Fall 2024 First-Year Writing (Barnard) BC1100 section 001

Field Too Large: War, City, System

TOO LARGE: WAR, CITY, SYS

Call Number 00193
Day & Time
Location
MW 10:10am-11:25am
404 Barnard Hall
Points 3
Grading Mode Pass/Fail
Approvals Required None
Instructor Andrew L Lynn
Type LECTURE
Course Description

How does one represent things that seem too large, or too complex, to understand?  What rhetorical strategies of compression, exemplification, typification, or visualization do we need to make such events or objects comprehensible?  And what sorts of risks – aesthetic, ethical, political – do we run in trying to do so?  In this course, we’ll move through a number of writers who have grappled with these basic problems of representation, focusing our attention on three particular kinds of excessively large objects: wars, cities, and economic systems.

Objects in this course may include: literature from Caryl Churchill, Teju Cole, Arthur Conan Doyle, Amitav Ghosh, Patricia Highsmith, Homer, Jamaica Kincaid, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf; maps from Charles Joseph Minard and John Snow; criticism and theory from Jane Jacobs, Immanuel Kant, Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, Georg Simmel, Susan Sontag, and Raymond Williams.  Course costs will not exceed $30.

Web Site Vergil
Department First-Year Writing @Barnard
Enrollment 15 students (15 max) as of 11:06AM Friday, December 6, 2024
Subject First-Year Writing (Barnard)
Number BC1100
Section 001
Division Barnard College
Open To Barnard College
Section key 20243FYWB1100X001