William
Torgerson
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
MFA in Creative Writing, Georgia College and State University
torgersw@stjohns.edu
The Big Idea for the Class:
What do you want to investigate?
That's what I ask
my students as I meet them each semester. Of course many
don't have any idea, and so we work together and make lists, write
in writer's notebooks, and visit the library and a local
bookstore. These are all activities designed to stimulate
intellectually-ambitious discussion. I call the early part of
our class the "intellectual browsing" stage.
Once everyone identifies a topic
within which to conduct a documentary-style investigation, we begin
our work, which includes the following:
- blogging
- accessing and reading scholarly articles via the St. John's
University library databases
- writing a hybrid research paper that combines scholarly
research and a pesonal story
- completing a short documentary film
- reflecting on what all those experiences might mean by writing
an introduction to the final portfolio, a text that leads of a
collection of the students' work for the semester
I hope the composition course I teach
explodes students' existing definitions for what a text can
be. I want to help the students see that they are bombarded
with texts everyday in the form of billboards, logos on clothing,
movies, pop ups on their phones and laptops. I want the
students to realize that these texts seek to impose power over
them. For example, a common agenda of the texts my students
encounter is to get them to spend their money buying stuff. Rather
than just blindly respond to environmental stimuli, I want my
students to think about the world they encounter and take
deliberate--thougtful--action.
When the students and I finish working
together, I want them to read "texts" in a different way.
It's my goal that they can read the texts they encounter, have an
idea how they were created and for what purpose, and I intend for
students to be better equipped to write these texts for
themselves. This means that they will have access to
power--being savvy readers and writers of texts--that they did not
have before the class began. Additionally, they will have the
knowledge they gained by conducting an investigation of their
choice, whether that investigation is to tell the story of their
immigration to the United States or decide how it is that they will
make use of their education following graduation.
Like most of my students, I read and write via Facebook,
Twitter, email, blogs, YouTube,
and on my phone just about everyday. I probably think of
myself primarily as a writer of novels, and my first novel was
published in February of 2011 by an indie press called Cherokee
McGhee. The book is called Love on the Big Screen and it tells
the story of a college freshman whose understanding of love has
been shaped by late-eighties romantic comedies. My
protagonist "Zuke" (his name intentionally rhymes with the disciple
Luke's name) thinks his love should be like movies such as
Sixteen Candles and Say Anything. In other
words, because of the movies that Zuke loved as a child, he has
overly-romantized notions of how his romantic life should
work. Zuke's movie obsession is certainly one example of how
texts, in this case films, can control or influence the thinking
and beliefs of the consumer.
I write all sorts of texts: my adpation of Love on the Big
Screen won the Grand
Prize of the 2010 Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival
Screenplay Compeition. I write essays, poems, short
stories, and articles on writing and teaching, and my work has
appeared in numerous scholarly and literary journals. I
believe if you can read like a writer, then you can write any
text.