First-Year Writing Seminar: The Self in its Spaces

Catalog description

How do the spaces we occupy determine who we are? This writing seminar will explore the ways our identities are formed by the geographic, cultural, and even psychic spaces we inhabit. For example, we’ll read authors who are shaped by New York, by memories of a homeland, by queer community, and by various social forces at play through it all. We’ll think about the making of a “self” in light of these spaces, and do both literary critical analysis and deep self reflection. Our primary readings will be personal essays, studying the way this most flexible form allows master writers to formulate new ways of articulating selfhood while also engaging with the world round them, but we’ll also read some critical social theory to provide a framework for our thinking. We’ll read established authors like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez and Jamaica Kincaid, and mix them up with newer authors like Rahawa Haile, Beth Nguyun and Chantha Nguon. We’ll also read Michel Foucault to explore notions of surveillance in all public spaces. Students will be expected to write one critical essay of literary analysis, one essay that brings two or more readings into dialogue, and one final personal essay that incorporates ideas gathered throughout the course.