ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Fiction and The Unknown Self: This course explores unreliable narratives and questions of self-knowledge. Through close readings of contemporary and twentieth-century texts, you’ll sharpen your analytical skills while embracing messy (and productive) ambiguity. 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 Jorge Luis Borges, Mariana Enríquez, Garth Greenwell, Maggie Nelson, George Orwell, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf. 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, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Joseph Heller, James Baldwin, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop. Robert DeMaria.

Ways of Knowing: We encounter different ways of knowing, taking into consideration that there are many different frameworks for understanding the world. We give close readings and consideration to various Indigenous authors, poets, speakers, and activists. This course also engages with place-based wisdom and relational viewpoints as it relates to environmental concerns. Authors may include Joy Harjo, Layli Longsoldier, Winona LaDuke. Charlotte Gullick.

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.

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, soap operas and reality television, musical theater, classic Hollywood melodramas including Imitation of Life, “melodramatic” teen movies like Confessions of 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.

A New World Naked: Sex and Romance in American Poetry: From Dickinson and Whitman to our current evolving moment, eros has been a strong and ineluctable force through American letters, however Puritanical its origins. Straddling the divide from religious celibacy and strict monogamy on the one hand to the wilder shores of queer and polyamorous devotions on the other, this course takes a closer look at how hooking up over the centuries has been celebrated by poets in both verse and prose. We also engage queer and multi-ethnic identities to consider how literature might mirror back a nation full of melting-pot pluralities. Timothy Liu.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?: This course focuses on representations of love (filial, parental, sexual, etc.) from antiquity to the present. Situating the selected works in their contemporary cultural and historical contexts, the course explores significant differences as well as possible continuities between past and present interpretations and representations of such basic concepts and institutions as gender, family, marriage, filial and marital duties, the private sphere, and sexuality. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet serves as a chronological center for these investigations, but we will also discuss selected texts (representing diverse dramatic, epic, and lyric genres) by Euripides, Aristophanes, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Emily Brontë, and others. In addition, we will look at various adaptations (musical, theatrical, fine arts) of Romeo and Juliet as well as film versions. Zoltán Márkus.

Reading (in) the Anthropocene: Our difficulty in adequately responding to human-induced climate change is, in part, a failure of our collective imagination. The deferral of resolute social and political action in the face of rising CO2 emissions, global warming, deforestation, species extinction, ocean acidification, and sea level rise suggests that the climate crisis is also a crisis of narration, story-telling, and imagining otherwise. The existential threats emerging from this planetary tipping point have profoundly reoriented the stakes of critical reading and literary expression in our contemporary moment. If heeding the warning signs of anthropogenic climate change depends on developing our own collective ecocritical literacy, what role do novels, short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction play in teaching us how to read in the Anthropocene? Policy writing and multilateral agreements may prove unsuccessful in limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. What creative forms of expressive writing might instead spur us to action on a truly planetary scale? This course will explore the broad terrain of environmental literature and the ecocritical interpretative methods that have emerged alongside it. Our readings will move across genres, from ecopoetry to nature writing, from climate fiction (cli-fi) to ecocriticism, and so too will our writing practices, as we will craft ecocritical literary analysis essays, place-based natural histories, collaborative conservationist manifestos, and public-facing environmental writing. Texts may include Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things, T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Timothy Clark’s The Value of Ecocriticism, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Alden Marte-Wood.

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.

Speculative Modernism: In 1917, Max Weber wrote, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Post-Enlightenment modernity is characterized by the ascendancy of reason and materialism, where rational thought and empirical evidence dominate cultural and intellectual life. For modern artists, this materialist worldview limits an understanding of human experience and the richness of existence. Imagination is not merely a creative tool but a fundamental aspect of human cognition that allows us to grasp concepts beyond the empirical, helping us to bridge the gap between the mundane and the transcendent. Literary modernists sought to capture the complexities of human experience through fragmented and innovative narrative forms. They explored themes of alienation and subjectivity as well as the fallibility of memory and the complex nature of time through metafictional narrative techniques like intertextuality and self-reflexivity. They were preoccupied with how language shapes reality, particularly through the use of symbols and myths. This course explores the intersection of modernist literature and speculative fiction, examining how modern literary techniques and themes are inherited and reinterpreted within genres like science fiction and fantasy, which also tend to draw influence from pre-Enlightenment medieval literature and Romantic mysticism. Through curious reading, collaborative discussion, and research-based writing, we consider how 20th-century speculative authors use experimental aesthetics and imagined worlds to question industrial modernization and the myth of progress. Matthew Schultz.

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 blues and hip-hop. It also may have created the circumstances under which the US could elect its first Black president and perhaps eschew its second. 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 Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, bell hooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, and Janet McDonald. Tyrone Simpson.

Taking Books Personally: Why do we read great books? To write well, think better, learn about the world, and appreciate the past: good answers often broached in college. But we also read to get something: about ourselves and the present. This course—part experiment, part collaboration, entirely conversation—explores what happens when these twin aspects of reading are aligned. To this end, we spend time with two kinds of texts: first, primary works of literature in conversation with one another (about vulnerability, sensuality, and the body), both in full and in excerpt. We move from the transformative passions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale to the psychologized heartaches of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Austen’s Persuasion to the fantastic, mythopoetic energies of fairy tales and Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem. And second, works of literary criticism, or commentary, that respond to the complexities of these gems—with a twist. Because the scholars we read offer not the arid dust of academic prose but energetic models for taking the text and self together. They teach us not only to understand ourselves, and each other, through the books we love but to know those texts anew by placing them in the context of our felt, lived, and embodied realities (including disability, sexuality, gender, and race). Our task, in other words, is to hone our attention to the subtleties of form, an author’s time, and argumentative prose of stylistic no less than conceptual nuance, all while using our experiences to support this work–to forge unexpected interpretive paths along the way. The result is a panoramic vision of Anglophone literature; of stylistic range—good and bad, persuasive and milquetoast; and of criticism’s role both in the academy and in our lives from day to day. 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, Kirstin Valdez Quade, 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