First-Year Composition Mission Statement: First-year composition courses at CCNY teach writing as a recursive and frequently collaborative process of invention, drafting, and revising. Writing is both personal and social, and students should learn how to write for different purposes and audiences. Since writing is a process of making meaning and communicating, FYC teachers respond mainly to the content of students’ writing as well as to recurring surface errors. Students should expect frequent written and oral responses on the content of their writing from their teachers and peers. Classes rely heavily on a workshop format. Instruction emphasizes the connection between writing, reading, and critical thinking; students should give thoughtful, reasoned responses to the readings. Both reading and writing are the subjects of class discussions and workshops, and students are expected to be active participants in the classroom community. Learning from each other will be a large part of the classroom experience.

Description: This course aims to introduce students to basic concepts in psychoanalysis and to explore their power and limits as tools of literary and cultural analysis. We will begin by studying Sigmund Freud’s Five Introductory Lectures. In this short book, Freud tells the story of how he came to develop psychoanalysis as a theory and a method of treatment for mental illness, and he introduces and explains such concepts as the unconscious, repression, the dreamwork, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, transference and sublimation. At the same time, we will be looking at a variety of stories, poems, novels and films to see how they are illuminated by Freud’s ideas and illuminate those ideas in their turn. Throughout the semester, students will develop their own skills as critical readers and writers through a wide variety of reading and writing activities.

Composition Section Learning Outcomes

Students successfully completing a FIQWS composition course will demonstrate an ability to:

• Explore and analyze in their own and others’ writing a variety of genres and rhetorical situations

• Develop strategies for reading, drafting, revising, and editing

• Practice systematic application of citation conventions

• Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations

• Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes

• Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences

• Locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias

• Compose texts that integrate the student’s stance and language with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation

Required Text

This is a Zero Textbook Cost course. There are links to reading assignments that live online, and I will (have uploaded) upload assigned articles in portable document format (.pdf).