WRITING THE ESSAY II:

WRITING THE ESSAY II:

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: 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 respond to readings in short prompts, participate in class writing workshops, and develop a longer research paper that closely examines the life of a work of art, from creation through critical reception.

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: OUR LIVING GHOST: PERSPECTIVES IN THE EXPERIENCE OF LEAVING HOME. In this first-year research seminar, we will examine various theories and perspectives on the notion of leaving home. How many ways are there to leave home? What is responsible for the impressions we keep and what is lost? What do we lose about ourselves—and why—and what do we gain? How does the concept of home—once we define it—move through us and, most importantly, why does the mapping of these changes of these perspectives prove so fascinating for writers, artists and philosophers? From coming-of-age narratives, to political homelessness, exile, family trauma, we will read memoirs, essays, and novels. Students will write four critical response papers, conduct research and explore their beliefs and challenge assumptions as we ruminate on concepts and perspectives in the experience of leaving home.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: DECONSTRUCTING WHITENESS. Whiteness is difficult to describe or define in part because, as Sara Ahmed has written, “whiteness gains currency by going unnoticed”: white structures of power perpetuate themselves through the “disappearance” that results when whiteness is positioned as a default or norm. And yet the study of whiteness risks “producing an attachment to whiteness by holding it in place as an object.” How, then, to proceed? How do we describe whiteness without re-inscribing it? We'll start this first-year research seminar with an introduction to race as the product of racism, invented and perpetuated by those who “believe themselves to be white” (in Ta-Nehisi Coates's words), in the service of maintaining systems of white supremacy. Texts by authors such as Ahmed, Alcoff, Baldwin, Biss, Brodkin, Coates, DiAngelo, Fanon, Ignatiev, Morrison, Painter, Rankine, Roberts, Seshadri-Crooks, and Yancy will help us continue to untangle the history, psychology, persistence, and—most importantly—the consequences of whiteness as it is institutionalized in the U.S. For the final research project, students will study the construction of whiteness in a context of their choice.

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: COMING OF AGE IN AMERICA. Baudelaire says that “genius is…childhood recaptured,” and without question some of our most important fiction—from Twain to Salinger to Harper Lee—is rendered through the eyes of younger protagonists. In this first-year research seminar we’ll explore a variety of short story writers and characters of diverse backgrounds, regions, and ethnicities, including Jamaica Kincaid, Junot Diaz, Maile Meloy, Edward P. Jones, and Sandra Cisneros, who together reveal the complexity of what growing up in America entails. We’ll consider the struggle for identity and belonging, but also for self-determination and independence, amidst mainstream expectations of community, family, or tradition. The course emphasizes close-reading, multiple drafts of essays, and proficiency with research skills, culminating in a longer final research paper.

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, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Dina Nayeri to produce a series of writing responses, a critical essay, and a final research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: CULTURE AND CONFLICT. This first-year research seminar offers a broad survey of social, political, and cultural topics. In the first unit, students read personal narratives on Race, Gender and Violence by such writers as Brent Staples, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Katha Pollitt. In the second unit, we expand into journalism and the media as students 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. As the semester progresses, students develop greater proficiency with research skills, culminating in a final research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: EXISTENTIALISM IN LITERATURE AND FILM. We’re born. We die. And something happens in between. Existentialism—the investigation of existence—is the study of this “in between.” In this first-year research seminar, we will explore how canonical existential thinkers have shaped today’s intellectual landscape through a survey of literature, film, and critical theory. Together, we will work through some of the most notorious existential ideas—the existential crisis, finding an authentic life, and nihilism—in order to discover a living philosophy tailored to the modern world. Writing across genres—creative, critical, philosophical—students will sharpen their research skills in order to produce original and thought-provoking work in the humanities. Possible writers might include: Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, W.E.B Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu. Possible filmmakers might include: Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, the Cohen brothers, Federico Fellini.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: FASHION AND REPRESENTATION: In this first-year research seminar, we will consider how fashion can be a tool for reinvention and subversion. Fashion is often considered too shallow a topic for serious writers. Yet whenever we wear clothes, we are participating in a cultural system where each item we put on our bodies has meaning, both literal and symbolic. We will begin the course by writing about ourselves: what does fashion mean to us? How do we represent ourselves, knowingly or obliviously, through our fashion choices? We will read academic and literary writing on fashion as well as fashion journalism, and use our readings to understand how fashion mythologies are created, and ponder about who and what are left out of our mainstream fashion narratives. The course will culminate in a research essay that brings to bear the course themes on a “fashionable” object.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THEIR PASTS. Are liberal democracies compatible within today’s global environment? Does the rising prominence of artificial intelligence signal an unprecedented threat to the future of human labor? Does the composition of our world today require a new vocabulary and approach in how we advocate for justice? History can provide a useful tool in helping us better understand these and other complex questions about today’s most pressing global issues. It could also help us better understand the lives of specific individuals: how they come to understand their daily lives; what they deem meaningful, possible, and impossible; and how they identify themselves and others in relationship to the specific social spaces they occupy. In this first-year research seminar, we will read and write personal histories to document and better grasp how the material and imagined worlds of specific individuals illuminate some of the most pressing issues of their times—and ours. Texts may include readings by James Baldwin, Roxane Gay, Yuval Noah Harari, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Nancy MacLean, Patti Smith, and Heather Ann Thompson. Our encounters with these readings are designed to inspire your ideas and unique approaches to your own research and writing, which will be harnessed through brainstorming, free writing, research, workshopping, drafting, redrafting, and critical feedback from your instructor, fellow students, and yourself. Each seminar participant will learn and practice basic historical research methodology by conducting strategic web-based searches, ethnographic research, and academic research, including historiographical surveys and archival work.

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: 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 SOULS OF BLACK FOLK: EXAMINING BLACK AMERICAN LIT AND CRITICISM. In this first-year research seminar, we will examine various trains of black thought and expressions of the black experience since Reconstruction. After emancipation, several writers took up the mantle of defining the role and position of black people as newly autonomous players in the history of this country. From early depictions in film to Black Lives Matter, we will study the evolution of images of blackness in the public imagination. We will look at differing and evolving opinions on civic engagement, scholarly pursuits, activism, and what it means to be an artist—all through the lens of being black in America. We will read from writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Brittney Cooper, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, and Michelle Alexander. The course will culminate in a research project.

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: 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.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: MIX AND MATCH: THE POSSIBILITIES OF GENRES. In this first-year research seminar, we'll explore works that use experimental forms to push boundaries in creativity and meaning. From epistolary form to retelling of mythologies to prose poetry we'll discuss how your ideas can be enhanced by playing with form. How can you weave together sociology with personal narrative or personal narrative with cultural criticism? Throughout the semester, as you experiment with your own hybrid forms, we'll read James Baldwin, Matthea Harvey, Eula Biss, Kate Tempest, Anne Carter, N. Scott Momaday, Olivia Laing, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, and more. The course will culminate in a research project.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: SETTING A FINE TABLE. We love food and it haunts us. We indulge in it and abstain from it. It makes us sick and it heals us. We worry over where it comes from and serve it during our religious rituals. We pay a fortune for it and we give it away. Its preparation is a science and an art. This first-year research seminar asks students to consider the many, often contradictory, roles food has played, and continues to play, in culture. And through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, students will have their own hand in the kitchen of the essay writer. Readings require a consideration of a variety of food writing--from primary sources, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, and journals--and include works by David Foster Wallace, M.F.K. Fisher, John McPhee, Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling, and Michael Pollan.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: SETTING A FINE TABLE. We love food and it haunts us. We indulge in it and abstain from it. It makes us sick and it heals us. We worry over where it comes from and serve it during our religious rituals. We pay a fortune for it and we give it away. Its preparation is a science and an art. This first-year research seminar asks students to consider the many, often contradictory, roles food has played, and continues to play, in culture. And through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, students will have their own hand in the kitchen of the essay writer. Readings require a consideration of a variety of food writing--from primary sources, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, and journals--and include works by David Foster Wallace, M.F.K. Fisher, John McPhee, Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling, and Michael Pollan.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: GETTING LOST IN THE FOREST: TRUTH AND TRANSFORMATION IN FAIRYTALES. In this first-year research seminar students will read and analyze fairytales from multiple regions including Europe and Asia as well as Native American tales. This class will introduce students to the origins of fairy and folk tales and explore modern adaptations of iconic tales such as those by Disney or Studio Gibli, with particular attention to the questions of representation and inclusivity, and how folk and fairy tales critique power and inequality in their original cultural/historical context as well as today. The course will culminate in a research project.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM AND THE FAMILY. Who gets to decide when and how to have a family? Who gets to keep their families together and who doesn’t? Is a choice really a choice in the absence of other choices? Reproductive politics are nearly always framed around the idea of “choice” and abortion rights, but the choices people are able to make are dictated by their relationships to race, class, ability, immigration status, sexuality, age, and gender identity, among other factors. This first-year research seminar will examine the politics of reproduction and the family using an intersectional lens. From the central role of controlling black women’s reproduction during slavery and into the present day; to coerced and forced adoptions across modern history; to the impact of welfare reform and the sterilization of people of color, people with disabilities, and transgender people; to the dismantling of black, brown, native, and indigenous families and communities through the prison and child welfare industrial complexes; to the separation of migrant families by ICE at the border, we will consider the roles that white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism have played in creating a world where bodily autonomy and the right to be a family are privileges afforded to those with the privilege to choose, and further consider what this means in an era where even the privilege to choose is in jeopardy. Students will engage with texts from such authors as Loretta Ross, Laura Briggs, Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Smith, and Rickie Solinger, among others. In addition to readings and short writing assignments, students will complete one researched-based final writing project.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: FASHION AND REPRESENTATION: In this first-year research seminar, we will consider how fashion can be a tool for reinvention and subversion. Fashion is often considered too shallow a topic for serious writers. Yet whenever we wear clothes, we are participating in a cultural system where each item we put on our bodies has meaning, both literal and symbolic. We will begin the course by writing about ourselves: what does fashion mean to us? How do we represent ourselves, knowingly or obliviously, through our fashion choices? We will read academic and literary writing on fashion as well as fashion journalism, and use our readings to understand how fashion mythologies are created, and ponder about who and what are left out of our mainstream fashion narratives. The course will culminate in a research essay that brings to bear the course themes on a “fashionable” object.