About ENG L111

What gives literature its “documentary” qualities and what role can documentaries play in redirecting our beliefs? How do they challenge or reinforce our expectations of what’s culturally right, socially ill, or morally good? Are ironic, impassioned, allegorical, or satirical depictions of real events any less genuine, authentic, or real? This semester, we will consider these questions by reading, analyzing, and theorizing about the possibilities of the documentary as a rhetorical and literary form. More specifically, we will consider how to read and study documentary as situations to be negotiated, which means we will consider how to study several dimensions of a text, including intention, formation, interpretation, and delivery.

To that end, our course is divided into three units that represent different purposes and contexts for documentary literature, including enculturation, uplift, and change. Within each unit, we’ll focus on key concepts to help us grapple with the analytic nature of what we read. We will also think more about how documentary literature may stem from a longer tradition of using texts to make a public record and deliver urgent messages for urgent times. And finally, we will consider how we should read them and what kinds of audiences we are called to be. 

Our covering of genres is eclectic and vast—including long fiction, polemical essay, contemporary philosophy, comic memoir, and film—and some of them have highly persuasive aims. Our collective challenge is to understand the complexities (perhaps even the limitations) of writing, reading, and enacting various renditions of “living to tell.” As part of that process, this course will help you to:

• understand how literature has been and can be seen as a powerful form of acting on the world; 
• view documentary literature more critically and respond to it more critically; 
• unpack complex beliefs and assumptions about life, culture, and text; 
• develop a repertoire of critical concepts by which you interpret and evaluate the persuasive strategies of various texts, and with which you can talk engagingly about texts; 
• formulate and develop a response to a critical question about something you read and with which you help another reader to understand it better.

Looking forward!

-Prof. Graban