Reading & Composition

Politicians, smartphone advertisers, and your university instructors all claim to want the same thing: to help you make your voice heard. To examine these various interests in the voice, this course unpacks a long and diverse cultural heritage of the voice as an ethical, political, and literary concept. Divided roughly into three units, it begins with the daemonic voice of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues and with the concepts of synegoria (according to which a legal representative speaks in the voice of his client) and advocacy in legal rhetoric. The course then turns to look at voice as a problem of presentation in lyrical address and as a problem of representation in realist novels. It concludes its line of questioning with modernist literary experiments with indexes (forms of language, often acoustic or metrical, that point to aspects of the context of their use, such as a regional accent, a professional vocabulary, a style of intonation). Taking up voice as a matter for verbal art and essayistic composition will allow us to ask a more specific series of question, including the following: When does voice become a relevant category in our reading and enjoyment of literary works, and how do we know when it emerges? What difference does voice make when it does “appear”? In fiction, what is the relation between voice and attributed categories of personhood (racial, gender, sexual, class, and otherwise)? If we were try to imagine all the things that go into the process of using language, where would we locate the voice in this process? At the beginning, as the condition of sense? At the outcome, as what is produced? We pursue these questions through readings of novels, short works of fiction, lyric poetry, and films.

Part of the Reading and Composition sequence, the course poses the above questions to teach students how to use writing as a tool for inquiry and problem solving. Students will be required to write either in or for each class. Students will learn how to develop an inquiry, take a principled position in relation to a problem, how to gather and use textual evidence to support their arguments, and how to connect their arguments to the ideas of other thinkers and writers. In keeping with the course’s topic, we will ask what role voice plays at each step of the composition process.

Required Texts:

Plato, Apology of Socrates
Excerpts from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics
Poems by, C.D. Wright, Alexander Pushkin, Robert Shaw, John Ashbery, Thomas Hardy, and others
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Franz Kafka, “Before the Law” and “Investigations of a Dog”
Required Screenings

Her (2013), dir. Spike Jonze