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

In this course, we'll learn about writing by thinking about dreaming. Right around the turn of the 20th Century, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, argued that dreams have meaning: they express our repressed, often quite outrageous unconscious wishes in distorted, censored forms more acceptable to our egos. But to see this, he claimed, we have to take our dreams apart, dissect them, interpret them bit by bit. We'll read Freud's strange and fascinating study The Interpretation of Dreams, then try to see how similar strategies of "close reading" can be useful in analyzing books, movies, paintings, and other kinds of cultural object. We'll be guided along the way by questions about how dreaming is related to reading (absorption in a book as reverie), watching (the dreamlike quality of cinema), making art (theorized by the Surrealists as a kind of surrender to the Freudian unconscious), and ideology (perhaps a waking dream that we all share). We'll think about how art can act as both a kind of soporific dream-inducing agent and a means of accessing the real.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills