Reading & Composition

Rather than focusing on a specific theme or genre, this course focuses on a wide range of writing styles, operating on the premise that you can’t write with style unless you know how to read it. Like many of the selected readings and films, the course’s goal is straightforward yet challenging: to consider how style and form convey substance and character in a text, and thereby learn to convey our own arguments stylishly. With that goal in mind, we will discuss works that all have highly self-conscious, unique, and lively written voices. Works for the reading and viewing lists were also selected for their provocativeness (to encourage valuable debate), for the extent to which they teach the reader how to read them and thus reward close reading, and for overall degree of fun and weirdness (always good indicators of a work that takes its style seriously). In addition to being written in unique (and sometimes notorious) styles, many incorporate style as a theme of the narrative itself, in which the freedoms and trappings of the written language play a crucial role. We’ll also play with our own styles through mimicry and invention (on paper) and by analyzing works through a variety of media (including in-class performances).

Likely Readings:

• Sei Shonagon, selections from The Pillow Book
• Kawabata Yasunari, some Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
• Murakami Haruki, “TV People,” “Where I’m Coming From”
• Project Itoh, Harmony
• Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution”
• E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Golden Pot”
• T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
• Henry Green, Back
• Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
• Lydia Davis, The End of the Story or selections from Break It Down
• Donald Barthelme, “The Glass Mountain,” “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” “The Abduction from the Seraglio”
• Samuel Delany, Babel-17
• Jenny Erpenbeck, The Old Child
• Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
• Secondary Readings: Anne Carson on Simonides, D. A. Miller on Austen, Naomi Schor, Simone Weil on The Iliad

Films:

• “Brief Encounter,” dir. David Lean
• “La Jetée,” dir. Chris Marker
• “Lost Highway,” dir. David Lynch
• “Schizopolis,” dir. Steven Soderbergh