ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

School Days: We read and discuss narratives about schooling, education, and coming-of-age. These tales take various forms, including fables, fairy tales, poems, memoirs, Bildungsroman, Gothic fiction, speculative fiction, campus satire, graphic novels, film. Likely texts: Book One of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (both Muriel Spark’s novel and Ronald Neame’s film), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Heesok Chang.

The Unknown Self: This course explores unreliable narratives and questions of self-knowledge. Through close readings of contemporary texts, you’ll sharpen your interpretive skills with the goal of a higher, more rigorous media literacy. In short, you’ll know better what you don’t know. Expect spirited debate, dialectical essays, and creative exercises around memory, identity, and blind spots both personal and cultural. Authors may include Zadie Smith, Jorge Luis Borges, Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Mariana Enríquez, and Maggie Nelson. Ryan Chapman.

The Graphic Novel: Between the billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, a Broadway adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and the spate of televised retellings and reimaginings of the Sandman and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, comics and graphic novels have left an indelible mark on our culture and the stories we tell. What is driving the popularity of this narrative form? What unique stories and narratives does the graphic novel allow us to tell? What is unique about the “graphic novel” when it is such a highly adaptable form? How does the relationship between image and text change how we think of reading, or what a “novel” even is? To engage such questions, we will read and analyze graphic novels that take up two common, often intertwining, narratives: the hero’s journey and the coming-of-age story. Readings may include Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marjane Strapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim, Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead, among others. Seth Cosimini.

What is a Classic?: Why are some works of literature called classics? Which works are these? Do they have common traits? How is it that they have endured while other works have been largely forgotten? Are all classics related in some way to the original classics of Greek and Latin literature? How old does a work have to be to achieve the stature of a classic? Can there be modern or even contemporary classics? Through reading and discussion of poetry and prose works often thought of as classics, this class investigates these and other questions. Authors include some of the following: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Heller, James Baldwin, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith. Robert DeMaria.

The Fragment as a Form of Knowledge: ”Fragments are the only forms I trust,” writer Donald Barthelme once claimed, before later suggesting “that particular line has been richly misunderstood so often … I have thought of making a public recantation.” But what are fragmentary forms, and why trust them more than others—or renounce such faith? This course examines various fragmentary texts—works composed of small pieces, works that seem (or that are) unfinished or incomplete, works perhaps not intended for publication, works constructed via combining and/or destroying parts of other pieces of writing, etc. We may begin with the notes and aphorisms of Schlegel, Lichtenberg, and Joubert, but our primary focus is on the fragment as form, as process, as metaphor in contemporary writing. Writers discussed may include Mary-Kim Arnold, Eula Biss, Anne Boyer, Anne Carson, Paul Metcalf, M.  NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, Srikanth Reddy, David Shields, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, L. Ann Wheeler, and others. Joshua Harmon.

Allegories of the Self: This course provides first-year students with practice in close reading and interpretive writing and conversation through the examination of symbolic worlds inscribed in various media, including texts and objects in Vassar collections, with a focus on allegorical narrative in classical and Medieval literary sources and Medieval and Early Modern art. Our consideration of allegories as knowledge systems introduces you to the historical development of liberal arts education in the medieval schools, as well as to the culture of libraries and the organization of knowledge. Because allegory often serves as a medium for examining the microcosm of the interior soul in its relationship to the macrocosm of the natural Universe, we also explore the idiom as a prototype for the modern science of psychology. This course thus serves to familiarize you with conventions of meaning in creative works in various media expressly composed to be interpreted, introduce you to the foundations, tools, and culture of higher education, and also function as a practicum for improving your skills with written and spoken language. Thomas Hill.

The Essay Form: The high-school essay trapped in the Darth Vader facemask called the topic sentence.  And the immobile drapery of the five-paragraph costume armor. This is an exaggeration, of course, but to write in more imaginative ways let us examine the experiments in prose undertaken by essayists of the past hundred years or so: George Orwell writing about shooting an elephant, Carolyn Forché about a colonel in El Salvador, Sean Wilsey on mourning after September 11, John Berger and Susan Sontag looking at photographs, Laurel Johnson Black on being a poor working-class kid at a rich college, Teju Cole’s drone tweets. Also, Annie Dillard’s advice to young writers, Geoff Dyer on Nietzsche, Grace Paley on teaching, David Shields on the lyric essay, Vivian Gornick on the situation and the story, Joy Williams on her dog, Edwidge Danticat on her uncle’s death, Eliot Weinberger on what he heard about Iraq, Jenny Diski on rape, Leslie Jamison on James Agee, Eula Biss on pain, Denis Johnson in Liberia, and David Foster Wallace on anything. The above readings will be posted on Moodle. In addition, we will read So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. This book is available at the college bookstore. We will write brief essays (one to two pages) for each class and two longer essays (about eight pages in length). Amitava Kumar.

Melodrama: This course looks at melodrama as a genre, a form, and a mode–one that travels from the 19th century to today across theater, opera, music, fiction, television, and film. Beginning with melodrama’s roots in the 19th century, we examine the infusion of music into theater and its subsequent pairing with excess emotion. In particular, we look into melodrama’s frequent staging of issues related to race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From here, we shuttle back and forth between the 19th century and today to chart the various iterations and adaptations of melodrama across time, countries, and art forms. Over the course of the semester we explore wide range of texts that might include Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon and Brandon Jacobs Jenkins’ An Octoroon, Victorian “sensation” fiction, telenovelas and soap operas, reality television, musical theater, “melodramatic” teen films like My Life as a Teenage Drama Queen, and even Lorde’s album Melodrama. By collecting and comparing these texts, this first-year seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the interactions and adaptations of melodrama in order to make our own theory of what exactly makes something “melodramatic.” Christian Lewis.

Into the Apocalyptic Landscape: This course explores characters caught in the dreamscape of violence and apocalyptic visions that is perhaps unique to American history and culture, from slavery to skinheads to school shootings. We examine the concept–coined by rock critic Greil Marcus–of Old Weird America, a folkloric history that has spawned murder ballads, the music of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and a wide range of literary work, including poetry by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Lucille Clifton, and Etheridge Knight; stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, Christine Schutt, and Denis Johnson. Longer works may include novels by William Faulkner, Gayle Jones, Robert Stone, William Vollmann, Hunter Thompson, and the graphic artist, Lynda Barry. David Means.

Poetic Forms and Possibilities: A poem abides form to reach its meaning. Its form is the structure or set of governing rules–a container for meaning. Just as a physical vessel provides a shape and coordinates for its contents–and as contents may determine the most appropriate vessel for their holding–poetic form negotiates with what its writer hopes to render. In this course, we will read and discuss several specific poetic structures, such as the sestina, the villanelle, the sonnet, and the pantoum. We consider what each offers, try our own hands at writing them, read scholarship on verse forms, and compose literary critical essays, including a close reading and a research paper. Tracy O’Neill.

{pre[post]} Modern Poetry: A First-Year Writing Seminar: A poem is an ambush! It is meant to sabotage your sense of reality and expand your perception of language and things–of what we know and how we know it. Reading, explicating, crafting, and performing poetry is a revelatory process. In this First-Year Writing Seminar, we encounter poetry from the Long 20^th Century that offers testimony to the shifting experiences of modern life from Baudelaire to Ferlinghetti and from H.D. to Ada Limón. We pay careful and generous attention to the poet’s craft of imbuing creative work with meaning (via form and language) as well as the reader’s critical response (via contextualization and comparative analysis). As such, our seminar is a study of curious reading, collaborative discussion, and written explication. Matthew Schultz.

American Bestsellers: There have been bestselling books since long before the term “bestseller” came into widespread use during the late nineteenth century. And although in the twentieth century bestsellers became associated with the novel, in the American colonies and early United States the books with the biggest sales included a variety of texts, such as primers, almanacs, and the Bible. This course approaches the practice of critical reading by tracing a history of reading in early America, thinking about which texts were popular and why. We focus on joining the careful analysis of textual detail with attention to historical contexts shaping ideas about reading—what it is, why people do it, and how it matters. Our texts represent a range of genres, including execution sermons, captivity narratives, and seduction tales, and may include works like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. We also focus on developing skills in academic writing, practicing writing as a recursive and collaborative process and a means of developing your own contribution to critical dialogue. In this work, you have the chance to study a contemporary bestseller of your choosing—anything from Stephen King’s Carrie to Michelle Obama’s Becoming. Blevin Shelnutt.

The Ends of Black Autobiography: Autobiographical writing has been and remains a preeminent mode of African American expression. It was one of the first intellectual gestures that the formerly enslaved made when they gained literacy. It has fed music practices like the blues and hip-hop. It also may have created the circumstances by which the US could elect its first black president. Over the last three centuries, blacks have used this mode to insinuate themselves into literary modernity and register the often unacknowledged dynamism of their emotional and intellectual lives. This course explores the aesthetics of black autobiographical narrative–its codes, tropes, and investments–from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to its most present iterations. If black autobiographical writing involves not only telling a story about a black subject, but also proffering a certain version of black life to its reading audiences, it is important to ascertain the nature of the cultural work that these stories (seek to) accomplish. Among the artists featured in this Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gloria Naylor, Barack Obama, Jasmyn Ward, Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey, and MK Asante. Tyrone Simpson.

Bad Taste: While English classes usually focus on works of art and literature collectively considered good, this class revels in the bad: the embarrassing or disgusting, the artistic failure, the guilty pleasure. With the help of some influential theorists of aesthetic badness, and a selection of “bad” examples drawn from poetry, fiction, film, and visual art, we examine the categories—ugly, kitschy, campy, sappy, problematic, and so on—that have been and continue to be used to police what is and is not art, and to distinguish “good” art from “bad.” We consider how artistic hierarchies become entangled with other kinds of hierarchies, exploring how “bad” art both sustains and subverts racial, sexual, and economic power. Why, for example, are the terms “rom com” and “chick flick” so often used dismissively? What makes a work of art provocative and avant-garde, rather than offensive—or simply gross? And when does the “merely” bad become “so-bad-it’s-good”? In the final three weeks of the course, the students are asked to reflect on the terms they themselves use to evaluate and describe cultural products, and to provide categories and case studies from their own experiences as consumers. Mark Taylor.

Succession, from Tudor England to HBO: The allure of power—and the impulse to hoard it—animated some of the greatest works of the English Renaissance. This course explores them alongside contemporary attempts to represent the perennial problem of handing over control: the abdication of Shakespeare’s moody Richard II beside the regal ascension of Black Panther; the antiroyalist fury of Lucy Hutchinson—one of England’s first women writers—athwart the antidemocratic ploys of Succession’s Logan Roy—for two examples. In the first half of term, we set these cultural interventions against the backdrop of very real leaders navigating the chaos of being on top, sometimes with literary flair of their own. In the second half, we increasingly consider succession’s personal stakes too: the burdens of carrying on a family name, the pressures of preserving an artistic legacy.

Though the texts we read range in date and genre, they raise a similar set of questions: how does a society cope with unresponsive leaders? How can problematic charges of “unfitness”—based on race, gender, ability, etc.—be untangled from more legitimate concerns about despotism? What happens when familial infighting, or the private consolidation of wealth, has public consequences? Why use the past to comment on the present? How can we create art—or, for that matter, simply live life—in that present with the past always at our backs? And why does succession inspire such imaginative vivacity in the first place? Together, we devise answers to these queries—while bringing new ones to the table—as we attend to verbal nuance, appreciate literary ambiguity, finetune a scholarly writing practice, and contribute to urgent public debate today. Pasquale Toscano.

The Heartache and Humor of Loneliness in Fiction: Loneliness is one of the driving forces of literature—loneliness in isolation, loneliness in a big city, loneliness in a family or relationship or social setting. In the best cases, reading provides an antidote to loneliness, but how do authors writing about loneliness accomplish this? How do they write about isolation or alienation without isolating or alienating the reader? What do these stories have to tell us about connection when we don’t have access to other people? We focus on the underexplored relationship between humor and loneliness, and consider the literary techniques that can make loneliness funny, suspenseful, and intellectually engaging. We look to classic and contemporary novels and short stories for their answers and write essays and our own creative pieces. Readings include work by George Saunders, Sally Rooney, Carson McCullers, Yiyun Li, Ernest Hemingway, Carmen Maria Machado, and Lorrie Moore, among others. Christine Vines.

Jane Eyres: Published pseudonymously in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre tells the story of a heated romance between a “poor, obscure, plain” governess and a Byronic landowner with a Gothic past. The novel quickly became part of the Victorian cultural landscape, even though Brontë’s rebellious heroine upended nineteenth-century notions of propriety and femininity.  Jane Eyre was not only popular in its day, however.  It has had a hypnotic hold on subsequent generations of writers, who revised and re-imagined Brontë’s text in order to contest its representations of love, madness, colonialism, Englishness, feminism, and education.  In this first-year seminar, we explore Jane Eyre’s complicated relationship with its literary descendants and ask fundamental questions about literary influence, canon formation, narration, and women’s writing.   

This is also a course that focuses on reading and writing. We move away from thematic readings of texts towards more complex modes of analysis that include considerations of form, genre, and historical context.  We pay close and careful attention to the language of literary texts under consideration.  We leave behind the five-paragraph essay taught in high school to focus on writing as a process.  We draft, review, and revise writing throughout the term.  One of the goals of the course is to help you become more self-conscious about your own reading and writing practices. Susan Zlotnick.

Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.

 

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS