First-Year Writing Seminar

The First-Year Writing Seminar, directed by the Department of Literature, aims to enhance the writing skills and literary acumen of first-year students through intensive composition and revision and the study of significant texts and models. Each seminar focuses on a literary theme chosen by the instructor, and each ranges across periods and genres. All of the seminars seek to instill rigor of argument, clarity of presentation, and stylistic grace. Students will be expected to write no fewer than seventy-five hundred words during the semester. Seminars will typically have fifteen students. All CMC students are required to take a section of FWS in their first year at Claremont McKenna College.

Course

FWS010 CM - First-Year Writing Seminar

Topics include:

All the World is a Stage. Koul
This course explores the implications of this notion in the thought forms, textual cultures and performance patterns of three different periods-European early modernity, medieval Kashmir and the Global South today-with readings that fall under the themes of “theater,” “world” and “theory.” Students will learn to write their critical impressions of this rich set of readings and viewings through iteration, self-critique and group reflection.
The American Dream. Martinez, M.
In this course we will read and respond to a variety of texts to foster critical thought about the “American Dream.” Each of the works we will read contributes to a larger conversation regarding intersecting discourses of race, class, gender, and nationhood as they complicate contemporary understandings of productivity, success, and privilege in the United States. You will join this conversation by sharing your perspective on the “American Dream” and by applying critical theory to various works. You will thereby flex your critical thinking skills as you practice writing in an organized, thoughtful, and persuasive manner.
Concepts of Evil. von Hallberg
This course will examine via the novel, story collection, lyric essay, graphic memoir, and occasional poem some of the vital female voices writing today. We will discuss issues of love, class, connection, feminism, racism, sexism, nationalism, the body, belonging, family, and others in these diverse texts, and respond to them both critically and creatively. Though these books might not (yet) have made it into the canon, they illuminate, in precise and perceptive ways, what it means to be alive today.
Contemporary Poetry. Laser
This course will study just what it says: contemporary poetry. We will read poetry collections, individual poems, and essays by poets writing now, and we will consider these works in the context of their immediate influences, and in the context of the genre of poetry as a wider literary tradition. Our essays will use progressively more sources toward discovering what poems are and how they work. We will learn to look at one text through the lens of others, to experience writing as a form of thinking, and to make arguments we really believe in. The wager of this course is that being a good writer means being a good reader, and if you can read poetry, you can read anything.
Contemporary Women Writers. Vallianatos
This course will examine via the novel, story collection, lyric essay, graphic memoir, and occasional poem some of the vital female voices writing today. We’ll discuss issues of love, class, connection, feminism, racism, sexism, nationalism, the body, belonging, family, and others in these diverse texts, and respond to them both critically and creatively. Though these books might not (yet) have made it into the canon, they illuminate, in precise and perceptive ways, what it means to be alive today.
How to Do Things with Words. Farrell
In this course you will see how great writers compel the interest of readers and you will learn how to do it too. You will study classic works in each genre and analyze their structure, diction, imagery, themes, and metaphors; you will attempt to employ these elements skillfully in your own writing. You will write at least one page per class, and one or two students will be selected to use the page they have written as the basis for a brief talk on the question of the day. Among our authors will be Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, Balzac, and Yeats.
Language and Life. Warner
The purpose of this course is to help students become more effective writers. To this end, we will read, discuss, and write about works from a variety of genres-essay, poem, drama, short story, novel. Throughout the course, we will examine the ways that form, feeling, and idea converge in master works of writing. Thematically, our readings center on uses and abuses of language in different personal and social contexts. Our writing concerns will range from the perils and pleasures of punctuation to larger questions of logic, organization, and style, and to the modes of exposition, narration, description, and argument.
Literature and Film. Morrison
This course examines the key literary genres of the novel, the short story, poetry, and drama by pairing significant literary texts with cinematic counterparts. The course is less about film adaptations of literary works than about reaching an understanding of distinctive elements of these genres through a study of the differing forms they take in the media of literature and film. Authors will include Poe, Dickinson, Nabokov, Shakespeare, and Chekhov.
Literature of the 50s and 60s. Faggen
We examine American culture in a time of change and upheaval through the works of Ellison, Salinger, O’Connor, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Yates, Heinlein, Kesey, Baldwin and others.
Making Monsters. Ketels
This course examines the important role that monsters play in the literary imagination. Monsters inhabit borders of difference, and this semester we will explore the complex interplay between the normal and the marginalized, the hero and the villain, the human and the animal. What constitutes a monster? What role do monsters play in the construction of myths and communities? What do monsters tell us about our own monstrosity? Readings to include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Lais of Marie de France, The Tempest, and Grendel. The craft of writing will always be front and center this semester, from short in-class writing exercises to collaborative workshops of full-length drafts. You will write weekly one-page homework assignments and several short papers.
MLK: Writing and Rhetoric. Smith, D
In this seminar, we will try to understand Martin Luther King, Jr., (MLK) as something more than an icon. We will avoid unhelpful hagiography, but we will honor King’s startling intelligence, courage, and sacrifice. We will study the texts he produced-the books and essays he wrote, and the sermons and speeches he spoke. We will consider his faith in God, his philosophical commitments, his political leadership, and his conceptions of race, particularly Blackness. By discussing and writing about King’s expressive repertoire, we will develop our own capacity for expression through writing. We will also explore the arguments of women and men who have differed with King, and those who have seriously studied his ideas. Considering these contexts will quicken our ability to think and write with nuance, complexity, and a subtlety that eschews needless dichotomizing. The seminar will be a space for compassion and capacity-building. Participants will walk a path of learning together.
Our Relationship With Language. Gaffney
How does our language reflect and shape who we are? Our very intimate, everyday relationship with language can be a barrier to strengthening our writing. Sometimes we need to hold the English language at arm’s length, see it anew and explore its limits and potential. This course will investigate our human relationship with language, introducing basic principles of linguistics, philosophies of language, language controversies, and varieties of written language. Good writers are able to make choices in their writing; you will learn from their examples as you sharpen and develop your own writing. We will read a range of texts, both fiction and nonfiction, recent and very old, including Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, and al-Ḥarīrī.
Philosophy and Poetry. de la Durantaye
This course will give an overview of the main conceptions of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in Western culture, from classical antiquity to the present. It will proceed through a series of questions. The first of these are: What is poetry? What is philosophy? How might they best relate to one another? Why does Plato refer to an “ancient enmity” between poetry and philosophy? Why might there be tension between the two activities? How might they be harmonized? What is the relation of reason to imagination?
Post-Apocalyptic Humanity. Davidson
Events like plague and climate change may be the catalysts, but humankind is both the protagonist and antagonist in post-apocalyptic literature. Starting with early modern accounts of newly-formed plague quarantine practices, this course will explore how post-apocalyptic literature both stresses and relieves tensions in the areas of identity, which includes topics of race, gender, and sexuality. In addition to the primary sources, students will work extensively with secondary articles and chapters from critical theory. This course will use the post-apocalyptic backdrop to help students learn the fundamentals of academic writing and revision by developing rich, evidence-based arguments that draw from multiple sources.
Shakespeare’s Comic Vision. Lobis
This course offers an intensive introduction to the study of literature organized around a highly compelling author, William Shakespeare, and a highly complex genre, comedy. Working through a selection of plays and adaptations, we will explore the “endless variety” of Shakespearean comedy, to cite the critic Samuel Johnson, its rich admixtures of “good and evil, joy and sorrow.” Our primary practical goal for the semester will be to cultivate the art of the “close reading,” analytical writing grounded in attentive reading and critical thinking. Through a series of exercises and essays, we will carefully consider not only what makes an argument cogent and coherent but also how to make our own more so.
Writing About Poetry. Parker
A course designed to introduce students to writing about poetry. The course will include an introduction to rhetorical, figurative, and metrical elements of poems. We will study several traditional and contemporary poetic forms: the sonnet, the couplet, the quatrain, blank verse, free verse, villanelle, and popular song.