English R1A

Other Readings and Media

Description

This writing-intensive course will study love, one of the great unifying themes of literature. Is love a construct we take from literature or is literature a construct we have created to help us express, even to access, love? Do we write love or does love use writing to show us what it is? “If love and sex were easier / we would choose something else/ to suffer,” writes poet June Jordan, turning love from something suffered to a respite from suffering in the break of a line. If literary analysis shapes our understanding of love, then it is urgent that we become dexterous in literary analysis. This semester, toward such dexterity, we will read poems, short stories, letters and essays that offer themselves as statements of or about love.

Students will be expected to produce weekly reading responses, and to write and revise three essays that showcase an increasing ability to make convincing arguments about the readings at hand. We will cultivate the skill of attentive reading and, through class discussion and workshop, apply it to students’ own writing in addition to the course texts.