Advanced Scriptorium: Masks & Metamorphoses

Course Description

Summary

The Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” functions as a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. In the Advanced Scriptorium, we build on skills from 2000-level Scriptorium classes while working to achieve an ambitious goal: the writing and revision of a long-form critical essay on a text of your choosing. In working toward this goal, we will hone fundamental skills including close reading, crafting a thesis statement, and translating critical sources, while also practicing nuanced ways of engaging with critical scholarship. As we dive more deeply into critical research and writing, we will learn to come up with a research question, write a prospectus, develop an annotated bibliography, put secondary criticism in conversation with our own ideas and with other criticism, and write with greater clarity and precision.

This interdisciplinary Scriptorium focuses on the relationship between who we are and who we present to the world (masks), and how this relationship changes over time (metamorphoses). We will think about this topic in a variety of contexts ranging from racial passing to class and gender covering to forms of becoming in contemporary fandom and transgender literature. As we engage with a variety of primary texts—short fiction, narrative cinema, autobiography, documentary, graphic novels—we will also explore critical theories and methods with which to investigate these works: theories of gender and sexuality, race, class, and power. Primary texts may include works by Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, James Baldwin, Casey Plett, Liana Finck, Ash Kreis, Rebecca Hall, and more. Critical texts may include works by Hortense Spillers, Laura Mulvey, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Leslie Morrison, bell hooks, Danzy Senna, Jennifer Nash, Andrea Long Chu.

Application to the class will require submission of a writing sample. Students from any discipline with previous critical writing experience--whether from a Scriptorium course or elsewhere--are encouraged to apply. Because the course bridges the gap between introductory critical writing and advanced work, I also encourage applications from juniors who are considering advanced work that involves critical writing in any respect. Please note that this course is not a workshop for advanced work; you cannot submit writing for this class that in any way overlaps with writing for another course.