ENGLIT 1414 - SECRET PITTSBURGH

Minimum Credits: 4
Maximum Credits: 4
Long Description When this course was first developed, the Secret [city] series, travel books that pride themselves on being "Local guides by Local People," served as the textual starting point for a course that bridges many disciplines, including literature, urban studies, art and architecture, history, writing, to name only a few. This is why the course retains the name "Secret Pittsburgh" though not all sites we visit are unknown or hidden from sight. However, one wager of this course is that our perspective as people and as writers has the potential to uncover hidden histories and unique narratives that aren't blatant. One of the biggest challenges and goals of this course is to learn that places are made from stories as much as they are made from geography, the built environment, ecology, objects, and people. In fact, each of the categories I listed in the previous sentence is composed of stories in its own right. As we explore spaces and places in Pittsburgh this semester, we'll think critically and creatively about how stories of these sites are and have been told and why those narratives matter for an understanding of place. In composing our own narratives about the sites we visit, we'll take seriously these questions of "how" and "why" in our own writing, creating yet another narrative layer in the stories of Pittsburgh places. We'll be learning how to "read" places we visit and how to use historical and fictional literature, as well as theories of space, archives, and representation to frame your own personal on-site experiences. We'll also be seeing how the skills of a literature classroom can translate into the "real" world as we consider the ways cultural centers, parks, museums, oral historians, and archivists work and influence meaning. Pittsburgh is a unique city, and it is a city uniquely conducive to storytelling. I particularly hope that this course will offer you ways of understanding how the classroom-and the literature classroom especially-translates into the cityscape in which you live. Throughout the semester, we'll ask ourselves how museum spaces (re)create history, objects, and people in specific places and times. We'll think about spaces that point to histories and people long gone. How are we to understand sites that are largely preserved in archives, that don't exist, strictly speaking, in the "real" world anymore? We'll come to realize that spaces aren't always places and that our unique position and perspective does influence the world around us. We'll think about the ways that the built environment produces feelings and aspirations and controls movement and time. We'll ponder the ways that story is often all that's left to us when places are erased through time, environmental pressures, political agendas, cruelty, misunderstanding, and violence. We'll use photography and language to represent spaces and places and to offer another narrative of place. The final project will involve assembling a guidebook. You will be responsible for creating a guidebook entry about one of the sites we visit this term and you will have the opportunity to publish your entry online for public consumption as part of an ongoing project begun by previous classes of this course. The project will be added to by each new cohort of students, so your work will live on in a continually expanding and revised guidebook. The writing done in this class is your Intellectual Property (actually and legally) and your Intellectual Property is yours. As such, you will need to grant the University permission to use it as part of an "Institutional Work." You will be asked to review and sign the University's copyright agreement for participants in the course, allowing submission of your work for public placement on the Secret Pittsburgh website.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Seminar
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis

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