Reading & Composition

This class is about texts that want to take in entire worlds. It’s about stories, novels, and poems that aspire to the comprehensiveness of encyclopedias. This ambition gives them a strange, hybrid quality: the way that they catalog and communicate vast quantities of information often makes them seem more like non-literary texts than what we traditionally think of as literature. They will allow us to think about the often-complicated relationship between fiction and non-fiction, to consider the many ways in which texts connect both to the “real world” and to one another, and to reflect on what it means to read literature at a time when seemingly everything worth knowing is instantly available on the Internet.

First and foremost, however, this is a writing course. It will be focused on the process of writing–on the many choices, simple and sophisticated, that go into communicating an interpretation of a literary text to a reader.

Readings will be drawn from the following:

Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Bouvard and Pecuchét by Gustave Flaubert

Poetry by Lucretius, John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, César Vallejo, Marianne Moore, Bertolt Brecht, Elizabeth Bishop.