Courses » » English 298. Experimental Courses

Digital Writing

When we turn on our computers and connect to the Internet, we enter into a virtual world that has transformed writing, writing practices, and writing environments. With a scroll here and a click there, we move from page to page, navigating through a complex network of writing composed by and for people across the world. The web invites us to write individually and collaboratively to real audiences using platforms such as blogs, forums, Facebook status updates, and on-line scholarly journals, among many others. In the digital age, writers use much more than text to present information or make arguments; they also incorporate images, photographs, infographics, video clips, hyperlinks, and sound. In this class, we will explore how technology has changed writing and what it means to be a writer, and how digital writing has altered the way we read. We will also learn the practical skills and rhetorical strategies of digital production, and compose digital texts of our own in various genres on the World Wide Web.

Vampires and Violent Vixens

This course introduces students to literary analysis by exploring how and why monsters are produced in various fictions. We focus particularly on issues of gender and sexuality, considering how certain behaviors and bodies are constructed as pathological in order to legitimate various social norms. This discussion-based seminar teaches students to pay particular attention to the use of language and form; that is, it teaches them the practice of “close reading.” Through this approach, students see how texts also call attention to their own construction of monstrosity and thereby resist simple interpretations based on a dualism between normality and deviance. We will work through transhistorical texts in a variety of forms, including work by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, and Alfred Hitchcock. We will attend to the particular socio-historical contexts from which these texts emerge, learning to consider how history and literature intersect. We end the course by looking at some contemporary popular culture texts, like the recent Twilight series, in order to learn to critically read our own social moment.

Advanced Argumentative Writing

In this course, we will complicate the simplistic notion of argumentation as “winning” or “dominating one’s opponent” through an exploration of various definitions of argument, rhetorical concepts and rhetorical practices across cultures and eras. We will use this knowledge to analyze arguments in various genres in an effort to investigate how arguments work and how rhetorical strategies change in different contexts. We will then draw on this body of knowledge to generate powerful and persuasive argumentative writing of our own.