WRI 101 - Course list for Writing in the Liberal Arts

Writing 101: Writing in the Liberal Arts
Spring 2018 Sections

WRI 101 [A]  The American Dream
MWF 11:30 - 12:20
Roberts

U.S. citizens perceive many challenges to the quintessential “American Dream,” a belief that upward mobility and success will result from hard work and determination. The concept of the American Dream finds its way into our historical, political, economic and cultural narratives. How has the American Dream been enshrined in our founding documents and legislation? Where do we find the cultural and popular manifestations which reinforce this narrative? Why do we see education as a chief ingredient to achieving the American Dream? What are impacts of immigration, income immobility, and socio-economic considerations on this intractable belief in American exceptionalism? Students will inquire into the ethos of the American Dream in primary documents such as The Declaration of Independence and Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay on the frontier. The promulgation of the American dream in music, literature, and the media occupies another project in the course, and students will also examine such topics as public education and school choice, immigration, and income immobility as these intersect with this important American ideal. 

WRI 101 [B]  Religion and the Public Square
MWF 9:30 - 10:20
Blum

The role of religion in society has reemerged as a flashpoint of public debate. This class will examine a variety of issues that emerge from the fundamental question: what role should religion play in American public life? In addition to honing the skills necessary for effective writing and argumentation, the class will draw on a variety of perspectives that engage fundamental questions about the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities that citizens have, and the role that religion plays with regard to them. Course work includes a number of brief, low-stakes written assignments, as well as consistent engagement with course readings through regular participation in class discussion. Three major written projects are also required, each of which involves detailed analysis of texts, while also challenging students to articulate and defend their own positions.

WRI 101 [C]  Religion and the Public Square
MWF 10:30 - 11:20
Blum

The role of religion in society has reemerged as a flashpoint of public debate. This class will examine a variety of issues that emerge from the fundamental question: what role should religion play in American public life? In addition to honing the skills necessary for effective writing and argumentation, the class will draw on a variety of perspectives that engage fundamental questions about the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities that citizens have, and the role that religion plays with regard to them. Course work includes a number of brief, low-stakes written assignments, as well as consistent engagement with course readings through regular participation in class discussion. Three major written projects are also required, each of which involves detailed analysis of texts, while also challenging students to articulate and defend their own positions.

WRI 101 [E]  Know Thyself: Writing, Editing, and Self-Discovery
TR 3:05 - 4:20
Lawless

How well do you know yourself? We sometimes imagine that we come by our knowledge of ourselves in quiet acts of introspection, executed best in long bouts of solitude. But when you reflect on what it means to be you, you do not do so in a vacuum. You rely on resources that your society has provided to you. You draw on the language and stories of your community to make sense of your experiences, needs, and aspirations. And you benefit from conversation with others, who will challenge your assumptions and provide perspectives that transcend your own. In this course, we will explore the ways in which public discourse affects our senses of who we are, for better or for worse.

Throughout the semester, students will complete a series of short, ungraded assignments, in which they will practice the diverse skills involved in writing, editing, and revising. In addition, students will draft and revise four major writing projects. First, students will analyze and critique a published personal essay, identifying ways in which the author fails to recognize or to comprehend important aspects of his or her own story. In the second and third projects, students will analyze and critique public discourses about anger and disease (respectively). Here, our goal will be to identify the unspoken (and sometimes pernicious) assumptions that underlie these discourses, and the ways in which these assumptions distort our senses of ourselves. Finally, students will write their own personal essays, in which they will attempt to grapple with the ways in which public discourse has shaped their self-conceptions.

WRI 101 [F]  Writing about Modern Physics and Technology
MWF 8:30 - 9:20
Yukich

Designed for any first-year student, this course invites students to study the fundamentals of several areas of 20^th-century physics and related technology, including quantum physics and nuclear energy, and development of the transistor, the atom bomb, and the laser. We will also consider the social ramifications of these technologies. All of the assignments and much of our discussion in this course will focus on learning to write concisely and unambiguously-for the educated general public-about science and technology. Readings will include a book, book reviews, news reports, and scholarly journal articles. We will examine readings with various degrees of formality and critique texts of varying quality. We will consider how good science writing must depend on the intended audience. The major assignments will include a book review of Richard Feynman’s QED, a news report on a recent development in physics or technology, and a research paper of the student’s choice. Secondary assignments will include a scientific abstract, peer review critiques, other informal writings, and regular grammar exercises.

WRI 101 [G]  Four Writers on Racism
TR 9:40 - 10:55
Hillard

The cultural history of the United States has been (and continues to be) energized and defined by public intellectual writers who produce discourses focused on the political, social, historical and lived experiences of American racism.  Using concepts and techniques first set forth in classical rhetoric, the course asks students to produce four written arguments that reckon with contestable issues found in the works of four contemporary writers:  Danielle Allen, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead, the 2017-18 Reynolds Lecturer who will visit Davidson in March.  We will probe several key questions throughout the semester, the responses to which will grow in complexity as our study proceeds: What are the special challenges to constructing agency in public intellectual discourses about U.S. racism?  How does the African-American rhetorical tradition inform current writing on the costs of white supremacy?  How might contemporary students’ own discursive practices evolve by studying the rhetorics of these four writers?

WRI 101 [H]  Disadvantage and Privilege
MWF 1:30 - 2:20
Delia Deckard

Each of the writing assignments, and the majority of the seminar’s discussion will ask you to attend to a single question: “What are the systems through which advantage and privilege replicate across generations in the United States?” Students will be asked to complete daily reflection assignments-short, low-stakes, unrevised and evaluated for improvement-as well as draft and revise four major projects. The first project asks students to reflect on a contemporary debate about an issue of inequality, critically engaging with the argument being made. The second the third projects require students to construct arguments parallel to those exemplified in articles. The fourth and final writing project is an original argument made in response to a specific prompt.  Readings include works by Junot Diaz, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Clint Smith. 

WRI 101 [I]  The Future of Humans
MWF 8:30 - 9:20
Robb

This course is about the ways technology is likely to transform us-physically and psychologically-in the next century. Some of the questions we’ll look at are scientific: What transformations can we anticipate? What is the likely pace of change? What technology is readily available? But our readings and discussions will also lead us into vexed philosophical questions about, for example, human nature, personal identity, distributive justice, and the best life for a human being. Topics include biomedical enhancement, artificial intelligence, immortality through “uploading,” and transhumanism.  Students will be asked to complete a number of short, low-stakes, unrevised assignments as well as four major projects, each drafted and revised. 

WRI 101 [J]  Love, Death, and Art
MWF 10:30 - 11:20
Kuzmanovich

In this course, we read and write about three of the great and sacred things- love, death, and art.  They are great because they call upon us to be great.  They are sacred because when they are encountered, they refocus our sense of time as well as our horizontal and vertical relations with that which is outside of us and much of what is inside but lying dormant and unvisited.  In other words, they sometimes create and sometimes release us from tunnel vision.  I actually believe that we are neurologically changed by the processes of writing and reading; these activities, done with full attention and discipline, rewire our brains.

My method is to help you recognize the formal and linguistic conventions that give an inkling of what artists returning to these subjects when through as some trifle focused their sensibilities and flooded their senses with something akin to norepinephrine, something that after many revisions, they were willing to offer to others as art.  A number of such inklings you will choose to echo and combine in your own way, and that will be the conscious making of your own writing style.  While we read, we’ll spend most of our time imaginatively retracing the paths to those inspired trifles.  Conversely, when we write, we’ll learn to drop as many breadcrumbs (or plant buoys, to un-mix the metaphor) for the readers to find those terrible depths and touchingly hidden-in-plain-sight trifles pulsing in our own writing.  That means I want you not merely to know the vague outline of these authors’ worlds when you read their work but to slow down and caress the sometimes marvelous and sometimes revolting details out of which they build those worlds.  Reading at this level has little to do with half-hearted escapist saunterings away from the borders of our own world, or worse, a willing confusion of our real world with their fictional ones.  Reading this way, reading as writer, reading for the suggestively hidden depths and technical lessons in style, makes life both more endurable and more enjoyable; writing this way gives shape to moments we usually cannot articulate to others, from a future-foreclosing bad first kiss (or hope-elevating good one) to mute but touching events suffused with beauty and pity.

WRI 101 [K]  True Crime
TR 8:15 - 9:30
Lewis

A New York Times article from July, 1999 entitled “Journalists, or Detectives? Depends on Who’s Asking,” reported that “Edmund J. Pankau, a private investigator who teaches techniques to journalists and detectives alike, said similar research skills were required for both jobs.” Predicated on the similarities between academic research and detective work, this course focuses on forensics as a model for evaluating evidence and using it to construct an argument. Readings, many of which come from sources like the New Yorker magazine, consist of reporting on notable real-life mysteries, both solved and unsolved; actual characters who execute, offend, and elude the law; and current quandaries in criminal law. A few films will also be included. Students’ writing will largely, though not exclusively, involve reporting on real crime in its many facets and from various perspectives. 

Writing 101: Writing in the Liberal Arts
Fall 2017 Sections

WRI 101 [A] Lives of Girls and Women in the Novel
MWF 9:30-10:20
Gay

In this course we will study a series of fairy tales and novels featuring female protagonists who struggle to define themselves in the face of societal repression. Oral and written discussion will focus on issues such as moral perspectives, female doubling, social anxiety, and sexual desire. Our will be partially informed by essays written by professional scholars who have addressed these issues and fictional works. Novels we will read include Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, English, 1982); The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, American, 1905); The Bride Price (Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian, 1976); and Lives of Girls and Women (Alice Munro, Canadian, 1971).

Students will compose a series of summaries and critiques throughout the semester to help develop skills that will be useful in completing four formal writing projects: developing an argument, proposing a clear definition, advocating a position, and critically assessing narrative theory. As an introduction to your thinking, we will first examine a series of fairy tales translated from The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (German): “The Three Little Men in the Forest,” “Maiden without Hands,” “The Robber Bridegroom,” “Princess Mouseskin,” “The Clever Farmer’s Daughter,” and “Cinderella.”

WRI 101 [B] Embracing Good Argument: Deliberation in Democratic Life
TR 12:15-1:30
Hillard

Critics and citizens alike worry about the quality of our political and civic discourses, pointing to hostile interactions, propagandistic tendencies, flawed reasoning, and a general agonistic atmosphere as symptoms of an eroded and corrupted contemporary public discourse. Many Davidson students are interested in pushing back at this new status quo in order to help the country return to more civil and reciprocal exchanges. This course offers students the tools for doing so by focusing on the social and rhetorical action called deliberation, the act of weighing alternative claims and positions through robust and conversation among persons who disagree about issues that matter are as eager to discover commonalities as they are to acknowledge differences. The course poses an overarching question that will be revisited as the seminar evolves: How can public disagreement become productive rather than combative? Drawing upon classical rhetorical techniques, students will evaluate and produce arguments in response to four contemporary issues that have been approached and valued differently by persons who hold contrasting personal and/or political commitments, are shaped by multiple ideologic assumptions, or adhere to various values, norms, and ideals.  Students will be guided in methods for drafting and revising their work and will be given opportunities to have their arguments responded to be interested readers. 

WRI 101 [C] Embracing Good Argument: Deliberation in Democratic Life
TR 12:15 -1:30
Hogan

Critics and citizens alike worry about the quality of our political and civic discourses, pointing to hostile interactions, propagandistic tendencies, flawed reasoning, and a general agonistic atmosphere as symptoms of an eroded and corrupted contemporary public discourse. Many Davidson students are interested in pushing back at this new status quo in order to help the country return to more civil and reciprocal exchanges. This course offers students the tools for doing so by focusing on the social and rhetorical action called deliberation, the act of weighing alternative claims and positions through robust and conversation among persons who disagree about issues that matter are as eager to discover commonalities as they are to acknowledge differences. The course poses an overarching question that will be revisited as the seminar evolves: How can public disagreement become productive rather than combative? Drawing upon classical rhetorical techniques, students will evaluate and produce arguments in response to four contemporary issues that have been approached and valued differently by persons who hold contrasting personal and/or political commitments, are shaped by multiple ideologic assumptions, or adhere to various values, norms, and ideals.  Students will be guided in methods for drafting and revising their work and will be given opportunities to have their arguments responded to be interested readers. 

WRI 101 [D] The American West
TR 8:15- 9:30
Garcia Peacock

What is the American West? Where is the American West? And, why does discussion of the ways in which its diverse people, places, and spaces have changed over time ignite passionate debate among historians and the public alike? In this writing seminar, we will pursue answers to these questions through an examination of the key ideas and images that have shaped our view of this region since the nineteenth century. A series of five writing projects will help students gain broader and more nuanced understandings of the West through a pursuit of three key themes: race, environment, and representation. Each of these writing projects will take the form of a multi-week sequence of activities aimed at encouraging critical and close engagement with a wide range of texts, including: journalistic writing, creative non-fiction, scholarly articles, historical monographs, and visual materials such as painting, photography, public art, and the landscape itself. By the end of the course, students will emerge with a portfolio of five essays that should, as a set, offer a unique perspective on how and why the American West remains a relevant topic and site of debate in the early twenty-first century. 

WRI 101 [E] In Stitches
MW 8:05 - 9:20
Stutts

Psychological functioning has a profound effect on one’s health. In recent decades, research has focused on the contribution of positive emotions on overall wellbeing. This course will explore the intersection of positive psychology and healthcare by answering the broad question: How do positive psychological variables affect health? We will investigate this question through the discussion of empirical articles, memoirs, case studies, and videos. In addition, there are five major writing projects: 1) a personal reflection on how positive variables influenced your health or the health of someone in your life; 2) a textual analysis of how positive psychology concepts map onto a patient memoir; 3) an argument paper about how the mind affects the body; 4) a research paper on a specific positive psychology and health topic of your choice; and 5) a synthesis of the major themes across the course and an extension into what the field should prioritize in the future to optimize functioning. 

WRI 101 [F] Codex to Cloud: Scriptures in the Digital Age
MWF 12:30 - 1:20
Snyder

When people think of the sacred scriptures of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, they generally think of books: the “book,” or codex, is the quintessential form of sacred scripture. This simple fact raises intriguing issues: how does the technology of the book-this particular way of formatting, arranging, and presenting information-influence the message of these scriptures? How does the meaning of scripture change when it’s furnished with pictures? And what happens when these scriptures migrate to unbound, endlessly mutable digital forms? Does a sacred text become less sacred when it’s atomized in “the cloud” or lives on a phone? The course begins by looking at the changes that happened when books passed from the roll to the codex form, in part, by constructing our own hand-written papyrus codex. We consider the transition from hand-copied manuscripts to printed books, and reflect on the forms that scriptures have assumed up to the present. Then, we’ll try to imagine the future of scripture in the digital age. The topic is well-suited to a course that emphasizes writing, as we’ll be considering the question of form and meaning where scripture is concerned and in our own writing. 

WRI 101 [G] Religion and Violence
MWF 9:30 - 10:20
Blum

News outlets regularly carry stories of individuals or groups engaging in violence that is presented-by either the perpetrator or the media-as religious in nature. This course is animated by the central question of how intimate the relationship between violence and religion is and how it may best be explained. Course assignments include regular written questions in response to course readings; brief low-stakes “discussion papers” that guide class conversation; and three major written projects-each of which will undergo review and revision-that consider different perspectives on the relationship between religion and violence. The goal of the course is to provide a variety of theoretical resources on which students can draw in formulating their own positions on this fraught question.

WRI 101 [H] Religion and Violence
MWF 11:30 - 12:20
Blum

News outlets regularly carry stories of individuals or groups engaging in violence that is presented-by either the perpetrator or the media-as religious in nature. This course is animated by the central question of how intimate the relationship between violence and religion is and how it may best be explained. Course assignments include regular written questions in response to course readings; brief low-stakes “discussion papers” that guide class conversation; and three major written projects-each of which will undergo review and revision-that consider different perspectives on the relationship between religion and violence. The goal of the course is to provide a variety of theoretical resources on which students can draw in formulating their own positions on this fraught question.

WRI 101 [I] Religion and Violence
MWF 1:30 - 2:20
Blum

News outlets regularly carry stories of individuals or groups engaging in violence that is presented-by either the perpetrator or the media-as religious in nature. This course is animated by the central question of how intimate the relationship between violence and religion is and how it may best be explained. Course assignments include regular written questions in response to course readings; brief low-stakes “discussion papers” that guide class conversation; and three major written projects-each of which will undergo review and revision-that consider different perspectives on the relationship between religion and violence. The goal of the course is to provide a variety of theoretical resources on which students can draw in formulating their own positions on this fraught question.

WRI 101 [J] White Supremacy and Racism
MWF 9:30 - 10:20
T. Foley

The core questions that guide this course and its written assignments are “How have enslaved and oppressed people of color in the United States most poignantly and incisively expressed their experience of white supremacy?” and “How, in turn, have white people most effectively and cunningly legitimated-at least in their own minds-their supremacy and its concomitant racism?” Students will be asked to post several short, low-stakes, unrevised writing assignments on Moodle as well as to complete four major projects, each drafted, responded to in either workshop or conference, and revised. 

WRI 101 [K] In a Family Way: American Memoirs of Life Together
MWF 11:30 - 12:20
Plank

This course focuses on the nature and diversity of American family experience as it shows itself in selected literary memoirs. In doing so, it will ask throughout about the process of recollecting a life and writing about it, how the story we tell of ourselves is also a story of others, especially those we know as kin; and, it will probe these stories for what they tell us about the impact of gender, race, class, generation, and ethnicity in the shaping of family experience. These are big questions. We get at them by the smaller tasks of reading good texts well day after day and writing clearly about them. The smaller tasks add up and may be the greater endeavor after all.

The writing assignments include a number of short essays (in the vicinity of 5-6) that may range from a paragraph to 4-5 pages. These may involve matters of style (the power of a well-chosen word, a paragraph that does what a paragraph ought to), questions of interpretation (explanation, analysis), or thematic concerns (back to that family and why everyone is talking about his or her father). As a final project, each student will write an episode of family narrative (7-8 pages) with commentary (2-3 pages) relating the narrative to two other works read in the course. We will focus less on how much we write than how well.  Likely texts for the course: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club; Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seeds; Tracy Smith, Ordinary Light; and Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life.

WRI 101 [L] Know Thyself: Writing, Editing, and Self-discovery
MW 2:30 - 3:45
Lawless

How well do you know yourself? We sometimes imagine that we come by our knowledge of ourselves in quiet acts of introspection, executed best in long bouts of solitude. But when you reflect on what it means to be you, you do not do so in a vacuum. You rely on resources that your society has provided to you. You draw on the language and stories of your community to make sense of your experiences, needs, and aspirations. And you benefit from conversation with others, who will challenge your assumptions and provide perspectives that transcend your own. In this course, we will explore the ways in which public discourse affects our senses of who we are, for better or for worse.

Throughout the semester, students will complete a series of short, ungraded assignments, in which they will practice the diverse skills involved in writing, editing, and revising. In addition, students will draft and revise four major writing projects. First, students will analyze and critique a published personal essay, identifying ways in which the author fails to recognize or to comprehend important aspects of his or her own story. In the second and third projects, students will analyze and critique public discourses about anger and disease (respectively). Here, our goal will be to identify the unspoken (and sometimes pernicious) assumptions that underlie these discourses, and the ways in which these assumptions distort our senses of ourselves. Finally, students will write their own personal essays, in which they will attempt to grapple with the ways in which public discourse has shaped their self-conceptions.

WRI 101 [M] Otherness and Belonging
TR 9:40 - 10:55
Utkin

“I am alone, I thought, and they are everyone” is one of the many haunting utterances of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most famous antihero, the Underground Man. Like him, the other protagonists of this course are outcasts, dissidents, and strangers-jaded office clerks and repressed misanthropes, queer activists and “enemies of the state”-who refuse to conform to societal norms, disrupt conventions by saying the unsayable, and write and make art from the margins, the realm of undesirables. Focusing mainly on Russia and Eastern Europe, we will analyze representations of otherness and belonging in fiction, non-fiction, film, and photography. We will explore narratives of undesirability through the thematic prisms of exile, immigration, and guest laborers; gender and sexuality; bodily disability; mental illness; prison writing, anti-Semitism and ethnic difference; religion; and unrequited love. The concept of undesirability will also be our point of entry for constructing arguments about community, privilege, and a society without outsiders.

The writing assignments will include four essays (3-5 pages), each drafted, peer-reviewed, and revised. The goal of the essays is to hone the skills of framing an argument, engaging with someone else’s ideas about otherness and belonging, and articulating an analysis of a given problem in concise and elegant prose. In addition to the four main writing assignments, students will be asked to produce a number of short unrevised writing assignments such as reading responses, brief film reviews, and close reading exercises. All students will be asked to nominate a text of any genre that grapples with the notions of otherness and belonging in salient ways. The class favorite will be included on the syllabus. 

WRI 101 [N] The Ethical Diet
MWF 10:30 - 11:20
Jankovic

What is good food? The first thing that comes to mind is that it is simply food that is tasty and healthy. But, in addition to ourselves, our food choices affect non-human animals, local and non-local economies, and the environment. So we should seriously consider the idea that in deciding what we eat, we make important moral choices.

In this course, we aim to acquire tools that will help us think and write clearly about our food choices. We will ask questions such as: Does the suffering involved in the industrial farming of animals make it immoral to consume animal products? Do we have moral obligations to non-human animals? To what extent do our food habits contribute to social injustice? Is the amount of food wasted in rich countries immoral, given that billions of people are hungry? We will look at several contemporary movements that try to address the ethical problems with the standard American diet: vegetarianism, veganism, locavorism. We will aim to articulate and address the conception of good eating developed by these movements. We will consider whether, given the different cultural and religious values that influence food choices, there can be a reasonable food policy that would apply to a large number of people. You will be asked to complete four writing projects. Each will consist of a series of assignments spread over four weeks. Only the final paper in each project will be graded.

WRI 101 [O] The U.S. in the Age of Fracture
TR 9:40 - 10:55
Wertheimer

Many observers worry that public life in the United States has fractured over the past several decades. Critics worry that the sense of national community has shrunk to ever-smaller circles, in response to such forces as the polarization of the electorate and the concentration of wealth. In this course, students will explore the so-called “Age of Fracture” in recent U.S. history, paying close attention to public debates among thinkers from multiple academic disciplines who represent a wide array of political perspectives.

Students will write several short, low-stakes, unrevised papers in response to the assigned readings. They will also write four graded papers, each drafted and revised. All of these assignments ask students to respond, in one way or another, to the writings of public intellectuals of their own choosing. These papers begin short and simple and grow progressively longer and more substantive. The first project asks students to choose an interesting public intellectual’s argument and disagree with it. The second project asks students to choose a different public intellectual’s argument and agree with it. The third asks students to identify such an argument, then partially disagree and partially agree with it. The final assignment asks students to assemble arguments of their own, based on primary-source research.

WRI 101 [P] Astrobiology: Life in the Universe
TR 8:15 - 9:30
Thompson

Are we alone? Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? These questions hold much public interest, and the answers to them would have profound scientific, religious, and philosophical implications. To fully appreciate any answer that may be found, we must first explore a different question: What is life? The answer to this seemingly straightforward question is not simple at all, and has been one of the great debates among scientists. Is there one definitive answer as to what constitutes life? Does the answer to this question depend upon where in the Universe the life in question resides? In this course, we will explore life on a variety of scales, including life on and near Earth, life on Mars, life in the Solar System, and life in the Universe. As we move farther into space away from our Earthly home, science has provided less evidence and we therefore must rely more heavily on our own beliefs, knowledge, and creativity to formulate meaningful stances about the possibility of life on the grandest of scales. The course will be organized in four sections, each exploring the meaning and current understanding of life on the scales mentioned above, from Earth to the Universe at large. Students will be asked to complete four writing projects, each exploring the meaning and current understanding of life on one of the size scales mentioned above. Each project will consist of one or two low-stakes, unrevised writing assignments and one larger piece that will be drafted and revised. 

WRI 101 [Q] What Is a Body?
MWF 12:30 -1:20
Horowitz

This course examines the ways in which we bring our own life experiences to bear on the texts we read and interpret, the topics we choose to study, and the manner in which we write. We will explore these issues through a guiding question that, like the acts of reading, writing, and research, may at first seem neutral or obvious, but on further inspection gives rise to a more nuanced set of questions: Is the body a biological fact, a social production, or some combination of the two? Is it a subject, an object, or both? How do race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability affect the way a person experiences his or her own body, makes assumptions about other bodies, and is perceived by other people? Whose or what kind(s) of bodes are at stake in any given text? Why those bodies and not others? What are the ethics of writing about others’ bodies? How do different academic disciplines think and write about the body? By negotiating these and other questions together, we will challenge each other’s viewpoints; expand our socio-cultural knowledge bases; and become more thoughtful, informed, and responsible scholars. This course involves daily reading and requires you to complete four major writing projects, and one final presentation. Each writing project incorporates a planning exercise, a rough draft, and a final draft and incorporates some form of peer review. The first project asks you to analyze the way a particular body or bodies are represented in the media. The second invites you to interrogate the rhetorical construction of racialized, gendered, and/or disabled bodies in a scholarly article. For the third project, you will put into conversation two texts about disciplining the body. For your final assignment, you will conduct primary source research on a body topic of you choosing and present your findings digitally. 

WRI 101 [R] The Art of Prose
TR 3:05 - 4:20
Nelson

This course helps students develop the skills of writing in the liberal arts: critical analysis of texts, exploration of and deliberation about public intellectual issues; familiarity with research strategies; understanding the conventions of using with integrity the work of others; and crafting of inventive, correct, and rhetorically sophisticated prose. 

WRI 101 [S] Language and Identity: Negotiating Difference and Finding a Voice
TR 1:40 -2:55
Fernández

Freshman year can be a nine-month language learning process.  Students don’t usually frame the challenges of the first year this way, but the situations they encounter–whether in the college classroom, public spaces, or living quarters–involve negotiations for meaning not unlike those faced by individuals learning to use foreign or second languages across conmunicative contexts.  In the past, students who wanted to succeed were compelled to shed all traces of their home language and identity.  Today, scholars espouse an intriguing alternative, a translingual orientation that, rather than force students to conform to the communicative standards of others, prepares them to reflect critically on and take control of their language choices.  In this course, we will examine translanguaging in contact zones, spaces where difference in laguage use, as well as culture and history, meet and grapple with one another.  Through reading, discussion, and writing, we consider the limitations and affordances of traditional, “melting pot” approaches and new translingual orientations toward difference.  In the final project, students will apply course readings to their own study of translanguaging in a campus contact zone of their choice.  Ultimately, as they learn to think and write in new ways, students in the course will themselves identify and prepare to navigate the academic and social challenges of their freshman year.  The course is aimed at students of any background interested in these issues.

WRI 101 [T] Public Intellectual Science Writing
TR 1:40 - 2:55
Miller

The fields of science and technology need public, cogent writing for readers who aren’t scientists. Scientific and technological innovations are potent forces not just in our economy and environment, but also in art, ethics, politics, and education. We will study public intellectuals writing about topics such as medicine (Atul Gawande); bioweapons (Richard Preston); pesticides (Rachel Carson); car wrecks (Malcolm Gladwell); computers (Ian Parker); highway design (Langdon Winner); and the history of technology and society (Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel). Students will work to assemble a repertoire of strategies for writing in academic and public settings.

WRI 101 [U] Sex, Love, and Friendship
MWF 2:30 - 3:20
Studtmann

Sex, love, and friendship are three of the most meaningful and important areas of our lives. Yet, there is significant and sometimes violent disagreement over many important questions concerning them. For instance, some have thought that homosexuality is morally impermissible, indeed even going so far as publically executing those who engage in homosexual activities, while others have thought that homosexuality is no more and no less morally problematic than heterosexuality. Alternatively, some think that abortions are morally permissible under any conditions, while others think that abortion clinics are engaged in something tantamount to genocide. Often enough, people who discuss these issues can do little more than cite slogans in favor of their view.

In this course, we will approach a number of topics concerning sex in a much more sophisticated way. The underlying thread to the discussions and the writing assignments is the extent to which moral, legal, and practical considerations impinge upon the various facets of our sexual lives.

We engage in this project first by reading essays written about them by prominent philosophers, social critics, and other intellectuals and then by composing considered argumentative essays concerning them. In so doing, we will work to uncover many of the unreflective assumptions, biases, and categories of thought that infect our thinking and strive to arrive at deeper and more coherently articulated positions. In addition to reading and discussing the assigned essays, we will also discuss the many facets of writing. This will include special attention to sentence structure, argument construction, essay structure, and the principles of good rhetoric and good reasoning.

WRI 101 [V] Nuclear Science, Technology, and Policy
MWF 8:30 - 9:20
Kuchera

The discovery of the atomic nucleus in the early 1900s quickly led to history-changing technologies around the world. While some applications provide societal benefits, others have the power to cause mass destruction. A science with potential to advance and yet destroy civilizations needs global cooperation to understand the pros and cons of the technologies involved. In this course, we will discuss the scientific principles behind the nucleus of the atom for a general audience and investigate how the properties can be harnessed for use in everyday life. From there, we will discuss the risks and what role national and international policy should play in safeguarding the materials and regulations of nuclear science. This course has four major projects where students will reflect on what are the risks and rewards of: basic science, technological applications, environment, and governmental policy. No previous nuclear science or policy background is needed. 

WRI 101 [W] Writing Revolution: After Haiti
TR 8:15 - 9:30
Bertholf

In 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue, once the richest colony in the world, rose in rebellion under Toussaint L’Ouverture. After struggling for more than a decade, the slaves finally achieved something that had until that time remained impossible, even “unthinkable”: the first large-scale abolition of slavery in the Americas. Nowhere is this desperate bid for freedom-the Haitian Revolution-more compellingly captured than in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (first published in 1938). However, even as he writes of Toussaint’s daring and resolve, James notes that the former’s allegiance to the French Revolution was problematic, paradoxical, and ultimately tragic. Indeed, the modern notion of freedom (liberté) to which Toussaint subscribed was itself an ideal of the same Enlightenment project which sought his enslavement. In this context, what do we mean by freedom? And what does it mean to be free? This writing seminar will explore these questions by taking up both the history of these events and the continuing debates about their meaning. We will also spend a great deal of time thinking about what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the “unthinkability” of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to the question concerning freedom, then, we will also grapple with the questions of how literature writes the “unthinkable” and of how revolution challenges the representational limits and potentialities of traditional literary genres. Doing so, therefore, will allow us, finally, to think more closely about what new genres revolution makes possible, including new non-literary modes of representation.

While participating in the general discussion across the semester, students will be searching out specific research topics of their own, topics relating the seminar readings and conversation toward a topic of personal interest. In addition to this final research paper (2,500 words), students will be asked to complete two smaller essays (1,500 words each) and to keep a biweekly journal (250-word entries).

WRI 101 [Y] The Politics of Food
MWF 9:30 - 10:20
Poland

This seminar springs from the assumption that what we choose to eat, and how, where, when, and with whom we eat are political acts.  The politics entailed by our food choices become especially clear when the decision concerns eating animals, and this issue is our seminar’s focus.  We will consider– in the context of contemporary, industrialized America–how food animals are raised, fed, and slaughtered; who works in these industries and who profits from them; how animal consumption impacts human health and the health of the planet; and what forms of ethical reflection most helpfully guide our decisions.

Students will complete four writing projects, each drafted and revised.  Essay topics will emerge from each of the four considerations listed above.  Students will also produce short, unrevised and sometimes ungraded assignments.