First-Year Writing Seminar: Small Lives

Catalog description

How do we tell distinctive stories about ordinary lives? What can the details of ‘small lives’ tell us about their larger cultural, historical, and political moment? In this seminar we will analyze representations in literature, journalism, memoir, and documentary and fiction film of lives framed as unremarkable and common; politically and socio-economically marginalized; and geographically and culturally adrift. We will focus on the ways in which the nuances and forms of these representations often blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction; how the textures of these ‘small lives’ are captured in verbal and visual mediums; and how these often isolated lives resonate with the experiences of a greater collective. Within the broader goal of developing critical reading and writing and effective speaking skills, we will focus on understanding the different ways in which our selected writers and filmmakers and we ourselves represent the contours and meaning of the ‘ordinary’ lives we encounter every day. Texts may include Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Freud’s case study of Dora, Teju Cole’s Open City, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?, interviews by Svetlana Alexievich, and films by Barry Jenkins, Chantal Akerman, and Sarah Polley.