Readings:

Working list of texts:

Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)

Tradition (Marci Blackman)

“The Lottery” (Shirley Jackson)

W, or the Memory of Childhood (Georges Perec)

“The Growing Stone,” “The Silent Men” – from Exile and the Kingdom (Albert Camus)

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Milan Kundera)

Course Description:

This course will move through texts that expose and try to work through the implications of being part of a community. Participation in a community is rarely a static phenomenon and often demands a process of negotiation—be it between cultural boundaries, the past and the present, or the new and the old. As we will see, these processes are also often the grounds on which a relationship between the individual and the collective is articulated. Taking as a point of departure the commonly-held association of community with oneness, we will examine the variety of demands, questions, and problems raised by the negotiation of individual “oneness” and collective “oneness.”

This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students’ reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Additional Information:

French R1B satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH.

Section times and locations in the Schedule of Classes