Reading & Composition

In this course we will explore literature of transformation: texts in which characters, or entire communities, undergo some change of form or change of mind.  Something in these characters, plots, or even narrative structures gets rearranged or reconfigured.  We’ll think, too, about how literature can sometimes ask us to become different as readers, in order to interact with a text at all.  Exploring the topic of metamorphoses, even revolutions (internal ones and external sociopolitical ones too) can help us reconsider our assumptions about reading and interpretation, including how we interpret the world around us.  As we try changing the way we read—exploring different ways of approaching fictional works—we’ll discuss how we might look differently at the most basic structures and value systems in place in our own minds and in the political and human relations that surround us.

Considering how our own ideas can transform, we’ll focus especially on the processes of brainstorming and revision in our writing: how changing the language of our thoughts can change the thoughts themselves.  This will be a course in which we encounter great texts, reflect together on what we take from them, and express our individual interpretations in several longer, and shorter, papers designed to develop the best of skills in reading, writing, and research.

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

Ovid, Metamorphoses (selections)

Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Shirley Jackson “We have always lived in the Castle”

Nella Larsen, Passing

Jane Campion, The Piano (film)

David Lynch, Mulholland Drive (film)

Selected poems of Gottfried Benn, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton