First-Year Writing Sem: Abundance: Thinking, Writing & Creating In The Age of Plenty

Catalog description

Every three minutes Americans take more photographs than the entire 19th century produced. We have some 100 000 words of text pass through our eyes and ears each day (that’s ¼ of War and Peace). We are in the midst of constant abundance – of information, choices, opportunities, products, texts, and images. Even the city we live in is bursting at the seams. But what is abundance and how do we navigate it ethically, socially, and artistically? This course investigates the history and changing shape of abundance, from sonnet writing in the Renaissance to twitter feeds today, from Augmented Reality poems and the Digital Humanities to consumerism, overcrowding, and artistic repurposing. Writers we will consider include Kenny Goldsmith, David Foster Wallace, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Marjorie Perloff, Walter Benjamin; Photography projects will include Penelope Umbrico’s Flikr Sunsets, Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, and Walker Evans’s Many Were Called; Music by Glenn Gould, Sonic Youth, and Jay-Z; Films by Richard Linklater, Sarah Polly, and Bela Tarr. As we examine these materials we will also consider the changing shape of the traditional college essay and how to navigate abundance in our own writing. Students will write three short papers and create a final critical essay that reframes and repurposes existent textual or media sources.