Reading & Composition
Readers in the Writing, Writers in the Reading: Film and Literature’s Scenes of Instruction
Can a work of art teach us how to read itself?
Our course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills through an exploration of literary and visual materials that thematize their own reading: texts that call attention to the activity (the work) of reading; texts that invite their readers to think both critically and strategically about how one ought to read them; texts that involve their readers in their structural mechanics in ways that may make a reader feel uncomfortable or self-conscious. As a corollary to this pursuit, we will also develop an understanding of how we ourselves read (i.e., what kinds of problems or ideas speak to us individually, how we think with and through our objects of study). As an R&C course, sustained critical engagement with the process of writing will guide our intellectual investigation of texts that teach us how to read. As a class, we will work together to form an understanding of the partnership between careful reading and analytical writing as well as the relationship of re-writing to writing. As we turn to the research-focused portion of our course, we will learn how to position our thoughts about course materials among other writers’ interpretations of those materials. With these goals in mind, the first several weeks of class will be dedicated to an intensive introduction to the practice of close reading and arguments structured around close reading before any in-depth analysis of the materials on the syllabus is pursued.