WRITING THE ESSAY II: METAPHOR IN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT. Language is fossil poetry–James Geary. Historically, metaphor is often treated as a fanciful device—an imprecise or linguistic trick employed as manipulation, or worse, as laziness. This has never been the case! Let’s illuminate metaphor in all its guises. We cannot subtract metamorphic reason out of ourselves or our thought processes. Human beings utilize metaphors constantly, consistently, in language, speech, image, action and thought. In this course we’ll explore metaphors’ ancient structures. Together we’ll examine metaphoric leaps in logic, convenience, explanation and security. How do metaphors perform such heavy lifting? And how do they “work” with such admirable, eerie efficacy? We’ll read, discuss, write and explore derivatives of meaning: What do metaphors reveal about the mind and why? Class readings may involve First Love, by Ivan Turgenev, Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940, Edited by Melissa Edmundson, How to Carry Water by Lucille Clifton, First Person Singular, by Haruki Murakami, Pandemic, by Slavoj Zizek along with separate essays by George Lakoff in Metaphors We Live By and I Is An Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World, by James Geary.

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

WRITING THE ESSAY II: BYE BYE BI. Bisexual erasure is real. The gender binary is real. Non-binary identities are real. Growing up biracial is real. Binary math makes what we see on computer screens real. And, in the U.S., bipartisan politics are all too real. So what does it mean to be bi anything? Why is there biphobia within the LBGTQIA+ community? How do we deal with the reality that any identity labeled with the prefix bi- can be inherently polarizing by definition? This course will try to understand why our world is so dependent on binary constructs. In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore personal, political, and cultural issues related to bi- experiences. We will examine how bi- issues reflect the ways that sexuality and desire are shaped by - yet often liberated from - the patriarchy’s paradigms of gender. To make visible the hidden impact of monosexism in healthcare, relationships, and even DEI initiatives, we will engage in conversation with a wide variety of creative works, contemporary media, and historical documents. Digital media; influencer videos; social activists’ Twitter feeds; .gov and .org websites, along with community-building discussions involving journalistic, literary, and scholarly sources, will also be considered. Students will develop research methods and critical inquiry skill-sets to produce genderographies of truth and possibility.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: ON BEING ILL. Forty-two years ago, Susan Sontag wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick ... Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” At this moment, when the world is wracked by a pandemic, we have an especially keen sense of this second citizenship and of the challenges, both ethical and practical, that it poses. In this seminar, we will examine how we think and write about illness and contagion, looking at texts drawn from various disciplines, among them literature, history, philosophy, and medicine. Throughout, we will follow Sontag in paying close attention to the metaphors we use for illness and the way illness serves as metaphor, asking what it means to live and write in a time when the two “kingdoms” of which she speaks are increasingly difficult to separate. Readings will include fiction by Lu Xun and Daniel Defoe, scholarship by Perundevi Srinivasan, Paul Farmer and Claire Colebrook, and memoir by Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Jamison, Alphonse Daudet and Virginia Woolf.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: BRANCHING NARRATIVES. Every story can potentially branch in infinite directions. Why settle for just one? In this course we’ll sample the history of experiments in branching narrative, in writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, in electronic genres such as hyperfiction, in playful literary movements such as Oulipo, and in video games. We'll conduct nonfiction branching experiments of our own, using tools such as extravagant footnotes, second-thought annotations, and the nonlinear storytelling app Twine. And we'll discover that the research process is itself a garden of endlessly forking paths.

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

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

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

WRITING THE ESSAY II: HOSPICING COLONIALITY. Today we are witnessing huge shifts in attitudes toward how we, collectively and individually, 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, and what we might call post-postcolonial writers, have always (and are) reimagining and rewriting their histories in the quest to reclaim their personal, cultural, and national identity. 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 Chinua Achebe, Arundathi Roy, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edward Said, Kamau Brathwaite, Kiese Laymon, Marlon James, Natalie Diaz, and others.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: LITERATURE: A SITE FOR FREEDOM. James Baldwin once said, “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” In these urgent times, this sentiment has never been more true. Despite all attempts to thwart these efforts, writers have always sought to find freedom in their words and stories, and many of us, as readers, often turn to books to reflect and encourage our own desires for freedom and to tell us a kind of truth about ourselves, sweet or bitter, as Baldwin says. This course will explore the ways in which literature has been, especially for those at the margins, a site for freedom. A site for truth-telling, reclaiming, and reimagining. We’ll read a variety of contemporary world literature examining how writers define freedom: what it is, why it's important, and even, in some cases, how to get there. Authors may include Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Kiese Laymon, Terrance Hayes, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Jesmyn Ward, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Danez Smith, Akwaeke Emezi, 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 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, Kae 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: 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: MEMORIES IN THE MAKING. This writing and research course will look at how we remember as collectives, cultures, and a country, how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our pasts affect our present and our futures. Our concepts of self, as both individuals and collectives, are created through the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. By looking at who gets to tell our stories and whose voices are muffled, we can begin to understand how power, privilege, and politics shape so much of the known world around us. We’ll look at how American culture is recorded impacts us, from the cold stone halls of museums to the very language we use to talk about the past. We’ll ask what our monuments saying, but also what do they say about us? This will ultimately lead to one extended research-based writing project that draws from a semester's worth of reading, discussion, and investigation.

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: COMING OF AGE SHORT FICTION. 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, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ernest Hemingway, and Dorothy Allison, who together reveal the complexity of what growing up 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: FROM OBJECT TO PLACE: UNLOCKING THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE. Writers often rely on their recollections of texture, scent, sound, taste, or sight to examine and make sense of their personal history. In this first-year research seminar, we will assess sensory details from our past to locate and craft our personal stories. Students will engage with texts from such authors as Zadie Smith, Andre Aciman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Crystal Hana Kim, Aleksandar Hemon, Edwidge Danticat, Ilya Kaminsky, Michelle Zauner, and Olivia Laing to produce a series of writing responses and a longer work of nonfiction prose.

WRITING THE ESSAY II: THE JOYS OF PROCESS In this course, we will bring a voracious curiosity to studying the many ways that writers and artists approach the process of creating things. Looking at notebooks, sketchbooks, project diaries, rough drafts, and other “work-in-progress” materials, we’ll familiarize ourselves with how an idea makes its way from observation and imagination to polished creation: essay, story, novel, painting, song, comic, film, dance. We will, meanwhile, draw inspiration and encouragement from these investigations, learning how to embrace mess, experimentation, and rough attempts as necessary parts of bringing our own written work to fruition. Texts will likely include work by Lynda Barry, Ross Gay, Tatsumi Hijikata, Isaac Babel, Charlotte Forten, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—to name just a few. Our work in this course will emphasize close reading, writing and revision, and developing research skills, culminating in a final research project on a topic related to the creative process.