Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

A quick question: what, exactly, is the point of college? Why really are you here? Some commentators describe a university as job preparation, a kind of economic exchange: a few years of your life (and probably a lot of debt) in ostensible trade for, one day, a better job and more money. Others suggest that higher education prepares elites, that it tries to shape the so-called “leaders of tomorrow.” A third group argues that time spent in college constitutes ethical training, a kind of self-discovery: according to this idea, you go to college to become a better person, to learn to think, to find out who you really are. Plus, trying to answer questions about the purpose of college also means figuring out what a college actually is. A college is a place of learning, sure—but it’s also an investment fund (check out the UC’s endowment!), a landlord (including mine and probably many of yours), a real-estate firm, an employer, a political lobbying group, a generator of research, a professional sports club, a military installation, and so (so!) much more. Maybe it’s no surprise that so many texts—novels, films, memoirs, essays, YouTube videos, webcomics, memes—choose a campus as focus and setting. How, they ask, does college help us understand who we are, what we want, and what we’re good at? (Or, how does college encourage us to keep believing that it can help us do those things?) How do the characters in campus narratives come to understand themselves in terms of identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality? What do these narratives suggest about what an education should look like, and what the goals of an education (and of life!) ought to be? What forms do campus narratives tend to take: what do novels or films about campus life look like, and why? And how do these narratives help (or fail to help) us understand and imagine what we want—and how we learn to want? In this course, we’ll use examples of these narratives (two novels, two films, various smaller things) to write about the university as both a conceptual institution and a concrete set of buildings and people and stuff. This is the really useful thing about the university and works of art about the university: they make especially visible the way the immediate and the abstract are linked, how the things we do and the spaces we occupy every day fit inside bigger concepts and problems. A university is an idea, but it’s also a thing.

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills