WRITING THE ESSAY II: HOSPICING COLONIALITY. Today we are witnessing huge shifts in attitudes toward how we, collectively and individually, identify and claim ourselves. We are asking—some of us for the first time: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I rewrite my story? We are rejecting the destructive and often divisive categories and oppressive histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation —choosing instead to flood the world with new stories that reflect our evolution and desire to live authentically and powerfully. This first-year research seminar explores how postcolonial and contemporary decolonial writers have always been reimagining and rewriting their histories in the quest to reclaim personal, cultural, and national identity. Through research, writing, and workshop, you'll engage with this practice yourself —conducting research, crafting arguments, and revising your writing as you explore what it means to "hospice" colonial narratives and birth new ones. We read a variety of postcolonial writers and critics, including Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edward Said, Kamau Brathwaite, Kiese Laymon, Marlon James, Natalie Diaz, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: WRITING AGAINST FACISM. Philosopher and former New School professor Hannah Arendt wrote about “the banality of evil” in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She questioned how ordinary people come to desire, enable, enforce, and implement the structures and cruelties of the totalitarian state. In this first-year writing course, we read authors who have attempted to chronicle and combat the evils of fascism, totalitarianism, colonialism, and imperialism. How can these works help us to think critically about these forces in society? We will read, write, and think deeply about these questions in a series of essays that culminate in a research project. We work together on each stage of the research and writing process to create a critical research essay. We also write a series of creative & philosophical investigations of these issues from a personal perspective. Authors will likely include Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Ilya Kaminsky, Mahmoud Darwish, Frantz Fanon, Solmaz Sharif, Aimé Césaire.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: RADICAL MEMOIR. In this first-year writing seminar we look at texts that defy the boundaries of genre to create a narrative form true to the fragmented, shifting composition of memory itself. Memoirist, diarist, theorist, philosopher: the authors we will consider perform the ongoing project of the construction of the self, or successive versions of self, through the creation of fragmented autobiographical texts. Students will write a series of essays responding to these texts and also learn to construct a longer, research paper. Authors considered will likely include Roland Barthes, James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Paul Preciado, Teresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Wayne Koestenbaum, Edouard Louis, Brian Blanchfield and Saeed Jones.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS. Though we, too, are animals, humans have often held themselves apart from–and understood themselves as superior to–nonhuman animals. This course adopts as its premise a stance against that anthropocentric worldview. We want to know not only what animals may tell us about humanness—but also what they may tell us about beyond-human experience. But we can’t ignore that our understanding is always already mediated by the human. In this class, our animal encounters are mediated by writers. We will examine how philosophers and scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Sunaura Taylor have theorized humanness and animality with and against each other—and in relation to social categories such as race, disability, and gender. We’ll also look at how writers and other artists have explored the lived experiences and inner lives of animals: we’ll meet Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ sacred marine mammals; the famous polar Knut and his ancestors, as imagined by Yoko Tawada; and, via Virginia Woolf, a beloved cocker spaniel named Flush. Potential topics will include: interspecies entanglement; the ethics of pets; colonial anthropomorphism and indigenous and decolonial theories of the nonhuman; the racialization of animality; gender, sexuality, and animality; disability and animal liberation; and the art of becoming-animal. Writing the Essay II is a course in the research-based essay. Our form, then, is the essay, and our other subject is research: that is, the various methods that are available to us as writers and when, why, and how we might use them. We will practice library research, archival research, on-the-ground research, and performative/embodied forms of research. Students will produce several short methods-based assignments building to a longer researched essay.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: EARTH, WIND, FIRE. The novelist, Alexandra Kleeman, said, “I think I’m most homesick for another time, a time of small, predictable changes, when disaster wasn’t woven into the fabric of daily living.” How do we experience nature and climate change? In this course, we will explore the living organism that is our earth. We’ll write from the joys of the smallest moments to the dissonance of the most dystopian. We’ll give voice to our climate anxieties. We’ll read stories, novels, essays, reportage, poetry, activist texts, and hybrid works. There will be plenty of room for imaginative, generative writing. Our research projects will be guided by our interests. Together, we’ll create a sense of agency and community. Those we may study include Svetlana Alexievich, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ayisha Siddiqa, Mosab Abu Toha, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: WHAT IS RAPE CULTURE? Ugh. It’s everywhere. But what is Rape Culture? This first-year writing and research seminar looks at sexual violence in literature and pop culture and asks students to consider different, perhaps difficult, points of view. We will investigate social and political issues including violence, equality, sexual justice and patriarchy through critical writing and art from the 1970s to the present. Digital events will be looked at in real time during the months this class is in session. This course emphasizes close readings and a research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: HOSPICING COLONIALITY. Today we are witnessing huge shifts in attitudes toward how we, collectively and individually, identify and claim ourselves. We are asking—some of us for the first time: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I rewrite my story? We are rejecting the destructive and often divisive categories and oppressive histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation —choosing instead to flood the world with new stories that reflect our evolution and desire to live authentically and powerfully. This first-year research seminar explores how postcolonial and contemporary decolonial writers have always been reimagining and rewriting their histories in the quest to reclaim personal, cultural, and national identity. Through research, writing, and workshop, you'll engage with this practice yourself —conducting research, crafting arguments, and revising your writing as you explore what it means to "hospice" colonial narratives and birth new ones. We read a variety of postcolonial writers and critics, including Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edward Said, Kamau Brathwaite, Kiese Laymon, Marlon James, Natalie Diaz, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FICTION. This course examines fiction that comes in a variety of storytelling forms, from short-short stories (or “flash fiction”) to stories that are a hybrid of poetry and prose; from magic realism to fiction that is more philosophical or existentialist. These diverse narratives explore important themes about the complexity of desire, the struggle with violence, the unreliability of memory, and our relationship to the physical, spiritual, and natural world. Authors include Amy Hempel, Dave Eggers, Lydia Davis, Dennis Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. The course emphasizes close-reading, revision, and proficiency with research, culminating in a final paper that combines student ideas with research sources.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: 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. This course will be a practice in how to incorporate ourselves into our research, and we will explore the intersections of personal essay and scholarly research. This course views research as a conversation and an act of community and solidarity. We will practice responsible and rigorous engagement in the intersections of our own experiences and the (written) experiences of others, learning how to place ourselves among them. We will practice how to speak with, and not for. We will read queerly, and define what that means for us as we go along. Texts may include work by: Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Samuel Delaney, Audre Lorde, E. Patrick Johnson, José Esteban Muñoz, Dean Spade, Candace Williams, and Monique Wittig.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: In this FYW course, we'll avail ourselves of the treasure trove of resources that New York City can provide to us for self-exploration and cultural revelation, with an emphasis on how the city can support your research and writing practices. We'll use the urban environment to stoke our interests and enhance our work, with close readings of New York writers who paved the way: James Baldwin, Joseph Mitchell, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, and plenty more.