Intro

Welcome to My Site

Writing 139W fulfills the upper-division writing breadth requirement for students in any major. Completing all ESL and lower-division writing requirements is prerequisite. The registrar’s official title for this course is “Advanced Expository Writing,” but reading and class participation will also factor heavily because good writing doesn’t occur in a vacuum. The course carries four academic units and may be taken pass / no pass unless your department requires that you take it for a letter grade.

Quarter = Spring 2008
Course Name = Writing 139W, Seminar A
Course Code = 25841

This course deals with a familiar and enjoyable topic but one that turns out to be tremendously difficult to grapple with theoretically. Indeed “what’s so funny?” is a question that has engaged some of the greatest minds in disciplines ranging from sociology to law to mathematics. (And those are just the ones we won’t be studying.)

We’ll start by examining the work of a philosopher and a neurobiologist, who use very different methods to answer the question in its broadest sense. Then we’ll consider a third approach, taken by a literary critic who is interested more specifically in what’s funny in contemporary U.S. culture and politics. We’ll discuss their differing conclusions, applying them to our personal experiences and our favorite works of humor and arguing about whether we agree with them. But we’ll also pay close attention to the methods of analysis these thinkers use and the methods of writing they use to present this analysis and convince us that it’s credible.

The goal of the course is for you to create a piece of writing that reflects your own analysis of the phenomenon of humor, which you’ll create by synthesizing (or contrasting) several of the methodologies you’ve encountered in the reading assignments and class activities.

Instructor = Aaron Winter
Room = Humanities Hall 251 Time = Mon./Wed. 3:00-4:20

that