Course details
Name: ENWR - 220
Title: WRITING IN THE MAJOR: ANALYTIC ES
Section: 05
Semester: Fall - 2017
Credits: 3
Description:
ENWR 220: Writing in the Major: Where does Interpretation Take Place?
This section of 220 will offer students the opportunity to reflect on the work of literary studies across diverse genres and historical periods, and what it is we are doing when we “interpret” literary texts. In this reflection, we’ll take as a guide Edward Said’s enduringly insightful 1978 text, Orientalism. With his direction, we’ll review a variety of texts, from canonical literary works of the English eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—some poems and a novel—to less formally recognized but no less sophisticated contemporary texts—such as song lyrics or twitter threads. We’ll practice modes of reading and interpretation, we’ll compare the varieties of perspectives and insights that these modes of reading reveal, and we’ll speculate on their relative value for contemporary life. By the end of the course, students will have familiarized themselves with the skills necessary to compose a research paper in the vicinity of five thousand words; but more importantly, students will feel confident transforming intuitions into arguments for the existence of notions or insights that did not explicitly exist before.
Instructor Bio:
Ana Schwartz is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania; before that she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation describes how colonial settlers in the seventeenth century tried to make sense of different, perhaps new emotions, as well as different ways of experiencing and talking about emotions. In addition to composing new interpretations of early modern and colonial texts, she writes about contemporary Latin American literature, and movies about outer space. Her favorite book might be Moby-Dick.
Last updated on 2017-03-23 By
Harrison Kim (harrisonk)
Schedule: Monday,Wednesday From 1:00 pm To 2:15 pm
Graduation requirements:
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Teaching Faculty: Schwartz Ana (schwartzan)
Is course canceled: No