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| Summer 2008 Course Descriptions The Expository Writing Program offers summer courses in Academic Writing. Classes are small, no more than 12 students, and are organized around three major sequences of instruction. Students work closely with instructors on how to read and summarize texts, how to analyze texts, and how to organize their thinking in clearly written essays. Courses are offered this summer in two categories: Writing about Social and Ethical Issues and Writing about Literature. In all sections, however, the central subject is academic writing and the intellectual and rhetorical skills that academic writing depends upon. TERM II 060.105.01 Academic Writing: Writing about Social and Ethical Issues (MWF 9:00-11:30) This course explores the historic centrality of music in African-American literature--the bondage narrative, autobiography, essay, and short story. Among other questions, we will ask how is it that the "Sorrow Song," or spiritual, is conceived as expressive of pain and historical injustice yet also as instrumental to cultural advancement? We begin with Frederick Douglass's characterizations of the spiritual; next, students will write an explication of arguments by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and W.E.B. DuBois about these spirituals; and finally students will develop an argument about James Baldwin's famous story "Sonny Blues." 060.105.02 Academic Writing: Writing about Literature (MWF 9:00-11:30) An author chosen for Oprah's Book Club forty years after his death, William Faulkner has long been acknowledged as one of the most fascinating and important American writers of the twentieth century. Attacked early in his career for what some considered his radical stylistic innovations, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. In this course, we will examine selected works of Faulkner's short fiction as students develop their skills of close reading, textual analysis, and argument--the essential skills of academic writing. 060.105.04 Academic Writing: Writing about Literature (MWTh 1:00-3:30) In this writing seminar, students will take a close and critical look at some of the most famous love poems of all time: Shakespeare's sonnets. Through close reading and critical analysis, students will investigate the ways in which Shakespeare manipulates the sonnet form, questions the conventions of romantic love, explores the dimensions of gender and sexuality, and struggles with mortality. In the culminating essay for the course, students will challenge a published scholar's reading of a sonnet by offering an interpretation of their own. 060.105.03 Academic Writing: Writing about Literature (MWTh 5:00-7:30) In this seminar, students will develop their analytical reading and writing abilities in relation to three forms of writing indispensable to literary study: theory, criticism, and the novel. The course will begin with an examination of a short selection of Sigmund Freud's writings on the affects of paranoia and anxiety. Students will next read Nella Larson's Passing, a canonical Harlem Renaissance novel, in light of Freud's theories. Finally, we will analyze the insights and limits of literary critic Deborah McDowell's now-classic interpretation of the novel. |