she encourages students to explore how historical and political contexts reshape traditional stories for modern audiences. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University and frequently presents on innovative teaching practices and the intersection of mythology, adaptation, and pedagogy.

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