ENG 234 - Writing About Place

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirements AR and IL.
Place is a powerful force in our lives, pulling us back toward the fields of our childhoods and forward toward dream destinations. We, of course, traverse many places in our lives, but they also move in and through us. In this MILA course, we will investigate how we come to know the physical world and to know ourselves in relationship to it by writing creatively about how the natural and built environments we inhabit influence and transform us. We will introduce students to a variety of genres: creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, and explore various interrelated literary traditions: nature writing, travel writing, exploration literature, adventure literature, epistolary accounts, and travel journaling. We will encourage students to become native informants-exploring what it means to live in a particular time, place, culture, and body-and curious explorers, letting negative capability (the power of not knowing) lead them into unexpected and unmapped territory. While inventing, shaping, and honing our creative writing, we will explore the poetics of place, the politics of space, and the historical and cultural significance of particular sites. The topic of place puts us at the intersection of identity and community, the boundaries of subjectivity and otherness, ontology and eschatology (Where did we come from? Where are we going?). Eudora Welty wrote, “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” As such, we will explore what it means to have a relationship with a place, how such relationships change over time, how the places we inhabit and visit affect how we view ourselves and the rest of the world. We will commit to the process of writing, including drafting, active defamiliarization, imaginative play/risk, development, and the serious re-envisioning of our ideas. We will read closely, think boldly, write creatively, and practice self-evaluation. The course will culminate in a short study abroad experience at a writer’s retreat in Italy, where the foreign environment will heighten our sense of place through intense direct experience and observation, giving us the opportunity to better apprehend all we’ve learned up to this point. Satisfies departmental Poetry or Prose requirement.