Spring 2025 First-Year Writing (Barnard) BC1138 section 001

LETTERS

Call Number 00211
Day & Time
Location
TR 10:10am-11:25am
To be announced
Points 3
Grading Mode Pass/Fail
Approvals Required None
Instructor Andrew L Lynn
Type LECTURE
Course Description

Dear student: I write to you, who now read these words. Or, perhaps, I don’t: perhaps I never had you in mind at all; perhaps you are just someone passing by, who has taken these words as though meant for yourself. This course examines how writers have made use of the privacy of letters in their public writing. What happens when we address our written words to a particular other? How, on the other hand, do we read words meant for someone else? What intimacies does the letter form make possible, or violate? And what might the special case of the letter have to tell us about writing in general? Objects in the course may include: fiction by Goethe, DeWitt, Diderot, Poe, West; epistolary poems by Ovid, Dickinson, Rankine, Shockley; paintings of letter-reading by Vermeer and Greuze; letter-memoirs by Baldwin and Vuong; criticism and theory by Althusser, Barthes, Benveniste, Fried, Howe, Jackson, Reed.

Web Site Vergil
Department First-Year Writing @Barnard
Enrollment 15 students (15 max) as of 10:05AM Thursday, December 5, 2024
Status Full
Subject First-Year Writing (Barnard)
Number BC1138
Section 001
Division Barnard College
Section key 20251FYWB1138X001