ENGL 2890

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - September 9, 2021 7:14PM EDT
  • Course Catalog - September 9, 2021 7:15PM EDT

ENGL 2890
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2020-2021.

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 Spring.

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 First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward LA-AS or ALC-AS.

Comments For descriptions of each topic, please visit the course website.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi:

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Exploring the Personal Essay

  •  4885 ENGL 2890   SEM 101

    • MW Online Meeting
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • Green, C

  • Instruction Mode: Online
    In this course, we will read and write personal essays, exploring the various possibilities within the genre. We will focus on 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: New and Old Media: Books in the Digital Age

  •  4884 ENGL 2890   SEM 102

    • MW Online Meeting
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • Lu, B

  • Instruction Mode: Online
    How do the form and structure of our books affect what we know and how we take it in? We live in a moment in which digital technologies are disrupting and expanding our definitions and uses of books, and, more importantly, the way we imagine and practice reading and writing. Students in this course will be asked to think about the ways in which the structure and design of a book encourage some ways of using it while limiting others. We’ll explore these issues using many approaches, including creative and analytical writing assignments and special attention to practical topics like papermaking, letterpress and/or block printing, bookbinding, and digital print technologies.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: American Nightmare: Horror Films and Fictions

  •  4886 ENGL 2890   SEM 103

    • MW Online Meeting
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • Barnes, R

  • Instruction Mode: Online
    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, creative projects, and the writing of a short-length horror screenplay as a final project.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Photography and Trauma:Legal and Med. Perspectives

  •  4887 ENGL 2890   SEM 104

    • TR Online Meeting
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • Srbinovski, B

  • Instruction Mode: Online
    “Through the camera people become customers or tourists of reality,” the American critic Susan Sontag once remarked. Why do we feel the need to capture the suffering of others in the form of a photograph, when we know an image cannot do justice to the violence that we see? And why does the language of photography–like that of “flashbacks”–insert itself into the writing of traumatic testimony? Drawing on court cases, crime reports, medical histories, and news stories from the last thirty years, we will interrogate the command that photography and trauma have come to have of the truth.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: The Invented Self

  •  4888 ENGL 2890   SEM 105

    • TR Online Meeting
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • Asi, A

  • Instruction Mode: Online
    The personal essay 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. In this course students will be inspired by classic and contemporary writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Rachel Cusk, Kiese Laymon, Leslie Jamison and Carmen Maria Machado. The class will be generative and skill-based. Students will learn how to harness introspection, develop their own voice, observe vivid detail, discover their themes and characters, and use structure, setting, expressive language and research to communicate their stories.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Apocalyptic Vision in Literature and Film

  •  4889 ENGL 2890   SEM 106

    • TR Statler Hall 351
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • Zukovic, B

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    "Apocalypse" is the end of the world--or ourselves--but it also introduces new forms of being, desire and knowledge. In this course we'll analyze apocalyptic fantasies by writing critical essays: a skill (and art) that crosses disciplines. Course material includes the cult novel that inspired zombie apocalypse movies (I am Legend, by Richard Matheson), three accounts of apocalyptic desire (Polanski’s Chinatown, Tarentino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joan Didion’s The White Album) and three works staging the collapse of mundane reality (excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House).
    Enrollment limited to students who are able to attend in-person classes in the Ithaca area.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Writing Back to the Media: Essays and Arguments

  • 17446 ENGL 2890   SEM 107

    • TR Statler Hall 351
    • Feb 8 - May 14, 2021

    • King-O'Brien, K

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Good investigative journalists write well and use their reportage to argue effectively. How can we adopt features of their writing for a variety of purposes and audiences, academic and popular? Our weekly readings will include features from the New Yorker, The Atlantic, slate.com, and the New York Times, among others. Students will write essays of opinion and argument—in such forms as news analysis, investigative writing, blog posts, and op-ed pieces—on topics such as environmental justice, conflicts in higher education, human rights, the uses of technology, gender equality, and the ethics of journalism itself. Coursework may include an independently researched project on a subject of the student's choosing.
    Enrollment limited to students who are able to attend in-person classes in the Ithaca area.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)