Section 2
Schedule and Syllabus

21W.731
WRITING AND EXPERIENCE

Lucy Marx
Fall 2000

Section 2; TR; 12:30-2:00; Room 1-242
Office: 14N-338
Telephone: Office:258-6561(no messages at this number please)
Home: 522-3015 (before 9:00 p.m. please)
E-mail: ltmarx@mit.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday; 2:00-4:00 and by appointment

Required Texts:

Mark Dery, the pyrotechnic insanitarium; american culture on the brink
Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living
Rebecca Walker, To Be Real
Strunk and White, Elements of Style

This course is an introduction to writing essays based primarily in personal experience and observation. As for most writers of the personal essay, your challenge will be to use your experiences as on opportunity to find fresh ways of thinking about broader issues in the world around you. In this case, our focus will be on exploring your experience as it sheds light on the more general experiences of your generation.

As your generation comes of age, you are fast becoming the focus of great interest and discussion. Your numbers are huge (larger even than the baby boomers’) and as a group you will probably be even more influential than we baby boomers have been. Pundits are rushing to describe you, and marketers to sell to you. But how do you see yourselves and the world you are inheriting? What do you want your influence and your contributions to be? These are some of the questions we will address in our reading and writing and investigation. Our class project will be to create something like a collective self-portrait of your generation, which we’ll produce in the form of a final class portfolio.

Since this is a writing class, much of our focus will be on your writing. And since writing and reading are the closest of companions, we will be reading, and talking and writing about what we read, a good deal as well. Some of the writing we do will be casual -- to be kept in a notebook of reading responses and observations and reflections touched off by our class conversation. For more formal essay assignments, you will have plenty of opportunity to shape and revise your work. Of course writing is hard work, and we will work hard. But my hope is that you will come to experience writing as an inviting medium in which to explore your experiences and your thinking, and as an opportunity to contribute to our collective conversation. I hope, as well, that you will find satisfaction in the process of crafting your writing into pieces you feel pleased to have included in our group portfolio.

Texts: I have ordered four books for the course, which should be available at the Coop. First we’ll look at Mark Dery’s provocative essay collection: the pyrotechnic insanitarium, american culture on the brink. We’ll be investigating what he (and other cultural critics) have to say about the state of our society at the millennium, the nature and health of the world you are inheriting. (As always in this course, I welcome any additional material to consider in class discussion.)

Next we’ll look at To Be Real, a lively and free-ranging anthology compiled by Rebecca Walker. These essays are written by close-to-contemporaries of yours and mostly by women. The writers here explore issues of personal identity, gender, class and race, political commitment and personal aspiration. Hopefully they will provide models and inspiration for you to try your hand at the personal essay form of writing. And I hope the men in class will consider our discussions of these essays as an invitation to correct the imbalance created by the prevalence of women’s points of view in these selections.

We’ll read the extended essay The Cost of Living, in which Arundhati Roy (author of The God of Small Things) speaks passionately about the world in which you are coming of age and her own vision and convictions in response to it. Does her moral stance make sense to you? Do you have, and do you see your contemporaries having, similar, opposing or alternative convictions that motivate and inspire you?

If you don’t already have a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, do get it and read it. As an introduction to the basic elements of grammatical writing and a sound approach to writing with clarity and style, this is a great quick read. It’s small enough to bring with you to class, and I will likely refer to it during the course of the semester. For a more traditional writing handbook The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing by Leslie C. Perelman, James Paradis, and Edward Barrett (members of the MIT Writing Program) is available online. This will be especially useful when you are writing essays that require citation. Do also have a good dictionary available for speedy reference as you read and write.

Aside from assigning these texts, I am relying on you to bring material to class which you think addresses crucial elements of your generation’s experience, interests, ideas, attitudes, obsessions, and convictions. Artifacts of youth culture -- music, literature, cartoons, video games, postings from cyberspace, whatever successfully speaks from or to your experience -- these will be crucial sources for our writing and conversation.

Finally, we will also regularly be reading the writing you are doing yourselves, the accumulating "text" that you are creating. Here, as we address each other’s work in progress, your careful reading and response is equally as important as it is with the published material. Remember that our responses will be, in large part, the basis of the revising and editing that each of you do as you work towards a final draft of an essay. Informed revision is essential to most good writing, so thoughtfully responding to class members’ working drafts is an essential contribution we all need to make.

There is a five dollar initial copying fee which covers all copying expenses.

Course requirements: Since so much of our class time will be spent in conversation about what we read and what we write, it’s crucial that you come to class ready to participate. This means being there on time and prepared to discuss and respond thoughtfully to the material at hand. You will be expected to have read all the assigned texts on the day they are assigned. Occasionally I will ask you to write about assigned readings in class.

We will keep a notebook of our responses to what we read and as a place to log ideas, questions and observations. The writing here is informal; sometimes it may be experimental. It is meant as a way to respond to the reading and the trajectory of the class conversation, and to note and explore relevant material that suggests itself to you as you go about your life. I expect the

writing here to be clear enough for easy reading, but I am not looking for finished, polished work. (It may, though, generate such work.) You need to devise a good way to keep your notes together and bring them regularly to class so I can randomly check in on them from time to time.

As for the more formal writing you do, you will have quite a bit of time to work on each of your essays. (Look at the schedule that follows for specifics.) By the end of semester you should have accumulated 20-25 pages of well-edited work to include in your final portfolio. This means you need to be aware of staying on course towards meeting this page requirement. Within the range of each assignment, you will have a good deal of leeway to choose the specific topic you want to explore. If you are having difficulties figuring out a subject to write about, I’m always happy to act as consultant. You will all have the opportunity to discuss proposed topics with classmates and to get my responses along the way. All of your essays will be discussed in class workshops, and I will touch base with you periodically as you think through revising.

Essay drafts should be typed, double-spaced, on one side of paper. Always start with your name, the date, the assignment and draft number. Number your pages and include a title.

We’re working on a tight schedule, so essay proposals, first drafts, and revisions need to be handed in on time. If you have a serious emergency that requires an extension, please get in touch with me right away. Such extensions will be granted only once per student per semester.

Since class participation and response to each other’s work is such an essential element of the class, you are responsible for coming to class regularly and on–time. Please notify me (preferably at a prior class or through e-mail) if a real and serious reason for missing a class comes up. It will then be your responsibility to get in touch with a classmate to provide you with any material or information you’ve missed. After three unexcused absenses, you will be withdrawn from the class. Lateness for class, if extreme or chronic, will be counted as an absence.

To meet the oral component of this course, you will be asked to help report on and lead class discussions on readings, and everyone will participate in offering a particular topic of your own choice, for which you will find material and lead a discussion.

As the writing accumulates, class members will serve as editors, helping to define the themes and selections that will make up our final portfolio. Class members will design and lay-out the text, and you will write whatever introductions, titles or "prose glue" we decide we need as the shape of the final portfolio emerges. Of course, I will always be available as coach and assistant.

As we go along I will respond to your work in writing and in conference. I will be glad to talk to you about the progress I see you making, where you might think about focusing effort, and my evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of your work to date. At the end of semester, I will read through your final portfolio, which will include your final 20-25 pages of revised writing and your reading and observation notebook. All required work (assignments and revisions, responses to readings and class members’ work) must be satisfactorily completed to pass the course. In deciding on your grade for the semester, I will take into account the quality of the written work in your portfolio, the consistency of your involvement and effort over the course of the semester -- including your efforts with your own work, the quality and thoughtfulness of your responses to peers’ work, your participation in general class discussion, and your leadership of class discussion.

Receiving a B or better in 21W.731 means that you pass Phase I of the Writing Requirement. If you receive a C in the course, there will be a case-by-case decision about whether you have passed Phase I. Receiving a D or F means that you have not passed Phase I.

Students often come into class with terrible writing experiences to tell -- of endless five-paragraph essays and papers covered in seas of red ink. I promise you this course will not follow in that tradition. We will work hard and you will be challenged to write as clearly and creatively as possible. But as we become steeped in the medium of continuous reading and writing that the class provides -- as everyone starts contributing material and insights and the class conversation gets going, as you figure out what you really want to write about and start hearing classmates’responses to your work -- I feel confident that all of us will find ourselves both learning and teaching, enjoying the process of creating our class portfolio, and even getting pleasure from the writing itself.

Class Schedule:

(This schedule may be revised as we go along.)

9-7: Introductions to class and ourselves

9-12: Writer’s Profile due; "Inherited World" introduced

9-14: Inherited world cont’d (Affluenza)

9-19: Inherited world cont’d (Reading: Dery cont’d, Affluenza)

9-21: Proposal for Essay #1 due (3-5 pages); inherited world cont’d (Reading: Dery cont’d, ads

aimed at you)

9-26: Media representations of your generation (Reading: Newsweek, NPR, Election)

9-28: 1^st draft Essay #1 due; "Where We Come From; What We Think; What We Do"

introduced (Reading: Walker)

10-3: Workshop

10-5: Proposal for Essay #2 due(5-7 pages)(Reading: NYTimes; Walker cont’d)

10-10: COLUMBUS DAY

10-12: Revision Essay #1 due; 1^st draft Essay #2 due (Reading: Walker cont’d)

10-17: Workshop

10-19: Investigative Essay (#3) Proposal due (7-10 pages); Conviction (Reading: New Yorker

profile; Roy)

10-24: Revision Essay #2 due; Generational sites of interest, youth culture; establishing topics

(Reading: Roy cont’d)

10-26: Conviction cont’d (Reading: Roy cont’d, Purdy, Eggers excerpts)

10-31: Sites and culture cont’d

11-2: 1^st draft Essay #3 due; sites and culture cont’d

11-7: Workshop

11-9: Sites and culture cont’d

11-14: Revision of Essay #3 due; sites and culture cont’d

11-16: Proposal for Essay #4 due (5-7 pages); sites and culture cont’d

11-21: 1^st draft Essay #4 due; sites and culture cont’d

11-23: THANKSGIVING

11-28: Revision of Essay #4 and Draft Portfolio due; editing planned

11-30: Contributions to Collective Portfolio finalized

12-5 Final editing

12-7 Collective Portfolio due

12-12 Personal Portfolio due; celebration!

We’ll start by looking at the context of your coming of age -- the world you have inherited. We’ll sample the views of contemporary cultural critics and their perceptions about the state of our society at the millennium. We’ll discuss what in their descriptions and analyses makes sense to you and speaks to your experience. And what, given your experience, you might feel moved to add or amend. We’ll look briefly at how your generation has been presented by the "experts". How, for instance, are you being depicted in Newsweek and on National Public Radio?

For most of the course we’ll be exploring your experiences directly--writing about and investigating for ourselves what your generation is really going through, thinking and doing; what you want for yourselves and what in the world you care about. We’ll touch upon some of the critical social issues with which you have been presented, such as the social relations of race, ethnicity and gender, and how you’re dealing with these issues We’ll read essays by as close to your contemporaries as possible and hear what they have to say. We’ll explore different sites of youth culture -- music, cyberspace, cartoons, video games, dorm life -- wherever we can find your contemporaries gathered and expressing themselves.

Finally we’ll look at how some of your contemporaries (or close to contemporaries) are asserting their own role in this world you are inheriting and committing themselves to changing it. We’ll talk about their visions and their moral stances and their actions, and whether they make sense to you. And we’ll raise the challenge of whether and in what situations you see yourself acting on your own convictions in similar (or different) ways.

Of course as we go much of our attention will be on your writing. Each of you will be asked to contribute four pieces of writing, one of which will be a longer investigative piece. For each essay or essay alternative, you will get a response (both from me and in peer discussion), first to your proposal and then to your first draft. You may continue revising and polishing over thecourse of the semester, and at the end of semester, you’ll submit your final work in a personal portfolio. Each of us will keep a journal in which we’ll write about class readings, our own musings, and anything we find in our daily lives of relevance to the course. This too I will be asking to see, though I will not be looking for polished writing but for the attention and engagement with which you are thinking and writing. Everyone will help lead class discussions, and class members will serve as editors -- collecting, editing, and shaping our class writing into the final group portfolio.nnnworksfWorkshop odiscussion ofof ssignment: Read: "Trendspotting: I Shop, Therefore I Am"; dery, pp.181-189. Due 9-12.

Tu; 9-12: Coming of age in a hyper-commodity culture. We’ll watch the video: "Affluenza"

Assignment, due Th, 9-14. Journal response to reading, video, advertisement (hand out) and/or "artifacts" you find yourself.

Th, 9-14: Class discussion, based on journal entries. Initial planning for the semester.

Assignment, due 9-19: Read: "God Sex Race and the Future; What Teens Believe," .Newsweek, May 8, 2000 (copies will be distributed). Journal response.

Tu, 9-19: Discussion: What They Say; What We Say. Responding to Newsweek. What do we we think of Newsweek’s take on you? What do we think it will be important to talk about, write about, investigate to get perhaps a truer picture? How will we organize ourselves to carry this out?

Assignment, due 9-21: Read Lisa Jones’s "she came with the rodeo", to be real, pp. 253-265. Bring to class a 1-2 page written description of your hypothetical dowry -- significant objects you carry with you either in your imagination or in reality. Feel free -- if you have one or two available -- to also bring the objects themselves.

Th, 9-21: The Things We Carry, What Do They Tell? Presenting our "dowries". Establishing initial categories/ editorial groups for our portfolio sections.

Assignment, due 9-26: Prepare proposals for developing your segment of the portfolio.

Tu, 9-26: Working in groups, fleshing out proposals.

Th, 9-28: American Beauty

Tu, 10-3:

Th, 10-5

Tu 10-10: Columbus Day

Th, 10-12

Tu, 10-17

Th, 10-19

Tu, 10-24

Th, 10-26

Tu, 10-31

Th, 11-2

Tu, 11-7

Th, 11-9

Tu, 11-14

Th, 11-16

Tu, 11-21

Th, 11-23: Thanksgiving

Tu, 11-28

Th, 11-30

Tu, Dec 5

Th, Dec 7

section home | schedule and syllabus | handouts | student work | 21w.731 home | comments?