ENGL 2890

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  • Schedule of Classes - June 10, 2022 7:44AM EDT
  • Course Catalog - June 9, 2022 7:14PM EDT

ENGL 2890
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 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 university class roster.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: TV Nation

  •  4510 ENGL 2890   SEM 101

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Television mediates our national and domestic life more than we may realize. From its origins, TV--even for those who consume little of it--has represented, even regulated, our experiences of childhood and adolescence, production and consumption, politics and citizenship. It seeks to define us as people, workers, and citizens. In this course, we will develop ways to read and to write about the small screen as a cultural text. In doing so, we will explore how the genres, institutions and ideologies of contemporary television both reflect and refract our national and domestic life. Writing assignments will include analyses of television series, of the Super Bowl live broadcast, of single advertisements and episodes.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi:

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

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

  •  4509 ENGL 2890   SEM 102

  • 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 by Audre Lorde, Angela Chen, Ela Przybylo, Michel Foucault, and Jessica Fern. 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: Do Our Stories Matter?

  •  4511 ENGL 2890   SEM 103

  • 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: Living with Death

  •  4512 ENGL 2890   SEM 104

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Everyone dies. Death is often viewed as an insurmountable boundary, but we enter into a dialogue with the dead when we read the words they’ve left behind. With death as our framework, we will ask: What are the ethical implications of witnessing the death of another? How do monuments and archives mark some lives as more valuable than others? Who decides who lives and who dies? How do we imagine the unthinkable, that our planet is dying? We will discuss perspectives on death from philosophy, psychology, medicine, as well as poetry, film, and television (The Farewell, The Good Place). Students will write personal narratives, oral histories, multimedia public essays (such as an op-ed, documentary, or podcast), and collaboratively create an annotated digital map of monuments.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Apocalyptic Vision in Literature and Film

  •  4513 ENGL 2890   SEM 105

  • 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).

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Composing Podcasts

  •  4514 ENGL 2890   SEM 106

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Journalistic podcasts, like NPR favorites Invisibilia, Radiolab, Rough Translation, and Hidden Brain, pull together research, interviews, and personal experiences with music and soundscapes in order to explore contemporary social issues. In this course, you will study these podcasts and compose your own research-based podcast. To compose, you will learn to use Audacity (a free software), conduct interviews, collect secondary research, write podcast scripts, and incorporate Creative Commons sounds and music. Using podcasts as a multimodal form of inquiry, you will select and research a social issue that affects you. While podcasts will be the subject of this course, it will foster stronger writing by asking you to write a lot, substantially revise, and be able to explain and identify how different types of writing work (knowledge about writing).

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)