WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE DEPTHS OF BOREDOM. Now more than ever, boring experiences threaten our enjoyment of life. Living in lockdown. 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, with an emphasis on research skills. Topics may include: small talk, long speeches, the science of how we experience time, quarantine, smartphones, capitalism, chores, reality television, intentionally boring films, monks, meditation, mindfulness, opiates, prison, the Internal Revenue Service, the fear of missing out, the lives of zoo animals, summer vacation, heaven, and silence.

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: THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY: REWRITING IDENTITY. Today we are witnessing huge shifts in attitudes toward how we, collectively and individually, want to 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? At this moment in time, we are deciding to reject the destructive and often divisive categories + oppressive histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. We are now rewriting the (his)story, so to speak, and choosing to flood the world with new stories that reflect our truth, evolution, and desire to live our lives with authenticity + power. This first-year research seminar asks students to explore the ways postcolonial writers have reimagined and rewritten their history in the quest to reclaim their personal, cultural, and national identities. Students will have the opportunity to engage with this practice by conducting research, writing, workshopping, and revising their writing. We will read a variety of post-colonial writers and critics, which may include Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, Arundathi Roy, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?: It is taken as a given that the word "love" functions as a signifier in society, but the question of what precisely it signifies remains elusive. In this first year writing course, students read and write about romantic love. Is it just a fantasy, something we hope to be true? Or a reality, for those who are lucky or who work hard to make it true? Students consider whether romantic love is a socially-constructed illusion or merely an elaborate rationalization for physical desire. To do this effectively, students must hone their skills for reading, analyzing, and thinking critically about how notions of romantic love are strongly influenced by cultural assumption. In the process, students are required to think through complicated issues, write in order to critically examine that thinking, share their ideas, and make arguments based on their perspectives and understanding. Authors include William Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Sharon Olds, and Laura Kipnis.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: NOT I: DECREATIVE WRITING. 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.” Implicit in that metaphor is Woolf’s deep frustration with how our “remorseless analysis” of identity can often dissociate us 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 “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 II: THE MEANING OF MYTH. In this first-year research seminar, we will discuss and write about an exciting range of myths in order to develop key composition and research skills. Myth is a far-reaching category that intersects with such fields as literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, theology, gender studies, political science, and psychology. Myths are said to address the origin and nature of things, how people should act, what motivates human behavior, and what it means to be human. Readings cover many genres and may include short foundational Western and non-Western tales, such as the Hymn to Demeter and the Inanna tales; excerpts from longer texts such as Genesis and The Odyssey; selected short works such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Wells’ Time Machine, Eliot’s Waste Land, and Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus"; the poetry of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and others; and essays by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Jung, Malinowski, Campbell, and Eliade. The class also addresses mythic themes in visual art, and how myths continue to inform politics and contemporary thought. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will explore how to formulate interesting questions, conduct close readings, construct and organize arguments, locate apt sources, marshal evidence, improve grammatical clarity, and reorganize and revise. Essays build toward a fully developed research paper.

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, Beatriz Preciado, Teresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Wayne Koestenbaum, Edouard Louis, Brian Blanchfield and Saeed Jones.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: STATES OF PLAY. For humans and animals alike, play is a central competent to social life, learning and survival. A pack of wolf cubs play-fights, a house cat stalks a fuzzy toy and pounces, children run and scream on a jungle gym in a flurry of deliberate chaos. However, what this first-year research seminar is interested in investigating is why play is so intrinsic to the human experience and how, as Diane Ackerman says, play can give us the power of “being absolutely attentive and completely there.” We are a world obsessed with competition, victory and reward, so what are the larger implications of the games we play? Can we learn about courtship by studying the intrinsic rules that arise on a playground? Is the nomenclature around football, or baseball, smeared with an historic residue about war and safety? How organically wired are we to play, and what boundaries might this help blur? We will be reading, among others, work by Diane Ackerman, David Foster Wallace, John Huizinga, Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Colson Whitehead. The class, through research and critical thinking, will amount in a variety of short pieces and ultimately one substantial essay about these questions, implications and uses of play in our lives, culture and countries.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: FUNNY OR NOT: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF COMEDY. “There is nothing very benevolent about laughter,” wrote Henri Bergson in 1900. Indeed, laughter—and comedy, the discourse that aims to provoke it—can be quite cruel. In this writing-intensive course, we will examine the numerous ways in which comedy has been used to reflect and at times reshape often troubling social attitudes. We will explore the rhetorical strategies of a wide range of comedic genres and forms, from stand-up comedy to memes, investigating the politics and pleasures of both laughing and not. Why is a particular sign, situation, or performance funny—or not? What are the uses and effects of particular comedic traditions (e.g., language play, slapstick, parody, satire)? What does it mean to take up the role of a feminist killjoy, to be a spoilsport, to refuse to laugh at your boss’s or family member’s racist or sexist or transphobic or ableist joke? As we take up these questions, we will examine others’ arguments and construct our own in response, in the form of both academic and (optionally) comedic writing.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE. “Writing about music,” it is famously said, “is like dancing about architecture.” And yet this hasn't stopped critics, poets, novelists, and essayists from describing music—and dance, and visual art—endlessly. In this first-year research seminar, we will consider both how music and dance are conveyed through language, and how art’s meaning is construed from its particular social, historical, and political context. Throughout, we will hone our own abilities to describe art, and consider various rhetorical strategies employed by different writers, including, most likely, Hilton Als, Joan Acocella, James Baldwin, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, and Zadie Smith. Throughout the class, you will have the opportunity to develop a longer research paper that closely examines the life of a work of art, from creation through critical reception.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: DISRUPTIVE NARRATIVES AND CONTINUANCE STORIES. What possibilities does Cree artist Kent Monkman’s commissioned monumental murals offer to the world once installed in The Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City? His art challenges a global audience, disrupts status quo imperialist narratives, and continues the stories of Indigenous peoples. These possibilities are what Gerald Vizenor, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, would describe as “survivance.” How can we offer similar possibilities of resistance and reconciliation in our own writing and creative work? This course aims to do several things: first, to engage with current movements of Indigenous survivance stories throughout the world; then, to identify single-story narratives that may need disrupting, such as government documents, archival materials, publicity images, problematic literatures, film narratives, commemorative statues in public places, and celebrated art in leading museums; and then finally, while rigorously studying contemporary theorists and creators to find models for each student’s own research and writing, to then disrupt narratives and or continue stories using the methods and stylistic techniques of literary journalism, poetry and prose, music production, mixed media installation, performance art, film, and inter-generational memoir. So that we may support our overall course objective, which is to be in conversation and inclusive, not merely reactively polemic, student projects will be designed within a collaborative maker environment wherein each participant contributes what Vizenor identifies as “an active presence.”

WRITING THE ESSAY II: RE-CLAIMING AND RE-SEEING RACE IN THE 'REAL' AMERICA.This first-year writing seminar sits firmly in the energy of the current resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement following the recent deaths of black people at the hands of police. The recent protests against police brutality, which have taken place in all 50 states of America and around the world, are marked by a sense of urgency, and, in scale and scope, have taken on a different tenor than the older and broader fights and movements for black lives that have been in existence for a long time. This movement against police brutality is set against the backdrop of other movements, such as the climate change movement, that point to an America in crisis. We seem to be at the precipice of a great shift in America's collective consciousness. Now, perhaps, we have the opportunity to re-claim and re-see race in America. To that end, students will engage with critical race theory, as well as the analysis of race as a product of culture that determines and shapes all aspects of our everyday lives. We'll read theory, study real-world case studies, and explore artistic (literature, film, art) expressions and representations of what Toni Morrison called the "wholly racialized society that is the United States." Students will have the opportunity to engage with this practice by conducting research, writing, workshopping, and revising. After we re-claim and re-see, we'll undertake the re-imagining of an America that has reckoned and healed, individually and therefore collectively, with its legacy of racism. What would that America look like? How do our individual voices and actions help define it? How does the intersectionality of our various crises and movements strengthen the collective capacity to heal and conceptualize a new American reality? To help answer these questions, we'll look to writers and critics such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, Michelle Alexander, Robin DiAngelo, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Kimberly Crenshaw, Eric Liu, Claudia Rankine, Bryan Stevenson, Michael Omi, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: "GOING TO MEET THE MAN": WRITING THE WORLD WITH JAMES BALDWIN. Who is this man? And why do we need to meet him? What will happen when we finally do? This course is a journey. We’ll explore, discover, develop and interrogate the vital spark of imagination in the realm of nonfiction essay writing. We will push the boundaries of this genre as you take your eye—and your “I”—in search of subjects both inside and outside of yourself. The world—or worlds are our subject. Together we’ll seek topics in people, things, and ideas. You’ll move from shorter writing tasks to longer and more involved ones, while reading published essays to accompany your own work.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: MONSTROUS BODIES. In this first-year research seminar, students will examine a diverse offering of multi-genre narratives about the body, resistance, and otherness. Throughout this course, students will explore, discuss, and write about the historical and contemporary impact of embodied narratives that disrupt the myth of homogeneous normativity. From the human zoos and sideshows of the mid-1880s to modern day voices and movements that defy and subvert dominant culture’s concept of desirability, this course will examine what it means to be human at the often overlapping intersections of gender, race, class, and ability. Students will examine not only how otherness has historically been weaponized against marginalized bodies but also how otherness has been reclaimed and mobilized as a form of resistance and freedom in the past and in our present. Students will read Morgan Parker, Shelley Jackson, Bessie Head, Leslie Parry, Tiphanie Yanique, James Baldwin, Beth Macy, Louise Erdrich, Safiya Sinclair, Robert Bogdan, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Kate Rushin, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: UNDRESSING FASHION. Fashion is often considered too shallow a topic for serious writers. Yet whenever we wear clothes, we are participating in personal rituals and cultural systems. We will begin the course by writing about what fashion means to us. How do we represent ourselves, knowingly or obliviously, through our fashion choices? We will use academic and literary readings to understand how fashion mythologies are created, and who is left out of these mythologies. Approaching fashion from a number of angles, from sustainability to appropriation, we will read writers such as bell hooks, Hilary Mantel, Jia Tolentino, and Shahida Bari, and consider the work of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Paul Rucker. This course encourages students to explore research as an aid to thinking and writing critically about fashion and will culminate in a final essay at the intersection of fashion and social justice.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: RETURN OF 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: IMMIGRANT VOICES. When political instability, persecution, or economic hardship forces us into a life of displacement, literature can serve as the only remaining connection with our discarded past. This first-year research seminar will explore contemporary fiction and memoir to examine the role of creative writing in documenting, expressing, and informing the immigrant experience. Students will engage with texts from such authors as Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, Teju Cole, Maaza Mengiste, and Dina Nayeri to produce a series of writing responses, a critical essay, and a final research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: ENVIRONMENT AND LOSS. Much of contemporary environmental journalism focuses on dramatic “disasters,” but what happens after the television cameras and reporters have long gone? In this first-year seminar focused on developing a research essay we will consider how environmental writing must be as much about the lived experience of people as it is about the physical space that surrounds them. Through a wide range of environmental writing including, but not limited to, personal essays, magazine features, nonfiction books and even novels, in this writing-intensive course we will look at how other writers approach the world around them, as well as exploring our own relationships to the environment as both personal and political space. Readings will include texts by John McPhee, Elizabeth Kolbert, Svetlana Alexievich, and Margaret Atwood.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: CULTURE AND CONFLICT. This Writing The Essay II module offers a broad survey of social, political and cultural topics, ranging from issues of race, gender and violence to media, esthetics and urbanization—often with an overlap among them. The texts we use vary from personal narratives to journalistic pieces to film and television. As the module moves forward, students will develop greater proficiency in research while having greater choice in topics of personal and/or local interest.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE ANIMAL IS METAPHOR. In this course we’ll read, discuss, write, define and explore how animals are used as potential to explain human experience. To study our relationship with animals (and nature) is to study our own subconciousness. We use animals and animal characteristics to define ourselves. Why? The complexity and irony of animal “otherness” furthering human behavior is a puzzling one. Why is a greedy person described as a pig? And why is goodness described as humanity? What are the origins of this way of thinking? The presence of animals are embedded in the language we use. Together, let’s untangle what’s already built within structures of sex and culture. Readings may include The Peregrine by JA Baker, Being a Beast by Charles Foster, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams, The Lumberjack’s Dove by Gennarose Nethercott and the glorious poetry of Kay Ryan.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE MEANING OF MYTH. In this first-year research seminar, we will discuss and write about an exciting range of myths in order to develop key composition and research skills. Myth is a far-reaching category that intersects with such fields as literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, theology, gender studies, political science, and psychology. Myths are said to address the origin and nature of things, how people should act, what motivates human behavior, and what it means to be human. Readings cover many genres and may include short foundational Western and non-Western tales, such as the Hymn to Demeter and the Inanna tales; excerpts from longer texts such as Genesis and The Odyssey; selected short works such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Wells’ Time Machine, Eliot’s Waste Land, and Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus"; the poetry of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and others; and essays by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Jung, Malinowski, Campbell, and Eliade. The class also addresses mythic themes in visual art, and how myths continue to inform politics and contemporary thought. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will explore how to formulate interesting questions, conduct close readings, construct and organize arguments, locate apt sources, marshal evidence, improve grammatical clarity, and reorganize and revise. Essays build toward a fully developed research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: CULTURE AND CONFLICT. This Writing II module offers a broad survey of social, political and cultural topics, ranging from issues of race, gender and violence to media, esthetics and urbanization—often with an overlap among them. The texts we use vary from personal narratives to journalistic pieces to film and television. As the module moves forward, students will develop greater proficiency in research while having greater choice in topics of personal and/or local interest.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: POETRY OF RESISTANCE IN TRANSLATION. In this first-year research seminar we will read and write about poetry in translation, with a particular focus on poetry of resistance. Stanley Burnshaw, known for his political poetry and social justice work, argues that poems are not made up of ideas, but of words: the exact words in the exact order the poet intended. This extreme view has its merits, yet poetry has been and continues to be translated, and some of the greatest poems in English were not first written that way. Texts may include poems and translations by Anna Ahkmatova, Paul Celan, Mahmoud Darweesh, Víctor Jara, Pablo Neruda, Alice Oswald, and Monique Wittig, and critical texts by Walter Benjamin, Marjorie Perloff, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Lawrence Venuti. Writing assignments will be comprised of close readings, annotations, and critical analysis, with a final research project involving scholarly and creative elements. Facility in a language other than English not required, but final projects may include your own translations from a language of your choice.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: BEING YOUNG. This first-year research seminar will examine the social, psychological and political concept of youth, as constructed by and reflected in a variety of texts by writers such as Mark Greif, James Baldwin, Arthur Rimbaud, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, M.K. Gandhi and many more. We'll read poetry, fiction, letters and essays for, by and about the young—lyric celebrations of youth, nostalgic reflections on past youth, stories of formation as well as texts in which youth is the culmination of life. Each student will work on one extended research-based writing project.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: FUNNY OR NOT: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF COMEDY. “There is nothing very benevolent about laughter,” wrote Henri Bergson in 1900. Indeed, laughter—and comedy, the discourse that aims to provoke it—can be quite cruel. In this first-year writing seminar, we will examine the numerous ways in which comedy has been used to reflect and at times reshape often troubling social attitudes. We will explore the rhetorical strategies of a wide range of comedic genres and forms, from parody to satire, from memes to stand-up; investigating the politics and pleasures of both laughing and not laughing, respectively. Why is a particular sign, situation, or performance funny—or not? What are the uses and effects of particular comedic traditions (e.g., slapstick, language play) and affective modes (e.g., the zany, the deadpan)? (Why) Are fart jokes funny—and how can they be subversive? What does it mean to take up the role of a feminist killjoy, to be a spoilsport, to refuse to laugh at your boss’s or family member’s racist or sexist or transphobic joke? As we take up these questions, we will examine others’ arguments and construct our own in response, in the form of both academic and comedic writing.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE MEANING OF MYTH: In this first-year research seminar, we will discuss and write about an exciting range of myths in order to develop key composition and research skills. Myth is a far-reaching category that intersects with such fields as literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, theology, gender studies, political science, and psychology. Myths are said to address the origin and nature of things, how people should act, what motivates human behavior, and what it means to be human. Readings cover many genres and may include short foundational Western and non-Western tales; excerpts from longer texts such as Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bhagavad-Gita, and The Odyssey; selected short works such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Eliot’s Waste Land, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus"; the poetry of Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich; and essays by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Jung, Malinowski, Campbell, and Eliade. The class also addresses mythic themes in visual art, and how myths continue to inform politics and contemporary thought. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will explore how to formulate interesting questions, conduct close readings, construct and organize arguments, locate apt sources, marshal evidence, improve grammatical clarity, and reorganize and revise. Essays build toward a fully developed research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE MEANING OF MYTH: In this first-year research seminar, we will discuss and write about an exciting range of myths in order to develop key composition and research skills. Myth is a far-reaching category that intersects with such fields as literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, theology, gender studies, political science, and psychology. Myths are said to address the origin and nature of things, how people should act, what motivates human behavior, and what it means to be human. Readings cover many genres and may include short foundational Western and non-Western tales; excerpts from longer texts such as Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bhagavad-Gita, and The Odyssey; selected short works such as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Eliot’s Waste Land, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus"; the poetry of Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich; and essays by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Jung, Malinowski, Campbell, and Eliade. The class also addresses mythic themes in visual art, and how myths continue to inform politics and contemporary thought. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will explore how to formulate interesting questions, conduct close readings, construct and organize arguments, locate apt sources, marshal evidence, improve grammatical clarity, and reorganize and revise. Essays build toward a fully developed research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: RADICAL MEMOIR. In this first-year research seminar we look at texts that elude the boundaries of genre to create a narrative form true to the fragmentary, shifting composition of memory itself and the construction of the self, or successive versions of self. Memoirist, diarist, theorist, philosopher: the authors we will consider traverse the liminal spaces of what Roland Barthes would describe as “the neutral”: a writing that “baffles the paradigm” as an “ardent, burning activity.” 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, Beatriz Preciado, Teresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Wayne Koestenbaum, Edouard Louis, Brian Blanchfield and W.G. Sebald.

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: I CAN’T GO ON I’LL GO ON: REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA IN LITERATURE. This first-year research seminar will focus on the various ways trauma is reflected in literary form, exploring it as a site where reality insists upon itself as something over and against our stories, strategies, and expectations. What kinds of techniques do writers employ to represent these sorts of traumatic events, traumatized characters and traumatized perspectives? How do these writers use trauma as a way of exploring the deeper mechanics of human consciousness and perception? 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 trauma radically deconstructs our ordinary conceptions of time, selfhood and otherness, forcing characters to confront the limits of their own languages and organizing intellects. How, for example, does J.M. Coetzee depict—in the words of critic Mike Marais— “the way the suffering body asserts a commonality that overrides our cultural inscriptions of difference”? Most importantly, this course will be a survey of writers who directly confront trauma as an intrinsic part of the human experience, and who explore the various ways in which we attempt to “go on” in the face of it. Those authors will likely include Coetzee, Beckett, DeLillo, Joy Williams, Cormac McCarthy, and James Baldwin, among many others. Our aim here is to help you become more conscientious and adventurous writers, so research assignments will be accompanied by several creative writing opportunities informed by our readings.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY: REWRITING PERSONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY. Today we are witnessing huge shifts in attitudes toward how we, collectively and individually, want to 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? At this moment in time, we are deciding to reject the destructive and often divisive categories + oppressive histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. We are now rewriting the (his)story, so to speak, and choosing to flood the world with new stories that reflect our evolution and desire to live our lives with authenticity + power. This first-year research seminar asks students to explore the ways postcolonial writers have reimagined and rewritten their history in the quest to reclaim their personal, cultural, and national identity. Students will have the opportunity to engage with this practice by writing, workshopping, and revising their own writing and conducting research. We will read a variety of post-colonial writers, critics, and texts, which may include Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and Arundathi Roy.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? It is taken as a given that the word “love” functions as a signifier in society, but the question of what precisely it signifies remains elusive. In this first-year research seminar, students read and write about romantic love. Is it just a fantasy, something we hope to be true? Or a reality, for those who are lucky or who work hard to make it true? Students consider whether romantic love is a socially-constructed illusion or merely an elaborate rationalization for physical desire. To do this effectively, students must hone their skills for reading, analyzing, and thinking critically about how notions of romantic love are strongly influenced by cultural assumption. In the process, students are required to think through complicated issues, write in order to critically examine that thinking, share their ideas, and make arguments based on their perspectives and understanding. Authors include William Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Sharon Olds, and Laura Kipnis.