Reading & Composition
SELF-STYLING
“Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.” (Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart). This course operates on the premise that style is more than a “phony” necessity; in fact, it can also be a means of self-discovery, self-invention, and a fair amount of fun-having. It’s all too easy not to pay attention to what characterizes one’s writing, to passively reproduce assembly-line structures and nutritionally worthless truisms. This course aspires to help us break free of that. By learning to recognize and interpret the styles of other writers, we’ll uncover and develop aspects of our own, and prove that analytical and creative writing are not two mutually exclusive categories. In accordance with that premise, in this course our enemies will be the bland and rote, our friends the idiosyncratic and experimental. Creative and complex arguments will be made fearlessly at the expense of always being right. Grammar rules will be discussed, admired, and from time to time, firmly stepped on. Clichés (especially those that tend to plague writing about literature) will be hunted and used for taxidermy. As you play with your writing through mimicry and invention (on paper) and by analyzing works through a variety of media (including in-class performances), we hope you’ll learn as much about your written voice as about the texts at hand.
Works for the reading and viewing lists were selected for their provocativeness (to encourage valuable debate), for the extent to which they 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 liberties and trappings of the written language play a crucial role.
Possible Readings:
• Sei Shonagon, selections from The Pillow Book
• Kawabata Yasunari, some Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
• Murakami Haruki, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” “The Elephant Vanishes,” “The Zoo Attack”
• Project Itoh, Harmony
• Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution”
• Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Cathedral”
• Lydia Davis, The End of the Story or selections from Break It Down
• Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation
• Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
• Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
• James Joyce, “The Dead”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” “The Man of the Crowd”
• H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
• Secondary Readings: Anne Carson on Simonides, D. A. Miller on Hitchcock
Likely Films:
• Vertigo, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
• Sans Soleil, dir. Chris Marker
• Happy Together, dir. Wong Kar-Wai