English R1A

Other Readings and Media

"Caroll, Lewis, Alice?s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Modern Library Classics)

Christie, Agatha, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Berkeley)

Murakami, Haruki, Hard-Boiled Wonderland (Vintage)

Leiber, Fritz, Our Lady of Darkness (Tor)

Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (Fifth Edition)



Course Reader: Various poems, short stories and essays of literary criticism, including:

Atwood, Margaret, ?Homelanding?

Coleridge, S.T., ?The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

Rossetti, Christina, ?Goblin Market?

Poe, ?Murders in the Rue Morgue?

Tolkien, J.R., ?Fantasy?

Todorov, T., ?Definition of the Fantastic? "

Description

"In this course, you will focus on the craft of writing college essays?a vast process that includes everything from refining grammar and style to developing theses, engaging critical thinking, and structuring your arguments in logical and dynamic ways. You are required to produce 32 pages of writing for this course, consisting of several short assignments, drafts, and five essays. All the while, you will be introduced to techniques of literary analysis, which require you to read slowly, carefully, and many times over, in order to discover the ways in which formal and rhetorical practices (not confined to literary texts alone, but ones that you may also see in, say, a State of the Union address) convey multiple meanings.



As an extension of our simultaneous foray into analytical writing and reading, I?ve chosen a set of texts, from the genres of detective fiction and fantasy. These works provoke us to sort fact from fiction and, in so doing, demand that we consider our own ways of grasping the truth in what we see, hear, read and write. In various ways, these texts capitalize on questions that you (as burgeoning critical writers) will encounter in the course of your own work: how do we ?know? the truth about the world that we see before us?is it a process that requires rational deduction or does it demand imagination? Are our perceptions based on assumptions and/or desires? Or do they accurately register and comprehend the signs we encounter? "