ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

School Days: This seminar will familiarize you with practical criticism both as a method of reading - reading slowly and closely - and as a practice of writing that eschews the dreary “five-paragraph essay” in favor of a more distinctive and candid style. You will also be introduced to the basic tools and terminology of narratology (the formal study of narrative), which should be of particular interest to prospective literature majors. Our texts include various stories about schooling, education, and coming-of-age, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. Heesok Chang.

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, Maggie Nelson, George Orwell, Kazuo Ishiguro, 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.

Troubling Girlhood: This course explores narratives focused on the public and private lives of young people, mostly those who identify as women and/or girls. The aim of the course is to write through and “trouble” (challenge and struggle over) our cultural assumptions regarding those who are gendered “girls” in the US. Using literary fiction, YA novels, short stories, memoir, and visual texts, we consider how various identity categories challenge and shift the meaning of “girlhood” in the United States from the 19th century into our contemporary moment.

In addition to reading some great texts, students enrolled in this course develop an academic writing practice, and learn to participate in and lead a college classroom discussion. Eve Dunbar.

Notes on Process: This course examines literary works conceived via the imposition of specific rules, constraints, and/or processes. We’ll consider some effects such self-imposed restrictions and/or culturally inherited forms have on our understandings of text, authorship, reader, genre, creativity. Our readings - generally within the categories of poetry and prose poetry - may include poems fabricated entirely from lines taken from other poems; English-to-English “translations”; a description of an incident on a bus told and retold in 99 distinct ways; an abecedarian built using the Fibonacci sequence; an epic written entirely on the shortest day of the year; an experimental autobiography written at age 37, containing 37 prose poems of 37 sentences each - and then updated at age 45 to become 45 prose poems of 45 sentences each; a series of sonnets that (ab)use and (literally) expand that form; sixty-sentence accounts of sixty-minute walks around Manhattan; a long, skinny poem typed onto a roll of adding machine tape and a long, skinny poem-as-text-message that it inspired some fifty years later. We may also read a memoir of transracial adoption that responds to the “unanswerable questions” posed by a Korean TV show; a book (re)constructed from the bureaucratic memoir of a former United Nations Secretary General; a series of increasingly destructive alterations to an 18th-Century British legal decision to tell the story of the mass murder of enslaved Africans; and/or a book of prose pieces “in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel.” Joshua Harmon.

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. 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, 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.

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 and Writing (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 and write 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 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things, T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, Lydia Millet’s “From This Valley, They Say, You Are Leaving,” Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Andreas Malm’s The Progress of this Storm, Ursula K. Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life, Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and Timothy Clark’s The Value of Ecocriticism. 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 Fiction!: Speculative fiction is a generic term that has been imagined variously, originating to describe a particular type of science fiction centered around fundamental human concerns and now understood to encompass several genres including horror, science fiction, fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction, revisionist historical fiction, and other “non-mimetic” narrative forms. This class will be a workshop in which discussion is sustained around craft and questions particular to speculative fiction: how to suggest the governing logics of other worlds, entry points into formulating a conceit, probability and the willing suspension of disbelief, and the social function of not materially realistic literature. Throughout the semester, we will read selected works from the genre. Tracy O’Neill.

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.

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 will examine the categories - ugly, kitschy, campy, sappy, 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 will 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 will be 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.

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 Marie-Helene Bertino, among others. Christine Vines.

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

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS