Writing About Literature, Fall 2006

Abstract:: Description from course home page:"Writing About Literature" aims: 1) to increase student's pleasure and skill in reading literary texts and in writing and communicating about them; 2) to introduce students to different literary forms (poetry, fiction, drama) and some tools of literary study (close reading, research, theoretical models); 3) to allow students to get to know a single writer deeply; and 4) to encourage students to make independent decisions about their reading by exploring and reporting back on authors whose works they enjoy. The syllabus includes an eclectic mix: William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Henry James, Michael Frayn, and Jhumpa Lahiri. We'll explore different ways of approaching the questions readers have about each of these texts.

Writing and Reading the Essay, Fall 2005

Abstract:: Exploration of formal and informal modes of writing nonfiction prose. Extensive practice in composition, revision, and editing. Reading in the literature of the essay from the Renaissance to the present, with an emphasis on modern writers. Classes alternate between discussion of published readings and workshops on student work. Individual conferences. This is a course focused on the literary genre of the essay, that wide-ranging, elastic, and currently very popular form that attracts not only nonfiction writers but also fiction writers, poets, scientists, physicians, and others to write in the form, and readers of every stripe to read it. Some say we are living in era in which the essay is enjoying a renaissance; certainly essays, both short and long, are at present easier to get published than are short stories or novels, and essays are featured regularly and prominently in the mainstream press (both magazines and newspapers) and on the New York Times bestseller books list. But the essay has a history, too, a long one, which goes back at least to the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne, generally considered the progenitor of the form. It will be our task, and I hope our pleasure, to investigate the possibilities of the essay together this semester, both by reading and by writing.