This course focuses on the writing of complex, analytic, and well-supported arguments through an engagement with literary texts. Clear writing is a form of clear thinking, so this course is designed to help students hone their critical thinking and reading skills. Learning to engage with others’ work in productive ways is an important part of developing your own skills as a writer, and so you will spend a lot of time reading, workshopping, and giving feedback on the writing of your peers, as well as using the feedback you get to edit, revise, and re-formulate your arguments throughout the writing process.

Cars, airplanes, trains, buses: in the modern world, we have more ways of getting to new places quickly and easily than ever before. How does this unprecedented access to many places affect the ways we live in and understand our relationships to them? In this course, we will read poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose that deals in some way with leaving home, travelling, or exploring new places, as well as narratives about returning again. Why is what Walt Whitman called the “open road” such a compelling idea in American literature? What is nostalgia, and why does it appear so often in writing about home, especially from people who made the decision to leave? How does the experience of exile affect the way people understand their identities? Our goal is to think through the ways writers understand and portray the new and exotic as well as the familiar, and how external movement is related to internal change.

Our focus will always remain on your own writing. You will produce four essays of various types and lengths, as well as shorter responses to the reading and to one another.