Some Logistics
Let’s begin by discussing the elephant in the room (the one none of us is sitting in). Our nation is in the throes of a viral pandemic, and thus this course needs to take place online. That’s not ideal, but I actually think it’s a better idea than trying to hold a course like this one—which depends on having us work together in pairs and groups—in a room where everyone is wearing masks and sitting six feet apart. So even if we can’t meet in person, we can still connect online. You may not get the chance to meet your classmates face to face this semester, but you will still interact with them (and me) a lot—on WordPress, Google Drive, Medium, Zoom, and probably some other online platforms as well. I will make it my job to do everything I can to make you feel you are not working alone but are part of a community of writers.
It’s also worth noting that there are 44 people enrolled in this course, which is somewhat larger than most sections of E110—which are usually capped at 22 students. The reason for this is strictly bureaucratic; this course counts as the equivalent of two sections in my teaching workload. And while, if this class were meeting in person, I wouldn’t want to try to run a whole-class discussion with 44 people in the room, almost all the “in class” work you’ll be doing this semester will take place in one-to-one conferences or small groups. You’ll also receive a lot of written feedback on your work from both me and your classmates. So I think you’ll feel that you’re getting the sort of close attention you need to grow as a writer. You shouldn’t, that is, feel like you’re lost in a big class.
Living Online and in Place
I noted in About E110 that all of the many sections of this course work toward a common set of learning goals. This still allows the teachers of individual sections of E110 a good bit of latitude, though, in choosing texts to work with, issues to consider, and types of writing projects to assign. In thinking about how to structure our work together this semester, I wanted to somehow address the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in. Certainly the pandemic has made many of us feel even more strongly than before that we are spending too much of our lives online. And yet what else can one do when sheltering in place? This is, after all, and for good reason, an online course. So how can we take advantage of the opportunities the internet allows us to connect with each other, while avoiding the sense that our lives have narrowed down to the space of a laptop screen?
I think we can get at a lot of these questions with the help of Jenny Odell’s terrific 2019 manifesto, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell is a visual artist from the Bay Area who is worried about the effects that commercial social media have on our everyday lives. She’s not anti-technology, but she is concerned about the attempts of giant corporations to harvest our attention for their own profit—a process that she argues keeps us in a near-constant “state of anxiety, envy, and distraction”, in sort of an unending fear of missing out. In her brief, fun, and smart book, Odell offers us some strategies for resisting this manipulation. I’ll ask you to draw on her ideas to develop two midlength essays of your own: (1) a critical response to How to Do Nothing, and (2) a report offering more detail and context about one of the texts or artists Odell discusses.
But this is not a course in Jenny Odell. It’s a course in learning how to write as a critic or intellectual—as someone, that is, who is trying to say something new and interesting in response to the work of other artists and writers. I hope that in working on these essays you’ll begin to sense some of the possibilities of this sort of responsive writing, and that you’ll perhaps want to do more of it in the future. I don’t normally assign my own writing in the courses I teach. (It strikes me as vain.) But since I won’t be able to chat with you in person in quite the same way as in most other courses, I’ve decided to also ask you to read a brief book I’ve written, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. I think you’ll find it useful in trying to figure how to approach Odell in your writing.
(You might notice that in some ways the title of Odell’s book is almost the opposite of my own subtitle: How to Do Nothing versus How to Do Things with Texts. But I actually think that Odell and I write from very similar perspectives, that the kind of close attention I urge you to pay to texts is very much like the attentiveness toward the physical world that she argues for. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.)
You’ve been in school for most of your life. So you already know a good bit about learning and writing. I hope and anticipate that you’ll draw on your experiences as a student and a person in writing your pieces for this course. Your writing should reflect who you are. My goal is to teach you how to do certain kinds of work with texts and ideas. It is not to train you to write in a certain style, to hold particular opinions, or to sound like me or Jenny Odell or anybody else. I want to help you articulate your ideas in a voice that feels your own.
I hope you have a good semester, and that you find the work I ask you to do challenging and fun. I’ll set up some times to talk with each of you individually at several points during the semester, but I also hope you will always feel free to check in with me during my Zoom student hours. (See Support.) I look forward to working with you!
E110: Seminar in Composition 