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Students will read and write about literary texts critically and closely. The course emphasizes recursive reading and writing processes that encourage students to discover, explain, question and clarify ideas. To this end, students will study a variety of genres as well as terms and concepts helpful to close analysis of those genres. They will practice various forms of writing for specific audiences and purposes. Students will reflect on and develop critical awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses as readers and writers. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 12 pages of formal revised writing.
This class will examine three American road-works-- Krakauer's INTO THE WILD, Pirsig's ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, and Kerouac's ON THE ROAD--by and through which we will examine two fundamental questions, together the sine qua non of Existentialism: 1) What makes for a meaningful, authentic life?; and 2) What does it mean to be a human being? Though this course will be structured around the three primary works listed above, it will also reach beyond the time and space of the U.S. to investigate the historical and cultural context of Existential literature. Additional works may include Victor Frankl's MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING; essays and short stories by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus; Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN or Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING or Horace McCoy's THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? or Alexander Maksik's YOU DESERVE NOTHING; Herman Melville; Samuel Beckett; HAMLET; or THE BOOK OF JOB. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 pages of formal revised writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 121.
In this course we will examine a body of work that traffics in such existential themes as freedom and responsibility, authenticity and bad faith, anguish and abandonment, identity and subjectivity, and choice and commitment. While some of our readings will reach beyond our own shores (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard), we will mostly focus on works by 20th-century American writers: Alexander Maksik's YOU DESERVE NOTHING, Chuck Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB, Jon Krakauer's INTO THE WILD, Flannery O'Connor's A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, James Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME, Nella Larsen's QUICKSAND, and Horace McCoy's THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? In the words of Zadie Smith, we're going to read a selection of very good books in this course, concentrating on whatever is most particular to them in the hope that this might help us understand whatever is most particular to us. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 pages of formal revised writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 121.
The title of this course is taken from Gary Lutz's essay of the same name, the upshot of which (both this course and Lutz's essay) is to focus our attention on fashioning sentences that hook, dazzle, surprise, spur double-takes, stab, make weak-kneed, and seduce. We will find our inspiration in a whirligig of writers (dramatists, novelists, poets, and essayists) whose syntactical moves and amped-up diction are worthy of thieving: Shakespeare (of course!), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, David Foster Wallace, Barry Hannah, William Gass, David Markson, Alexander Theroux, and Christine Schutt--to name but a possible few. Plus, we'll supplement our study and practice with a critical and theoretical examination of style, using such sources as F.L. Lucas's STYLE: THE ART OF WRITING WELL and Richard Lanham's STYLE: AN ANTI-TEXTBOOK, as well as essays by the aforementioned Woolf, Gass, Theroux, Wallace, and Lutz. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 pages of formal revised writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 121.
The title of this course is taken from Gary Lutz's essay of the same name, the upshot of which (both this course and Lutz's essay) is to focus our attention on fashioning sentences that hook, dazzle, surprise, spur double-takes, stab, make weak-kneed, and seduce. We will find our inspiration in a whirligig of writers (dramatists, novelists, poets, and essayists) whose syntactical moves and amped-up diction are worthy of thieving: Shakespeare (of course!), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, David Foster Wallace, Barry Hannah, William Gass, David Markson, Alexander Theroux, and Christine Schutt--to name but a possible few. Plus, we'll supplement our study and practice with a critical and theoretical examination of style, using such sources as F. L. Lucas's STYLE: THE ART OF WRITING WELL and Richard Lanham's STYLE: AN ANTI-TEXTBOOK, as well as essays by the aforementioned Woolf, Gass, Theroux, Wallace, and Lutz. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 pages of formal revised writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 121.
