Reading & Composition

The postwar psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said: “Home is where we start from.” If home is where we start from, where are we going? Somewhere else? Somewhere better? What constitutes a home anyway? Is home a feeling? A place? A mother? A memory? And if we are leaving home, who stays home? And what do we carry with us from home as we go out into the world? Working comparatively across a range of media and texts from different genres, time periods, and national traditions, this course explores this question of home and why there is no place like it. As we will see, the figure of home opens onto complex questions of family, gender, sexuality, desire, politics, race, class, culture, language, time, morality, norms, and meaning. Together we will explore figurations of home in literary, filmic, and theoretical texts and consider how the home has been a site for fantasies of the good life, nation, and political futures. This course will cast a long glance backward through centuries of fascination and stories of home, this place where “we start from” and perhaps never really leave.

Alongside exploring and critically engaging the concept of home, students will improve their writing and research skills. Students will continue to improve as writers, to develop writerly practices, and to consider and debate the values and powers of writing together and alone. As it is an R1B, students build on close reading and critical analytical, textual, and rhetorical skills they began in their R1A course and are introduced to scholarly research methods and various modes of critique for use in their own writing, thinking, and research. By the end of the semester, not only will students have learned how to produce a strong critical humanities research paper, but will hopefully better enjoy the practice of writing itself, feel more comfortable thinking in language, and want to write and read more than ever before.