| Instructor: Dr. Katalin Orban |
Objectives
The aim of this course is to help you become a confident,
engaging writer, who can
- ask an interesting question (not the same as answering
a question),
- turn a set of ideas into a coherent, developing argument,
and
- persuade an intelligent, skeptical audience.
To make your text effective for the genre of the academic
argument, you will need to develop your ideas on the basis
of appropriate textual and factual evidence
and, instead of reducing complexity into a strong and simple
argument, you will need to do justice to the complexity
of a problem.
In class discussions, peer review, and instructor-student
conferences, you will have many opportunities to respond to
others' ideas and try out your own. Peer review will be a
very important part of the course, as reviewing and editing
other people's writing is a great way to learn the art of
revising and editing your
own--something you will keep doing throughout your academic
career and beyond.
The readings and assignments will always challenge you to
go beyond the obvious, to learn to doubt easy judgments, and
to reflect on your own assumptions. Our ideal will be a clear,
enjoyable style, which is sophisticated without
relying on fancy vocabulary or elevated language to substitute
for clear thinking.
Topical introduction
This module will ask students to think about the ethical
implications of storytelling and representation. For example,
what role does the capacity or inability to articulate one's
view of oneself and the world play in ethics? What ethical
problems and choices does interpretation involve?
- In Unit 1, we will consider various aspects
of literary activity critics have found important for ethics,
such as the estrangement of
the familiar, the possibility of losing oneself
in reading, turning to an "other," or the imaginative
exploration of moral dilemmas.
- In Unit 2, we will think about the claims
of the small, the concrete, and the marginal against some
general (according to some, universal) framework for ethics.
We will read three interesting stories that revolve around
questions of law and span 400 years--a philosophical essay
by Montaigne, a short story by Kafka, and a recent film
by Canadian director Atom Egoyan.
- Finally, in Unit 3, we will consider
whether authors, texts, and readers can "cross the
line" into misreading, abuse, or betrayal, and we will
extend this question to the more general question of research
ethics in various disciplines.
You Will Need To
Purchase Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference or a similar
reference book. (Available at NUS Co-op).
Have a current email account and know how to access the Web.
Learn how to use IVLE for uploading your work and participating in the discussion forum of this course.
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