Reading & Composition

This course will encourage critical reading, thinking and writing skills around the topic of the manipulation of space in literature, photography and film. We will read literary works and theoretical essays, and watch films that are particularly interested in how real and imaginative spaces can serve to frame stories, histories and ideologies and/or themselves become the protagonist. What laws govern real and imagined spaces? How do characters navigate them and according to what principles? What visible and invisible forces shape the worlds we encounter and how do we shape our thinking and argumentation, consciously or unconciously in relation to them? We will explore how spaces may reflect the encounters, experiences and memories that have transpired within them; we’ll also question how space can reflect time and history. Concurrently, we will ask how being aware of different kinds of space helps us to think differently about the world around us.

Whether it be in a room, a city street, a house, a road or outer space, narratives are often carefully situated; critical arguments also require a considered framework and composition. Some questions we will address in order to think about writing styles are: How do imaginative narratives and critical arguments get their audiences on the same page? Do they also seek to distance them, and to what end? Through reading and class discussion, we will focus on how we frame our narratives and arguments. By engaging with works of literature, film and photography that make clear allusions to their mode and style of composition, we will consider the way we compose. Course Objectives

This is the second class in the Reading and Composition series, and will specifically address the process of writing a research paper. We will build upon the analytical writing skills students have acquired through their experience in R1A, and gradually work towards producing a final research paper.

Books

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang, ISBN: 0374521344)

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harvest Books, ISBN: 0156453800)

Franz Kafka, Amerika (Schocken, ISBN: 0805210644)

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (New ISBN: 978-1-59017-302-2)

Edwin A. Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Dover Thrift Editions)

Films

Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, 2h11)

Caché (dir. Michael Haneke, 2005, 1h59)

2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968, 2h28)