Professor: Allison S. Curseen
Course Number: English 2150
Class Time: MW 2:55-4:35
Class Room: A-17 Lexington 1402
Office hours: MW 4:40-5:40 or by appointment
Office: 7-298
Office Phone: (646) 312-3936
E-mail: [email protected]
Required texts*
Aaron, Jane E. The Little, Brown Essential Handbook, 7th edition. Longman, 2010.
* Some older texts are out of copyright and an electronic version is easily accessed online. All additional readings mentioned in the syllabus will be either handouts or available through e-res or blackboard.
Course Description
According to a 2012 Pew Research article, 87 percent of teachers look at internet technology as having made “an ‘easily distracted generation with short attention spans’” (Pew Research). Such a position garners its strength from the prevalence of social media, instant downloads, google search, and the constant knowledge of “what’s trending.” Yet before there was YouTube, twitter, texts, and blogs, we had (and still have) music videos, movie trailers, bumper stickers, commercials, comic strips, posters, and the almost forgotten want-ads. This is to say nothing of movie shorts (as old as cinema itself), short stories, one acts, haikus, dance solos, and musical ditties. Whether commercial or art or both, the short form is not a passing phase; it has been with us for a very long time. In this class we will explore various genres defined by brevity and compactness. Brevity, we will find, is relative. A short story might be considerably longer than a poem, and by the same turn, most long poems are longer than flash fiction pieces. An infomercial might be shorter than the average season premiere (though just barely depending on the show), but for our purposes it straddles the line; by if it is a commercial it is defined by its length, but as a feature of television programming, it is often slightly shorter than the average episode. Part of our explorations will include making a case for whether a form is indeed short. We will also explore what’s at stake in brevity; what does the constraint of time and in some cases breath do to and for the text? In asking these questions, we will consider the history, politics, and aesthetics of both constraint and immediacy.
This class is first and foremost a writing class. One of the great things about approaching short texts is that the time spent reading in this class should not be overly taxing. However you are expected to put all the time saved on reading into your writing, which includes thorough research, revision, editing, and citation. Ironically while the forms we will look at will be defined by their brevity, one of the other great things about this class will be that it asks you to consider the abundance in the short and the small. This is to say that while we will have some assignments that are also short (mainly so that you can experience the same kind of necessity for immediacy as the texts we look at), you will often be writing more words than the text you are writing about has. Short attention spans might be part of our conversation, but sustained analysis to an idea, a text, and the way different texts express the same idea is our goal. To this end a major part of the grade in this class will come from the curating and editing of an issue of our journal, In Short.