Reading & Composition
Reading Between the Lines: Scenes of Reading in Literature and Film
As an R&C course—which fulfills a university requirement—this course seeks to develop students’ analytic writing and critical thinking skills via an engagement with literary texts that stage themselves as texts being read. Some of the texts we will encounter call attention to their status as material objects. Others dramatize their own consumption by fictional readers. Still others may simply depict the act of reading or writing more generally, offering a commentary on the nature of literature itself. Though their exact metafictional mechanisms may vary, all of these texts offer readers the opportunity to explore the relationship between a text, its author, its readers, and the world more generally.
Our exploration of this theme and the related questions that arise—of authorship, interpretive authority, fictionality, etc.—will, in turn, inform the way we as scholars approach literary texts in our own writing. What sort of questions can we productively ask about literature? How can we make our answers to these questions clear and understandable to our fellow readers? In the early part of our course, we will learn and practice the art of close-reading, that is, the study of how form and meaning relate in literary texts. We will then practice building longer, analytical arguments about literary texts, before—in our final, research-based unit—exploring the ways in which we can enter
into and contribute to ongoing conversations and debates within scholarship about the texts we have read.
Working Reading List:
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem”
Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”
Auster, City of Glass