Reading & Composition

The project of reading always involves assuming some authority on the part of the narrator from whose point of view the text unfolds. But just how far does that authority extend? In this course we will explore texts from a wide range of linguistic traditions and historical periods that have particularly complicated relationships with narrative authority and point of view. We will begin with straightforward examples of unreliable narrators who directly or deliberately mislead their readers.

Reading & Composition

Marriages in myths and fairy tales are rarely without extensive trials; folklore is full of lost and monstrous husbands, women’s journeys to retrieve them, and their efforts to flee them.  In this course we will read a core set of narratives about supernatural or otherwise strange relationships — such as Cupid and Psyche, Tam Lin, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard — and think about what these tales do, and what subsequent authors do to them.

Reading & Composition

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Reading & Composition (closed)

Reading & Composition

Writing strategies and expectations vary among cultures. Spanish writers, for instance, may be surprised to discover that their thoughtful attempts at emphasizing an idea can be seen by English readers as unnecessary repetitions. They may also find themselves wondering why a general reflection, intended to highlight the argument’s complexity, can be perceived, instead, as a digression.

Reading & Composition

Popular culture today depends in part on a widespread agreement about what determines a “person,” or what constitutes an “identity”—the must-have elements of a biography. Nevertheless, these topics have recently generated intense controversies and public debates, which often involve literary and philosophical works. In this class, we will study how novels, poetry, essays, film, and other artistic and theoretical forms have dealt with the responsibility of representing persons, whether fictional or historical.

Reading & Composition

How to fathom the separation line between humans and their nonhuman contexts, when the two seem, at this present juncture of protracted and irrecoverable ecological catastrophe, irrevocably, perhaps tragically, imbricated?

Reading & Composition

A poet who imagines Manhattan as a booming metropolis that welcomes anyone and everyone. A nineteenth-century writer for whom the rise of urban centers represents the promise of American prosperity. A Mexico City journalist who wonders whether individuality dissolves in his overcrowded, “post-apocalyptic city.” And a poet from East L.A. who struggles to find belonging among the freeway tangles and segregated spaces of her hometown, the so-called “City of Angeles.” Who—and what—gets lost and found in the American city?

Reading & Composition

This course will explore fairy tales and how such stories are adapted and translated across cultural, linguistic, national, historical, and temporal boundaries. Most of us know many fairy tales, but the versions of those fairy tales vary widely. Examining these variations, together we will be asking what it means to adapt a story that ‘everyone knows.’ What old meanings are lost, and can they be recovered? What new meanings emerge with new adaptations or as the surrounding culture evolves?

Reading & Composition

In fiction and theory as in reality, it is impossible to really escape notions of eating. Whether characters gather around a table in a realist text, whether representations of forbidden fruit appear and subvert themselves in symbolic texts, or whether a text turns its eye to the “consumption” of language itself, eating and being eaten are as quietly omnipresent in writing as they are in our own lives.

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