ClassInfo

This course explores how literary language builds the collective knowledge, shared reality, and civic relationships that make up public life. Literature's power in the public sphere goes far beyond the quiet, solitary experience of reading. We will investigate how telling stories, documenting events, imagining possibilities, communicating ideals, representing conflict, and even creating fictional characters contribute to public life. Through a wide variety of texts, we will reflect on the nature of public life and on how reading and writing build civic relationships and democratic potential. This course will also offer you two tracks for actively engaging in public life. A service­-learning option will give you the experience of building literacy, developing skills in communication and public media, and strengthening roles in work and family. This recommended learning framework can engage your role as a citizen, broaden the impact of your education, and help you explore potential professional interests. Alternatively, an individually designed public project will prompt you to consider the links between literary/media culture, personal action, and public life, and to make your own intervention in these fields. To succeed in all areas of this class you must display active engagement, independent thinking and motivation, and organization.

GENERAL DESCRIPTION:

This course explores how literary language builds the collective knowledge, shared reality, and civic relationships that make up public life. Literature's power in the public sphere goes far beyond the quiet, solitary experience of reading. We will investigate how telling stories, documenting events, imagining possibilities, communicating ideals, representing conflict, and even creating fictional characters contribute to public life. Through a wide variety of texts, we will reflect on the nature of public life and on how reading and writing build civic relationships and democratic potential. This course will also offer you two tracks for actively engaging in public life. A service­-learning option will give you the experience of building literacy, developing skills in communication and public media, and strengthening roles in work and family. This recommended learning framework can engage your role as a citizen, broaden the impact of your education, and help you explore potential professional interests. Alternatively, an individually designed public project will prompt you to consider the links between literary/media culture, personal action, and public life, and to make your own intervention in these fields. To succeed in all areas of this class you must display active engagement, independent thinking and motivation, and organization.

SECTION SPECIFIC DESCRIPTION:

In this course we will navigate and investigate the types of narrative, such as biography and autobiography, that rely on a pact with the reader in regard to what Sidonie Smith calls the
"vital statistics" of the subject narrated, a pact that depends on those "rules of evidence that link the world of the narrative with a historical world outside the narrative." But we will do so through texts that require the reader to also be a viewer - namely, COMICS. By focusing on a medium that is both a unique art form and a hybrid of word and image we will use our readings, discussion, writing, and service learning project to explore the ways we tell stories about ourselves and about others within the context of a readerly pact that assumes some historical and "real world"
veracity. We will also explore the way that the telling and/or visualization of those stories transform their subjects.

We have the unique opportunity to take advantage of placements working at and with partner organizations around the cities through the community service learning program at the University. There is no better way to learn civic engagement, to connect to the stories of others, and to discover your own story than by doing service in the community to which you belong. It can be easy at a school so large as the University of Minnesota to imagine that you belong to the University community, over and above the city in which the University is located. This is a story about your life that is encouraged, to a certain extent, by the school itself. But it's not the only story that you might be able to tell about the communities you engage with on a daily basis.

The course takes a tri-fold approach of focusing on (1) comics as our medium, (2) life writing - biography and autobiography - as our genre, and (3) public life and community engagement as our impetus.

This course explores how literary language builds the collective knowledge, shared reality, and civic relationships that make up public life. Literature's power in the public sphere goes far beyond the quiet, solitary experience of reading. We will investigate how telling stories, documenting events, imagining possibilities, communicating ideals, representing conflict, and even creating fictional characters contribute to public life. Through a wide variety of texts, we will reflect on the nature of public life and on how reading and writing build civic relationships and democratic potential. This course will also offer you two tracks for actively engaging in public life. A service­-learning option will give you the experience of building literacy, developing skills in communication and public media, and strengthening roles in work and family. This recommended learning framework can engage your role as a citizen, broaden the impact of your education, and help you explore potential professional interests. Alternatively, an individually designed public project will prompt you to consider the links between literary/media culture, personal action, and public life, and to make your own intervention in these fields. To succeed in all areas of this class you must display active engagement, independent thinking and motivation, and organization.

This course explores how literary language builds the collective knowledge, shared reality, and civic relationships that make up public life. Literature's power in the public sphere goes far beyond the quiet, solitary experience of reading. We will investigate how telling stories, documenting events, imagining possibilities, communicating ideals, representing conflict, and even creating fictional characters contribute to public life. Through a wide variety of texts, we will reflect on the nature of public life and on how reading and writing build civic relationships and democratic potential. This course will also offer you two tracks for actively engaging in public life. A service­-learning option will give you the experience of building literacy, developing skills in communication and public media, and strengthening roles in work and family. This recommended learning framework can engage your role as a citizen, broaden the impact of your education, and help you explore potential professional interests. Alternatively, an individually designed public project will prompt you to consider the links between literary/media culture, personal action, and public life, and to make your own intervention in these fields. To succeed in all areas of this class you must display active engagement, independent thinking and motivation, and organization.