Abstract

Many U.S. universities require that first-year students take a foundation course in the humanities. This course, often taught by faculty from a variety of disciplines, is designed to introduce students to analytical reading, thinking, and writing. Since the sequence of texts that constitutes the course may be chosen more for each text’s intrinsic merit than for the texts’ relations to each other, creating a coherent design for such courses can be a challenge. One strategy calls for a lens or framing text, that is, an idea, concept, or question through which students will interrogate each text in the sequence. By using such a frame, students will have a familiar starting point as they launch into an analysis of each new text, and they will find that their experience with the framing idea will deepen with each encounter so that, incrementally, they build analytical facility and confidence. For one such framing idea, I propose the concept of authenticity as defined by the philosopher Charles Taylor in “The Ethics of Authenticity.” I first define Taylor’s concept and suggest the variety of texts that can be illuminated through it, and then illustrate with an analysis of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Brother.”