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AMS 350: Writing About American Society
In this seminar, we believe that writing is thinking. Our focus is outwards, towards issues that inform --
and bedevil -- American society. What we hope to bring to these issues is our considered thought, laced with
humor, passion, an awareness both of our ignorance and of our knowledge, as well as a feisty determination to
engage readers with our prose.
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How do we do this? Well, to think about our readers, we begin by reading Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Patron and the Crocus.” I know what you’re thinking: Virginia Woolf? In an American Studies seminar? Happily, the manuscript of her essay is in the Mortimer Rare Book Room here at Smith. This allows us not merely to read her essay, but to be humbled by the painstaking revisions Woolf made as she thought -- and wrote -- through questions of how to capture her audience. This year, partly by design, partly by chance, we look at a number of issues that confront us as members of this formal community of learners. We’ll examine the case of Newton Arvin, the Melville scholar who taught at Smith until he was upended by the Massachusetts blue laws on pornography. We’ll also examine the case of the Pulitzer prize-winning Mount Holyoke Professor Joseph Ellis, the brilliant historian who fabricated his own brilliant history in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and a critical high school football game. Suzanne Wilson, feature writer at our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, will join us to look at the press coverage on the Ellis case. We’ll also read selections from the Smith College years of Sylvia Plath, and benefit from the expertise of Karen Kukil, the Associate Curator at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, who edited Plath’s journals. And we’ll read Smith graduate Margaret Edson’s play “Wit,” which looks at language and scholarship, life and death. If you’d like to know how we will think and write about place, the distinction between the personal essay and the autobiographical essay, and why we’re visiting Historic Northampton to think about what we wear on our feet and why, have a look at the syllabus for AMS350A. Texts (available at Broadside Books)
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