ENGL 2890

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - October 16, 2017 11:09AM EDT
  • Course Catalog - June 14, 2017 7:15PM EDT

ENGL 2890
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

ENGL 2890 offers guidance and an audience for students who wish to gain skill in expository writing—a common term for critical, reflective, investigative, and creative nonfiction. Each section provides a context for writing defined by a form of exposition, a disciplinary area, a practice, or a topic intimately related to the written medium. Course members will read in relevant published material and write and revise their own work regularly, while reviewing and responding to one another's. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term. Topics differ for each section.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 18 students per section.
Prerequisites/Corequisites Completion of First-Year Writing Seminar requirement or permission of the instructor.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)
Satisfies Requirement This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. It fulfills distribution requirements for the humanities in Arts & Sciences and most other colleges. Taken with the instructor's permission, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

Comments For descriptions of each topic, please visit the course website: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/engl2880-2890/

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Exploring the Personal Essay

  •  6643 ENGL 2890   SEM 101

  • In this class, we will read and write personal essays, exploring the various possibilities within the genre. We will explore the power of image and specific detail, the uses and limits of the first-person narrating self, and the boundary between public and private. Reading will focus on contemporary essayists, possibly including Leslie Jamison, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Hilton Als, and John Jeremiah Sullivan; we will also read classic essays, including those by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and James Baldwin.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: Do Our Stories Matter?

  •  6644 ENGL 2890   SEM 102

  • Can a story take down a system? Under what conditions? This class will examine the role of the personal narrative as a political weapon. We will analyze the impact of art on the sociopolitical landscape through the works of James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. We will then interrogate our own biases, assumptions, desires, relationships, and fears in order to write the self into a global context. The essays we craft will confront the intersections of political and personal trauma, history and family, identity and theory. Ultimately, we will ponder, “Do our stories matter? Why or why not?”

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Legal Science Fictions

  •  6645 ENGL 2890   SEM 103

  • Science fiction writers build whole new social systems, and questions of how to govern these new societies inevitably come up. Ought this robot be considered a legal person? Does this cool new policing tactic infringe our rights? Should earth laws apply in space? In this course, we'll consider how such legal topics as personhood, equality, and criminality arise in science fiction and in real cases, and how issues of gender, race, labor, and policing and punishment are complicated by technology in our own world.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: The Epic Western

  •  6646 ENGL 2890   SEM 104

  • Sweeping vistas. Dark canyons. A cowboy hero, and---the Vietnam War? Epic Westerns shape the legendary landscape of the American West and dramatize individual and collective efforts to establish national values. At the same time, they track the way those values change over time, reflecting contemporary cultural or political events, e.g. the antiwar movement, feminism, the nation's bicentennial. Looking at recent political struggles, we'll discover what history Western narratives engage, and what they obscure.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Apocalyptic Vision in Literature and Film

  •  6647 ENGL 2890   SEM 105

  • "Apocalypse" is the end of the world---or ourselves---but it also introduces new forms of being, desire and knowledge. In this course we'll analyze apocalyptic fantasies by writing critical essays: a skill (and art) that crosses disciplines. Course material includes a cult novels (I am Legend), accounts of apocalyptic desire (Dr. Strangelove and Destroy, She Said), and works staging the collapse of mundane reality.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Global Romance: Love and the Political

  •  6648 ENGL 2890   SEM 106

  • Does love create worlds or put them in question? Does it secure a community, or mark its dissolution? What is love when it meets the law? This course examines the dialogue between romantic and political narratives, tracing the ways they interrupt, galvanize, or complement each other. We will bring together fictions of love's sway over the self and through reviews and critical essays, we'll examine what happens when romance is placed at the heart of tales of empire, migration, reunion, and revolt.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Writing Back to the Media: Essays and Arguments

  •  8671 ENGL 2890   SEM 107

  • Good investigative journalists write well and use their reportage to argue effectively. How can we adopt features of their writing for a variety of purposes and audiences, academic and popular? Our weekly readings will include features from the New Yorker, The Atlantic, slate.com, and the New York Times. Students will write essays of opinion and argument—in such forms as news analysis, investigative writing, blog posts, and op-ed pieces—on topics such as environmental justice, the value of an elite education, human rights conflicts, the uses of technology, gender equality, and the ethics of journalism itself.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Creative Nonfiction: The Invented I

  •  8988 ENGL 2890   SEM 108

  • In this class, we’ll explore the personal essay, focusing on how the form can be a tool for self-discovery, self-reflection, and self-invention. As thinkers, we’ll focus on the practice of critical reflection, learn how to interrogate our experiences, make peace with the imperfections of our memory, and become more conscious of the particular ways in which we see the world. As writers, we’ll study narrative craft, including scene, dialogue, metaphor and character development through novels, documentaries and audio stories.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)