Expository Writing (105-0-20)
Topic
Textual Catastrophe: Reading, Writing, and Losing
Instructors
Rio Mckade Bergh
Meeting Info
Shepard Hall Classroom B05: Mon, Wed, Fri 1:00PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
Aided by the contemporary 24-hour news cycle, catastrophe is ubiquitous. Social, political, and environmental catastrophes bombard us daily. Yet, for all of its ubiquity, catastrophe resists the reduction to the commonplace. Catastrophes produce feelings of shock, trauma, and upheaval. On a broad scale, they upend systems of organization and structure. On a psychological level, catastrophes fracture ways of understanding the self and the world. For those who survive catastrophic experiences, the catastrophe does not end with the event itself—living in catastrophe's aftermath demands finding ways to stabilize and make sense of a world transformed from seeming order to a state of flux.
This class will examine works of literature that attempt to represent catastrophic events from European contact in the Americas to the present, along with contemporary music and film dealing with personal and interpersonal catastrophes (i.e., grief/loss and alien/artificial intelligences, respectively). Readings will feature American writers from the canonical to lesser-known including Ralph Lane, Crevecoeur, Melville, Whitman, Simon Pokagon, William Joseph Snelling, Poe, and Layli Long Soldier. Films include Ex Machina (2014), Arrival (2016), and This Much I Know to Be True (2022). For music, we'll venture to Australia, listening to albums by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Ghosteen 2019) and Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (Carnage 2021).
We will pay particular attention to the formal textual strategies used in texts as they wrangle with representing the catastrophic, attending both to the ways texts (including films and albums in the category) use generic conventions and rhetorical strategies to stabilize themselves in a state of flux, and to the moments when those conventions and strategies fail, rupture, or break, and, in turn, are rearticulated. By examining textual breakage and reassembly, we will try to think about parallels between writing that makes sense of the unmooring effects of catastrophe and college-level writing that engages with complex, ongoing, emerging, and sometimes disorienting conversations and arguments. Our purpose will be to better understand how to make sense of complicated situations and contexts through descriptive, summative, and argumentative writing that carefully synthesizes complex sets of evidence.
Class Materials (Required)
"They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing ISBN:978-0-393-93584-4