English 90: Spring 2009 : Section 01
Readings in Genres
Wed-Fri, 2:50-4:05 pm, 107F West Duke Building
You'll notice that I've changed the title of this course from "Readings in Genre" to "Reading Genres." I've done this to signal a shift in focus from kinds of texts to ways of reading. I have tried to structure our work this semester not around the sort of literary genres (e.g., fiction, poetry, drama) presented in many textbooks, but around reading genres—that is, around ways of understanding and constructing complex texts.
Many scholars now think about genre less in terms of form (e.g., a sonnet has 14 lines, a haiku has 17 syllables) than function. For them, a genre is a way of speaking or writing that responds to a particular kind of occasion, that does a certain kind of work. When someone comes to your home, you welcome them. When you've done something wrong, you apologize. When you meet someone who interests you at a party, you flirt. These are all everyday speech genres. There are many more. The point is that they are defined not by their structure, what they look like, but by their function, what they do.
In this course we will continue this line of thought by looking at some of the genres of literary reading—that is, at ways of responding to the sometimes odd demands that literary texts seem to make of us. We will approach reading as a social practice, as a set of moves for doing things with texts. To do so, we will look at a series of authors who test the constraints of the forms they are working within. While many of these texts may at first strike you as odd or difficult, I think you will also soon find that they open up new and exciting possibilities for your own writing and thinking.
Up to spring break, our mode of work will be straightforward: We will read and talk about a text together, and then I will ask each of you to imitate and extend its approach in your own writing. Sometimes this work will be of an analytic sort—as when, for instance, I ask you to draw on the ideas of Mary Louise Pratt in locating and describing a "natural narrative." At other points, I'll ask you to experiment with more imaginative forms of writing—such as retelling a familiar tale with a new twist, or composing a sequence or montage of images, or combining visual and verbal texts.
After spring break, we'll shift to something more like a case study approach. We will read four well-known works that have long puzzled, frustrated, and intrigued many readers: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Blake's Songs, Toomer's Cane, and Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Your task will be to write not in the mode of those texts but in response to them—to reflect on some of the ways they put our familiar genres and practices of reading to the test.
The measure of your skill as a reader will be the inventiveness and precision of your work as a writer. You can expect to read a series of unusual and challenging texts, and to do some critical or imaginative writing of your own nearly every week of the semester. Your grade for this course will be based on two revisions of these short pieces—one due right before spring break and the other at the end of term. See the Course Materials below for more details.
Good luck! I look foward to working with you!
Course Materials