WRIT 100 - Writing Seminar for First-Years

FDR: FW
Credits: 3

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-02:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Other Worlds (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. This course focuses on fantastic literature about borders and boundary states. Many readings will come from the edges of literary genres: speculative fiction, memoir based on fairy tales, and more. The core skill students will hone is persuasive writing based on textual evidence, but they will also explore other modes and media, including creative writing.  (FW) Wheeler.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-03:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Middle East and North Africa in Films (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. This interdisciplinary course examines the Middle East and North Africa through films and academic texts drawn from history, comparative politics, film studies, and sociology. Students will develop a critical approach to understanding the social movements, cultures, and life of ordinary people of the region. Within the discourse of colonialism and post-colonialism debates, students will gain insights into topics such as nation-building, women’s leadership through popular music, poverty, uprisings, and the humanitarian crisis of refugees. Students will also explore how the use of cinema has served to address, define, restore, or retell stories of a truly diverse region.  (FW) Al-Ahmad.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-04:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Healing Power of Nature (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. In this section students will read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, an account of vital factors that helped concentration camp inmates survive, then study three key works that deal with major personal struggles healed through outdoor activities and adventures. The works are Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and Fred Chappell’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are. We’ll connect these works to extreme sports, the outdoor recreation industry, environmental issues, mindfulness, and scientific studies of healing. Our goal is to study and discuss hope and healing in this and other troubled times.  (FW) Smout.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-05:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Do Great Artists Steal? The Legalities of Copyright and the Ethics of Attribution (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. Often attributed to Pablo Picasso, the phrase “great artists steal” highlights artists, authors, and creators’ propensity to build upon the work of their peers and predecessors–frequently without acknowledgement. In this course, students will explore intersecting ethical and legal issues concerning the reuse of intellectual property. Specifically, discussions cover the roots of US copyright law, what constitutes plagiarism, W&L’s Honor System, remix-culture, and historic acts of creative theft. Join us as we examine rap sampling, literary mashups, memes, alleged plagiarism by canonized authors like William Shakespeare, and contemporary copyright infringement cases like Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin. While the topic of the course is the ethical reuse of creative content, the main focus is writing. All readings, assignments, and activities help students augment and refine their writing skills.  (FW) Cook.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-06:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Wicked Women (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. Concentrated work in composition. All students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. This section begins with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with recent essays on Hillary Clinton. In between, we examine witches, femme fatales and fallen women, using representations of difficult women in literature, journalism, and film, as essay prompts. The course is not for women only—for instance, our discussion of witchcraft runs from Conde’s I, Tituba through excerpts from Harry Potter.  (FW) Brodie.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-07:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, and Conundrums (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. Melville wrote that “significance lurks in all things.” In other words, meaning exists everywhere but is hidden and sometimes difficult, even impossible to discover. Upon this belief, rests the possibility of mystery. And it is with mysteries that we will concern ourselves this semester—”mysteries” not in the generic sense of stories about crime and detection but mysteries of character, morality, race, religion, and art. Central to each of the works we will read is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, ambiguity, 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 the limitations of human discovery. We will approach your own 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.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-08:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Nature of Nature: Environmental Thought and Literature (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. This seminar is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How do writers and environmental thinkers understand their relationships to “the natural world”? How can we understand our own? We read widely within environmental literature. Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, provide scaffolding for our discussion of “nature”, “truth”, “individuality”, “community”, “life”, “death”, “knowledge”, and “mystery”. We explore the implications of these ideas for an individual life as well as for a globalized world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention.  (FW) Green.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-09:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Superheroes (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. (FW) Students will analyze the evolution of the character type from Superman’s first appearance in 1938 Action Comics to contemporary superheroes in 21st century media.  (FW) Gavaler.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-10:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Animal Intimacies (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. Non-human animals occupy a central force in our lives. We love them, wear them, eat them, study them, experiment on them, honor them in our art, poetry, and film, and establish therapeutic relationships with them. Animals have long served as a reflection of our own (in)humanity, and this class will offer a close look at the human-animal bond through different genres of writing, including but not limited to poetry, personal essays, food writing, animal rights and environmental activist writing, and comics.  (FW) Kharputly.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-11:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Generational Trauma and Graphic Memoir (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. Some traumas we carry in life we experience firsthand, but others are passed onto us by the people who raise us and the people who raised them. In this class, we will read three acclaimed graphic memoirs—Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—that explore complicated family dynamics and the bearing of personal traumas, such as discrimination and assault, and collective traumas, such as war and genocide, on familial relationships intergenerationally.  (FW) Womer.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-12:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Performance and Identity (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. What are we to do with works of art and aspects of pop culture that, at best, offend modern sensibilities and, at worst, do harm? If live theater is supposed to depict the dynamic complexity of others, providing what Nataki Garrett has named “a space for witnessing and reflection,” how do we handle plays that instead deny the full humanity of their characters? Ought they to be buried, relegated to classrooms…or can performance remediate their ills? This course aims to address such questions with a deep dive into contemporary versions of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a play that explicitly endorses antisemitic and racist attitudes and yet continues to be popular onstage. During the term, we will focus on increasingly transformative productions and interpretations of Merchant; we will not center Shakespeare so much as engage the diverse set of theater makers and authors who dare to speak back to his works. Throughout it all, we will experiment with different genres of descriptive and analytical writing, letting the artists—and their efforts to grapple with the darker aspects of our cultural legacy—provide a model for our own explorations of identity and belonging in modern America.  (FW) York.

Winter 2022, WRIT 100-13:  Writing Seminar for First-Years: Generational Trauma and Graphic Memoir (3).
 Prerequisite:  First-year standing. Some traumas we carry in life we experience firsthand, but others are passed onto us by the people who raise us and the people who raised them. In this class, we will read three acclaimed graphic memoirs—Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—that explore complicated family dynamics and the bearing of personal traumas, such as discrimination and assault, and collective traumas, such as war and genocide, on familial relationships intergenerationally.  (FW) Womer.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-01: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Argument and Civic Participation (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. In this seminar, we will research and write persuasive essays about contemporary civic issues while learning the basics of argument. By reading critically and thinking about current events, you will have an opportunity to discover and write about issues that intrigue you. We will read from a wide range of genres and dissect contemporary and classic essays to serve as models of instruction and inspiration. However, we will learn about our topic by reading what other students have written, focusing class time on improving writing skills through peer review, class discussion and writing exercises. Learning to write persuasive, thesis-driven essays for public audiences will prepare you for the kinds of writing you will encounter in your academic, civic and professional life. Writing about topics in which you are deeply invested will not only help you improve as a writer but also teach you how to participate in ongoing political and social conversations that are important to you and your audience. (FW) Abry.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-02: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Shut Up and Play: Black Athletes and Activism (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Colin Kaepernick’s national-anthem protest revealed the complicated relationship between black athletes and American democracy. Raising questions linked to patriotism, free speech, and labor relations, this situation shows—among other things—why the interdisciplinary analysis advocated by Africana Studies provides a full understanding of contemporary social realities. We pursue three goals tied to such enhanced comprehension. First, we learn to write clear, organized, and well-supported prose through assignments demanding skill in different types of verbal expression. Second, we strive to read multimedia materials and to use these sources in public discussions about citizenship. Finally, we try to place current debates about black athletic activism within the broader context of civil disobedience and post-Brown vs. Board pursuits of racial equality. Our class is anchored by the exploration of four case studies: Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the army; John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics; Serena Williams’s boycott of Indian Wells; and Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem. (FW) Hill.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-03: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Old Time True Crime (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. True crime and crime reporting fascinate us - popular culture bears witness to our collective preoccupation with unsolved crime. This seminar focuses on a selection of primary source digital archives, exploring the advent of newspaper reporting on crime and criminals in the U.S., England, and Australia in the long nineteenth century. We’ll examine questions of audience, language, and perspective, and focus on crime, criminals, and victims as sensational entertainment. We will compare and contrast with models of contemporary crime and true crime reporting and discuss the history of policing as well as the concept of the EU’s “Right to be forgotten” data privacy law and its potential impact on primary sources. Students should be prepared to encounter unpleasant or disconcerting material. (FW) Kane.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-04: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Virtual Reality (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Through this course you will learn to research and write about how virtual reality (VR) will transform our daily experiences over the next decades. We will examine how technological advances emerge from academic research labs, and how those trends are brought to market as products. We will examine what scholars and business leaders are saying about VR in order to reveal various techniques of writing. You will gain experience in writing technical reports based on research sources. We also will look at the ways that fiction and film are shaping society’s perception of VR. For the assignments, you will investigate a specific aspect of VR in an area of your interest. The course ends with student-led discussions about use case scenarios for VR (as well as augmented reality and mixed reality) in education, entertainment, and society. (FW) Barry.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-05: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Gothic Novel, Then and Now (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Beginning with the first gothic novel in 1764, the gothic has thrilled readers for centuries. Featuring a variety of foes, the gothic novel offers readers a way to explore their deepest fears, especially the monsters (real and imaginary) who lurk among us, haunting our houses and our minds. In this course, we will read a wide range of texts— from Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) to Carmen Maria Machado’s recently-published memoir, In the Dream House (2019)—in order to explore the persistence of the gothic in our cultural imagination. (FW) Walle.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-06: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Middle East and North Africa in Films (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. This interdisciplinary course examines the Middle East and North Africa through films and academic texts drawn from history, comparative politics, film studies, and sociology. Students will develop a critical approach to understanding the social movements, cultures, and life of ordinary people of the region. Within the discourse of colonialism and post-colonialism debates, students will gain insights into topics such as nation-building, women’s leadership through popular music, poverty, uprisings, and the humanitarian crisis of refugees. Students will also explore how the use of cinema has served to address, define, restore, or retell stories of a diverse region. (FW) Al-Ahmad.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-07: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Animal Intimacies (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Non-human animals occupy a central force in our lives. We love them, wear them, eat them, study them, experiment on them, honor them in our art, poetry, and film, and establish therapeutic relationships with them. Animals have long served as a reflection of our own (in)humanity, and this class will offer a close look at the human-animal bond through different genres of writing, including but not limited to poetry, personal essays, food writing, animal rights and environmental activist writing, and comics. (FW) Kharputly.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-08: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Good Wife (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. The good wife, or, how to survive a marriage, run a household, and save a kingdom. This seminar examines two iconic wives in literature: Griselda and Scheherazade. One is known for her sacrificial patience, the other, cunning fabrication. Yet both share the status of female paragons around whom a community coheres. Reading an eclectic range of texts from the medieval to the postmodern, we ask how gender shapes representation, and vice versa. We chart the various transformations of the two female archetypes through literary history and are on the lookout for moments of breakdown under the burden of exemplarity. And if their goodness resides in securing common profit, how do Griselda and Scheherazade compare to other figures of femininity, such as the diva and the whore? Throughout the seminar, our emphasis is on learning the craft of academic writing via close reading, research, and engagement with critical sources. That is, we read, think, and write like Griselda and Scheherazade—with fortitude and deftness. (FW) Kao.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-09: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Don’t “I” Me: Privilege Otherness and Writing Good (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. In this course we examine “One of these things is not like the others” (aka impostor) syndrome and its effect on the human quest to feel good enough. Our reading and writing explore the complexities of and correspondence between (suggested) inferiority and otherness based on factors such as color, gender, education, sexual orientation, privilege and language. We will dig into works from, among others: Kendrick Lamar, Peggy McIntosh, Claudia Rankine, Tucker Carlson and Wes Anderson. (FW) Fuentes.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-10: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Mysteries, Puzzles, and Conundrums (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Melville wrote that “significance lurks in all things.” In other words, meaning exists everywhere but is hidden and sometimes difficult, even impossible to discover. Upon this belief rests the possibility of mystery. And it is with mysteries that we concern ourselves—”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 read is some puzzle, secret, riddle, enigma, ambiguity, 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 the limitations of human discovery. We approach your own 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.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-11: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Adaptation X2 (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Adaptation X2 focuses upon developing students’ skills in analytical writing by exploring case studies of the always fascinating and debate-producing question of adapting novels into films. In addition, each case explores at least two instances of adaptations of one original. These scenarios provide rich and complex material for class discussion that will be focused upon facilitating individual students’ essays. Possible texts and authors include crime fictions and films beginning with Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler; science fiction from Forbidden Planet to Black Mirror and Dune (a major new film version is forthcoming!), and classics from William Shakespeare and Jane Austen to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. (FW) Adams.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-12: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Aspects of Elizabeth (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) is among history’s most fascinating figures. She ruled a small island, beset by threats both external and internal, during a period of tremendous political, religious and cultural change. Her 45-year reign saw the conspiracies and eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the consolidation of the Church of England, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the flowering of English culture in such figures as Shakespeare, Donne, and Marlowe. We learn about both the public and private Elizabeth by focusing on four distinct topics: her own poetry, letters and speeches; the portraits of her as princess and queen; her controversial personal and political relationship with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and films about Elizabeth. The primary texts of the course are each other’s essays; we learn about our topic by reading what other students have written, while focusing most of our class time on improving our writing skills. (FW) Dobin.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-13: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Fables, Animal Tales, and Tricksters (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. Different cultures have used animals and tricksters as allegorical elements or as symbols to foster particular ideologies. From Aesop’s fables to Native American tales, across the globe we can discover connections between animals, tricksters, and people illustrating different cultural, political, and social norms. In western popular culture, animal tales are still used as allegories for political satire or social criticism. What do apes, birds, pigs, coyotes, rabbits, frogs, or foxes have in common with humans? How and why do cultural representations of particular animal tales change? We will read key animal tales, examine themes and patterns, and trace different versions of animal stories right up to the 21st century. (FW) Ruiz.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-14: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Nature of Nature: Environmental Thought and Literature (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. This seminar is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How do writers and environmental thinkers understand their relationships to “the natural world”? How can we understand our own? We read widely within environmental literature. Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, provide scaffolding for our discussion of “nature”, “truth”, “individuality”, “community”, “life”, “death”, “knowledge”, and “mystery”. We explore the implications of these ideas for an individual life as well as for a globalized world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention. (FW) Green.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-15: Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Healing Power of Nature (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. In this section students will read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, an account of vital factors that helped concentration camp inmates survive, then study three key works that deal with major personal struggles healed through outdoor activities and adventures. The works are Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and Fred Chappell’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are. We’ll connect these works to extreme sports, the outdoor recreation industry, environmental issues, mindfulness, and scientific studies of healing. Our goal is to study and discuss hope and healing in this and other troubled times. (FW) Smout.

Fall 2021, WRIT 100-16: Writing Seminar for First-Years: Controversies in Children’s Literature (3). Prerequisite: First-year standing. In this seminar, students engage with works written for children (some classic and some modern; some fiction and some nonfiction) and apply a critical lens to issues involving violent content, gender representation, racial stereotyping, religious objections, and historical accuracy. Instruction in research methods and proper use of information is also included. Students can expect a dynamic environment with a lot of small-group discussion and activities. (FW) Harrington.