WRITING THE ESSAY II: New York: City of Poets. In this first year seminar we will read and write about the poems and poets of New York City, with a particular focus on those that speak to diasporic and immigrant experience, multilingual forms of expression, social justice movements. From the “imprisoned lightning” of Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, to the “inviolate curve” of Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, we will read poems we can place in the city; our class discussions and assignments will take us out of the classroom to visit the places these poets describe. Texts may include poems by: Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Patricia Spears Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Federico García Lorca, Suzanne Gardinier, Marie Howe, Tan Lin, Dante Micheaux, Marianne Moore, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Nuyorican Poets, Ishle Yi Park, Camille Rankine, Derek Walcott, and Yiddish Poets. We will hone the skills of close reading, the personal essay, and annotation, with a final project involving scholarly and creative elements.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ADVENTURES IN BOREDOM. All day long, boring experiences threaten our enjoyment of life. Waiting for the train. Washing the dishes. Attending required college courses. But what do we mean when we call something “boring”? Where does boredom come from? And is there any benefit to being bored? In this first-year writing seminar we’ll explore these questions and many more through an exciting and unpredictable selection of reading and writing assignments. Topics will include: small talk, long speeches, the science of how we experience time, handheld devices, the internet, capitalism, “women’s work,” reality television, intentionally boring films, Buddhism, asceticism, meditation, mindfulness, heroin, prison, the Internal Revenue Service, the fear of missing out, the lives of zoo animals, life in a boring town, living off the grid, summer vacation, heaven, and silence.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: DEAR READER — HYPOCRITE READER: "You—hypocrite reader—my double—my brother," Charles Baudelaire interpellates us, in a gesture of mingled accusation and complicity. How do writers imagine their audiences? What do we think of our readers? Who gets left out—on purpose or, more commonly, by accident? How do interpretive communities shape the texts they read? In this first-year writing seminar, we'll read letters, poems, essays, stories, manifestos by Yiyun Li, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claudia Rankine, Charlotte Bronte, Leslie Jamison, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bertolt Brecht and many others to think about how and why—but also, prominently, for whom—we write.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: REVISION & REENACTMENT. In this first-year writing seminar, we will focus on two related creative strategies—revision and reenactment—to structure a broader discussion about failure and transformation, repetition and intervention, the present in relation to the past. We will first look at theories, methods, and examples of revision, including materials from The New School’s Archives and Special Collections, thinking through our own relationships to the revision process and trying out new approaches, using digital tools such as Draftback. We will then turn to examples of writing and art that adopt revision as an artistic strategy—e.g., fan fiction, parody, erasure, and other forms of appropriation—and examine their various effects. In our final unit, we will focus on reenactment as a mode of re-vision that dives into history and uses new contexts to produce new meaning. As part of this unit, you will be invited to revisit the New School’s Archives, identifying material and/or events that could lend themselves to reenactment. Throughout the course, we will subject our own writing, and the course, to frequent revision. Readings include essays, short stories, a novel, a play, a few films, and a range of visual and performance art. Writing assignments will include the personal essay and a critical essay, with the option to develop a creative project supplemented by self-analysis.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: CONSTRUCTING WORLDS THROUGH LANGUAGE: From Chaucer and The Great Vowel Shift to Tennessee Williams and the poetry of Southern vernacular, in this first-year writing seminar, we'll concern ourselves with the significance of language and dialect and their roles in building narratives. The objective for the student will be to develop a sense of the ways that language and its uses have changed over time and how languages both inform and borrow from the societies they arise in. Language is an expression of experience. As we all have varied life experiences, so too does the language we use to express our own experiences as well as the experiences of others. Readings may include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wollstonecraft, DuBois, Marx, August Wilson, Maya Angelou, Mark Twain, Junot Diaz, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: BILDUNGSROMAN, BRIEFLY. What does it mean to grow up? In this first-year writing seminar, we will read and respond to a range of 20th and 21st century novellas that reimagine and reinvigorate the classic literary genre of the bildungsroman, which traditionally depicts a young person’s moral or spiritual education. As we read, we will investigate the ways in which the novella’s compression and distillation shape coming-of-age tales, and ask questions such as What is knowledge? and How is the (growing, changing) self constituted by its particular social world? Authors may include Jamaica Kincaid, Tao Lin, William Maxwell, Carson McCullers, and Jeanette Winterson.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE QUEER PAGE: In this first-year seminar we will read, discuss, and respond in writing to a multiplicity of queer texts, from foundational works of queer theory to contemporary fiction, essays and poetry. This course will consider the relationship between body and text, and we will practice close reading a wide range of LGBTQIA textual bodies, queer pages that work to counter hegemonic norms. Some questions this course will raise include: How do queer texts function as a space for intersectional analysis, and what are the connections and places of overlap between bodies and texts? Texts may include work by: Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Meg Day, Samuel Delaney, Jack Halberstam, E. Patrick Johnson, Rickey Laurentiis, Audre Lorde, José Esteban Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Robert McRuer, Adrienne Rich, Eve Sedgwick, Julianna Spahr, and Monique Wittig. This course will ask that you hone skills in close reading, writing the personal essay, and will involve a final project involving scholarly and creative elements.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WE THE PEOPLE: The aging writer Elizabeth Costello in J.M. Coetzee’s eponymous novel meditates that she has never been comfortable with the word “we” in its exclusive form—“we” Africans, for example, as opposed to “you” others. How do we write our collective identities? In this first-year writing seminar, we'll read political texts like the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and B.R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste; poems by Claudia Rankine, Arthur Rimbaud, William Wordsworth and others; essays by Frantz Fanon, Leslie Jamison, Claude Levi Strauss and more, as well as a number of other texts to think through questions of how we imagine ourselves as belonging to (or being excluded from) groups.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE RACIAL IMAGINARY. Race is often called a “social construct”—an invented idea, a fiction—but it’s a fiction so powerful it shapes the realities of our histories, our social systems, and our daily lives. What happens when, as one contributor to the Racial Imaginary anthology writes, our imaginations are “riddled with the stories racism built”? How can an act of imagination, as expressed in a painting, sitcom, or poem, do harm—or help? In this first-year writing seminar, we’ll examine the role of race in the life of the mind, with particular attention to the consequences of U.S. conceptions of race as represented in contemporary texts. Is it possible, as editors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda ask, for race ever to “outrun its birth in racism and become some kind of neutral, unfanged category”? We’ll read a variety of texts—including Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoirs, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s criticism, and Eula Biss’s lyric investigations—in an attempt to address such questions, and to learn how to better write about race and ethnicity ourselves.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: EVERYONE'S A CRITIC. Pop culture has historically been dismissed as frivolous or a passing fad, the fodder of naïve youth – but we all create and digest popular culture. Pop culture is, in some ways, a reflection of who we are at any given moment in time. Studying what's popular allows us to deepen our understanding of humankind: age, race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and the realities of social, historical, and political contexts. These lenses, taken together or perhaps in opposition, provide opportunities to see ourselves authentically and to change, progress, and heal. In this first-year writing seminar, we will recast pop culture as perhaps the truest reflection of who we are, what we believe, desire, and value. The authors we will read are ideologically and stylistically diverse, but what they have in common is their concern with social, cultural, and political issues and their strong distinctive prose. Our discussions will focus not only on the ideas presented in the texts but also on the structural and rhetorical features of the texts themselves, the language in which the ideas are embodied. Students will develop critical writing and reading skills and make persuasive arguments through writing about the issues that are most prevalent in their lives. The writers and thinkers we may read include: W.E.B Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Malcolm Gladwell, Virginia Woolf, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Zora Neale Hurston, Hilton Als, Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag, E.M. Forster, Zadie Smith, and more.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE FAITH BETWEEN US. Look at the headlines, flip through a magazine, or click the link to your favorite website, and faith and religion very often appear—separating one believer from another (and from non-believers) or living between us, forming the glue that holds communities together. Through a consideration of a variety of contemporary religion writing—mostly from newspapers, popular magazines, journals, and websites—this first-year writing seminar will ask students to take their own excursions into faith and faithlessness, and through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, create the stories that, in Joan Didion’s words, “we tell ourselves in order to live.” Readings may include works by Ayad Akhtar and Karen Armstrong, James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson, Zadie Smith and Matthew Teague, Yolanda Pierce and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: NOT I: ON WRITING TOWARD CONSCIOUSNESS. In her novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf reminds us that looming behind every person’s story about selfhood is the ambient enormity of consciousness itself: “the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, yet at the same time cannot forget.” Woolf’s frustration with our “remorseless analysis” and advertisement of identity is grounded in a deep sensitivity to how much is lost when we dissociate ourselves from a far more comprehensive and mysterious sense of what it feels like to be alive. Almost a century after Woolf published her major works, contemporary neuroscience now offers us radical new insight into those shifting qualities and states of awareness that comprise personhood. That research has also ratified Woolf’s sustained argument that being—the full psychosomatic experience of a human life—is simply more than selfhood. In this interdisciplinary first-year writing seminar we’ll explore both literature and science in an attempt to write about the parts of personhood we usually fail to get on the page, from ordinary boredom to non-conscious cognition to what Buddhists call bare attention. We’ll operate from the premise that the purpose of writing consciousness in a richer, more comprehensive way is to write beyond the human. Readings will pair fiction by writers like Woolf, Don DeLillo, and Joy Williams with selections from works on linguistics, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and neurobiology.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: IDENTITY: WHAT IS IT? With all of the fury about "identity politics," we rarely pause to ask how we know what identity is, or why we perceive things to be what they are. This class will think philosophically about identity, approaching questions of essence and existence through theoretical readings by Classical philosophers and post-Marxist critics, and through analyses of contemporary culture (especially Get Out and essays on contemporary romance).

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ILLNESS AND HEALING. In this first-year writing seminar students will look at classic texts on illness and healing such as Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors and Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals as well as essays on black women's maternal death rates and climate change. Is the earth sick? Why is chronic illness on the rise? Do mental illnesses need to be "cured"? We will formulate questions and learn to think on the page and research. The memes tells us if we heal ourselves we can heal the world. Students will write personal and research essays as well as look at news about the wellness industry and discuss current events in real time.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE POET'S PROSE. Oscar Wilde says that “a poet can survive anything but a misprint.” So what happens when we employ that exactitude of poetry to essay writing? And what does it really mean to experience life as a poet? In this first-year writing course, we will engage poetic techniques to craft creative and expository essays. Reading and writing assignments will include poems and essays in a variety of forms, traditions, and voices. There will be an emphasis on informed discussion, peer workshopping, in-class writing, and collaborative projects. Course texts will include historical and contemporary works, especially by those who identify as both poet and prose writers, such as John Donne, Aphra Behn, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Joy Harjo, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, Li-Young Lee, Claudia Rankine, and Kevin Young.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WE SHOULD ALL BE WOMANISTS: THE POLITICS OF BLACK WOMEN'S LITERARY IMAGINATION: In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2012 TEDx Talk she made a daring suggestion: We should all be feminist. However, African American and African scholars have done the work to uncover and deconstruct the imperialistic features of White-Western feminist theory, which raises the question: Shouldn’t we all be womanists? In this first-year writing seminar, we will develop a working understanding of womanism in order to articulate how the ideas show up in short stories, poetry, novels, critical essays, and plays. Moreover, we will interrogate the thin line between fact and fiction in those same literatures. Through an examination of a kind of “black womanist literary canon,” this course explores canonical and contemporary, dramatic and critical texts simultaneously to work toward individual and communal understandings of womanism in order to think and write critically about the ways race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality shape the lives of black women and their literatures. In looking at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, why does womanism matter? In thinking about the historical tensions between the two, what is that relationship between womanism and feminism? How does womanism engage concerns of sexuality and why is that important? This course’s objective is to drive students to be rigorous in their answering of key social questions, to develop a strong foundation in critical reading and effective writing. Writing assignments will include the personal essay, a critical essay, and the option to develop and workshop a creative writing project. Readings may include works by Audre Lorde, Kia Corthron, bell hooks, Yaa Gyasi, debbie tucker green, Lynn Nottage, Assata Shakur, Kia Ann Petry, Suzan-Lori Parks, Katori Hall, Dominique Morisseau, Lisa B. Thompson, Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Octavia Butler, Roxane Gay, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Moya Bailey, Sharon P. Holland, among others.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: STORIES FROM ELSEWHERE: The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end,” Valeria Luiselli writes in her nonfiction book Tell Me How It Ends. This shaping of a narrative from scattered fragments, memories and events applies not only to the immigrant experience, but also to the process of writing nonfiction itself. Where do we find a beginning, middle and end? How do we decide what to include and what to leave out, what is important to our story and what is not? In this course, students will examine different kinds of immigrant voices and how they choose to frame their stories, as well as considering how the very words we use to describe people--immigrants, refugees, illegal aliens, expatriates--also work to shape our narratives for better or for worse. We will read a variety of sources, including essays, short stories and magazine articles, as well as analyzing narrative techniques in other media, such as documentaries, movies and podcasts. Readings will include texts by Valeria Luiselli, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Albino Okero-Ochello, and Pico Iyer, among others.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WRITING ON THE VERGE. This first-year writing seminar will focus on literary works depicting the physical, mental and social extremities of the human experience, from psychological disturbances to natural disasters. What kinds of strategies, for example, do writers employ to represent traumatic events and traumatized perspectives? What can these altered states of awareness tell us about the way our minds construct reality? Keeping those questions in mind, we’ll pay special attention to writing that captures the way extreme situations radically deconstruct our ordinary conceptions of time, memory, selfhood and otherness, forcing characters to confront the limits of their own organizing intellects. In that respect, studying how writers capture these “extreme” states of mind on the page will be a way of learning how human consciousness itself can be represented in rich, strange, and more comprehensively “realistic” ways. Authors may include James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Samuel Beckett, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, and Lydia Millet, as well as a wide array of interdisciplinary essays on the subject.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE WANDERING SELF. Travel writing can be many things at once: exploration of new terrain, discovery of the self, reinvention of the self, escapism, cultural education, and much much more. Travel writing is almost as old as both writing itself and the human urge to know and/or conquer the world around us, but in this modern age of all-access travel where anyone and everyone can blog about their adventures we will consider how and why certain travelogues rise above the fray. In this first-year writing course we will consider the role of place (how to make the unfamiliar familiar, or make the familiar new again) and self (who are you and/or who do you want to be?), in the acts of both traveling and then writing about traveling, through our own writing and via in-class discussions of texts by writers including Jenny Diski, Pico Iyer, Rebecca Solnit, Jamaica Kincaid and Bruce Chatwin.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: DOUBT: In a 2013 New York Times piece, Philip Lopate called the essay an exercise in doubt. Rejecting the often-touted virtues of certainty, Lopate instead invited essayists to honor the deeply unsure and divided nature of human consciousness and to embrace doubt as integral to the essay writing process. In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore and consider the value—and possible limitations—of Lopate’s insights in discussing and practicing various essay forms: the personal essay, the argumentative essay, and the exploratory essay. Texts may include readings by Joan Didion, Philip Lopate, David Foster Wallace, Cheryl Strayed, Brent Staples, Amy Tan, Richard Blanco, Timothy O’Brien, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, Tom Junod, Roxane Gay, and more. Our encounters with these readings are designed to inspire your ideas and unique approaches to your own writing, which will be harnessed through lots of brainstorming, free writing, workshopping, drafting, redrafting, and critical feedback from your instructor, your fellow students, and yourself.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WRITING ABOUT VALUES: In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore fundamental issues of our lives in order to develop key analytic and argumentative skills. We will discuss what is really worth striving for and what makes a good or meaningful life. Topics include questions of priorities, definitions of good and evil, cultural and moral relativity, the nature of love, the challenges of suffering and death, and sociopolitical issues such as minority rights, feminism, and the environment. Texts may include short works by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, Euripides, Shakespeare, Woolf, Sartre, June Jordan, Michael Pollan, Al Gore, and many others, as well as Eastern and Western religious texts and topical newspaper articles. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will focus on tackling the stages of the writing process, entering a conversation, identifying key value conflicts, anticipating counter arguments, identifying sources, and engaging the reader. We will work on developing close reading and research skills, logical strategies, rhetorical techniques, and grammatical clarity, along with the effective deployment of summary, quotation, citation, and tone.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: PERSONAL NARRATIVES: Writing means translating your own idiosyncratic experiences and thoughts into a common language. In this first-year writing seminar, we’ll examine a series of first-person works and analyze how, and to what extent, these writers convey their inner lives on the page. What can we learn from examining the techniques they employ? Students will practice formulating, developing, and expressing ideas in essay form, ranging from literary analyses to personal narratives of their own.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: NEW YORK, CITY OF POETRY. In this first year seminar we will read and write about the poems and poets of New York City, with a particular focus on those that speak to diasporic and immigrant experience, multilingual forms of expression, social justice movements. From the “imprisoned lightning” of Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, to the “inviolate curve” of Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, we will read poems we can place in the city; our class discussions and assignments will take us out of the classroom to visit the places these poets describe. Texts may include poems by: Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Patricia Spears Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Federico García Lorca, Suzanne Gardinier, Marie Howe, Tan Lin, Dante Micheaux, Marianne Moore, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Nuyorican Poets, Ishle Yi Park, Camille Rankine, Derek Walcott, and Yiddish Poets. We will hone the skills of close reading, the personal essay, and annotation, with a final project involving scholarly and creative elements.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ENTRE PAUSAS: FRAGMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE. Everyday life is often overlooked as a site from which abundant critical thought and artistic insight emerges. This first-year writing seminar seeks to understand the everyday as a place-time where social and political life is not just inhabited but creatively reimagined and critically transformed. What happens when global and local narratives are re-framed from the perspective of the quotidian? What shifts in understandings of power, agency, and knowledge when our care and attention are given over to 'non-monumental' spaces, temporalities, and experiences? As we turn our attention to experiences typically marked as habitual, small, invisible, or otherwise unexceptional, we will consider the way that writing can bear access to that which is often left unseen or palpably unsaid. Throughout the course, we will develop familiarity with a range of critical, literary, and artistic approaches to writing quotidian life, exploring themes of embodiment, collective or shared perception, domestic and public spaces, identity-formation, and desire. Writers, thinkers, and artists we explore may include: Gloria Anzalúda, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Paz Errázuritz, Diamela Eltít, Veronica Gago, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Audrey Lorde, Clarice Lispector, Anna Maria Maiolino, José Quiroga, Trinh T. Minh-ha and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WRITING ABOUT VALUES. In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore fundamental issues of our lives in order to develop key analytic and argumentative skills. We will discuss what is really worth striving for and what makes a good or meaningful life. Topics include questions of priorities, definitions of good and evil, cultural and moral relativity, the nature of love, the challenges of suffering and death, and sociopolitical issues such as minority rights, feminism, and the environment. Texts may include short works by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, Euripides, Shakespeare, Woolf, Sartre, June Jordan, Michael Pollan, Al Gore, and many others, as well as Eastern and Western religious texts and topical newspaper articles. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will focus on tackling the stages of the writing process, entering a conversation, identifying key value conflicts, anticipating counter arguments, identifying sources, and engaging the reader. We will work on developing close reading and research skills, logical strategies, rhetorical techniques, and grammatical clarity, along with the effective deployment of summary, quotation, citation, and tone.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: 80s-90s AMERICA: I want my MTV. Just say no. The AIDS crisis. Frankie says “Relax.” The Rodney King riots. Globalization. riot grrrl. Grunge. Anita Hill. What legacies did the last two decades of the 20th century leave for the new millennium? In this first-year writing seminar, our critical reading and essay progressions will engage with the cultures, politics, and socio-economics of ’80s-’90s America to examine how we got to where we are now. Reading and writing assignments will include a variety of written forms, genres, and voices in conversation with artifacts from visual art, music, and fashion. Class meetings will emphasize informed discussion, peer workshopping, in-class writing, and collaborative projects. Documentary and literary texts may include works by Gloria Anzaldua, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ken Burns, Michelle Alexander, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bret Easton Ellis, and Harriet Jacobs.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ADAPTATION. This first-year writing seminar will consider the practice and theory of adapting literary works to other art forms including film, plays, modernized texts, and other new forms of media. Exploring often universal themes expressed in the original works, students will learn to write critically and creatively about storytelling elements and the process of creating popular stories. We will analyze original works for structure, character, language, and theme and then, as we read/watch an adaptation of each, we'll mark the similarities and differences in the structures, characters, and language and also note whether or not the adaptation successfully upholds the themes of the original work (and how it does so). We will also pay close attention to how the adaptations of such classic/iconic works deal with representation and inclusivity of characters/minority groups that may have been ignored or misrepresented in the original. Readings may include work such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Great Gatsby, Tristan and Isolde, Beloved, I am Not Your Negro, Hidden Figures, Winter in the Blood, Kiki's Delivery Service, Crazy Rich Asians, Pride and Prejudice, works by William Shakespeare, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: OBSESSED: WRITING ABOUT WHAT HAUNTS US. In this first-year writing seminar, we’ll visit the landscapes that leave their observers obsessed, and observe and put into practice our own writing obsessions. How can an incredibly close study of a subject find its way into our work? What's the difference between deep research and obsession? We'll read essays, fiction, and poetry by Jhumpa Lahiri (Italian language); John McPhee (truckers); Vinson Cunningham (sermonic essays); Jonathan Franzen (birds); Natalie Goldman (craft essay on obsession in Writing Down the Bones); Natalie Diaz (poetry); Roxanne Gay (Scrabble); Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation); Siddhartha Mukherjee (cancer); M.F.K. Fisher (frugality)

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES. This first-year writing seminar examines the theory and practice of memoir and personal essay through a study of techniques of writing the self, integrating literary analysis and creative writing in an exploration of the role of memory and imagination in reconstructing and shaping the past. Students will learn how to translate personal experience and research into effective pieces of writing. To that end, we will read a variety of texts including memoir, personal essay, and travel writing, among others, and examine the ways writers use language to bring their subjects to life, reading not only for the story but, more importantly, also for distinctive prose style and technique. As writers we all have unique concerns, backgrounds, and perspectives. Our goal is to effectively communicate what we have seen, heard, and felt, focusing on the world outside of ourselves as much as our interior worlds. Our workshops will help us focus on hearing our unique voices and the voices of others, offering new ideas and thoughtful critiques. We will learn how to use the truth of our lives to create compelling narratives that feature quality thinking, depth of insight, and impressive prose style. Readings may include works by Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Philip Lopate, Joan Didion, Michel de Montaigne, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Pico Iyer, Jeanette Winterson, Margo Jefferson, Mary Karr, Mary McCarthy, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, Alexander Chee, and more.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: CULTURE AND CONFLICT. This first-year research seminar offers a broad survey of social, political and cultural topics, with students having a greater choice over subject matter as the semester progresses. In the first unit, on Race, Gender and Violence, we’ll read personal narratives by such writers as Brent Staples, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Katha Pollitt. In the second unit, students expand into journalism and media research as they pursue topics of personal and/or local interest. In the final unit, students choose a film or television show and explore that piece within the backdrop of a larger social context.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL. This first-year writing seminar encourages students to consider the ways they are taught and the unspoken assumptions about their education. To do this effectively, students hone skills for reading, analyzing, and thinking about structures of implicit thought in formal education. To think through complicated issues, write to examine that thinking, share their ideas, and make arguments based on their perspectives and understandings. Authors include Paulo Friere, Adrienne Rich, Mary Louise Pratt, Susan Griffin, and Ralph Ellison.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: LOVE AND DEATH. We are born. We fall in love (or not). We die. In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore how the search for love and the fear of death plays upon, perhaps, all aspects of our being. From a first-person view, we will examine how we have authentically lived love and death, composing creative non-fiction, memoir, and cultural- criticism. From a third-person view, we will study critically what love and death might mean for others, engaging with philosophy, literature, and film. With love and death as a compass, our travels will also take us down paths lit up by passion, sex, commitment, and loss. Constantly learning from one another, this seminar will focus on in-class dialogue and writing widely across disciplines and genres. Authors and directors may include Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and bell hooks.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ELEMENTS OF FACT AND FICTION: In this first-year writing seminar we will ponder the importance, necessity and psychological functional of storytelling. As a species, humans are storytelling animals. We can’t explain ourselves or know each other without using, sharing, inventing and assuming stories. What is universal in reason? How does it work? Who decides the context of meaning? We’ll begin the semester reading old stories—fairy tales, for instance—and study the evolution of metaphor and culture. Good stories are timeless and relatable. How, then, do we keep churning out new ways of thinking old stories? We’ll read novels, memoirs and literary theory. We’re actively seeking an understanding of the goal(s) of narrative drive. How is learning achieved? What do we want to understand when we read other peoples’ experiences? Is it to relate to what’s already within us or do we grow? If so, how and where? Potential readings include: The Story Factor: Secrets of Influence from the Art of Storytelling, by Annette Simons; Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, by Cristina Bacchilega; Strange as this Weather has Been, by Ann Pancake; Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann; A Childhood: The Biography of Place, by Harry Crews; There There by Tommy Orange; and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: GREAT SHORT FICTION: This first-year writing seminar aims to develop the broader skills of close reading and clear, analytical writing. The syllabus offers a survey of the short story with authors both canonical and contemporary, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Sherman Alexie, and others. The course explores such themes as character and conflict, experimental and psychological fiction, and moral fiction, as well as the role of voice, descriptive language, and symbols. The course requires ongoing shorter assignments plus multiple drafts of three formal essays.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA. In this first-year writing seminar we look at texts that confront depression, grief and longing. Poets and philosophers have often examined these emotional states as passage through a “dark night of the soul” in which an author confronts the despair within and finds a way to traverse it. These personal and spiritual reckonings are often deep examinations of the self in the world and a search for meaning in existence. This writing intensive course considers philosophical, poetic and other renderings of mourning and melancholia in authors such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Karen Green, Sigmund Freud, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Paul Celan and others. Through a series of essays, we begin a conversation in our own writing and thought with these authors and issues.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: The RETROSPECTOSCOPE: ON MEMORY AND SELF. In this first-year writing seminar we will explore the way memory shapes how we see ourselves, others and the world around us. How do the circumstances under which a memory is formed affect us? How does the language we use to talk to ourselves and about ourselves inform how we assemble our sense of self? To what extent is the act of forgetting actually a core component in identity-making? As the semester progresses we’ll explore work by science writers, essayists and novelists in an attempt to understand the malleable nature of memory and the impact it has on how we interact with our reality. Some authors who will help construct our own arguments about this deeply personal, but universal topic, include: Jorge Louis Borges, David Eagleman, Jill Bolte-Taylor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Jamaica Kincaid and Tim O’Brien, among others. Steeped in their unique and varying points of view, we will then write two short essays and one longer rumination on the nature of memory and identity.