The Craft of Writing

This course is loosely organized around the idea of visuality and the body: looking at painting, photography, film, digital art, and literature, we will look at the construction of meaning through different media that aim to somehow capture the world. Through these works, we’ll interrogate a history within philosophy that places the visual at center. In addition to creating ease in the interpretation of literature and art, the larger question at play this semester will attend this very hierarchy of the senses. What is the relationship between the sense, the body, and our conceptual rhetoric? Are optics our primary sense?

Readings and discussions about such questions will form the basis of this course’s approach to analytical research writing. In the course of the semester, students will learn to research and write two analytical essays in draft and final forms.