ENGL 2880

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - February 6, 2017 7:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - February 6, 2017 7:15PM EST

ENGL 2880
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

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. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term. Topics differ for each section.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 18 students.
Prerequisites/Corequisites Completion of First-Year Writing Seminar requirement or permission of the instructor. ENGL 2880 is not a prerequisite for ENGL 2890.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)
Satisfies Requirement This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. It fulfills distribution requirements for the humanities in Arts & Sciences and most other colleges. Taken with the instructor's permission, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

Comments For descriptions of each topic, please visit the course website: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/engl2880-2890/.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: The Epic Western

  •  6112 ENGL 2880   SEM 101

  • Sweeping vistas. Dark canyons. A cowboy hero, and -- the Vietnam War? Epic Westerns shape the legendary landscape of the American West and dramatize individual and collective efforts to establish national values. At the same time, they track the way those values change over time, reflecting contemporary cultural or political events, e.g. the antiwar movement, feminism, the nation's bicentennial. Looking at recent political struggles, we'll discover what history Western narratives engage, and what they obscure. In films such as The Searchers, The Wild Bunch, and the recent The Hateful Eight, as well as novels including Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, we will examine the intersections of history, gender, class, race, and power in the mythic American West.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Legal Science Fictions

  •  6113 ENGL 2880   SEM 102

  • Science fiction writers imagine whole new social, economic or political systems in order to diagnose or cure the world's ills, and questions of law inevitably emerge. Should this robot be considered a legal person? Does this cool new policing tactic infringe our civil rights? In this course, we'll consider how such legal topics as personhood, equality, and criminality arise in utopian fiction and science fiction, and in actual case law, and how issues of gender, race, labor, and policing and punishment are complicated by technology and law. Assignments will include writing your own Utopia, and a collaborative research project on a currently contested legal-technological issue. Authors will include Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Plato, Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and China Miéville.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Do Our Stories Matter?

  •  6114 ENGL 2880   SEM 103

  • Can a story take down a system? Under what conditions? This course will examine the role of the personal narrative as a political weapon. We will analyze the impact of art on the sociopolitical landscape through the works of James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. We will then interrogate our own biases, assumptions, desires, relationships, and fears in order to write the self into a global context. The essays we craft will confront the intersections of political and personal trauma, history and family, identity and theory. Ultimately, we will ponder: Do our stories matter? Why or why not?

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Recognizing Genocide

  •  7967 ENGL 2880   SEM 104

  • Genocides remain etched in our memories. But what, exactly, is a genocide? In this course, you'll write in several roles to shape public opinion. As a legal expert, you'll review the Genocide Convention’s applicability to the Rwandan genocide. As an academic, you'll test the concept of genocide against the Cambodian experience. Reporting as a journalist, you'll profile the killings in former Yugoslavia. As a politician, you will debate whether to recognize the deaths in Darfur as a genocide or not. To support these several forms of writing, you'll read Henri Locard’s Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, watch Hotel Rwanda and Enemies of the People, explore the genocide archive at Cornell, and hear cases from the Arusha Accords and The Hague.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Global Romance: Love and the Political

  •  8855 ENGL 2880   SEM 105

  • Does love create worlds or put them in question? Does it secure a community, or mark its dissolution? Does it socialize or unsettle the individual? What is love when it meets the law? This course examines the dialogue between romantic and political narratives, tracing the ways they interrupt, galvanize, or complement each other. We will bring together fictions of love’s sway over the self (such as The Tempest, Frankenstein, and Beloved) with theories of love’s place in the political (such as Elizabeth’s Povinelli’s The Empire of Love and Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Declaration). Through reviews and critical essays, we'll examine what happens when romance is placed at the heart of tales of empire, migration, reunion, and revolt.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: The Invented I

  •  9633 ENGL 2880   SEM 106

  • In this course, we’ll explore the personal essay, focusing on how the form can be a tool for self-discovery, self-reflection, and self-invention. As thinkers, we’ll focus on the practice of critical reflection, learn how to interrogate our experiences, make peace with the imperfections of our memory, and become more conscious of the particular 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, Zadie Smith, Eula Biss, James Baldwin and David Foster Wallace, among many others. A few documentaries and audio stories will round things out. Through our workshops, we’ll learn how to be generous, empathetic, and constructive readers of our peers’ work.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)