English Composition in Connection with the Reading of World Literature

Both images of flying or of aerial human ascent and images of falling or of downward movement and descent appear regularly within disparate expressive cultures across time and place. Moreover, despite their ostensible opposition as images or tropes, flight and fall are frequently deployed in curious continuity with one another. Focusing our attention, then, precisely upon works of art that make use of real and imagined acts of flying and falling, this course will examine an array of literary, photographic, sculptural, and filmic representations, including works by Ovid, Xu Lizhi, Sigmund Freud, Yves Klein, Kerry Skarbakka, Alejo Carpentier, Toni Morrison, Richard Drew, Alejandro González Iñnáritu, and Michael Rolando Richards. On the one hand, it will be our aim to track and take stock of how these tropes, as rhetorical devices, articulate distinct meanings and circumstances within specific cultural contexts such as Roman antiquity, the Black Atlantic of the 20th and 21st centuries, or a post-9/11 United States. On the other hand, we will also reflect upon how or why tropes of flying and of falling oftentimes serve particularly as a means for expressing situations of, at once, confining or determined realities and of dreams of life that extend beyond such boundaries. Throughout the semester, students will be invited to draw connections between works as well as to follow lines of thought according to their own interests in relation to the course materials while participating through a range of modes of engagement.
This class fulfills the university’s requirement for Reading and Composition. As such, this is a writing-intensive course that will focus on developing an essential skill: the argumentative academic research essay. Assignments will emphasize not only close reading and literary analysis, but also the research process and how to effectively engage relevant secondary literature while positioning your own thoughts. Throughout the semester, we will practice constructing persuasive and complex written arguments via frequent drafting, peer review, and revision.