ENGL 2880

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  • Schedule of Classes - February 7, 2022 7:27PM EST
  • Course Catalog - February 7, 2022 7:14PM EST

ENGL 2880
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2021-2022.

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.

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

Distribution Category (LA-AS, ALC-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 or ALC-AS.

Comments ENGL 2880 is not a prerequisite for ENGL 2890. For descriptions of each topic, please visit the university class roster.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Beyond Sex: Asexuality, Friendship, and Polyamory

  •  4396 ENGL 2880   SEM 101

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    This course explores concepts like desire, friendship, pleasure, and intimacy through asexual, aromantic, and polyamorous perspectives. Our class wants to ask: Why and how are we compelled to structure relationships around sex? How might sex limit our capacities for ethical togetherness? What does non-sexual pleasure or intimacy look and feel like? What is love beyond romance? How might we cultivate a more intimate and politically useful vision of friendship? How might ace, aro, or poly perspectives help people have more empowering sex or relationships? To answer these questions, we’ll explore various poems, zines, comics, films, and short novels, in addition to theory. Writing projects include personal reflections, short analytical pieces, creative writing activities, and a critical memoir final.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Exploring the Personal Essay

  •  5985 ENGL 2880   SEM 102

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Creative nonfiction can be a powerful tool with which to excavate and examine our lives. Writers have used it to center and communicate lived experience from the margins, dealing with themes of empire, sexuality, race, gender and class made personal and specific. Students will learn how to harness introspection, develop their own voice, discover their themes and characters, and use structure, setting, expressive language and research to communicate their ideas. They will write essays based on personal experience as well as research while considering carefully their options and choices surrounding the expression or use of form and constraint, scene and exposition, images and details, dreams and memory, characters and dialogue, cities and places, time and timelines and, finally, honoring the past while imagining the future.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Strange Doctors, Science Fictions

  •  6521 ENGL 2880   SEM 103

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    How do we imagine doctors, or doctoring? What are our references when we’re asked to conjure up doctors in literature, media, or film? What do we do with tropes like the mad doctor, or strange doctors? This course traces narratives of strange doctors that emerge in 19th century British literature—Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Watson, and Dr. Jekyll, and others—and their contemporary afterlives in popular culture. We will engage with TV adaptations like Miss Sherlock, novelistic reimagining such as Frankenstein in Baghdad, and other retellings or re-imaginings of these figures. We consider issues such as gender, race, class, nationality, and more as we contend with the cultural lineages of these figures today, and how they have been taken up imaginatively, critically, and subversively across the world.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Placing Masculinity

  • 18000 ENGL 2880   SEM 104

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    From the rugged cowboy to the refined flâneur, different masculine identities have long assumed particular forms of emplacement. Inspired by queer theory’s renewed interest in the works of stereotypically “manly” writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, this course will examine the often-fraught relationships between gender and place as we consider the following questions: how does masculinity transform to accommodate crises of place-change and place-loss? How might new articulations of masculinity emerge from such crises? In thinking critically about the ways in which literature and film think through and out of questions of identity and emplacement, students will be tasked with writing both conventional academic papers and personal essays.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Exploring the Personal Essay

  • 18001 ENGL 2880   SEM 105

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    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)