WRIT 100 - Writing Seminar for First-Years

FDR: FW
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Topics for Winter 2012:

WRIT 100-01: Writing Seminar for First Years: What We Eat (3). In this section, students develop their college-level writing skills through analysis of an often mundane yet deeply meaningful facet of human life: eating. Our study of “what we eat” imagines that “we” many different ways: the particular students and professor in this writing class, American consumers in general, global citizens, human beings, members of specific religious traditions, ethnic groups, and genders. From those many perspectives, we analyze the aesthetic, cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of our everyday food choices primarily by engaging with four recent books: We Are What We Ate, a collection of short food memoirs by a range of American writers; Eating Animals, by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer; and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, both of which have helped spur the current “locavore” movement. Writing assignments take a variety of forms, from personal reflection to research-based essay, but each assignment helps students improve their analytical writing skills as we focus on developing complex arguments in clear, precise, well-structured prose. (FW) Braunschneider.

WRIT 100-02: Writing Seminar for First Years: The 1960s (3). This section focuses upon active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Students examine a variety of texts (short stories, novels, nonfiction, plays, songs, speeches) produced during and in response to the most turbulent decade in recent American history. We consider the several competing versions of the 1960s suggested by these works and how such attempts to define the period enable us to see the present more clearly. Assignments take inspiration from the experimental vibe that characterized the times. Writers represented are likely to include Allen Ginsberg, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, August Wilson and others. Requirements include at least four revised essays in addition to several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. (FW) Crowley.

WRIT 100-03: Writing Seminar for First Years: Insiders & Outsiders (3). Many a tale begins like this: You are a stranger in a small town, and soon you begin to learn that the town has secrets – a veiled past, a horrible crime, some undisclosed undertaking you must either join in or resist. The dramatic tensions between insiders and outsiders, the initiated and the uninitiated, those with private knowledge and others with new perspectives, have been richly explored in American culture, in everything from sophisticated political allegories to good old horror movies. In this section, we study novels, memoirs, and poems that make use of this classic division and consider what such texts propose about a number of issues: the individual’s relationship to community, for instance, or the costs of conformity, or the destructive power of inflexible ideologies. As we consider such questions, our ultimate goal is to cultivate and practice active reading and precise argumentation in written analysis. Requirements include intensive writing (multiple essays and revisions), regular evaluation of fellow students’ writing, and active class participation. (FW) Matthews.

WRIT 100-04: Writing Seminar for First Years: The 1960s (3). This section focuses upon active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Students examine a variety of texts (short stories, novels, nonfiction, plays, songs, speeches) produced during and in response to the most turbulent decade in recent American history. We consider the several competing versions of the 1960s suggested by these works and how such attempts to define the period enable us to see the present more clearly. Assignments take inspiration from the experimental vibe that characterized the times. Writers represented are likely to include Allen Ginsberg, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, August Wilson and others. Requirements include at least four revised essays in addition to several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. (FW) Crowley.

WRIT 100-05: Writing Seminar for First Years: Wicked Women (3). This section begins with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with recent essays on Hillary Clinton. We look at witchcraft, femme fatales and prostitutes as a way of considering literary approaches towards women and men’s power and sexuality. The course is not for women only – for instance, our discussion of witchcraft and wizardry runs from Miller’s The Crucible through excerpts from Harry Potter. (FW) Brodie.

WRIT 100-06: Writing Seminar for First Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, and Conundrums (3). We concern ourselves with mysteries, not in the generic sense of stories about crime and detection, but mysteries of character, morality, religion, and art. Central to each of the works we study is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, or complexity. Sometimes the work itself is the mystery, a kind of hieroglyph. Each work, in its own way, raises questions about the methods and limitations of human discovery. We approach the student’s writing as a means of investigation and discovery as well, with an emphasis on developing the skills necessary to build convincing “cases” (i.e., arguments) when evidence is incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. (FW) Oliver 

WRIT 100-07: Writing Seminar for First Years: The Nature of Nature: Environmental Thought and Literature (3). This section is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How have writers, poets, and thinkers understood their relationships to “the natural world”? What is nature? How are we able and unable to define it? We read widely within environmental literature. Emerson, Whitman, William Cronon, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, frame our discussion of “nature,” “truth,” and the relationship of these ideas to one another. We explore the implications of such understandings for the individual life, as well as for a modern world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention. (FW) Green.

WRIT 100-08: Writing Seminar for First Years: The Nature of Nature: Environmental Thought and Literature (3). This section is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How have writers, poets, and thinkers understood their relationships to “the natural world”? What is nature? How are we able and unable to define it? We read widely within environmental literature. Emerson, Whitman, William Cronon, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, frame our discussion of “nature,” “truth,” and the relationship of these ideas to one another. We explore the implications of such understandings for the individual life, as well as for a modern world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention. (FW) Green.
 

Topics for Fall 2011:

WRIT 100A-01: Writing Seminar for First Years: International Issues (3). This section is designed for non-native speakers of English and provides extensive group and individual help with reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. We study some international issues and compare life in other countries with contemporary life in the United States. The course also involves students teaching us about their native countries. (FW) Smout 

WRIT 100-01: Writing Seminar for First Years: Coming of Age (3). This course studies the literature of coming-of-age, the fundamental human movement from youth to adulthood, immaturity to maturity, ignorance to knowledge, innocence to experience. Through class discussions, informal writings, and formal essays, we study the tensions, aspirations, pains, joys, myths, and realities of this transition. Using a range of writing assignments and exercises, we work hard at the interpretive essay, developing students’ critical thinking and writing skills. (FW) Conner.

WRIT 100-02: Writing Seminar for First Years: Hardboiled and Film Noir (3). An exploration of the 20th century’s fascination with crime fiction through a study of short stories and novels by three of its finest American practitioners—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith—along with several classic film versions of their novels by such major directors as John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock. The course begins with close study of the hardening in the 1920s of the high culture vs. mass culture dichotomy through a careful juxtaposition of T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetry and Dorothy Sayers’s popular crime fiction. We then turn to the American noir novels and films of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s and their self-conscious effort to challenge this opposition of high and mass culture with popular narratives marked by high artistic ambition. (FW) Adams.

WRIT 100-03: Writing Seminar for First Years: Otherworld Journeys (3). This course surveys medieval and Victorian narratives about encounters with the “otherworld”—an extraordinary realm parallel to that of normal human experience and inhabited by supernatural creatures much like ourselves. The course considers how this otherworld shapes normal reality and what its presence reveals about medieval conceptions of the “ordinary.” Readings include the 12th-century Lais of Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, and revisions of these otherworld encounters by 19th-century poets such as Keats and Browning. Short response papers and critical essays encourage close reading and help students develop analytical writing skills. All medieval texts are read in modern English translation. (FW) Jirsa.

WRIT 100-04: Writing Seminar for First Years: Insiders & Outsiders (3). Many a tale begins like this: You are a stranger in a small town, and soon you begin to learn that the town has secrets—a veiled past, a horrible crime, some undisclosed undertaking you must either join in or resist. The dramatic tensions between insiders and outsiders, the initiated and the uninitiated, those with private knowledge and others with new perspectives, have been richly explored in American culture, in everything from sophisticated political allegories to good old horror movies. In this class we study stories, novels, plays, and poems that make use of this classic division and consider what such texts propose about a number of issues: the individual’s relationship to community, for instance, or the costs of conformity, or the destructive power of inflexible ideologies. As we consider such questions, our ultimate goal is to cultivate and practice active reading and precise argumentation in written analysis. Requirements include intensive writing (multiple essays and revisions), regular evaluation of fellow students’ writing, and active class participation. (FW) Matthews.

WRIT 100-05: Writing Seminar for First Years: What We Eat (3). In this class, students develop their college-level writing skills through analysis of an often mundane yet deeply meaningful facet of human life: eating. Our study of “what we eat” imagines that “we” many different ways: the particular students and professor in this writing class, American consumers in general, global citizens, human beings, members of specific religious traditions, ethnic groups, and genders. From those many perspectives, we analyze the aesthetic, cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of our everyday food choices primarily by engaging with four recent books: We Are What We Ate, a collection of short food memoirs by a range of American writers; Eating Animals, by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer; and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, both of which have helped spur the current “locavore” movement. Writing assignments take a variety of forms, from personal reflection to research-based essay, but each assignment helps students improve their analytical writing skills as we focus on developing complex arguments in clear, precise, well-structured prose. (FW) Braunschneider.

WRIT 100-06: Writing Seminar for First Years: Wicked Women (3). This section begins with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with recent essays on Hillary Clinton. We look at witchcraft, femme fatales and prostitutes as a way of considering literary approaches towards women and men’s power and sexuality. The course is not for women only—for instance, our discussion of witchcraft and wizardry runs from Miller’s The Crucible through excerpts from Harry Potter. (FW) Brodie.

WRIT 100-07: Writing Seminar for First Years: Indian Country: Reading America Through Native American Eyes (3). In his film Smoke Signals, one of Sherman Alexie’s characters asks two other Indians about to leave the reservation, “Hey, do you guys got your passports? [The United States] is as foreign as it gets. Hope you two got your vaccinations!” What does this country’s landscape, history, literature, and culture look like from an Indigenous perspective? Who is telling the contemporary Indian’s story? How does this contribute to our understanding of American identity and destiny? Concentrated work in English composition with readings from contemporary Native American authors such as Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Carter Revard, Janet McAdams, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko in a mixture of genres, such as drama, poetry, nonfiction prose, and narrative fiction. (FW) Miranda.

WRIT 100-08: Writing Seminar for First Years: The Sacred and the Daily: Environmental Literature (3). This course is an exploration of the human understanding of nature. How have writers, poets, and thinkers understood their relationships to “the natural world”? What is nature? How are we able and unable to define it? We read widely within environmental literature. Emerson, Whitman, Darwin, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, frame our discussion of “nature,” “truth” and the relationship of these ideas to one another. We explore the implications of such understandings for a modern world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention. (FW) Green.

WRIT 100-09: Writing Seminar for First Years: I See Dead People (3). The course focuses on literary representations of spirits and the afterlife. Texts may include: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; A. S. Byatt, The Conjugal Angel; W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe; Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit; Thornton Wilder, Our Town; Toni Morrison, Beloved. (FW) Gavaler.

WRIT 100-10: Writing Seminar for First Years: The 1960s (3). The course focuses upon active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, students examine a variety of texts (short stories, novels, nonfiction, plays, songs, speeches) produced during and in response to the most turbulent decade in recent American history. We consider the several competing versions of the 1960s suggested by these works and how such attempts to define the period enable us to see the present more clearly. Assignments take inspiration from the experimental vibe that characterized the times. Writers represented are likely to include Allen Ginsberg, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, August Wilson, and others. Requirements include at least four revised essays in addition to several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. (FW) Crowley.

WRIT 100-11: Writing Seminar for First Years: Love, Death, and Other Passions (3). This course explores understandings of love, death, and other passions in some or all of the following forms: fiction, philosophy, science, and art. Are passions like these something you do or something that happens to you? Would we and the world be better off without them? Is there a scientific explanation of love and the passions? What would it mean for human experience to think so? (FW) Kosky.

WRIT 100-12: Writing Seminar for First Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, and Conundrums (3). We concern ourselves with mysteries, not in the generic sense of stories about crime and detection, but mysteries of character, morality, religion, and art. Central to each of the works we study is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, or complexity. Sometimes the work itself is the mystery, a kind of hieroglyph. Each work, in its own way, raises questions about the methods and limitations of human discovery. We approach the student’s writing as a means of investigation and discovery as well, with an emphasis on developing the skills necessary to build convincing “cases” (i.e., arguments) when evidence is incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. (FW) Oliver.

WRIT 100-13: Writing Seminar for First Years: Trees, People, and Cyborgs (3). This course examines the relationships of human beings to nature and technology. The title of the course is serious: What kinds of relationships do we have with trees, especially forests? Where do we draw the boundary between humans and machines? Does humanity occupy a (privileged) middle ground between other kinds of being? Our readings come from a mix of science, environmental literature, and science fiction. We also watch the Terminator tetralogy. (FW) Warren.

WRIT 100-14: Writing Seminar for First Years: Faith and Doubt (3). Requirements include at least four revised essays in addition to several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. The course focuses upon active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section we explore the topic of belief and how it shapes a person’s selfhood. How does being a part of a religious community, or a variety of religious communities, shape one’s identity? How does identity change with the adoption of either belief, skepticism, or another culture? We ask these questions primarily through the genres of novels and short stories, examining lives of faith and doubt. Texts include Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel Gilead, about a Congregationalist minister descended from abolitionists; James Wood’s The Book Against God, a novel on a philosophy student’s repudiation of his father’s Christianity; the Pulitzer-prize winning play, Doubt, by John Patrick Stanley; and selected short stories from Flannery O’Conner and Jhumpa Lahiri. (FW) Gertz.

WRIT 100-15: Writing Seminar for First Years: Schools of Magic (3). In this section, students read fiction and view films about schools for exceptional scholars: academies of magic, sorcery, and superheroism. Using the lens of these manifestly out-of-this-world fantasies, we focus on various theories of education with reference to students’ own experiences in liberal education. Primary texts include works by Lev Grossman, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula LeGuin, John Milton, J. K. Rowling, and Caroline Stevemer; excerpted educational theorists range from William Cronon and John Dewey to C. S. Lewis and John Henry Cardinal Newman. Familiarity with the Narnia books is helpful but isn’t essential. (FW) Keen.

WRIT 100-16: Writing Seminar for First Years: The 1960s (3). Requirements include at least four revised essays in addition to several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. The course focuses upon active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. In this section, students examine a variety of texts (short stories, novels, nonfiction, plays, songs, speeches) produced during and in response to the most turbulent decade in recent American history. We consider the several competing versions of the 1960s suggested by these works and how such attempts to define the period enable us to see the present more clearly. Assignments take inspiration from the experimental vibe that characterized the times. Writers represented are likely to include Allen Ginsberg, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, August Wilson, and others. Requirements include at least four revised essays in addition to several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. (FW) Crowley 

WRIT 100-18: Writing Seminar for First Years: I See Dead People (3). The course focuses on literary representations of spirits and the afterlife. Texts may include: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; A. S. Byatt, The Conjugal Angel; W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe; Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit; Thornton Wilder, Our Town; Toni Morrison, Beloved. (FW) Gavaler. 

WRIT 100-19: Writing Seminar for First Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, and Conundrums (3). We concern ourselves with mysteries, not in the generic sense of stories about crime and detection, but mysteries of character, morality, religion, and art. Central to each of the works we study is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, or complexity. Sometimes the work itself is the mystery, a kind of hieroglyph. Each work, in its own way, raises questions about the methods and limitations of human discovery. We approach the student’s writing as a means of investigation and discovery as well, with an emphasis on developing the skills necessary to build convincing “cases” (i.e., arguments) when evidence is incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. (FW) Oliver.

WRIT 100-20: Writing Seminar for First Years: American Gothic (3). What are Americans afraid of? Students in this class hone their skills as critical thinkers and writers by analyzing gothic tales from multiple genres. We focus on the American short story from Poe to King, but course texts also include film, poetry, and the graphic novel. (FW) Wheeler.

WRIT 100-21: Writing Seminar for First Years: Humans, Cyborgs, and Posthumans (3). What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a mind? Is there a soul? Will we merge with machines? Will there be Artificial Intelligence? Students in this class hone their skills as critical thinkers and writers by analyzing arguments from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the philosophy of human enhancement. (FW) Gregory.