AMST 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing.

Topic for 2015/16a: Thoreau in His Time and Ours. Henry David Thoreau’s influence on American environmental thought, political ideas, and literary culture is enduring. The course examines some of his own writings, including Walden, Essay on Civil Disobedience, excerpts from his Indian Notebooks, and from his lifelong Journal. We will also read and write about 21st-century works in his tradition, including Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild (and the recent film made from it), as well as some contemporary journalism. 20th-century writers could include John Muir, John Burroughs (with a field trip to his nearby retreat Slabsides), Ernest Hemingway, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder. Photography and landscape painting influenced by Thoreau will also be considered. Thoreau himself was a great prose stylist and can provide a model for our own writing, including journal writing. Mr. Peck.

Topic for 2015/16b: The Instruction of Citizenship. Emma Lazarus’s celebrated poem, “The New Colossus,” identifies the Statue of Liberty as the “Mother of Exiles” welcoming the world’s “wretched” and “tempest-tost.” However, the popular definition of the United States as a “nation of immigrants” repeatedly comes into crisis when the state faces the arrival of new groups. This course examines how literature by first- and second-generation Americans brings to light conditions that either bind or divide us as communities. Where does the instruction of citizenship take place and what does it mean to be “naturalized” as an American? What do we gain or lose with assimilation? What exactly is “multiculturalism”? How does immigrant writing respond to or disrupt abstract notions of American citizenship? Authors may include Jamaica Kincaid, Sui Sin Far, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Peter Bacho, Junot Díaz, Fae Mynne Ng, Abraham Cahan, Lonny Kaneko, Piri Thomas, Edvige Giunta, Kym Ragusa and Mary Gordon. Ms. Brawley.

Open only to freshmen; satisfies the college requirement for a Freshman Writing Seminar.