Class description:

Reading the Present: Text and Meaning


The goal of this course is to develop the critical reading and argumentative skills necessary for writing college-level papers. Our overall focus will be on developing a rhetorical approach to textual analysis, which, briefly, means learning to attend not only to what a text says, but also to how it says - how the text’s language, pacing, structure and context (among other aspects) work to augment, counter, sustain or otherwise complicate the claims the text makes.

The centerpiece of this class will be a close reading of one of the most rhetorically interesting works of American letters: W. E. B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, a book of numerous literary modes (philosophy, history, fiction, autobiography, sociology) that still bears enormous import on American discussions of race. In addition to the DuBois, we’ll also read some Nietzsche, some Freud, a number of poems, a novel (Marguerite Duras’ The Lover), and, if there’s time, a few shorter stories and essays.

As this is a 1A class, we’ll also be spending quite a bit of time working on writing, both on the general level of argumentative development and on the more concrete level of syntax, diction, sentence and paragraph construction. By the end of the class, you will be producing papers that are provocative, stylish, thoughtful and challenging.