ENGL 2880

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - January 19, 2016 6:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - January 19, 2016 6:21PM EST

ENGL 2880
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

This course does not satisfy requirements for the English major. ENGL 2880 offers guidance and an audience for students who wish to gain skill in expository writing—a common term for critical, reflective, investigative, and creative nonfiction. Each section provides a context for writing defined by a form of exposition, a disciplinary area, a practice, or a topic intimately related to the written medium. Course members will read in relevant published material and write and revise their own work regularly, while reviewing and responding to one another's. Since these seminar-sized courses depend on members' full participation, regular attendance and submission of written work are required. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term.

When Offered Fall, winter.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 18 students.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)
Satisfies Requirement Students must have completed their colleges' first-year writing requirements or have the permission of the instructor.

Comments Website: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/engl2880-2890/.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Secrets, Surveillance, and You

  •  6138 ENGL 2880   SEM 101

  • Political secrets call to mind spies like James Bond or Jason Bourne. What if the protagonist of the drama of political secrets is not some fantastical secret agent, but you? Drones, hackers, and secret court hearings have become part of our infrastructure of knowledge-making and governing. This is done in your name, to keep you safe. This course will explore the relationship between political secrets, transparency, knowledge, and individuality. We will discuss literary texts like the story of Judas, In Cold Blood, and A Most Wanted Man, investigative journalism about Wikileaks and the Snowden documents, and films like Zero Dark Thirty and Imitation Game. In the end, we all have to choose which secrets to tell, which to keep.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: The Invented I

  •  6139 ENGL 2880   SEM 102

  • We are our experiences, but we're also our reflections of those experiences. So honest reflection about our thoughts and actions allows us to constantly invent and reinvent ourselves. In this course we'll explore the personal essay, focusing on how and why writers frame experiences as they do. As thinkers, we'll consider the practice of critical reflection, learn to contextualize our experiences, and become more conscious of the ways in which we see the world. As writers, we'll study narrative craft, including scene, dialogue, metaphor and character development. Our reading will feature Jamaica Kincaid, Eula Biss, James Baldwin and David Foster Wallace, among others. Through our workshops, we'll learn how to be generous, empathetic, and constructive readers of our peers' work.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: The Everyday is Extraordinary

  •  6140 ENGL 2880   SEM 103

  • In this course we¿ll draw on the everyday stuff of life. We will look at how authors such as Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, David Sedaris, John Steinbeck, and James Thurber have taken small moments, faint memories, and everyday experiences and transformed them into lasting works that speak to the human condition. Our exploration will be supplemented by works of street photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Henri Cartier-Bresson and cinema-verité documentarians such as Agnes Varda and Ross McElwee. In-depth discussions and writing assignments will allow students to mine the minutiae of the everyday, and workshops throughout the term help hone their writing to create clear and illuminating pieces.

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Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Post-Human Thinking: Beyond the Brain

  •  8085 ENGL 2880   SEM 104

  • Environmental crises, artificial intelligence, and the cognitive sciences urge us to abandon our human-centered mindset and adopt a post-human perspective. But how can we get outside our own heads and think like a post-human? Can we reason like machines? See the world the way a bat does? Or share consciousness with another being. In this course we'll examine the extended mind in Memento and Shakespeare's Hamlet, bio-enhancement in the television show Fringe, mindlessness in Shaun of the Dead, and intelligent environments in such video games as Portal 2. Students will extend their own thinking in essays that examine these topics from artistic, philosophical, and cultural perspectives.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Patient Zero to Global Pandemic

  •  9645 ENGL 2880   SEM 105

  • The medical historian Roy Porter claims diseases are "largely of mankind's own making." If so, what is our responsibility in fighting them? This course examines literature, television, film, and radio concerning disease outbreaks in order to consider how humans manage disease on an individual and societal level. How do fictional representations of outbreaks speak to ongoing debates about international aid work, quarantine procedures, and mandated vaccinations. Course materials may include Albert Camus's The Plague, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Siddhartha Mukherjee¿s The Emperor of All Maladies, episodes from House, M.D., TV mini-series Angels in America, and films from the X-Men series.

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Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Grassroots Politics

  • 17286 ENGL 2880   SEM 106

  • What does it take to run a successful grassroots campaign in the U.S.? This course will teach you the nuts and bolts of political campaigning for both candidates and issues. You will learn how to determine the best timing for your campaign, how to develop a campaign strategy, how to target and persuade voters, how to raise money, how to use media, how to manage people, and how to run an election-day operation. Drawing on readings from political scientists, modern campaign consultants like James Carville and Dick Morris, and classical strategists like Sun Tzu, you will discover the art and science of campaigning, while improving your research and writing by producing documents like op-eds, district profiles, and strategy memos all for the campaign of your choice.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Black Power, Yellow Peril

  • 17285 ENGL 2880   SEM 107

  • Why have Asian Americans been held up as a model minority while African Americans have been disparaged? How do African American and Asian American experiences of race and gender inform each other? In 2013 activist Suey Park used #BlackPowerYellowPeril to promote a vision of interracial alliance going back to the great anti-slavery orator Frederick Douglass's defense of the Chinese. Taking the turn-of-the-century Yellow Peril and the mid-century Black Power movement as racialized embodiments of white American fear, this course will trace literary points of contact, conflict, and coalition across these two racial formations. Possible content includes political writings by Malcolm X and Chairman Mao, novels by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston, movies like Enter the Dragon, and music such as the Wu-Tang Clan's.

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