Welcome to English 152

Hello! I'm Dave Wanczyk. Nice to meet you in words.

Course Description:

This class will be about the family, how we write our families, and how established writers have come to understand themselves as writers by better understanding where they came from. Texts will include Mary Carr's The Liars' Club, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, and Bret Lott's Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: the Men in My Family, as well as Zakes Mda's Cion.

We will have twice-weekly responses to the reading, and an extended piece of personal writing (memoir), all of which we will workshop together in class.

In order to study the rhetoric of family writing, we will use Thomas Larson's The Memoir and the Memoirist, finding ways to make public arguments about our private lives. That work inspires us to develop our ethos through serious reflection of the personal, and encourages sentiment rather than sentimentality in family writing. We will discuss the difference!

The success of our rhetorical appeals relies first on our self-knowledge, and that knowledge is inextricably linked to our families, our memories. I foresee members of this class learning how to analyze (and produce) family writing of a high order while analyzing how we talk about the self in a unifying, universal way that makes us, in Philip Lopate's words, all "feel less freakish and alone."