Will Count Towards SAS - English Major and Minor
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.
In this course, we will focus our attention on Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Why only 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 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? Native Son was published 35 years before the Civil Rights Act was passed; 36 years before informing an arrested person of his Miranda rights became law; 70 years before Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow, and 73 years before the Black Lives Matter movement was founded. Reading Richard Wright will allow us to reflect on racism, policing, incarceration, and the legal system in 20th century and 21st century America.
What else will we read? We will build the rest of the reading list together as we move through Wright’s novel, following his lead.
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 Wright’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 Wright’s work.
About Professor Miller
Richard Miller is the co-author, with Ann Jurecic, of Habits of the Creative Mind (2019, 2nd edition). 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.
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.
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.
Miller started his career as a writing teacher, spent time as an administrator, returned to the classroom as a Gen Ed teacher specializing in large lecture courses, and now focuses on teaching creative thinking and imaginative reading. In recognition of his success in these areas over the 29 years he has been teaching at Rutgers, he received the Chancellor-Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2022, which honors a member of the New Brunswick faculty "whose teaching contributions resulted in an extraordinary impact on the institution, students’ experiences, and public engagement."