Fall Courses

This fall I’m teaching three sections of freshman Composition I, which has a heavy emphasis on rhetoric here a the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). And I’m teaching one section of Introduction to Poetry. That gives me 105-110 students, depending on how the adding and dropping works out by the end of this coming week.

In the composition class I’m using Ways of Reading, which is a text full of difficult readings. For example, I lead off the semester by slowly working through Foucault’s “Panopticism” chapter of Discipline & Punish and Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I go back and forth on this textbook. After some semesters I swear I’ll never pick it up again, but I’m tempted back by the way challenging readings motivate students to learn a good, solid reading process and how classroom discussion is much better when its driven by a real need to know. And, despite the fact that the texts in Ways of Reading are from the same perspective as those in, say, Rereading America, students tend to react more favorably to them than “softer” cultural criticism pieces.

In the poetry class, I’m using Western Wind. I favor this text because it emphasizes formal interpretation over thematic reading and because it has some good chapters on sound. I think its selection of poems is a bit weak, so I supplement it with a fat dose of more unusual poetry. I use Blackboard to distribute: sound poems by Hugo Ball and Joseph Beueys; visual poetry by a number of people, including Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Schwitters; and prose poems by Stein, Simic, and some others. I also add a few things from the New York School, and I might add some fragments from Sappho later in the course, when we start reading from Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, which we’re reading for two and a half weeks.