Reading & Composition

Writing strategies and expectations vary among cultures. Spanish speakers, for instance, may discover that their thoughtful attempts at emphasizing an idea are sometimes seen by English readers as unnecessary repetitions. They may find themselves wondering why a general reflection, intended to highlight the argument’s complexity, can be perceived, instead, as a digression. Also, why do sentences in English need to be so short and paragraphs so long? And when did using the passive voice become an unforgivable sin?

Reading & Composition

Reading speculative fiction has long been stereotyped as a fundamentally unserious, childish, or even irresponsible pursuit: an effort to escape existing realities instead of engaging critically with them. Yet in the age of The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale, it seems obvious that stories of distant futures, alternative histories, and faraway planets do not always appeal to readers on the basis of pure escapism: they offer

Reading & Composition

This course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills via an exploration of texts that stage their own reading and reception within the work. More specifically, we will focus on texts—such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—in which the characters themselves narrate and discuss other stories.

Reading & Composition

This course will be devoted to investigating storytelling, fantasy, and the imagination. In our readings, we will explore traditional elements of storytelling, including narratorial and authorial perspective, reliability, presence, self-consciousness, and voice. We will pay particular attention to storytelling devices such as allegory, verisimilitude, digressions, and interruptions, as well as symbols of imagination, including mirrors, dreams, monsters, miracles, illusions, and veils.

Reading & Composition

We tend to think about illness in biological and epidemiological terms. Much of our knowledge about health is communicated through the language of medicine and science; we look to doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, and a range of other experts when seeking advice on how to lead a healthy life. But can science fully convey what it means to be ill? In this course, which borrows its title from Virginia Woolf’s essay of the same name, we will pay close attention to the ways in which illness gets figured in literature and art.

Reading & Composition

Revolutions often, if not always, present themselves as radical breaks with the past. Following the French Revolution, the newly formed National Convention declared that “The era of the French is counted from the Republic, which took place September 22, 1792 of the vulgar era…The vulgar era is abolished for civil usage.” The same decree set forth an entirely different calendar—complete with an autumn new year and a ten-day week—to emphasize the extent to which the Revolution began a new era, completely distinct from anything that had come before.

Reading & Composition

Every family has its secrets. In this class, we’ll look at fiction, film, television, and poetry that reveal what happens when a family’s metaphorical skeletons emerge from the closet. Does the revelation lead to crisis? Chaos? Resolution? With some of our stories, the reader alone learns a character’s secret, while the story’s other characters remain in the dark. What kind of “revelation” is this? How does the possession of this secret knowledge affect a reader’s attitude toward the character and the story’s events? How do these secrets alter or contradict our notions of family?

Reading & Composition

The Tower of Babel in Genesis is a brief and dramatic story about how human languages and habitats become multiple and scattered. The end of the story is one way of conceptualizing the differences and divisions among peoples in the world. The story is tightly constructed, and its ambiguity yields profuse interpretations, retellings, allusions, and echoes throughout literature. In this course, we examine the way literature returns to and rewrites Babel. A post-Babel world of many languages necessitates translation, so we examine this fact both thematically, and through works in translation.

Reading & Composition

Consciousness of our own mortality is a key part of what makes us human, giving rise to manifold cultural responses, including practices of commemoration, rituals of mourning, and built monuments. In this class, we will explore a wide range of these responses as expressed in literature, film, and visual art from antiquity to the present day. How do rituals of mourning and commemoration serve the needs of the living?

Reading & Composition

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.”

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