Training in writing expository prose. Instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

This course aims to develop your abilities to think critically in the act of reading texts in close, detail oriented ways, understanding relationships between form and content and the generation of meaning. The goal is to sharpen your skills as a writer by practicing the development, presentation, and revision of complex ideas on assignments and exercises. No prior expertise on reading and writing about poetry will be assumed, and an adequate amount of time will be devoted to going over fundamental methodologies for reading poems closely and writing about them. As a guiding theme, we’ll examine questions and theories in the philosophy of mind and how poets submit them to a poetics, to sets of poetic techniques. Reading poems often entails a self-reflexive experience of language. What kind of mental acts does poetry express linguistically and how do they relate to the reader’s participation in the act of generating meaning? Does this activity really differ from standard experiences of language and of everyday life? After all, if the poet has something to say, can’t she just say it? Is this kind of talk about using language a certain way why we tend to dislike poetry? What exactly is it that we dislike? How are various modes of intentionality, cognition, self-consciousness, or mind/environment relations depicted or examined in poetry? These are questions we will often return to as we read 19th and 20th century poets and a couple of short stories, but we won’t necessarily obsess over them as they may engender discussions that branch out toward other related topics that you might want to discuss and write about as we strive to become better readers and writers.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills