First-Year Writing Seminar: Shapeshifters: Writing in and across Genre

Catalog description

The central goal of this course, as of most college writing courses, is for students to develop their voices as academic writers. Implicit in that common aim is a relationship between tradition and individuality that may seem counterintuitive: By practicing the conventions of a particular genre of writing—in this case, the critical essay—one will start to sound, not like other writers, but more like oneself. To help illuminate that relationship between received convention and an original authorial voice, we will look to writers whose works span multiple contemporary literary genres. As readers, we will pay careful attention to how our expectations of a given genre influence how we tune into and interpret a text’s unique qualities. We’ll begin by reading essays, poems, and a work of self-designated “biomythography” by Audre Lorde, all of which have a first-person speaker or narrator. How does genre shape the relationships between reader, speaker, author, and meaning? We then turn to Samuel Delany, reading examples of his science fiction followed by his coming-of-age memoir, The Motion of Light in Water. How do the differing relationships to real events, people, and places across these two genres cue our reading? We conclude the course by reading two books that combine and blur genre distinctions, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Anne Carson’s Decreation, to examine their fundamentally hybrid natures. Throughout, we will also read critical writing about the primary course texts, both to enrich our understanding of those texts as well as to examine the genre conventions of scholarly writing as students set out to practice it.