Professor: Allison Curseen
Class Time: MW 2:55-4:35
Class Room: A-17 Lexington 307
Office hours: MW 4:40-5:40 or by appointment
Office: 7-298
Office Phone: (646) 312-3936
E-mail: [email protected]
Walking, Standing, Crawling:
America’s Romance with the Vertical
Fall 2014 ENG 2100, Writing 1
Course Description:
In a 1960s photograph of anti-integrationists in Knoxville, TN, we see two white protesters holding a sign that reads: “SIT-DOWN DEMONSTRATIONS are UN-AMERICAN.” The two men prop up their sign on the trunk of their drop top Chevy Impala: one of the men stands at the rear holding his end of the sign, but ironically the second man holds the other end of the sign by sitting down in the car. In this course we will explore both this sign’s simultaneously blunt and cryptic message and the irony that presumably good Americans need to adopt an “un-American” gesture in order to make their voices heard.
We will begin by simply asking the question, what is so un-American about sitting down? Another way to approach this question (assuming the inverse to be true) is to ask, what exactly is so American about standing up? Engaging a wide range of text from political essays to photographs, to advertisements and music, we will interrogate America’s relationship to the vertical. The readings focus particularly on notions of standing and walking (upright), but students are encouraged to consider other expressions of vertical aspirations (e.g. skyscrapers, iconic shots of the American eagle soaring, etc.). Concerned with how American-ness is negotiated and articulated by tensions between up and down; high and low; upright and lowly; sky and underground; or top and bottom, we will also pay attention to dissenting gestures from those who have been denied a vertical position or who find in crawling, falling, sitting, and laying down a way of resisting–or perhaps redefining– American.
This class is first and foremost a writing course, and the primary objective is to improve students’ skills as writers and ready them for the type of writing expected of them at the college level. To that end, as we examine U.S. preoccupations with verticality from a variety of angles (i.e. religious, performance, political, physiologically), I will put pressure on how (and with what language) students interpret a particular gesture or position (in a painting, song, or essay) and how they are using one text (e.g. a theory about dance) to understand another text (e.g. a manifesto for racial segregation). In papers, journal entries, and in class discussions, students will spend a considerable amount of time articulating a clear analysis of a text, crafting a cogent argument based on that analysis, and presenting both in an organized and logically sound manner.
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.