While people sometimes dismiss words as the opposite of action, this course emphasizes words as action. Words don’t just sit there. They clarify, or they confuse; they comfort, or they provoke. They make people laugh, cry, remember, forget, throw caution to the winds, or contemplate the universe. They take us away from ourselves and into ourselves. Words make and break things, constrain us, and allow us to imagine possibilities that may become realities: nations, identities, families, freedoms, new worlds.
Like other first-year courses in the department, this course will expose students to a range of literary styles, voices, genres, and students will be trained to pay attention to essential details and qualities of each work. But however deliberately crafted a work may be, words and works mean different things to different people and in different contexts, so we have to look outwards as well as inwards as we think about literary meaning. As language is fundamentally a social phenomenon, we will attend to how it functions as terrain of control and struggle and medium of play and connection. In addition to literary texts, we will examine examples from history, news, and popular culture as well.
A central goal of the course is to inspire students to take their own use and interpretation of words seriously as action with a wide array of possible effects. Before it was a noun denoting a type of assignment, the word “essay” was a verb implying effort, exploration, experimentation. Understanding meaning as mobile can, I hope, motivate students to craft effective arguments. The final essay invites students to declare a particular imagined audience beyond the instructors, write accordingly, and explain their goals and choice of rhetorical strategies.
