ENGL 2880

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - January 31, 2019 7:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - January 31, 2019 7:15PM EST

ENGL 2880
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2018-2019.

This course 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: 17 students.
Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: completion of First-Year Writing Seminar requirement or permission of the instructor.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)
Satisfies Requirement This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. Taken with the instructor's permission, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If counted toward the First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward LA-AS.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Feeling Human: Animals, Humans, the Posthuman

  •  5843 ENGL 2880   SEM 101

  • This course considers how emotions and their effects on the body and the environment constitute what it feels like to be a human. To investigate these affective stances, this course will study narratives where human identity is constituted or disrupted by meeting nonhuman and posthuman identities. We'll also consider how emotion and related categories are a kind of cognition from the perspective of contemporary affect theory. Course materials may include the films Her (2013) and The Shape of Water (2017), fiction by A.S. Byatt and Téa Obreht, and scholarship by Donna Haraway, Brian Massumi and Ruth Leys.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Identity Matters

  •  5844 ENGL 2880   SEM 102

  • We hear the term identity politics all the time, but why is the self so politicized when everyone has one? In this course, we will consider the self as a body, a part in a system, and a tool for change. By looking at various works by writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Richard Rodriguez, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sherman Alexie, and others, we will critically reflect upon what it means to be a person in a body full of intersections, and discuss ethnicity, class, race, gender, nation, and religion to examine ourselves. Through personal essays, we will engage in self-inquiry, self-discovery, and self-invention to raise important questions about who we are and who we can.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Culinary Encounters of the Other Kind

  •  5845 ENGL 2880   SEM 103

  • What does it mean to say you’re hungry for something? This course explores the joyful and the dark sides of eating and traces how food informs the ways in which we ingest the world, particularly the parts of it unfamiliar to us. We will consider how the meeting of food, word, and image inform larger social categories and reflect on the way food affects how we think about others, putting it in conversation with literature, art, current events, film, imperialism, and history. Possible texts include Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, art by Kara Walker, Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ Racial Indigestion, the Iroquois White Corn Project, fiction by Chimamanda Adiche, The Search for General Tso, Greek myths, and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Hungry Stones.”

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Exploring the Personal Essay

  •  7532 ENGL 2880   SEM 104

  • In this course, we will read and write personal essays, exploring the various possibilities within the genre. We will explore the power of image and specific detail, the uses and limits of the first-person narrating self, and the boundary between public and private. Reading will focus on contemporary essayists, possibly including Leslie Jamison, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Hilton Als, and John Jeremiah Sullivan; we will also read older essays, including those of Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and James Baldwin. We will also pay close attention to students' writing, with workshop feedback. Working through drafts, students will develop fuller skill at criticism and revision.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Art and Argument: the Personal Essay in America

  •  8146 ENGL 2880   SEM 105

  • How have contemporary American writers engaged with the personal essay to respond to the last fifty years of American history and culture? And what importance might we ascribe to the personal essay in current American social and intellectual milieus? In this course we will read essays by such authors as James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Teju Cole, and Yiyun Li that consider the complexities of place, culture, race, and art. Through class discussion, composing personal essays, and collaborative writing workshops, students will explore how the personal essay's various forms and foci are inflected by the interplay between socio-historical moment and authorial intention.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Addictive Media or How to Survive What You Love

  •  8450 ENGL 2880   SEM 106

  • What is addiction in the 21st century? The substances of addiction have changed throughout history, but so too has our definition of addiction, who can be addicted, and how we should treat it. This course will examine addiction through an assortment of different media texts, from science fiction films to documentaries to Snapchat. We will analyze movies such as The Social Network, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Her as well as television shows like Breaking Bad, hook-up apps like Tinder, and popular video games like League of Legends. By the end of the course, we will create our own definitions of addiction that adequately address the dangers as well as possible benefits of addictive media.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Fans, Fantasies, and Feminism

  • 17562 ENGL 2880   SEM 107

  • “Fan fiction” is sometimes taken to mean the opposite of “literature”—a kind of writing supposed to have neither artistic nor commercial value, the (embarrassing!) public expression of fantasies that would be better left private. We’ll read some feminist scholarship to help us answer that charge. When we’re not getting our theory on, we’ll go full-on media nerd, cultivating a shared canon of fannish classics like Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Harry Potter. We’ll consider fiction on the edge, like Fifty Shades or Star Wars novels. And we’ll read plenty of fan fiction and watch loads of fan vids. Warning label: Students who take this course should be aware that the syllabus contains sexually explicit material, much of it homoerotic.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)