Welcome to E280!
This course is designed to help familiarize you with literature in its various forms—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and film—and to teach you to engage critically with texts in a variety of media. The readings for this class will emphasize the fluidity of genre, and our discussion will focus on the often-complicated relationship between form and content. In addition to providing you with the tools to analyze literature, this course will help you hone the writing skills necessary to succeed at the university and in your future careers. Over the course of this semester, you will learn to think rhetorically about purpose, audience, and genre, recognizing the different ways writers achieve their desired rhetorical effects and learning to do the same in your own writing. Additionally, you will learn that good writing doesn’t “just happen” in one attempt. By the end of the semester, you will see writing as a process, one that involves repeatedly revisiting your essays in response to peer evaluations and conferences.
Required Texts and Supplies:
- Brian Friel’s Translations
- Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
- Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
- Ticket to REP production of The Importance of Being Earnest
- Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
- Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy
- Print-offs of materials on Sakai
- One class notebook
- Printer paper and ink cartridges
Virginia Garnett 