CCWP12: Writing Home

Topical Overview

From the time of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an eighteenth-century woman writing about her visits to Turkey, to contemporary homepages on the web, the written word has played a continuing and powerful role in constituting reality. In this module we will consider one such kind of writing--"writing home"--but we will be exploring and enjoying just how complex this notion can be. We will read and discuss the correspondence of some celebrated travellers as they address readers back home, but we will also appreciate the subtler question of how writers can use language to create a "home" for themselves. In considering these issues, as well as the connections between the self and home, we will study various readings that dramatize what happens when people leave home for far away or imaginary places. Readings will include canonical works such as Shakespeare's The Tempest, and excerpts from Daniel Defoe's novel, Robinson Crusoe. To help us investigate issues like identity formation and border crossing, we will view Orson Welles' film, Touch of Evil, and read critical works like those of the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua. Finally, we will look at contemporary notions of identity and home as told by such writes as Pico Iyer in The Global Soul, or as seen in Sherry Turkle's studies of the ways people choose to narrate their own identities on the Internet.

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Rhetorical Overview

The readings and writing assignments in this course are designed to help you hone your skills as a writer. To this end, you are expected to read assignments with care, and are encouraged to interact with the texts, both by identifying structural elements of the piece, such as the author's thesis, evidence, assumptions, etc. and by identifying points of interest for yourself. Getting into the practice of being an active reader, who continually responds to the texts, will in turn help you become a better writer. You will be given many opportunities to try out your ideas and develop them further through class discussion, informal writing done in class or as homework, and through peer reviews of your work.

This course also lays the groundwork for the type of writing you will be expected to do throughout your university career, by focusing on identifying a motive for writing, the development of an argument or interpretation, and use of appropriate and convincing evidence. In addition to stylistic matters such as proper form for citation and formatting, we will cover topics such as conducting library research, using primary and secondary sources in an essay, and developing a writing "voice" within the academic community and beyond.

I hope that you will come to view our class as a space in which to voice ideas and try out different opinions and approaches in response to the readings and discussion. Keep in mind that you may encounter opinions or values that are different from your own; being a responsible class member means engaging with these ideas in an appropriate manner. You do not have to agree with everyone--discussions will be rather dull if there is no difference in responses--the key is learning how to articulate and support your reasons for adhering to a given interpretation.

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Unit One: Setting Boundaries

"Home" functions as a point of departure in our first unit. Here we primarily consider texts which describe or occur in areas defined as "foreign" or "exotic"--not home to the narrators. In the course of these readings, however, you will be asked to interrogate how home/not-home is defined, and on whose terms such divisions are made. We will also look at ways displaced narrators make these new places "home" for themselves, and what role the Other plays in such settlement. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, for example, argue that the dominant entity needs the "low Other" to define him/herself against that Other. Our readings will engage this theory, and invite you to formulate your own responses to the ways our texts attempt to define both "home" and "self" as discursive practices. Some questions/issues for this unit: On whose terms is "discovery" made? How and why is the Other constructed? What role does gender play in "authorizing" identity? Readings will come from the following:

• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. New York: Penguin, 1994, 191-225

• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. R. Halsband. London: Clarendon, 1965. "Turkish Women," "Female Society in Turkey."

• William Shakespeare, The Tempest (any edition)

• Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. 5-7

Rhetorical Objectives

• Identifying an author's main point and subpoints
• Identifying the ways cultural, social and historical situations influence writing
• Drawing inferences
• Performing a close reading
• Developing a thesis in your own writing
• Generating ideas/motives for an essay
• Organizing ideas into an essay
• Using concrete details from the text to support your interpretation

Additional Resources

Following are some resources you may want to peruse. They are related to issues and questions that have arised during class discussion.

• To see an example from the Victoria and Albert Museum of some outfits worn during Lady Mary's time, click here
• William Dampier, New Voyage Around the World This is the source of much material found in Robinson Crusoe.
• Beckford, William, Vathek: An Oriental Romance. Fantastic, fictional tale of eroticism and intrigue.

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Unit Two: Border Crossings

Whereas the first unit focused on writings which sought to create and maintain certain divisions or borders -whether based on national identity, race or language--readings in unit explore what happens when these supposedly concrete borders become destabilized. Some of the authors found in Unit 2 comfortably inhabit multiple homes, whether in terms of language, ethnicity, or nationalism, while others struggle with such multiplicity. Additionally, we will consider how factors such as gender or class further complicate self-definition. In some cases, identity seems to straddle more than one "border," moving between or among multiple homes. In other instances the border itself takes on a kind of identity. We will read selections from the following works and view two films:

• Gloria Anzaldua, "La conciencia de la mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness" in Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987, 77-98.

• Jennifer Devere Brody, "Hyphen-Nations" in Cruising the Performative: Interventions in the Deployment of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Sexuality, ed. Sue-Ellen Case, Phillip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, 149-162.

• Sue-Ellen, Case The Domain-matrix. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. 221-225

• Chang Rae Lee, Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead, 1999, 1-12, 60-81

• Sayles, John, "Lone Star"

• Orson Welles, "Touch of Evil"

Note: Touch of Evil will be available for viewing through IVLE. Log onto the IVLE course website and click on "videos" on the menu on the left.  You will need to have Windows Media Player installed on your PC to view these videos. Please refer to the following page for instructions on how to download and install Media Player. Media Player Instructions Page.  

You must view the film before coming to class. The video will be available through IVLE for about two weeks, should you want to review it for use in writing your next paper.

Rhetorical Objectives

• Identifying and questioning assumptions
• Comparing/analyzing multiple texts
• Writing an effective summary
• Supporting abstract ideas with specific evidence
• Using one text to comment on another

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Unit Three: No Place Like Home?

What is home in a globalized society? While Dorothy could be transported from Oz to home with three clicks of her heels, today a click of the mouse takes us almost anywhere in the virtual world. In this final unit we will revisit themes from previous units, as well as take on new material. From home countries to homepages, people's increasing mobility presents new challenges in defining oneself and/or community. Although "home" may never have seemed so transient, some readings in this unit suggest that such mobility drives people to work even harder to create a "home" for themselves, while other works embrace a more ambiguous existence. We will read selections from the following:

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1994, pp5-7, 163-185.

• Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. New York: Knopf, 2000. pp3-5,16-25, 32-38, 41-51, 235-265, 295-298

• Rebecca Mead, "You've Got Blog." The New Yorker 20 November, 2000.

• Sherry Turkle, "Who Am We?" in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Rhetorical Objectives

• Organizing results of library research and incorporating this work into your essay
• Evaluating sources
• Using MLA style for formatting the research paper and bibliography
• How to introduce and contextualize quoted material
• Acknowledging sources
• Developing a theory of your own and situating it in relation to the work of others