Index#: 07588
SPECIAL PERMISSION REQUIRED
APPLY HERE: https://forms.gle/dT1vTXtMxKpgeU967
Will Count Towards English MAJOR
Will Count Towards English MINOR
In this course, we will focus our attention on one novel by William Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom!
Why one book? We learn how to read critically not by reading, but by re-reading. And yet, you could scan university syllabi the world over and you would find few, if any, courses where students are given the time necessary to reread a text that has already been covered. In this seminar, we will be learning about how we read by moving slowly through a text that is rich, challenging, and unsettling.
Why this book? We are living at a moment when the country’s roots in slavery and racism have become central to the country’s politics. Faulkner spent much of his writing life spinning tales about fictional characters who lived in a fictional county in Mississippi. The characters in Absolom, Absolom! are, at most, two generations removed from the Civil War, the fall of the South, and Reconstruction. As we read the novel 85 years after it was published, we will find ourselves contending with Faulkner’s assertion (in another novel) that “[t]he Past isn’t dead. It isn’t even over.”
What else will we read? We will build the rest of the reading list together as we move through Faullkner's text, following his lead. And we will read works by two novelists who have discussed their indebtedness to Faulkner’s work: Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward.
What will you do besides read? This is a course in essayistic thinking. As such, it is a course designed to cultivate curiosity and original, research-based writing. There will be daily, graded, in-class responses to the day’s reading; there will be brief formal submissions along the way, as we make our way through Faulkner’s novel. And there will be a final, research-based paper that explores a question of the student’s choosing.
Who should take this course? Anyone who wants to be a better reader. Anyone who wants to learn how to write creatively about the real world. Anyone who wants to acquire the habits of the creative mind. STEM students, students in the social sciences, and students in the humanities all will find much of interest in Faulkner’s work.
Please note: admission to this course is by permission only. Interested students should fill out the application form, which may be found here. Applications will be read in the order received. Admitted students will receive a special permission number.
About Professor Miller
Professor Miller has co-authored Habits of the Creative Mind (2019, 2nd edition) with Ann Jurecic. This collection of essays works with the idea that writing is a technology for thinking new thoughts and that one learns to use writing for this purpose through practice. Composed with the reflective teacher in mind, Habits promotes an approach to writing that keeps open and alive the questions that are central to our humanity.
Professor Miller's most recent work, On the End of Privacy: Learning to Read, Write, and Think in the 21st Century (UPitt, 2019) looks at the personal, educational, and cultural consequences of the shift from a paper-based to a screen-centric world. He is in the early stages of a project on the untold stories of the institutionalized. Both projects are centrally concerned with curiosity and archival exploration.
Professor Miller is also the author of Writing at the End of the World (2005) and of As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education (1998). He has delivered over one hundred invited talks across the country and abroad on a range of topics related to literacy, technology, and higher education. Professor Miller published exclusively on his blog, text2cloud.com, from 2008-2016, pursuing a project he called, "An Experiment in Learning in Public." During this time, he wrote extensively about "the end of privacy" and how education is being changed as a result of the proliferation of hand-held devices that enable instant publication and global distribution of anything that can be seen or heard. He focused on news coverage of Tyler Clementi's suicide, campus violence, and evolving forms of literacy in the digital age. He also composed a graphic narrative following the misadventures of Professor Pawn, erstwhile expert in Exlification.
Professor Miller regularly teaches "The Coming Apocalypse," a large lecture-format course which provides an introduction to narratives of the end of the world, and "Writing After the End of the World: An Introduction to 21st Century Literatures." "The Coming Apocalypse" was designated a School of Arts and Science's Signature Course in the Spring of 2016. "Writing After the End of the World" was designated an SAS Signature course in the fall of 2019 and was offered in this format for the first time in the spring of 2020, when teaching in person was suspended mid-semester due to the COVID-19 global pandemic.