ENGL 2880

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - January 8, 2020 7:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - January 8, 2020 7:15PM EST

ENGL 2880
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

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.

Comments ENGL 2880 is not a prerequisite for ENGL 2890. For descriptions of each topic, please visit the course website.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Dead and Deadly Women: The Feminine Noir

  •  5624 ENGL 2880   SEM 101

  • Darkly troubled women who circumvent our expectations and disrupt their assigned social positions abound in recent books and films. In this course, we will be examining fiction by authors like Ottessa Moshfegh and Oyinkan Braithwaite, poems by writers from Keats to Megan Levad, films like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and essays from writers like Alice Bolin and Tori Telfer, who provide fascinating commentary on the continuing appeal of the feminine noir in popular culture.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: American Nightmare: Horror Films and Fictions

  •  5626 ENGL 2880   SEM 102

  • Why do we like to be afraid? What kind of fear is intrinsically American and why? From the early fear of the cultural “other” in Universal Classic Monsters to the Satanic Panic of the 60s and 70s in Rosemary’s Baby to Cold War paranoia and unchecked consumer culture in Romero’s Trilogy of the Dead to contemporary race relations in Get Out, this course seeks to understand how horror films speak to, and perhaps against, our country’s past, present and, future. Possible texts may also include Poe short stories, works by Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, and Ling Ma's Severance. Assignments will include critical essays, written creative projects, and the making of a short-length horror film as a final project.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Exploring the Personal Essay

  •  7286 ENGL 2880   SEM 103

  • 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, Eula Biss, and Alexander Chee; 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: Creative Nonfiction: The Invented Self

  •  7847 ENGL 2880   SEM 104

  • Especially since the rise of social media, the personal has not been private -- but that has been true of personal essays for a long time. Writers who share themselves through essays have always invented themselves by deciding what's private and what's public and what's created through the artifice of writing. In this course we'll go through a process of inventive self-discovery by reading the work of published writers and going through the steps of drafting, revision, and collaborative feedback. Writers we read may include James Baldwin, Maggie Nelson, Alexander Chee, and Joan Didion, among others.

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