Reading & Composition

It’s almost impossible to encounter a new cultural object or experience without unconsciously slipping it into some category or another. We take it to be a work of art or an occasion for entertainment, an expression of elite or popular taste, something real and refined or crass and commercial. In this class we’ll take a look at how these judgments of taste fit together and what’s at stake when we make them.

Do these distinctions come about because of something special in the objects themselves or are they products of our cultural biases? By keeping these questions in mind as we look at a wide range of texts, both written and visual, we’ll be able to investigate why we consider certain kinds of texts worthy of being read and written about in a college setting.

The central focus of this class will be to improve students’ capacity to articulate their interpretations of literary texts. The bulk of the papers will be on the assigned texts but there will also be opportunities for students to write about cultural objects of their choice.

Texts will include:

Novels:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

Plays:

The Bacchae by Euripides

Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca

Movies:

All About My Mother (written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

Adaptation (directed by Spike Jonze, written by Charlie Kaufman)

TV Shows:

Twin Peaks (created by David Lynch)

There will also be a course reader that will feature excerpts from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass; short fiction and poetry from William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, César Vallejo, and Jorge Luis Borges; and theoretical work from Plato, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dwight Macdonald, and Pierre Bourdieu.