About Writing in this Class

writing to read, writing to talk, writing to learn

"As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another's presence."

- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

In order to fully engage with the women's writing we will read and discuss in this class, we will need to create a classroom in which we are each actively involved in seeing and hearing from ourselves and each other as well as seeing and hearing from our class texts.

I will lay the foundation for this kind of classroom interaction in part by coordinating three levels of your writing in this course. First, you will join a group of four to conduct a class literary blog both with your own entries about the class texts and discussions and with responses to others' entries. Second, you will write short, two-page papers, in which you will develop a claim about a text or texts we are reading and discussing in class. Both the blog entries and the short papers will be started during class and completed at home. Third, you will write two formal literary papers, the midterm and the final, in which you will develop an interesting claim about texts we have discussed in class. These three writing projects should build on each other, that is, the blog is a place to try out writing about and responses to texts in conversation with others, the short papers are more formal spaces in which to try making arguments out of the observations you've made in the blogs, and the midterm and final papers are formal places to map out what you think are the most interesting claims you have discovered in your active reading and writing practice.

As we will see in the writing we read this semester, writing is a way of engaging with and learning about the world and about yourself. While our writings in this class will be much more formal than the kinds of writing you might do in a journal, in a personal blog, or in notes to friends (though those are all valuable forms of writing), the writing in this class will be designed to help you work through and learn from the readings of the course as you develop your skills as a literary analyst.