Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

“dialectic.” I will begin with the “skeleton,” my themes and
assignments, and then move on to the “meat,” my purposes and
rationale.
Although not a requirement by any means for any writing
course at the University of Delaware, my classes had a “course
theme” that molded every aspect of the course, from the articles
that my students were to be read to the essays that my students
were to write. It was the heartbeat or the soul of the whole of
the conversation, whether within or without the classroom. As
stated in the course syllabi:
Throughout this course, we will be exploring the
issues of Identity, Individuality, and Perspective.
How do you define your identity – your “self”: who
are you, who do you want to be, and why? What makes
someone an “individual” – and are you one? What
makes your thoughts and perceptions “yours”? What
has molded how you perceive yourself, your world, and
your place in it – past, present, and future? What
is the relationship between all of this and your
perspective of “reality”? And, perhaps most
important of all, what becomes of your “reality” if
those perspectives change? You will be confronted
with essays as well as films that will (hopefully)
provoke these questions in your thinking and your
writing, and push you to see and re-see who “you” are
and to broaden your perspective not only of your
“self” but your reality.
With this as the defining principle of the course, the roughly
fourteen-week classes were separated out into four units, each
of them exploring that question of “Identity, Individuality, and
Perspective” from a different angle, a different aspect of
“self,” and each of them culminating in an essay that
articulates that exploration. The first of these dealt with the
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