Reading & Composition

This course approaches the North and Central American landscapes as cultural and geographical spaces that are crisscrossed with borders, both seen and unseen. Focusing on Latinx border crossings and the U.S.-Mexico border(lands), we’ll explore a tangle of themes and questions: How do borders function as physical and ideological boundaries that construct and reinforce difference, prompting us to view the Americas in terms like insiders vs. outsiders, citizens vs. immigrants, here vs. there, place vs. non-place, or humans vs. migrants, laborers, or refugees?

Reading & Composition

Do you need to be at least a little crazy to be a great writer? Is going insane just a natural reaction to the world around us? To what extent should mental health crises be medicalized, and to what extent should they be accommodated as uncomfortable parts of most people's life experiences? These are just some of the questions that we will explore together over the course of the semester.
 

Reading & Composition

Writing strategies and expectations vary among cultures. English writers, for instance, may discover that their concise and clear expression can sound naïve to Spanish ears, or that their use of irony and witticisms can be taken as a sign of levity. Conversely, Spanish writers may find that their thoughtful attempts at emphasizing an idea are seen by English readers as unnecessary repetitions, or that a general reflection, intended to highlight the argument’s complexity, is felt instead as a digression.

Reading & Composition

“Tell me, how does it feel with my teeth in your heart?”

  • Medea, Euripides

“There’s always a part in every [episode] where the narrator goes, And that’s when she snapped.”

Reading & Composition

In this course, we will examine found documents as a literary device, i.e., stories that are told through an accumulation of texts, often “found” and assembled by the author or narrator.  Our readings will include examples of epistolary literature as well as experimental tales told through pieces of poetry, critical reviews, footnotes, and gallery labels.  We will also consider horror writers’ particular fondness for found documents, and cases when the mysterious sources of certain materials — and the gaps between texts — represent encounters with the unknown.  Many of our texts will feel r

Reading & Composition

In this R1B course we will explore fictional (and often fantastical) depictions of and engagements with real events of the past - that is, with history. Over the semester, we will examine and discuss films and literature which incorporate descriptions, references, personal recollections, and even richly imagined accounts of historical events or periods into the fictional(ized) stories they tell and worlds they construct.

Reading & Composition

“Fallor ergo sum.” (“I err, therefore I am.”)

            —St. Augustine, 5th century

 

“C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.” (“It’s more than a crime, it’s a mistake.”)

            — Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, 1804

Reading & Composition

To say that ‘to love is to live’ is nothing less than to affirm the proximity between these two actions, where, if nothing else, only a meager vowel separates the two. Love attests to a paradoxical type of freedom: we must be free to love; yet, when we are in love, we are unable to freely choose who or what it is that we love. Once ensnared in its warm embrace, love encircles us like a python, squeezing gently (sometimes not) until it completely surrounds us. But love can swallow and transform our world as quickly as it departs from it, leaving us only with malady.

Reading & Composition

In addition to fulfilling R&C’s writing requirements, this course will focus on ideas about plants, flowers, and gardens spanning from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. We will closely scrutinize received preconceptions about plants and gardens, such as the negative perception of plants’ lack of mobility as a deficiency and the notion of the garden as an enclosed space with borders, and read a variety of texts that challenge and/or complicate such normative perceptions.

Reading & Composition

Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom we borrow our course title, is one of the most famous critics of morality. But he’s by no means the only one, the critique of morality having been the focus of intense literary and philosophical attention for some time before and after Nietzsche. We will study literary, philosophical, and critical texts that take up this critique, as well as related issues: the difference between ethics and morality; the relation between morality and happiness; the possibility of morality without God; the meaning of the good life; and so on.

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