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: POETRY OF RESISTANCE IN TRANSLATION. In this first year 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. Prerequisite: Writing the Essay I

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, Aleksandar Hemon, Zadie Smith, André Aciman, Krys Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nina McConigley, and Dinaw Mengestu to produce a series of writing responses, a critical essay, and a final research paper.

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: 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 move from questions of how to represent the non-verbal arts to broader considerations of how joy, ecstasy, and the sublime are conveyed through language. 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. The class will include close reading and short writing prompts, and culminate in a research paper that combines critical and creative writing.

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: BOUNDLESS ESSAY: In this first-year research seminar we will ask what makes an essay an essay and what can an essay do? As David Lazar writes in “Queering the Essay,” “To read through the history of essays on the essay is to a large and fascinating extent to see practitioners of the form struggling to articulate what the form is and refusing to keep the form stable, refusing to narrow its sense of possible performative and formal dimensions, frequently inverting commonly accepted conventions.” Students will be introduced not only to a historical overview of this ever-fluid genre, but also its futures, evidence of which can be found in the growing presence of experimental nonfiction on the literary landscape. We’ll consider the power of both brevity and long form, and explore how ancient forms are thriving in the newest mediums, from lyric, hybrid, and collage, to visual essay, memes, and site-specific textual performances. We’ll ask how such a boundless genre can both embody and uncover truths and identities in its admiration for the possibility of facticity. Along with several essay experiments, students will complete a long-form research essay 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 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 GLEANERS. In her 2012 essay "A Sort of Leaning Against," Maggie Nelson writes: "For a long time, I worried there was something wrong with me as a writer, because I leaned so heavily on the thinking and writing of others. And further, that instead of wanting to hide that leaning, my impulse has often been to showcase it, to make this thinking-with-others, this weaving of mine and others’ words, part of the texture of my writing." Here Nelson presents a practice of "writing with," engaging with and depending on the works of others in her own writing, as a kind of feminist ethic of interdependence. Over the course of this first-year research seminar, we will investigate this "mutual aid" in writing alongside literary concepts of “inheritance” and “influence.” What happens when artists make visible their attachments, associations, and connections—both critical, aesthetic, and sensory. This course will invite students to consider the visual art practices of collage and assemblage, as well as list-making, quotation, pastiche, and archival/experiential research to disturb the notion that when we write we are writing alone. We will consult the projects and processes of artists, critics, filmmakers, and writers, including Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, Sei Shōnagon, Susan Briante, Harryette Mullen, Jorge Luis Borges, Marianne Moore, Joan Retallack, Marcel Proust, John Ashbery, Muriel Rukeyser, Claudia Rankine, Bernadette Mayer, and Agnes Varda. Students in this class will keep a journal of observations and responses, annotate texts, and perform close readings and critical analysis in short weekly assignments. The culminating project will be a final research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: AUTOFICTION AND HYBRID 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: AMERICAN SHORT FICTION IN OUR TIME. This first-year research seminar uses the short story, one of America’s great genres, as a lens through which to view shifting currents in American society. Hemingway’s In Our Time will anchor the course, with a movement toward more contemporary writers who provide a diversity of styles, content and demographics. The themes of the course include Modernism and displacement, the tension between traditional and modern values, the struggle for family, and the elusive pursuit of the American Dream. The course emphasizes close-reading, multiple drafts of essays, and proficiency with research skills, cultivating in a longer final paper.

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: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN NEW YORK. This first-year research seminar will give students an opportunity to consider the myths and dreams that New York represents, alongside the realities of living here, and how these two realms intersect. In particular, we will consider what about the city advances social justice and what impedes it. The texts we will be reading and writing about—poems, short stories, articles, essays, criticism, oral histories and films—will address the values inherent in both the myth and the reality of the city through the prominent social issues that affect New Yorkers every day. A reporting assignment will get you out into the city to write on a pressing social issue, and the information you gather will help you to argue for change. Through discussing the course texts, analyzing them, conducting research, and forming arguments, you will ultimately present your own views and hopes for the city and the people who live here. Writers and thinkers to be read include Walt Whitman, Edwidge Danticat, Pedro Pietri, Jane Jacobs, Jelani Cobb, Chang-Rae Lee, The Yes Men, and Jonathan Kozol.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: I CAN'T GO ON I'LL GO ON: LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF TRAUMA. This first-year research 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 II: BOUNDLESS ESSAY: In this first-year research seminar we will ask what makes an essay an essay and what can an essay do? As David Lazar writes in “Queering the Essay,” “To read through the history of essays on the essay is to a large and fascinating extent to see practitioners of the form struggling to articulate what the form is and refusing to keep the form stable, refusing to narrow its sense of possible performative and formal dimensions, frequently inverting commonly accepted conventions.” Students will be introduced not only to a historical overview of this ever-fluid genre, but also its futures, evidence of which can be found in the growing presence of experimental nonfiction on the literary landscape. We’ll consider the power of both brevity and long form, and explore how ancient forms are thriving in the newest mediums, from lyric, hybrid, and collage, to visual essay, memes, and site-specific textual performances. We’ll ask how such a boundless genre can both embody and uncover truths and identities in its admiration for the possibility of facticity. Along with several essay experiments, students will complete a long-form research essay project.

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 research seminar 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, and we’ll also 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: 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: 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: LONERS, OUTCASTS, ODDBALLS, AND WEIRDOS. What makes someone "odd"? Why are some people outcasted while others seemingly have no problem being "mainstream"? In this first-year research seminar, we will deconstruct the concept of the weirdo, the outcast, the loner, the loser. One thing these concepts have in common is the idea of marginalization, but what are the margins that exclude some for failing to conform, while other people are located—squarely—within the norm? Students will explore that question through reading and writing about short fiction by Lorrie Moore, Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy; we'll read creative non-fiction by Lucy Grealy, Rachel Kushner, and Fenton Johnson, as well as a novel by J.M. Coetzee or Han Kang. We may watch a film and visit a New York City museum to enrich our understanding of the outcast as portrayed through various media. Students will compose three formal essays, ranging in style from memoir to scholarly, academic writing; the third, final essay will be a research paper on a subculture involving deviance or societal exclusion. Drafting, close-readings, and workshopping of student writing, as well as student presentations, will form the basis of our discussions.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: WRITING THE BODY. Everyone has a body, so why is sometimes difficult to empathize with people who live in bodies different than our own and how can writing help us bridge that experiential gap? Most of the major social justice issues of our time (immigration, abortion, race, gender and sexuality, to name a few) are about bodies and difference. In this first-year research seminar we will learn through close reading, writing, and revision how to use our writing as a tool to further critical argument, expression, and identification. Together, we will read work from writers and thinkers such as James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Carmen Maria Machado, and Maggie Nelson, among 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: 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: SUBVERSIVE JOY: WRITING THE SENSES AS RESISTANCE. In this first-year research seminar, we will examine literary works, theories and perspectives on the ways traditionally marginalized and/or oppressed communities have used humor, joy, spirituality and creativity to assert their humanity beyond constructs that only see some bodies as sites of trauma or for the uses of exploitation. After all, who doesn’t love an underdog, someone with so much faith and hope that they will make a way from no way? What does dedication to creating beauty and a legacy of art in a community that is rarely viewed in its full complexity truly mean, particularly for literature? Where and when has this resistance art flourished? Who has sought to de-legitimize it and have those efforts been successful? Is this simply an idealistic concept or is there scientific evidence that bears it out as necessary for survival? What is the impact on canon and individual work when trauma, pain and struggle are metabolized on the page into healing, connection and reconciliation? Readings may include Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, David Mura, Tommy Pico, Ross Gay, adrienne maree brown, Lucille Clifton, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Brittney Cooper and others.

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: 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: 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: THE ART OF SURVIVAL. American history often requires us to consider stories of how minority groups and marginalized communities have survived. We have survived war, disease, loss, racism, sexism. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martin Luther King, humans persevere. It is through these tales of triumph, of overcoming, and victory, that we are reminded change is possible. Where does the strength to persevere come from? How do marginalized groups find the will to carry on? To push forward in the face of adversity? In this first-year research seminar we will examine these questions and more. Beginning in the mid-1800s, moving through the 20th century and landing in our modern America, this class will explore human perseverance. What motivated Dr. King as he marched through the streets of Washington? What informed Katie Stanton as she sat in her study writing essay after essay? Through paintings, songs, political speeches, and fiction, we will explore how humans push back, what causes them to push, and what kind of inspiration this may provide in an adverse political climate. What can the great leaders of our past teach us about our own strengths, our own hopes for this country and the ways in which we can survive our own lives? Readings may consider Stanton, King, Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin, Harvey Milk, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Valeria Luiselli, Beyoncé, among others.

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, Aleksandar Hemon, Zadie Smith, André Aciman, Krys Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nina McConigley, and Dinaw Mengestu to produce a series of writing responses, a critical essay, and a final research paper.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: REVOLUTION! Manifestos. Calls-to-arms. Subversive pamphlets and zines. The language of revolution so often requires a revolution in language. With this idea as our starting-point, in this first-year research seminar we will explore the key role that writing and rhetoric play in social and political resistances. Through close-readings of manifestos, philosophy, critical theory, and fiction, we will examine the revolutionary sparks that texts aim to ignite. As writers, we will seek to understand what possibilities our own writing provides for radical personal and political change. Constantly learning from one another, this seminar will focus on in-class dialogue and sharpening our research skills to produce original and thought-provoking writing in the humanities. Authors may include: Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Paul, Ralph Ellison, bell hooks, The Invisible Committee, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, José Esteban Muñoz, Paul B. Preciado.

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: WRITING ABOUT PEOPLE: Of all the expressive arts, writing is uniquely capable of representing what it’s like to be inside each of our heads. In this first-year writing and research seminar, we will examine writings that mine the inner lives of their authors, subjects, and characters. What makes these pieces work, and how do they fall short? We will look at writing about the self, writing about others, writing about the culture at large, and works of fiction. Students will practice formulating questions, researching in response to these questions (including conducting interviews), and expressing their ideas on the page.