ENGL 152
Other People's Lives: Contemporary American Memoir Fall 2014
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The goal of this course is to teach you how to write a clear, well-argued, intelligible and interesting analytical paper. We will spend most of our class time actively engaged in a variety of techniques to improve your critical reasoning and analytical skills, both written and oral. Though the skills you learn will be applicable to other disciplines, and a central purpose of the course is to improve all aspects of your writing, this is a literature class, designed partly to prepare you for upper level courses in the English Department, so we will, therefore, spend equal time on the interpretation of literature, in this case, contemporary American memoir, examining the ways in which recent American memoirists represent themselves through prose and the choices they make in shaping their life stories. Given the techniques shared by novelists and memoirists, how firm is the line between fiction and non-fiction? What are the sources of a memoirist’s authority? What are the ethics of memoir-writing? What kind of relationships do memoirists seek with their readers, and how do they go about achieving them?
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 12
Expected: 12
Class#: 1417
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: several short essays, with drafts and revisions, in-class presentations, written comments on published and student work, active participation in discussions
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level English course, and preference given to first-year students with evidenced need for writing instruction
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills

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