Craft of Writing

In this course we will develop the skills of critical reading, writing and thinking as we explore the theme of the “everyday." We will inquire into the nature of everyday experience and ask how it might be constituted and registered in language, sign, image, body, and place. What is the “everyday” aspect of our lived experience? Is it visible or touchable? Can we see it or speak it? Does it leave any traces? If so, what are these traces and where (and when) can they be found?

As we seek out the everyday, we will also ask how we ourselves are articulated and shaped through our own quotidian experiences. How do the words, images and spaces we inhabit, and the motions we perform constitute and shape our own selves? We will also consider how the everyday is at once the site of the banal and the place where we find ourselves faced with the uncanny and the absolutely strange. What is the life of an ordinary word? What of a photograph or advertisement? What meanings and myths subsist in “everyday” objects? Thinking through the iterations of the everyday in text, image and embodied space, we aim to analyze the multiple forms taken by this concept.

This course fulfills the second half of the Reading and Composition (R&C) requirement at UC Berkeley. In this course, we seek to develop the critical tools required of writers and readers at the college level by establishing strategies for close reading, argument building, the use of textual evidence, and academic research. Also, we will provide some introduction to the discipline of rhetoric and the modes of inquiry active in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley.