Designing a Course

During the time I've spent this week imagining an interesting English 1000 class, I've had difficulty deciding how much and what type of material to assign. My personal inclination is to work with a couple of novels (in addition to the as yet undetermined rhetoric primer): I'm thinking Bellow's Seize the Day and Delillo's White Noise. Both of these novels, in addition to being stylistically excellent and reasonably short, are full of interesting themes that could be extracted and developed. I recognize that this grounds the class pretty solidly in the English Department, but it seems to me that the main themes are general enough to transcend departmental barriers and allow for some interesting, exploratory writing. I feel that many of the skills derived from critically interpreting a novel could be applied to any type of critical analysis -- even across disciplines.

My main concern so far is how to structure and balance the readings. I don't want the novels (or the novella in Bellow's case) to suck all the attention away from the rhetoric primer. However, the novels would have to be read simultaneously with the rhetoric primer, so I need to figure out some way to tie both readings together -- perhaps short prompts on the novel material utilizing the ideas in the rhetoric primer. In any case, I feel like this type of structure will allow me to be passionate about what I'm presenting (because I love both of these novels with a mad and literary love) while still incorporating the technical aspects of rhetoric that make this course what it is.

I'm hoping that the "literariness" of these works will not scare off the non-English majors, but both of these are so readable that it seems unlikely to me. I hope, in particular, that the famous "college arrival" scene at the beginning of White Noise will catch everyone's attention. We'll see how it turns out.