For Students

Fall 2012 University Writing Seminars

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• See the Brandeis University Bulletin for undergraduate writing requirements
• Further information and frequently asked questions regarding the writing program, including composition, can be found here.

UWS 1a: Religions, Pluralism, and the American State
MWR 9-9:50
Lincoln Mullen

Two of the most pressing questions about American religion and its public role are intertwined: how should religions relate to one another, and how should religions be related to the state? Students in this class will take up these two questions through the historical analysis of texts about the interactions of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, and Native American religions with one another and with the federal and state governments. They will investigate how law has regulated the public sphere and the civil square in which religious interactions take place, but also how religious actors have driven those interactions. We will trace the history of American pluralism, from the fact of diversity in eighteenth century to the idea of pluralism in the twenty-first century. Students will write three essays: one expositing a document about a religious conflict, a second interacting with other historians' interpretations, and a third based on original research into religious
conflict.

UWS 2a 1 and 2a 2: Absurdity in Fiction and Film
MWR 9-9:50, MWR 12-12:50
Kyle Wiggins

"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face," writes Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. What does this lurking absurdity look like? How has it infiltrated our lives? This course will examine a rich tradition of 20th- and 21st- century philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers who make sense of the nonsensical. By the end of the semester, students will be able to define the absurd (though explanations for its existence will remain optional). Course readings and viewings include works by Jean-Paul Sartre, John Cheever, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, the Coen Brothers, and George Saunders. Confronting ludicrous and often frightening depictions of reality gives students the opportunity to hone analytic, writing, and research skills essential for success at the university. 

UWS 3a: "It's Not a Tune You Can Hum": Writing About Sondheim's Musicals
MWR 9-9:50
Georgia Luikens

Stephen Sondheim’s musicals represent the pinnacle of American musical theater as an art form in the second half of the twentieth century yet they almost belong in their own genre.  Sondheim’s musicals speak to a breadth of human experiences, many previously untouched by song and dance: a series of fractured fairytales; the fate of retired showgirls; a writing partnership gone sour; presidential assassins; a bachelor on his 35^th birthday and an artist at a crossroads in his professional and personal life.  Through a close study of production history, characterizations, lyrics, music, movement, plot and script, this class will investigate three examples of Sondheim’s work – Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George and Company – as well as excerpts from other productions. We will also listen to relevant soundtracks and view production videos as well as examine responses to the works studied.  Throughout this class, students will be required to produce thoughtful, well written responses in clear academic English.  Over the course of the semester, researching, writing, and editing skills essential to the Brandeis undergraduate curriculum will be developed.  Students do not need any prior drama or musical training; however, an interest in music and/or music theater is strongly encouraged.

UWS 5a: Writings About School
MWR 9-9:50
Michaela Henry

In this course, we will read and critically examine educational scenes in literature. Education is commonly viewed as the key to liberation from oppression. But can we accept that claim without question? In a post-colonial era, legacies of colonial subjection are passed along through models of education that remain rooted in cultural values of the former colonizers, and as such, these models serve not to liberate colonized peoples, but to maintain their oppression. This course will explore literary narratives of schooling from formerly colonized locations (such as Jamaica, India, and Ireland) in order to explore the ways education is not merely the transfer of information but is a process through which particular kinds of persons (subjects) are created.  As this course is a University Writing Seminar, we will explore these questions through foundational practices of critical reading and academic writing.

UWS 6a: Mapping and Writing Renaissance London
MWR 9-9:50
Nathaniel Hodes

Today we take for granted the concept of a city as a staging ground for street interactions with strangers, a laboratory of ideas and economics, and an organically evolving matrix of buildings, but this notion began in the Renaissance during a period of prolific literary activity. In this course we will read an assortment of 17th century plays and stories dealing with the seedier side of urban life—con-artists, kidnapping, plagues, and prostitution—against the developing map of London. The focus of our readings will be to ask, how were authors such as Shakespeare, Middleton, and Nashe evoking their newfound sense of place in fictions intended for popular consumption? As we explore the assigned texts, rigorous weekly writing assignments will connect our critical dialogue to practical matters of paper-writing, paying special attention to structural aspects of analytical essay formats and the logic of argumentation.

UWS 7a: Remembering the Resistance
MWR 9-9:50
Drew Flanagan

George Santayana wrote that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." However, the process of remembering the past is not as simple or innocent as it may appear. Interpretations of historical events often change along with changes in politics and social reality. During World War Two, France was occupied by Nazi Germany. While some people resisted the occupation and aided the Allied powers against Germany, others collaborated with the occupier. French society has since struggled to reconcile the competing legacies of resistance and collaboration. In examining the controversy over the nature and meaning of the Resistance, we will consider how collective memory can be shaped, manipulated and contested. What is at stake when we write, talk about, or film history?

We will read essays about the concept of collective memory and examine how various interpretations of French resistance have been reflected in film, fiction, on public monuments and in the speeches of politicians. In the process, we will focus on developing critical thinking skills and writing several types of college-level essay effectively and persuasively. Students will share and discuss their work with their classmates, culminating in an independent research paper on a topic relating to the issues raised in the course.  

UWS 10a: Speaking the Unspoken: Film Music of the Twentieth Century
MWR 12-12:50
Paula Musegades

What is your favorite film? Who is your favorite actor? Can you name your favorite film score? For the majority of moviegoers, these first two questions are easy to answer. “Movie music,” however, often goes unnoticed. Film scores convey the unspoken – they aid in the dramatic progression of a plot, depict hidden emotion, establish continuity, and sometimes simply (or not so simply) fill the silence. This course will survey the past century of Hollywood film music from silent cinema to the latest Blockbusters, while considering the following questions: What is the role of music in film? How has film music progressed throughout the past century? Who and what are the major landmarks of this important tradition? Throughout the semester, students will be required to develop thoughtful, well written responses in clear academic English. With a critical analysis of films, their scores, and related texts, this course will deepen students’ understanding of music’s role in cinema while simultaneously sharpening their analytic, writing and research skills required for success at Brandeis. Students do not need any prior musical training; however, an interest in music and early film is encouraged.

UWS 3b 1 and 3b 2: Migration Stories
MWR 12-12:50, MWR 1-1:50
Anna Jaysane-Darr

What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be “out of place”? American fiction and memoir has long been enamored of the immigrant story, a story that both illuminates and questions the myth of the American Dream. These stories also give us an opportunity to take a step back and examine how allegiance and belonging are constructed, and how they can be taken apart and revised. Is culture something solid and unchanging, or is it fluid and unstable? In this course we will look at the fiction and memoir of migration and displacement through the lens of contemporary anthropological theories of culture and the nation. We will read short stories by Maxine Hong Kingston and Edwidge Danticat, as well as the harrowing novel What is the What by Dave Eggers, along with key theoretical texts by Benedict Anderson, Liisa Malkki, and others. These explorations will give us ample material to use in our primary work, which is essay writing. Breaking down essay writing into three units - close reading, lens analysis, and research – this class helps students to develop critical thinking skills in addition to the basic elements of the essay: thesis, structure, analysis, style, and argumentation.

UWS 13a 1 and 13a 2: From Sleeping Beauties to Femme Fatales: Gender and Genre in American Film
MWR 12-12:50, MWR 1-1:50
Cory Nelson

This course will explore representations of women in American cinema, ranging from film noir to Hitchcock thrillers to Disney princess movies. As we survey the silver screen’s shifting representations of female power, sexuality, and the war between the sexes, we will consider how femininity has been constructed in American cinema. How has film endorsed or critiqued gender roles? In what ways have movies celebrated female independence, and in what ways have they forced strong women to accept submissive social roles? To what extent do the conventions of popular film genres, like the romantic comedy, limit the stories that can be told about women?  We will explore these questions and more as we practice the standards of academic writing, allowing students to develop the critical thinking and writing skills they need to succeed at Brandeis. Our film analysis will be guided by influential essays in gender and feminist film theory, including works by Judith Butler and Laura Mulvey. Possible film titles include Double Indemnity (1944), Vertigo (1958), Thelma and Louise (1991), (500) Days of Summer (2009), and Transamerica (2005).

UWS 5b: Mourning and Melancholia in the Works of J.D. Salinger
MWR 12-12:50
Orah Minder

J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye holds a fraught seat within American high school English curriculums. Not only is Catcher’s place in English curriculums still in question, but readers’ personal reactions to Holden, the protagonist, tend to be mixed. Some readers find him to be a whiny, unlikeable teenager; others read him as a young man in mourning over the loss of his younger brother. This course will seek to give students a broader sense of Salinger as concerned with the impacts of war on individuals and families and images of mourning within families. We will begin with a reading of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and A Perfect Day for Banana Fish. We will then read a number of Salinger’s short stories and Franny and Zooey. Finally, we will end with a reading of Catcher. Many students will have read Catcher in high school; for others, this will be a first reading of the novel. The goal of this course is to come to a fuller understanding of Salinger’s work through class discussion and individual essays. We will use Sigmund Freud’s theory of mourning as presented in his classic essay Mourning and Melancholia as a lens through which to view the Glass and Caulfield families.

There will be three required essays for this course: for the first essay, students will do a close reading of a short story, for the second essay, students will conduct a reading of a text through the lens provided by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia, for the third essay, students will write a research paper that analyzes a range of critical work written on one of the Salinger texts read in class. 

UWS 9b 1 and 2: Female Spaces in the Eighteenth-Century British Novella
MWR 12-12:50, MWR 1-1:50
Sarabeth Grant

The early eighteenth century in Britain was a time of great upheaval and change. In response to the turmoil generated by the civil war, experimental government, and religious strife of the previous century, the thinkers of this era grappled with notions of British selfhood and modernity. The anxieties of the age reveal themselves through the conflicting presentations of the female voice within the various writers and genres of the period. In this class, we will consider the representation and invocation of the female voice as explored in three novellas of the period: Eliza Haywood's Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), Jane Barker's Love Intrigues (1713), and Penelope Austin's The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family (1721). Through our reading of these texts we will explore the appropriation of the female voice by three different historical female figures; investigate the role of cross-dressing and masquerade in defining a female self; identify the moments when voice is denied to a female character; and delve into the link between romance and identity formation in fiction by women.  

This course will use the literature of the early eighteenth century as a means of developing the skills necessary to successful academic writing. By participating in a series of writing exercises, workshops, and conferences, as well as producing three major essays over the course of the semester, we will not only become conversant in the major themes central to British modernity but also in the methodology of college writing. 

Place still matters in American culture. Detroit is a national symbol for post-industrial blight and urban decay. The Alaskan bush inspires stories of independent spirit and individual ingenuity. New England stands in for the nation's colonial history and its high culture. We use stories of place to help define ourselves and the collectives to which we belong. This course examines a few narratives of place or region in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. We will ask what counts as a region, identify techniques of representation that define a place; examine the ways regions are tied to race, class, and gender; and speculate about regional narratives’ capacity to empower or silence marginal cultures. Along the way, we will examine diverse media, including film, fiction, and poetry.

This course is a University Writing Seminar. As such, its primary goal is to prepare students for college-level academic writing. Students will learn the standards of academic writing, practice those standards, and develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the process of composition and revision. Furthermore, students will learn critical skills for doing academic research. Research is not a common-sense procedure, and one of our aims will be to learn a few techniques for making the most of the research tools available at Brandeis. To accomplish these goals, students will need to read, understand, and construct critical arguments about the course material and engage in independent research outside of class.

Mental illness occurs in all groups, yet a very particular type of mental illness narrative became common – we could even say popular – in the twentieth century: stories of mental illness in young women. Almost always dramatic and frequently romanticized, the experience of mental illness as recounted in these books deserves to be examined. In this class, we will explore novels and memoirs that articulate and narrate experiences of mental illness while we interrogate gendered aspects of those experiences and narratives. Texts we may look at include “The Yellow Wallpaper,” The Bell Jar, and Prozac Nation. We will use critical theory to discuss the ways that mental illness functions as a metaphor. By the end of the course, students will have written three essays: a close reading essay; a lens essay (one that uses one text to analyze another); and a research essay. As a University Writing Seminar, this class’s primary goal is to prepare students for college-level academic writing. Students will develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the process of composition and revision as well as cultivate crucial research skills that will help them make the most of the information resources available at Brandeis.

U.S.-Israeli relations have evolved from an initial American policy of sympathy and support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in 1948 to an unusual partnership that encompasses not only diplomatic and strategic interests but also an array of economic, technological, religious, and cultural ties. The main goal of this seminar is to enhance your knowledge so that you can write theoretically-informed and historically-grounded critical evaluations and assessments of U.S.-Israel relations. You will first look closely at documents on U.S. policy toward Jerusalem, and next use the text of a prominent American Zionist thinker to analyze his vision for a Jewish State and current realities.  Your research assignment will be to choose a decision of one U.S. President, since 1948, and analyze the factors that caused him to make that decision towards Israel. Your instructor will guide you through each assignment, helping you to sharpen critical thinking and research skills, to improve clarity in your writing, and to help you organize your thoughts in order to create powerful arguments.  This course will ultimately assist you in your university goals as well as becoming an excellent writer for whichever field you pursue in your career.

UWS 18a: Environmentalism in America
MWR 1-1:50
Sarah Sutton

In 1970, more than 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day, placing environmental issues like pollution, pesticide use, and oil spills on a national stage. More than thirty years later, today’s environmentalists advocate for the awareness of issues as broad ranging as global warming, environmental inequalities, and sustainable agriculture, to name a few. Have there been multiple environmental movements in America? What has changed since the 1960s, and what remains the same? This course examines the historical roots of modern environmentalism, asking how activists’ philosophies, goals and tactics have developed over the past several decades. In our writing assignments, we will examine the events, texts and images that inspired the first Earth Day, and analyze critical texts to explore how ideas about the human place in the natural world have shaped the course of the modern environmental movement. Course readings include works by Rachel Carson, John McPhee, Bill McKibben and other environmental activists. While considering the past, present and future of environmentalism, students will learn to engage critically with texts, craft complex arguments, and compose engaging, articulate and incisive essays.

What does it mean to find something funny? When we laugh, must we laugh at something or someone? Why do I sometimes feel such keen discomfort when watching reruns of I Love Lucy, or The Office? Such notorious killjoys as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Immanuel Kant have given their attention to humor, and their evaluations haven't always been positive. Some claim that laughter must necessarily be an expression of contempt for another, that enjoyment of comedy encourages coarseness of feeling and deadens our sympathy for others. These thinkers say that comedy transforms our neighbors' pain and humiliation into entertainment. Certainly, racist or sexist humor seems to operate on this principle, and as the saying goes –– most often attributed to Mel Brooks –– "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall down an open manhole and die." However, there are also those who claim that laughter encourages human sympathy and community. Comedy, they claim, can both unite us in common understanding and help us get outside of our petty jealousies and prejudices by giving us a new perspective on the world. Humor, it turns out, may make us more able to care about each other and to understand our world. It may even be one of the more valuable forms of intellectual inquiry available to curious and sympathetic thinkers.

This course sets out to investigate the relationship between our capacity to enjoy comedy and our ability to appreciate the experiences of others, and seeks to provide interested students the opportunity to sharpen their academic skills and to deepen their analytic habits of mind. We will examine the real and supposed tensions between comedy and sympathy by carefully considering key ideas from a variety of disciplines and by closely examining examples of humor from literature, the visual arts, and performances in television or film. The question of what we find funny and how we ought to regard that feeling offers ample opportunity to rigorously investigate examples of humor, to engage critically the often contentious scholarship that considers that question, and to produce original research suggesting some kind of answer to it over the course of three substantive essay assignments. Students will leave the course with experience in applying essential strategies for framing and working through analytic questions in writing, amply prepared to begin with confidence their scholastic careers at Brandeis.

As Billy Joel put it, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” (and don’t let the door hit Michael Bay on the way out).  We are going back to the renaissance of postwar European art house cinema (1945-1975), when names like Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, and Varda revolutionized film, prompting critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.  In addition, using brief essays by the great doyens of European café culture as complementary pieces to a wide assortment of landmark releases on the big screen, you will learn what makes good writing on film, and how viewing and analyzing movies can make us better writers.  A final assignment will allow you to explicate on an “essential art house” classic of your own choosing, incorporating the skills reviewed over the course of the semester, prepping you for the rigors of university-level discourse and academic exposition.  You may just leave the seminar yearning for the days of a double-feature at the Bleecker Street Cinema!  

In the 19th century, the 'West' conquered almost the entire continent of Africa, and dramatically expanded its holdings in Asia, Australia, the Middle East and America. In all of these places, the imposition of western power was resisted by native communities, who did not want to see their lands taken, their cultures belittled, and their communities mistreated. This University Writing Seminar will examine the dynamics of power and resistance through a series of reading and writing assignments designed to enhance students' writing and critical thinking skills. 

In this course, we will examine a rich variety of texts to explore some of the most important, and most controversial, questions about colonial rule: How did Europeans extend, consolidate, and justify colonial power? How did indigenous peoples respond to the sudden imposition of European power, and what were some of the successful methods they used to resist the inequalities of colonial rule?  Most importantly, how should we define resistance: is it limited to violent warfare, or can it include acts of passive abstention or even cooperation?

In order to engage these broad questions about power and resistance, students will critically analyze the writings of imperialists like  Jules Ferry and Ernest Renan, and  they will examine George Orwell's gripping short story Shooting an Elephant through the theoretical lens of James Scott. At the end of the semester students will conduct historical research on a resistance movement of their choice; moreover, they will be given the opportunity  to develop their own, original comparative arguments about the role of revolution in fighting inequality. Our goal in this course will not be to simply master a set of writing skills, but also to open up our concept of writing to new possibilities.

When we think about artists such as Lady Gaga, Prince, Rihanna, or Marlyn Manson, we think of glamour, theatricality, sexual ambiguity, and lots of make-up. All of these artists and many others have their roots in glam rock. Emerging out of the European art rock and the English psychedelic scenes, glam rock pushed the limits of rock and roll both musically and socially. Glam rock challenged the conventional ideology of rock and roll and brought numerous issues to the limelight such as gender, homosexuality, and theatricality in rock music. This course will explore the history behind the conception of glam rock and its impact on pop music by looking at various artists from David Bowie to Queen. This course is designed to develop critical thinking skills through discussions, listenings, and writing. Through the course of the semester you will learn how to develop clear cohesive arguments and learn key writing skills.  

How many hours have you wasted watching video after video on YouTube? Do you find yourself wishing you could turn off your phone, your computer, your television, and focus for a while on...something? Sometimes there is too much context. 

This course will explore the options available in a world with too much information and the ways in which this chaos shapes our interpersonal relationships. Our guides in this effort will include Susan Bordo, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, and the Coen Brothers (among others). During the first part of the semester, we will focus on close reading, and you will write a paper analyzing an advertisement of your choice. The lens essay will be your next major assignment, for which you will use Wallace’s ideas about authority and democracy to interpret the John Sayles film Lone Star. For the third and final block of the term you will write a research paper that explores the ways in which narrative structure—that is, the accretion of information, artfully organized—both serves and undermines the goal of understanding a life. 

The essay assignments for this course are designed to teach you the skills necessary for success at Brandeis. You will learn to engage critically with texts, organize and develop your thoughts, and integrate outside sources to improve your arguments. Peer reviews, individual conferences, class discussion, and revisions will help you refine the style, grammatical form, organization, and overall quality of your analytical writing.

Death, disfigurement, and ghosts. Family conflict, powerful curses, political power struggles, murder, and war. All of these themes feature prominently in Shakespeare’s history play, Richard III. In this class, we will do a focused examination of Richard III in order to evaluate the way in which Shakespeare represents a historical narrative as both disturbingly violent yet infused with comedy. This course will explore what happens when history is re-presented in a new context, particularly as a form of entertainment.  We will question what it means to shift a historical narrative into a new setting, and what is gained or lost by such a re-presentation. We will use various readings from historical, literary, and film criticism in order to examine how history is represented within Shakespeare’s play and how history is retold in our own modern context in various film productions of Richard III.

Most importantly, in this course students will be introduced to the art of the college essay. A range of writing activities will teach students to read critically, craft complex arguments, evaluate and engage with scholarly sources, and articulate their ideas in graceful prose. We will engage in a series of targeted writing exercises, workshops, and conferences, and produce three major essays over the course of the semester in order to explore the representations of history in the text and productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

In her essay on feminist film theory “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that classic Hollywood’s male-bodied characters have long occupied the position of the “lookers,” while the women have been vested with what she names “to-be-looked-at-ness.”  This course aims to find out what happens when the male gaze is inverted––where women (and other-gendered persons) become lookers and male bodies become those which are objectified.  As a class, we will explore “the crisis of masculinity” so often discussed in recent studies on manhood through a close reading of traditional and non-traditional representations of men and the male body in films since classic Hollywood.  We will pay close attention to male relationships to feminism, the domestic, queerness and the struggle with rugged individualism in the post-modern age as we analyze such films as Hitchcock’s Rear Window, The Matrix, Basic Instinct and Fight Club.  Our work with gender and film will be focused on the process of composing concise and compelling essays at the college level as well as fostering critical thinking and effective argumentation.

Did the Philistines kill King Saul, or did David have him assassinated? Did an angel save Jerusalem from the Assyrian siege, or did King Hezekiah pay-off the Assyrians using treasure from the Temple? Who really killed Goliath – David or a nobody named Elhanan? In this course, we will discover firsthand that history does not write itself. People write history. Like other types of writing, history writing is a creative endeavor.  But unlike modern historians, the biblical authors had little interest in the past for its own sake. An ancient author may have written about the past for a plethora of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with reporting what really happened. By using modern critical approaches to the Bible, we will explore the beliefs, biases, and aims that shaped the biblical authors’ depictions of the past. Reading a variety of “historical” texts from Deuteronomy, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, as well as from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian sources, you will develop an understanding of why biblical authors wrote about the past. More importantly, you will learn to craft a college essay: to engage critically with texts, organize and develop your thoughts, interact with outside sources to enhance your arguments, and articulate your ideas in beautifully-crafted sentences. 

Henry David Thoreau declared “I stand in awe of my body,” expressing a sense of the body as a source of delight, wonder, and even artistic inspiration. Conversely, the body can also be a source of embarrassment, dismay, and disgust. Both the pleasure and the disgust the body can evoke are brought together in the concept of the “grotesque body,” which will be the theme of this writing seminar. Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness are “fundamental attributes of the grotesque style,” and that, as a mode of representation, the grotesque comments on and critiques social realities. In this class we will read, discuss, and write about the grotesque body as it is represented across a variety of cultural texts, including poetry, short stories, and television, in order to ask what critical functions those representations serve. What can the spectacle of a grotesque body convey that an ordinary one cannot? For what reasons and on what occasions is the grotesque appropriate? Is the grotesque ever “appropriate”? We will consider the function of the grotesque body with respect to issues of gender, race, and class, drawing examples from the past, as well as from our own historical moment, as we work together to write three major essays, each developing skills that will be crucial throughout your college careers.

UWS 1b: From Page to Screen: Jane Austen in Literature and Film
MW 5-6:20
Katie Nadeau

Jane Austen has come to be a central figure in our society’s conception of romantic love, yet in many ways her place in the cultural imagination obscures her more complicated exploration of human relationships. In this course, we will interrogate our contemporary romantic version of Austen by analyzing a number of her texts through the lens of their representations in film. We will explore not only what happens when a novel is adapted as a film, but, more specifically, what happens to Austen in film. What are the differences between these two media? Do the adaptations faithfully represent or transform Austen’s texts? Do they provide a critical reading of her novels, or a misreading? What textual concerns do they emphasize and which minimize, if not erase altogether? Through this approach, we will come to see Austen within a contextual framework far different, though no less enjoyable, than that in which many of us first knew her. But more than just to get you thinking critically about Austen, this course is designed to help you gain the skills necessary to write a successful college level essay. Thus, we will focus our attention on three major writing assignments, the close reading essay, the lens essay, and the research essay, in each of which we will approach Austen as a novelist and in film from a distinct critical angle.