Pynchon, Thomas : The Crying of Lot 49; Sebald, W.G.: Austerlitz;
Recommended: Davis , Mike: City of Quartz
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; James Joyce, Dubliners (selections); James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (selections); Anne Carson, “The Life of Towns”; Charlie Chaplin, City Lights (1931); Paul Strand, Manhatta, (1921); Walt Whitman, “Manahatta” (from Leaves of Grass); Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989); Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”; Mike Davis, City of Quartz (excerpt).
The city can be many different things in literature. As a plot device, the city is often a place of danger and opportunity, a place where characters make their way or lose themselves in the attempt. As setting, the city may be open or closed; it may invite the freedom of exploration or provoke the anxiety that arises from exclusion. These interpretations consider the city as a backdrop, as the stage on which the drama of fiction unfolds. But what happens when we push it to the foreground? What happens when we consider the city itself as subject, character, or text?
In this class we will examine 20th-century texts that foreground the city in various ways. We will encounter moments in which urban space is conflated with mental space, private space with public power, cityscape with text. In our written assignments we will try to move beyond the old divisions between character and setting and consider the broader implications of these crossover moments.
The primary aim of this course is to develop your critical thinking, writing, and research skills, and to help you to write across the disciplines. To this end, you will write and revise three short critical essays (4-5 pages) during the course of the semester. Students will also be responsible for weekly reading responses and in-class peer writing reviews.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Butler, Octavia: Fledgling
Beasts of the Southern Wild, dir. Benh Zeitlin, 2012; a course reader/bCourses readings including writings from: Gloria Anzaldua, Samuel R. Delany, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, José Muñoz, Eve Sedgwick, Evie Shockley, and others.
This course will begin with the request (and the requirement) that you read with pen in hand. But we'll quickly move from the idea of taking notes in the margins of material, printed pages to thinking of images, movies, TV shows, advertisements, and even social and political structures as "texts" which you will comment on, mark up, explain, and critique with the power of your pen (or your laptop).
"Marginalia"—the notes and scribbles that we make in the margins of the printed page—is a term that sounds dismissive and belittling. After all, who would give serious attention to the penciled comments in the margins of a library book, or the graffiti that covers a sign in the hallway? My contention is that those notes, scribbles, annotations, and glosses have the power to transform the original text. Our collective project will rearrange the supposed priority of "center" over "margin," and affirm that we should pay a lot of attention to marginalia. We will consider the relationship of "center" to "periphery" in its broadest social and political senses, and we will make it our task to question, disrupt, and rearrange the implied hierarchy and order implied in this mapping.
This is an R1A course, and so we will do a lot of writing and a lot of revision, with the goal of developing your academic reading and writing skills. We will practice beginning with the roughest of rough drafts—an assortment of scribbles in the margins of a text—and using these jottings to craft an essay. Along the way, we will remember and consider the initial surprise, pleasure, skepticism, interest, insight, and other kinds of engagement with the text that prompted us to write in the margins in the first place. Our attention to marginalia will help us imagine how those who read our essays will, in turn, handle and respond to them.
Notley, Alice: The Descent of Alette; O'Hara, Frank: Lunch Poems; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen
A course reader will be available with texts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Jack Spicer, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Boyer, Brandon Brown, and Dana Ward.
We will also listen to a number of pop songs, by artists including Frank Ocean, Icona Pop, Taylor Swift, Dr. Dre, and Stevie Wonder, as well as all of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Additionally, we will listen to songs suggested by members of the class.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
Do poems last forever? Shakespeare seemed to think so, or at least he thought that poems could transmit a boy’s beauty after his body was long dead. In this course, we will consider the claims to “forever” that poems make. Is this claim essential to poetry, or is poetry perhaps just as fleeting as a summer’s day? We’ll think about the desire for poems to last forever alongside another lyric genre that seems committed to its own self-destruction: the pop song. While a pop hit can get stuck in your head, it’s likely to be replaced by another one. Are poems more like pop songs? Or can pop songs last forever too, as Frank Ocean sings: “Do you not think so far ahead? / ‘Cause I been thinking ‘bout forever”? In this course we will consider the temporal implications of love poems written on bar napkins, mythopoetic epics, club hits, slow jams, political interventions, ballads, anthems, songs that own the summer, and poems that everyone knows by heart. Where and how do poems or songs last—in our heads, on the page, in our repetitions? Are today’s songs and poems covering the same ground as Shakespeare did centuries ago? Or do new forms bring new feelings? Over the semester, we will be listening to short songs, and reading (mostly) short texts, slowly and carefully. We’ll consider how form and medium impact thematic content, and how questions of temporality are encoded in form.
This course seeks to develop your critical thinking and writing skills. Therefore, alongside this close reading and listening, you will produce several papers of increasing length. These papers will be developed through outlining, drafting, editing, and revising.
Greenblatt (editor), Stephen: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Nichols, Jeffrey: Take Shelter (film)
Wordsworth famously wrote, “Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her.” What then of storms and natural disasters – moments when our environment becomes disordered, disruptive, or overpowering? We will read representations of nature’s stormy instability as a reflection or extension of human loss and tumult; an aesthetic marvel to be enjoyed from a distance; an indifferent force of desolation; and, perhaps most terrifying, a dynamic system in which we humans act as a potentially overwhelming and destructive force that unsettles and intensifies nature’s hazardous instability. We will explore how these various renderings participate in cultural discourses that are deeply rooted in time and place. This course brings a body of literary works into conversation with each other while also considering how these texts may shape and inform 20th- and 21st-century environmental writings.
While we will spend a good deal of class time puzzling over the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the selected texts, our primary aim in this course is to develop academic reading and writing skills. To this end, we will have frequent practice in writing in a variety of forms of discourse, including exercises in observation, description, and reflection, as well as short analytical essays. Processes of outlining, drafting, editing, peer-review, and revising will be central to the life of our classroom and your work for this class at home.
Cicero: Political Speeches; Donne, John: The Complete English Poems; Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar; Shakespeare, William: Othello; Swift, Jonathan: A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works
12 Angry Men (film), dir. Sidney Lumet (1957); To Kill a Mockingbird (film), dir. Robert Mulligan (1962)
Course reader including excerpts from rhetorical theory (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Kenneth Burke); and political speeches (John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.).
Every author must face the problem of what constitutes persuasive speech. From Plato and Aristotle in fourth century B.C.E. Greece to the twentieth-century philosopher Kenneth Burke, theorists have struggled to understand rhetoric: what is it? How does it persuade? Is it inherently moral? In this class, we will read a series of literary and political texts from a wide variety of times and places in order to understand how each author or character understands rhetoric and seeks to persuade his or her audience. We will attend to both the similarities and the differences among these speakers and writers in order to examine how the time, place, and goal of each determine his or her rhetorical strategies.
Of course, every student (and most professionals) must also face this problem of how to persuade. Even as you read samples of famously persuasive rhetoric from Cicero, Shakespeare, Swift, Kennedy, and King, you will also consider how their strategies of persuasion may or may not succeed in your own writing. By interrogating the goals and audiences of each writer on the syllabus, you will learn to examine critically the rhetoric of your own writing and that of your peers. You will consider what makes an argument persuasive, using what you learn to develop your skills in argumentative and expository writing.
Butterworth, Jez: Jerusalem ; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (1818 Text); Whitman, Walt : Leaves of Grass
Course Reader
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
What does it mean to be an individual, to say “I”? What does it mean to be part of a group or community? These days we seem to take individualism and the importance of the individual for granted, but was it always this way? This class will examine the ways in which individuals are conceived of and formed, as well as how larger communities include some individuals and exclude others. How are these outcasts and outsiders represented, and how do they represent themselves?
We will consider these and other questions by exploring and discussing a wide range of media from the past two hundred years: literature (poetry, novels, plays, essays), philosophy, film, TV, and visual art – especially artists classified (accurately or not) under the umbrella term “outsider art.”
The central goal of the R1A course will be to develop your critical thinking and writing skills. You will write and revise three papers of increasing length over the semester, and work with peers to improve your writing and ideas.
Moseley, Walter: Devil in a Blue Dress; Smith, Anna: Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; West, Nathanael: Day of the Locust
Films: Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974); Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep (1977).
A course reader will be available for purchase.
In this course, we’ll explore the political, economic, cultural, and social histories that have culminated in Los Angeles's distended geography, smog-filtered light, and barely connected enclaves. We’ll learn how writers and filmmakers have used the city’s geography as a platform for exploring temporal and spatial experience in urban communities, from the dawn of Hollywood to the explosive racial and class disturbances of the 1990s. The point is to explore Los Angeles as both a physical space and a cultural concept, with the categories of race, class, and gender as our through lines. How does L.A.’s geography structure subjectivity for the citizens who move about its sprawl? How does that geography impart unique experiences of time and space? What can the city’s image tell us about American political and cultural ideals? What do the city’s socio-economic realities indicate about the failure of those ideals? How has L.A.’s status as a hub of ethnic, sexual, and cultural diversity made it a unique background against which to critique and reimagine the categories of race, class, and gender? What literary and cinematic techniques have artists devised to represent urban experience in a city that often resists representation? How have these conventions shifted over time, and what might these shifts tell us about the changing nature of life in Los Angeles?
Throughout the semester, you will be working to find and improve your voice as both a critical and creative writer. Through two essays and a biweekly “city journal” that tracks your experience as an urban subject, we will hone skills like sentence craft, effective argumentation, and critical thinking.
Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; O'Connor, Flannery: A Good Man is Hard to Find; West, Nathanael: Miss Lonelyhearts
The Night of the Living Dead, dir. George Romero, 1968; South Park, dir. Matt Stone and Trey Parker: selected episodes; Broad City, dir. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, 2014: selected episodes.
A course reader will include selections from the likes of Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath.
How does ickiness work? What makes something grotesque? Why, so often, are we also laughing? This course will examine various texts that have that special something that turns our tummies. We will look at novels, stories, and films that generate discomfort—digestive and otherwise—and explore the various lines they toe and tangle: between horror and humor, perversion and pathos, attraction and repulsion. Tackling issues of excess, deformity, and taboo, this course will explore how various ick factors, at specific historical junctures, confront and cross fraught boundaries—of gender, race, and sexuality, among others—and why we both love and loathe it so much when they do.
In this course, you will be asked to write several short essays of increasing length in order to develop your academic reading and writing skills. We will work on reading critically, posing analytical questions, and crafting and supporting well-reasoned arguments through both these papers and additional in-class exercises. Students will be asked to draft, revise, and peer-review their written assignments over the course of the semester.
Thomas, Rob, ed.: Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars; Thompson, Ethan and Jason Mittell, eds.: How to Watch Television
Veronica Mars (Seasons 1 and 2--available as DVD/BluRay box sets or downloads from iTunes, Amazon, etc.); also a Course Reader and other online readings as selected by the instructor.
Writing about television constitutes one of the most popular forms of literary criticism outside of academic circles today. TV critic Lili Loofbourow argues that episode recaps and their in-depth analysis of our favorite shows fulfill our need for a "sustained, ethical, collective conversation" and that television shows provide the common text for that conversation in a secular age. This course will examine the claim that TV shows provide a way to talk about questions that used to belong to the domains of religion and philosophy, through our own sustained engagement with the first two seasons of the critically acclaimed teenage noir detective show Veronica Mars, which we will watch and discuss together in the form of a group recapping blog. As with most multi-arc television shows, there are many potential topics that students might choose to pursue, from issues of the conventions of the detective show genre and its structure to the ethical quandaries faced by a teenage private eye in a socially and racially diverse southern California town. Part of the course's aim is to help you learn how to decide what engages your interest and makes for an effective critical approach to a topic.
The class will involve a substantial time commitment: at least four hours of weekly TV viewing; supplementary reading to help students learn the stylistic and formal requirements of episode recaps; group blogging; and several papers that develop blog posts into larger-scale engagements with the course material and the question of mass media's role in ethical debates. Peer review will play a significant role in the editing and grading processes.
Darnielle, John: Wolf in White Van; Diaz, Juno: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Dove, Rita: Thomas and Beulah; Ford, Richard: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar; Milutis, Joe: Failure: A Writer's Life; Perec, George: A Void
Additional resources will be made available through bCourses.
(Note the new instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class:)
Work and play regulate the rhythm of living, but when was the last time you saw them represented as you experience them? Realistic novels may mention both to be realistic, only to bypass them in favor of events and plot set-pieces. Workplace media, like police procedurals, are depicted as all discovery and confrontation, while avoiding the drudgery of paperwork, uneventful patrolling, and outreach. And presentations of play, as in professional sports, fail to resemble the weekend soccer game, or the aimless entertainment we indulge in after our work days.
This class will work with texts that foreground work and play as discrete and interrelated: contradistinguished and co-constructed. By wrangling with concepts that are simultaneously familiar and under-explored, we will engage with the kind of thought-work that goes into the best writing, regardless of one's discipline.
Over the course of the semester, you will write two short essays and one longer research-based project. There will also be various shorter assignments designed to hone your ability to formulate complex arguments and ask the kinds of questions that generate fruitful analysis.
Agamben, Giorgio: The Open; Hogg, James: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (1818 edition); Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A course reader, to be purchased at a location TBD
What is a monster? Why do we fear it? What role does it play in our conception of ourselves and our world? Our work in this class will focus on the figure of the monster, especially as it appears in the literature of nineteenth-century Britain. We will pursue this figure from the frozen moors of northern England, through the barren wastes of the Alps and the North Pole, to the foggy London streets stalked by Mr. Hyde and the infamous Jack the Ripper. In so doing, we will discover how writers and their readers used this figure to determine what society was, and who belonged to it.
In the process of this investigation, you will learn how to analyze and mobilize rhetoric in and through writing. You will not only think about how writers make explicit and implicit arguments about the world around them, but also explore how to develop your own written arguments coherently and effectively. Furthermore, you will hone your research skills and your ability to develop arguments at length. In the process, you will write and revise two progressively longer research essays.
Albee, Edward: Desert Solitaire; Anzaldua, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera; Austin, Mary: The Land of Little Rain; Bitsui, Sherwin: Flood Song; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony
Required Course Reader will include primary works by T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson, and Robert Misrach, and critical writings by Michel Foucault, W.T.J. Mitchell, Mark Reisner, Rebecca Solnit, and Shiloh Krupar.
(Note the new instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class:)
In this course, our primary focus will be the cultural representation of the American desert in the post-1945 period. From the first detonation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico to the massive infrastructure projects devoted to bringing water to the west, the American desert has served as both backdrop and rallying cry for American environmental struggle. We will investigate the ways in which literature, film, and activist writing reveal the desert as a site at once subjected to and critical of the administrative logic of late modernity. Drawing on secondary readings in critical geography and cultural criticism on landscape and place, we will confront the desert as a contested, produced, and rigorously managed site.
This course acts as an introduction to college composition and research. Together, we will develop skills of critical reading and learn how to build evidence-based arguments from our readings of literary texts. We will also learn how to construct compelling research questions from literature and other arts. To help you through this process, we will devote significant class time to developing analytical, argumentative, and verbal skills. Concretely, over the course of the semester, you will produce at least 32 pages of writing.
Diaz, Junot: This is How You Lose Her; Goethe, J. W.: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Greene, Graham: The End of the Affair; Nelson, Maggie: Bluets; Reines, Ariana: Coeur de Lion
Other materials will be available on the course website, including work by Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, Joan Didion, Lydia Davis, John Donne, Shakespeare, Petrarch, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. We’ll also incorporate some popular love songs, including everything from Edith Piaf to Kanye West.
While a break-up may (in theory) end a relationship, it rarely ends a novel. This course will take its cue from novels and poems that dramatize the break-up in all of its obsessive, playful, and melancholy permutations in order to get a better glimpse of what it is, exactly, that the break-up breaks. How is a break-up characterized in written form? Does writing down an ending merely prolong it? What counts as a break-up? Can you break up with a place, a house, or a habit? What is our relationship (or obligation) to the person, place, or thing after the break-up? This course will also examine how the relationship between lover and loved object relates to the relationship between writer and reader. It will use break-ups to help us probe poetic terms like apostrophe (when a poet addresses an absent person) or lyric address (how the poetic “I” speaks to the poetic “you”) and to investigate how a poem or novel eventually ends.
While this course will be organized around ideas of the break-up, its primary purpose is to develop your skills as a writer, reader, researcher, and critical thinker. That being said, many of the patterns of behavior that we will find to characterize the break-up—flirtation, agitation, spats, stubborn melancholy—might also apply to your relationship with your own writing! This class will be structured as a workshop and will include peer revision, individual meetings, and in-class discussions of various techniques of essay writing and research. Students will be responsible for a short diagnostic essay followed by two longer essays and revisions.
Graff, Gerald: “They Say / I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing; Lakoff, George: Metaphors We Live By; Shakespeare, William : Julius Caesar; Williams, Joseph M.: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
A course reader, available at the copy center or on bCourses
A film TBD
Language is a tool for expression, but also for manipulation and the exercise of power. In this class, we will be looking at a wide variety of the ways in which power makes itself felt through language, ranging from subtle and ostensibly honest persuasion, to persuasion backed up by force, to the language of direct authority. In the process, we will consider how to decode the assumptions that often underlie such language and shape our responses to it. As we’ll see, the ethics of speaking and writing are anything but simple, and as speakers and writers ourselves, we can’t avoid making compromises.
The subject matter of the course has a direct relationship to your mode of engagement with it: in addition to considering how speakers wield power through language, you will be honing your own skills of argument and persuasion in several papers throughout the semester, most of which you will revise. These writing assignments will allow you to harness your own sources of power (knowledge, creativity, a captive audience) and apply them to the discipline of academic writing.
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; James, Henry: Washington Square ; Kaysen, Susanna: Girl, Interrupted ; Sittenfeld, Curtis: Prep
Films: Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee; The Suburbs, Arcade Fire; American Beauty, Sam Mendes; Illmatic, Nas; Downton Abbey, episode 1
Excerpts in course reader from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, Robert Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Adrien Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Marcel Proust
In this course, we will consider the multiple forms the house and home can take, as well as the relationship between the individual house, apartment, dorm room, etc. and its surrounding environs. We will use a range of texts to help us theorize the physical dwelling itself and its connection—or lack thereof—to the more abstract feeling of being “at home.” We will also consider the condition of the “private space” situated within a larger institutional structure (the campus, the hospital, the housing project, the country estate, the jail, the cemetery) or neighborhood (urban, suburban, rural, small-town and city). Additionally, we will consider the range of possible spaces an individual can occupy throughout his or her life, investigating how this sequence of homes influences our interpretations of whether our own lives and the lives of others are successful, unsatisfying, ideal, unconventional, problematic, normative or just quirky enough.
This course will add to the composition skills developed in R1A by focusing on students’ research skills; students will write two short essays and one longer research-based paper.
Rivera, Tomás: . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra/ . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism: Revised Edition
DVDs: The Grapes of Wrath; Harvest of Shame; House/Divided
CDs: Dust Bowl Ballads; The Ghost of Tom Joad; Renegades
Reader/bCourse Site: Course reader and/or bCourse site will include excerpts from Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field; Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez; Ernesto Galarza's Spiders in the House and Workers in the Fields; Stephen J. Pitti's The Devil in Silicon Valley; David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear; Michael Denning's The Cultural Front; Randy Shaw's Beyond the Fields; Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear; and photographs by Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol, and Matt Black. More information on the first day of class.
(Note the new instructor, topic, book list, and course description for this class.)
In this course we will think about what cultural historian Michael Denning has called the "lowercase grapes of wrath narrative," which emerged during the Great Deparesson. In John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, this was a story about economic collapse and environmental catastrophe. It was a story about home and homelessness: foreclosures, evictions, and forced migration. It told a story of poverty, suffering, and exploitation and at the same time, a story of hope, perseverance, and social change through activism.
In what ways did this story haunt the American cultural imagination in the second half of the twentieth century? In what ways might it still haunt us today in light of a number of uncanny returns: another crash on Wall Street, another "Great" economic crisis, a new season of environmental apocalypse, and another round of bankers with foreclosure notices in hand? If the twenty-first century reboot of hard times in the Golden State has shifted the setting from California's Central Valley to the postmodern nowhere of Silicon Valley, and if the desperate masses now queue up for hours not at soup kitchens but instead at Apple Stores, is the "grapes of wrath" narrative still relevant? Does the U.S. popular imagination look elsewhere, or to other narratives, to resolve our current crises, to think through what has happened, and to imagine what will happen next?
As we explore these questions, we will develop your skills as a writer, reader, researcher, and critical thinker. Three papers are required. All three will combine analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources. The first paper is a 3-page diagnostic essay. The second paper will be 5-6 pages; the final paper will be 10 pages; and both of these longer essays will undergo revision. In-class writing, workshops, and discussion are required.
Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Whitehead, Colson: Zone One
BBC America: Orphan Black; Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species (excerpts); Encinosa Fú, Michel: "Como tuvieron que morir las rosas" ["Like the Roses Had to Die"]; Jonze, Spike: Her; Rivera, Alex: Sleep Dealer; Wells, H.G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau (excerpts)
Many of us tacitly surrender to the belief that “social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an inevitable course.” Quite often, we encounter this idea of progress through variously coded forms of narrative emplotment about the so-called "human condition." The question of what it means to be human, then, becomes all the more important when considering the ideological dominance of technological utopianism and social progressivism. Especially in consideration of human variability, abjection, and alterity, we must ask whether "progress," when taken to its "inevitable" extreme, enacts a redefinition of the human. If so, how do literature and film negotiate anxieties concerning the course of history and the sociohistorical relations that govern the categorical treatment of human differentiation? How is the representation of (non)normality affected by the systemic stratifications of raced, classed, gendered, and disabled bodies that mediate cultural production? Does technology, as Rosalind Williams suggests, produce historical contradictions by eliding the very power structures it reproduces?
In this class, we will explore these challenging questions, while developing our critical thinking skills for the purpose of effective rhetorical practice and composition. Most importantly, we will focus on how to find, evaluate, and make use of research tools and resources for analytic writing across the curriculum. The primary writing assignments for the course will be three progressively longer papers combining analysis of primary texts with research from secondary sources. Strategies for revision will form another major focus of the course, and the second and third papers will include substantial work and feedback at the prewriting and draft stages of composition.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: Strange Pilgrims; James, Henry: The Figure in the Carpet; More, Thomas: Utopia; Sartre, Jean-Paul: Nausea; Shakespeare, William: Othello; Williams, William Carlos: Imaginations
Also a course reader
In What Is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre claims that the prose writer "is in a stuation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvers them from within....[Whereas] the poet is outside language. He sees words inside out as if he did not share the human condition, and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as he comes toward men." In describing prose as a mode of ecstatic and embodied engagement and poetry as a mode of estrangement, Sartre resolved generically a set of arguments routinely made about literature: that it is uniquely tied to action and that it resides at an absolute distance from the world and its actions. This course begins by interrogating Sartre's distinction and quickly turns to the broader questions Sartre undertakes: what literary work is and why we care about it. We will scrutinize a small group of novels, short stories, poems, and one Shakespeare play, deriving arguments from them about the effects of reading, what it means to contemplate an ideal world (or to have such an ideal fictively excised from the mind), what the reader's creative role is, and so on. We will also examine a selection of classical and contemporary arguments which describe the literary as a special modality, as a means of training our minds to handle certain kinds of problems, as a manifestation of the gap between authorial intention and the logic of language, and so on, comparing these arguments with what we find in our sample literary group. Requirements for the course include one short (three-page) diagnostic essay, two mid-length (five-page) essays, and a longer (eight-page) research paper.
The MLA Handbook; Johnson, James Weldon: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Lowell, Robert: Life Studies; Satrapi, Marjane: The Complete Persepolis; Wordsworth, William: The Prelude
Also (available on-line): Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Florence Hardy's The Early Life of Thomas Hardy.
Course reader, including Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, poems and stories by Elizabeth Bishop, and introductory material on autobiography.
Life writing seems self-explanatory as writing that is about one's life, but what does that mean, exactly? How does a life become literature, and why should literature, the province of the imagination, be made to present a real life? This course examines the rewards and difficulties that follow from life writing's proposition to connect the biographical self of the author with the self of the text. We will begin with a brief examination of autobiography as a genre before turning our attention to literary works in genres that are not necessarily autobiographical, but which authors have adapted to tell the story of an autobiographical self. Among other questions, we will be asking how each work creates its identification between the author's "I" and the text's "I," as well as what the work gains, loses, or calls into question through that identification. In addition to the readings, the course will also sharpen students' written argumentative and research skills; you will write and revise several essays, culminating in an eight- to ten-page research paper.
Golding, William: The Spire; Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure; Ibsen, Henrik: Four Major Plays: A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder; Levi, Primo: The Monkey's Wrench
One of the key questions that critical writers ask about literature is "how"? How does the writer build the first sentence and finally end a scene, chapter, or stanza? How are the material surroundings of the characters rendered? How can we articulate and form arguments about the subtle variations and contradictions that surface from our studies? How can we buld arguments about the text we are taking apart? If we focus on the way tangible structures are envisioned and built (or renovated or destroyed) and how the "architects" in and of the texts relate to the process of construction, we can create a strong foundation to consider form versus content. The course materials will therefore investigate the struggles of architects and builders in order to heighten our awareness of the formal and structural choices made by the author. This will in turn furnish lessons for constructing our own critical arguments in class discussions and on paper.
While these questions and proposed texts will furnish us with material for rich discussions, this class is chiefly geared to improve your writing. We will concentrate on both mechanics and style, learning how to read closely, formulate interesting arguments, gather evidence, and organize claims into persuasive essays. Over the course of the semester, you will produce approximately 32 pages of written work through a gradual process of drafting, editing, reviewing, and revising. The assignments will also include a research paper, satisfying the course requirement.
Hacker, Diana: Rules for Writers; Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Also a course reader with selections from W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and W. H. Auden.
The early twentieth century was peculiarly preoccupied with its own modernity. While science and technology made great strides forward, two World Wars left devastation, and writers struggled to portray the tumult of a swiftly changing social landscape. Somehow, to them, subjective human experience seemed objectively different.
But in such shifting waters, how can we know how much we actually know? What exactly is the difference between fact and opinion? Do art and literature create objective knowledge? In the 1910s and '20s, while some argued that art should become scientific, others valued a newly radical ambiguity in creative expression. This course will examine how subjectivity and objectivity operate together in language. You will use original research to develop progressively longer papers, ultimately completing 32 pages of writing in drafts as well as revisions.
Agee, James and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen; Sebald, W. G.: The Emigrants; Sontag, Susan: On Photography; Turabian, Kate: A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations; Woolf, Virginia: Orlando
Course Reader, including essays by Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Eastlake, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Anna Pegler Gordon, Margaret Olin, Geoffrey Batchen, Elizabeth Abel, Teju Cole, and Alison Winter.
This course examines the increasingly central role of photography in capturing and constituting events in our everyday lives. We will conduct a broad survey of critical essays on photography from its inception to the present day, tracking not only its technological development over the last century and a half but also key debates regarding photography's capacity to change the world and our sense of ourselves in it. As we begin to understand the world as photographed and photographable in the twentieth century, new questions emerge as to the kinds of narrative practices we turn to in telling stories of our individual and collective experiences. Does photography record history or make it? What kinds of (in)visibility has the medium offered its subjects throughout the last two centuries? We move from critical investigations to contemporary literary texts that attempt to grapple with these issues both thematically and formally. Our class will enter these ongoing conversations in a similar spirit, maintaining a Tumbir comprised of mixed photographic and verbal responses both to our texts and to each other's posts. This course also requires two short critical essays and will culminate in a final research project and presentation.