SSYYLLLLAABBUUSS -- WWrriittiinngg 113399 Time: Tu-Th, 11:00 - 12:20p (33504) Location: HH 100 Instructor: Libby Catchings Office Location: 537 MKH Contact: [email protected] Office Hours : Tues. 1:30-4:00 Course Listserv: [email protected] Course Director: Jonathan Alexander Contact: [email protected] Course Website: (eee + Writing Studio) COURSE DESCRIPTION Writing 139W: Writing 139W fulfills the upper-division writing breadth requirement for students in any major. Completing all ESL and lower-division writing requirements is prerequisite. The course carries four academic units and may be taken pass / no pass unless your department requires that you take it for a letter grade. Making and Breaking Chains : American popular culture is obsessed with prison; shows like Beyond Scared Straight and Jail bubble up alongside home improvement programming, while Lady Gaga uses the prison as her personal runway. At the same time, we continue to traffic in the memories of slavery, most recently via the Adidas "shackle" shoe incident and the Kanye/Jay Z collaboration, No Church in the Wild. So what is it about these two forms of bondage that capture the popular imagination, and what is the relationship between them? Ironically, looking these forms of bondage becomes the basis for defining that most cherished of American values: freedom. This course addresses how freedom, slavery, and the prison have been represented by writers working in diverse genres in order to ask how—and why—the philosophical, sociological, and (popular) cultural representations of freedom and bondage are constructed in particular ways. Historically, claims about what it means to be free -- or even human -- have been made through discourses about enslavement and imprisonment; some have used bondage as a trope to explore philosophical or artistic projects, while others have used it to interrogate the assumptions of various political and economic paradigms. Others, still, have used these tropes as a means of advocating social change, notably through slavery and prison abolition movements. Over the next ten weeks, we will look at how writers such as G.F. Hegel, Frederick Douglass, and Angela Davis define the relationship between freedom and bondage, and examine the stakes of these definitions for an American ethos deeply invested in the concept of freedom. We will also look at social-scientific representations, political speeches, television, and documentary films. This class will not be discussing the statistical effectiveness or devastation of imprisonment, however. Rather, our focus will be on the rhetoric and representations of enslavement and incarceration, in order to determine how such depictions affect our conceptions of civic identity in the United States. REQUIRED TEXTS All texts will be provided to you free of charge on the course website, either via link or in PDF format: • Binder, Guyora. “Bondage, Freedom, and the Constitution.” Cardozo Law Review . Yeshiva University, 1996. 17 Cardozo L. Rev. 2063. LexisNexis.com. • Buck-Morss, Susan. "Hegel and Haiti." Critical Inquiry (Summer 2000). • Davis, Angela Yvonne. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. • Douglass, Frederick. "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?". 1852. • Haki, Ajamu C.B. "After All Those Years." 1996. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. Bell Gale Chevigny, Ed. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999. • Hegel, G.W.F. "Self-Consciousness," "Lordship & Bondage." Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807. • McBride, Dwight. Impossible Witnesses. New York: NYU Press, 2002. Print. • Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. 1861. • Jefferson, Thomas. "Original Rough Draught of the Declaration of Independence." 1776. • Johnson, "What is the Meaning of the California Hunger Strikes?". California Prison Focus. Spring 2012. • Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Liberty." 1824. • Western, Bruce and Katherine Beckett. "How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution?" American Journal of Sociology (January 1999). ***NOTE: Whether you bring a laptop, or print hard copies of these documents out, you MUST BRING the assigned text to class for close reading ! Failing to do so affects your participation grade. COURSE REQUIREMENTS Papers: • Essay #1 (4-5 pages), • Essay #2 (5-6 pages), • Essay #3 (6-8 pages). These papers are formal essays and must follow the conventions of academic essays, and each will require you to write a substantial draft for peer review. They must be printed in 12-point font, double- spaced with 1-inch margins. All formal essays, including drafts for peer editing, must be typed and should adhere to MLA format. (Please refer to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers .) Essays should have a proper heading, appropriate title, pagination, and, if appropriate, a Works Cited page. Your final drafts are due at the beginning of class on their respective due dates. Late work will not be accepted except in cases of documented emergencies. Commonplace Blog: Throughout the quarter, you will keep a commonplace blog that focuses on representations of freedom and bondage. Before and even through the twentieth century, people (writers especially) kept commonplace books that they would fill with personal thoughts and reflections, important quotes from whatever they were reading, newspaper articles, photographs, ads, videos, and so on -- a scrapbook, of sorts. You'll be compiling your own version to chronicle (and comment on) things relevant to our topic that you find outside of class - whether newspaper editorials, photos, commercials, scholarly articles, or pop culture artifacts, but doing so in blog-format. The Writing Studio, then, will be your go-to-place for recording casual musings, interesting links, relevant videos, and images that strike you as relevant in some way to the class themes . The blog will also be a space for periodic homework assignments to help you on your way. More importantly, however, the material you generate here will provide the basis for Paper #3 , so it is doubly to your advantage to actively gather material and form commentary throughout the quarter. You should expect to write at least 500 words per week (1.5 pages double-spaced), for a total of 8 weeks' worth of blogs. That means you'll be writing at least 4,000 words (or 12-15 pages) for the quarter. Note: if you do the bare minimum, expect a grade that reflects just that. • Commentary: every week your writing should be a combination of personal observation and analysis; that means you can write conversationally about your encounter with a text as you might in a journal, but you also need to critically evaluate what you're looking at, i.e., practice close reading, and write annotated bibliographies (a throwback to 39C). • Format: you can use the Writing Studio to make your commonplace book digital, OR, if you're particularly tactile and artsy-craftsy, a 3-ring binder - as long as the pages are secured and orderly, and the text is legible. • Commonplace Blogs are due every Friday by 5 pm. In-class Presentation : In Week 7 and 8 you will prepare a 5-minute presentation for the class that investigates a representation of freedom or bondage from popular culture (advertising, music, film, poetry, etc.); this representation must be a first-person account of the conditions of freedom, slavery, or prison. You will then briefly analyze how that representation works for the class. Your Commonplace Blog will be a useful resource for identifying the kinds of representations or texts you might like to talk about. Presentations should do the following: • Discuss the genre and/or medium of the representation in question; • The cultural or historical context of the text, as well as its author, and reception by various audiences; • Identify key tropes, patterns, uses of language that reveal the DISCOURSES at work in the piece; • Say a word about how you plan to connect this piece to your final project . Attendance: Woody Allen once said, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." Attendance is important to advancing the kinds of discussions that will help you develop your papers. You must regularly attend class; your success in this course largely depends upon it. Lateness is disruptive and will not be tolerated. Every two tardies will be considered equivalent to one absence, and any tardy in excess of 10 minutes counts as an absence . Missing more than 2 classes will negatively affect your participation grade. Not showing up for more than 4 classes will result in the lowering of your final grade and, if necessary, failure of the course. Participation : Active participation in classroom dialogue can be one of the most satisfying learning experiences you have at UCI. We discover what we actually think when we engage in class discussion - in no small part because of the new insights and challenges uncovered through exchange with peers. Since your progress in this course hinges more on discussion than lecture, you should commit yourself to speaking regularly in class. If you find yourself unengaged by class discussions, remember that the best way to guide a topic in a direction that interests you is to pipe up. • MESSAGE BOARD - To ensure your participation you are required to post on the Message Board prior to EACH CLASS PERIOD: 1. Respond to the guided reading questions for each text , in complete sentences, using integrated quotations from the text itself. I will post guiding questions to the Message Board before each class. 2. Generate ONE thoughtful question or comment about the text under discussion . I will frequently begin class by asking students to share their ideas, so every student should come to class prepared to share. That means, make sure you 1) post responses to the Message Board by 10 am the day of class , and 2) bring those responses to class to read aloud and discuss. • PEER REVIEW - writing well doesn't happen in a void; often we learn the most by seeing how others write, and how they respond to our own arguments.