UHC/General Writing
English Composition 0200/12375
University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2001
Understanding Difficulties
The title of this course might surprise you. If you
are like most people, you consider "difficulty" in negative not positive terms, as a word that signifies an absence or lack, as a situation to be avoided. You go to great lengths to suppresse it and deny it. And it is likely that you acquired this attitude during your early years in school. On the other hand, you might not be like most people; you might find difficulties an intellectual challenge, and might learn a lot from engaging them.
Actually, I believe that at one time or another, we have all found ourselves stymied by difficulties, while at other times, we have found them engrossing and have been pleasantly surprised by how thoughtfully and productively we dealt with them. I would like for you to think about what might account for that difference; is it a matter of attitude? inclination? know how? cultural background?
In this particular course, the difficulties you will be asked to think about and through are those you will encounter as you read and write about three literary texts (Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak!, Lynn Emanuel's Then, Suddenly) and a "how to" book (Gertrude Stein's How to Write). My goal is to put you in a position to develop reading and writing strategies that will enable you to engage textual difficulties as linguistic clues that require a particular kind of work. You will learn to identify, describe, and process difficulties as interruptions in the flow of reading that, once they are scrutinized and assessed, can become steps toward interpretation. I will ask you to consider how different educational and disciplinary approaches construct difficulties, to reflect on the assumptions about teaching and learning that these constructions are based on, and to articulate the consequences of these constructions for the ways readers are expected to work through them. I will also ask you to consider whether the kind of learning that this kind of inquiry makes possible extends beyond literary studies.