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

What does it mean to be at home? In this course, we will investigate the places, people, and things we call by this name. Beginning with the primary, spatial sense of the word, we will think about place: the houses, apartments, countries, and cities that we might call home. What happens when we leave these places? How do we carry them with us? Moving away from the more literal, spatial sense of the word, we will consider how home is a feeling: a familiarity we trace through the senses, attached to certain flavours, sounds, and smells. After grounding ourselves in this cosier exploration of the concept, we will address more complex relationships to the idea of home. What does it mean to experience strangeness, fear, or alienation, in encounters with things that promise safety and comfort? We will explore these possibilities through Freud’s concept of the uncanny, in which safety and unsafety are one and the same thing. Understanding, finally, what home is made of – the ways we carry home with us – we will put this understanding to the test. How do we make new homes for ourselves, in strange, unfamiliar places? Writing can be a vital tool for understanding our relationship to place, and we will consider how it is possible, in these contexts, to write ourselves home – to learn to make home without houses, to live in the self instead.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills