Reading & Composition

This class aims to reconsider our assumptions about the family home. Contemporary popular culture celebrates the home as a refuge from the world, finding in its separation from public life and association with the nuclear family the promise of a nurturing, comfortable space where we can simply be ourselves. Yet literature and film are replete with another sort of home: isolated but never totally private, familiar but never completely safe.

Over the course of the semester, we’ll explore a number of unconventional homes.  In our first unit, we’ll visit some houses that, while familial, are anything but warm: haunted by secrets, suffocated by unhappy marriages, or petrified by the threat of their own destruction. Then we’ll turn to a set of non-domestic living spaces, including the boarding school, the convent, and the hotel. As we move from familial homes to institutional ones, we’ll rethink the oppositions that supposedly distinguish them: between private and public, between what seems natural and what’s obviously artificial, and between home and everything that isn’t.

Since this is an R and C course, its major goals are to improve students’ skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, and to explore the relationships between the three skills. In addition to discussing the texts in class, students will write responses to them in a variety of forms, from literary analysis essays to creative projects.

Required texts:

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Required viewing:

Robert Bresson, The Angels of Sin

Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Stanley Kubrick, The Shining

Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster

Paweł Pawlikowski, Ida

Shorter readings, including short stories and poetry, will be distributed in class.