Reading & Composition

What’s the opposite of laughter? The tear? The sigh? Or the particularly grave, slightly condescending expression of the person who informs us, reproachfully, that a situation is serious and therefore “no laughing matter?”

Insanity, terrorism, totalitarianism, class conflict, racial tension, famine, murder, hopelessness, and, of course, death: the texts we’ll study in this class concern themselves with the most serious subject matter possible. And yet each text is also essentially and irrefutably funny. As we discuss them, we’ll ask whether comedy can also work as social critique, how humor might help us face the dark realities of life, and why laughing matters.

The goals of this course fall into two categories: reading and writing. The course will develop students’ abilities to read texts closely and carefully, to examine both points of coherence and moments of tension within them, and to analyze the relationship between meaning and textual form. The other major aim is to help students express increasingly complex ideas in writing. The various writing activities in the class, from the major analytical essays to shorter creative exercises, will connect critical thinking and writing, improve students’ control over their writing voice, and introduce new ways of thinking about structure and development.

Texts:

Novels:
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (excerpts)
Franz Kafka, The Trial

Plays:
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Short stories:
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose” and “Diary of a Madman”
Flannery O’Connor, “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “Good Country People”

Films:
Pedro Almodóvar, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Luis Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel
Joel and Ethan Coen, Fargo

Essays:
Erich Auerbach, “The Enchanted Dulcinea”
Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”