In this course, we will examine the fundamental issues of our lives in order to develop key analytic and argumentative skills. We will discuss what is really worth striving for and what makes a good or meaningful life. Topics will include questions of priorities, definitions of good and evil, the role of self-realization, cultural and moral relativity, the nature of love, and the challenges of suffering and death. We will discuss social and political issues, such as imperialism, minority rights, feminism, torture, food production, and the effect of human “progress” on the environment. Texts will include short works and excerpts by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Montaigne, Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Conrad, Woolf, Orwell, Gandhi, Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, J. Hillis Miller, Gloria Naylor, Michael Pollan, Al Gore, and others, as well as Western and Eastern (Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist) religious texts and topical contemporary articles. The course will also draw on material set forth in such films as Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth and Kenner and Schlosser’s Food Inc.
We will focus on tackling the stages of the writer’s process, entering a conversation, anticipating counter-arguments, and engaging the reader. We will also work on developing close reading skills, logical strategies, rhetorical techniques, grammatical clarity, and the effective deployment of summary, quotation, citation and tone.