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Course Description

Summary

This scriptorium, a “place for writing,” functions as a class for writers interested in improving their essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with writing and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we work to create new habits and strategies for our analytical writing. As we practice various essay structures with the aim of developing a persuasive, well-supported thesis, we will also revise collaboratively, improve our research skills, and study grammar and style. Our aim is to learn to write with complexity, imagination, and clarity, as we read model examples of form and content on the theme of borders and boundaries. As we interrogate real and figurative perimeters, we will ask many questions: What happens in liminal spaces? How do power structures establish borders and keep them intact? Who and what gets put into the margins? What if those boundaries are transgressed? What happens to the body and to identity when one is “in between”? How do you conceive of yourself if you are neither “here nor there,” “nowhere and everywhere”? Readings may include texts by Anzaldúa, Adichie, Barthes, Berger, Butler, Chang, Chen, Douglas, Fanon, Foucault, Hall, Haraway, hooks, Hurston, Kincaid, Larsen, Long Soldier, Lorde, Rushdie, Said, Sinclair, Turner. Writers at any level are encouraged to take this class.