English R1A

Book List

Luiselli, Valeria: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions; Williams, Joseph: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Description

Literary writing often presents us with profound forms of individual, subjective life—the "I" of the lyric poet, the well-developed character of the realist novel. What opportunities are there, however, for the writer who wants instead to focus on the life of a group, a neighborhood, a workplace, an organization, or a collective? In pursuing answers to this question by way of an examination of American literature, we will pay special attention to the relationship between literary form and the forms into which humans organize themselves.

This is a writing-intensive course, which means that half our time will be spent examining the fundamentals of the thesis-driven essay, from sentence grammar and paragraph structure to close reading and interpretation.