OPTIONAL CLASS ACTIVITY THIS THURSDAY!!
NICK FLYNN
Author of
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Thursday, April 22
1-2:30 pm
Vertical Campus, Room 14-270
Nick Flynn’s most recent book is The Ticking is the Bomb (Norton, 2010), a memoir of bewilderment and becoming a father, which Kirkus calls “. . . a stunningly beautiful cascade of images.” His previous memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), and a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (Faber, 2008), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. Each spring he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn (and elsewhere).
Hi all & welcome
to the webspace for
English 2150: Happiness.
Please poke around and introduce yourselves!
Course Overview
Everyone wants to be happy, or at least we all think we do. But, what is happiness? Why do advertisements, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, parents, and friends all think they know the big answer? In “Happiness,” Dead Prez writes, “we can’t escape from the realness/happiness is all in the mind.” Following this notion that “happiness is all in the mind,” this course will begin by exploring and interrogating recent work in the recent field of psychology often referred to as “happiness studies,” beginning with Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. The course will include a wide variety of texts, with an emphasis placed on looking at scientific studies and newspaper articles alongside literature (both contemporary and canonical). In exploring different types of literature—from nonfiction to fiction to poetry and plays—you will learn how to look for intriguing questions in a text, pull together evidence and analyze its implications, make sound and interesting claims based on your evidence, develop convincing arguments, and structure coherent essays with clear theses. Be prepared to write frequently, engage in class discussions of assigned readings, respond to student work, share your own writing with peer editors, and participate in small group work and presentations.