Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Introduces students to the relationships between writing and purpose, between the features of texts and their meaning and effects. May focus on one or more literary or non-literary genres, including (but not limited to) essays, oratory, autobiography, poetry, and journalism. Includes attention to writing skills. Students with credit for ENGL 104W may not take this course for further credit. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

English 114 Language and Purpose  

“The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.” --Annie Dillard  

In an essay on watching a total solar eclipse in 1978, Annie Dillard proposes language as a kind of kiddy toy with which we as people, we as individuals, understand the world and do things in it. It’s a grand claim, maybe even a bit much. And yet, her writing undercuts this pretension. The sentences balance the vast sweep of some global beach, infinite in sand, with our mind’s and culture’s rinky-dink plastic scoop and pail. The pathetic insufficiency is grimly funny: cosmic importance against a three-dollar plaything from Canadian Tire. The echoing blowhard alliteration between ‘bucket’ and ‘bluster’ shows how loudly we fail, while the repeated ‘With these…’ reenacts the trite proverb ‘Try, try again.” And yet, even as her carefully crafted sentences reveal that language just isn’t up to the task, these sentences get the job done: the images, sounds, contrasts, patterns reveal language’s ability to make an idea resonant, compelling, and clear. The world is huge and complex and language merely gives us little lenses and angles to gain insight. The bitterly laughable bucket and shovel built an idea’s sand castle on the shore.  

Ideas, emotions, attitudes, arguments, and understandings come about through the artful and deliberate craft of writing. In this course, we will read a wide range of literary texts—essays, poems, short stories, a (short!) novel and a play—and work on learning how to read them carefully and closely to see what they do, how they work, and how they mean. The attention to language will raise a related cluster of questions: What is literary language? How does literary language work? What does literary language do? In asking these questions, we might also be asking what does language do? How does it work? What is it for? To answer these questions, we will come at language not just as readers, but as writers.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Writing is a way to think and a way to communicate this thinking. For the course, we will try out and practice both academic writing and public writing. Of course there will be an analytic essay, with a specific thesis and careful scrutiny of evidence. Mastering such a form is crucial to a university education. The course will also include work on critical forms of public writing: statements, essays, or explorations rooted in our readings, but designed to be read beyond the university.  

Readings for the course will be diverse: essays by David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, and others; short stories by Thomas King, Ursula LeGuin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and more; Henry James’ classic ghost story Turn of the Screw; Shakespearean comedy; and poems by many. Through these many authors and genres, students will encounter the major literary forms and be introduced to numerous historical periods, movements, and genres. Writing assignments will be equally diverse: possibilities include argumentative interpretive essays, reflective memoir, blog posts, podcasts, and creative responses. The writing will be taught through repeated low-stakes experiments, the processes of revision, and peer group workshopping. The aim is to develop writing as a critical and analytic craft, one which clarifies and develops ideas clearly and usefully.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: