All Reading and Composition courses must be taken for a letter grade in order to fulfill this requirement for the Bachelor’s Degree. This course satisfies the second half or the “B” portion of the Reading and Composition requirement.

In this course students will work to develop their expository essay writing. Together we will read and discuss a number of texts and work on techniques for freewriting, paragraph-structuring, and editing essays about those texts. In our reading (works by Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Svevo, to list a few) we will focus on the theme of the written word itself in various forms: how written language structures thought and reality. As we investigate this theme we will work our way to a central topic: empathy. Is our basic idea of the accessibility of other minds altered when we become habituated to reading and writing? Is the whole idea of the “other” and “alterity” re-cast and re-crafted when the written word is introduced? Examining these questions will bring us to parallels between intersubjectivity and temporality, between books and minds, between reading and thinking. Our goal will always be to explore complex ideas in literary and theoretical texts, and then write about those ideas in clear and effective prose.

Prerequisites: Successful completion of the “A” portion of the Reading & Composition requirement or its equivalent. Students may not enroll in nor attend R1B/R5B courses without completing this prerequisite.