First-Year Writing Seminar: Metamorphoses

Semester and Year	FA 2011
Course Number	FIRST-UG324
Section	001
Instructor	June Foley
Days	Mon,Wed
Time	3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Notes/Restrictions

Open to Gallatin first-year students only.

Description

This course explores the idea of metamorphosis, or transformation, by which humans become—among other things--stones, flowers, and stars; animals, gods, monsters; and members of the opposite sex. We read and write about some of the many varieties of metamorphosis, such as those linked with disguise and dissimulation; madness and dissolution; immigration and exile; sickness and healing; and self-creation that reflects self-knowledge. Students write academic essays that develop their own ideas in their own voices, in stages that progress from freewriting and drafting to workshopping, revising and polishing. Throughout the course, we reflect on writing itself as a transformation of subjective, ephemeral impressions into words fixed on paper (or shimmering in cyberspace) through which we communicate with others. Readings include selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Humphries trans.); poems based on it by Ted Hughes and a contemporary play based on it by Mary Zimme rman; fairy tales, folk tales and contemporary revisions (ed. Maria Tatar); essays on immigration and exile in Letters of Transit (ed. Andre Aciman) and in Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work; Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; and essays on neurological transformation and creative responses in Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars.

Course Type

First-Year Program: Writing Seminars (FIRST-UG)