ENGL 2890

Last Updated

  • Schedule of Classes - April 4, 2023 12:09PM EDT
  • Course Catalog - April 3, 2023 12:59PM EDT

ENGL 2890
Expository Writing

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023.

This course 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.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: completion of First-Year Writing Seminar requirement or permission of the instructor.

Distribution Category (ALC-AS, LA-AS)
Satisfies Requirement This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. Taken with the instructor's permission, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If counted toward First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward LA-AS or ALC-AS.

Comments For descriptions of each topic, please visit the university class roster.

View Enrollment Information

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Composing Podcasts

  •  3975 ENGL 2890   SEM 101

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Journalistic podcasts, like NPR favorites Invisibilia, Radiolab, Rough Translation, and Hidden Brain, pull together research, interviews, and personal experiences with music and soundscapes in order to explore contemporary social issues. In this course, you will study these podcasts and compose your own research-based podcast. To compose, you will learn to use Audacity (a free software), conduct interviews, collect secondary research, write podcast scripts, and incorporate Creative Commons sounds and music. Using podcasts as a multimodal form of inquiry, you will select and research a social issue that affects you. While podcasts will be the subject of this course, it will foster stronger writing by asking you to write a lot, substantially revise, and be able to explain and identify how different types of writing work.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Frame by Frame: Reading and Writing Montage

  •  3974 ENGL 2890   SEM 102

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    Montage assumes that some forms of knowledge may only be accessible and communicable through the collision, fragmentation, and juxtaposition of words and images, rather than through synthesis and seamless connections. This class begins with an introduction to the aesthetics and politics of montage in the films and writings of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein before turning to the function of montage in a variety of contexts and media, in the radical Black poetry of Langston Hughes, in the experimental leftist novels of H.T. Tsiang, and in the films of Third Cinema and New Queer Cinema. Students will experiment with unconventional page layouts and typography to discover the modes of analysis and argumentation that might be enabled by writing that emulates the disjunctive editing techniques of film.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America

  •  3976 ENGL 2890   SEM 103

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    If a time traveler from the past traveled to the present, the United States would look much different. On the Left, people are protesting everything from police violence to Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. On the Right, people are protesting everything from the removal of confederate statues to children’s books about LGBTQ characters. A whole new lexicon—wokeness, cancel culture, white fragility, incels, the alt-right, etc.—has emerged to describe the current landscape. This course will investigate the ongoing struggle to define America. From the Left to the Right, students will encounter a range of viewpoints.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • Topic: Apocalyptic Vision in Literature and Film

  •  3977 ENGL 2890   SEM 104

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    "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 the cult novel that inspired zombie apocalypse movies (I am Legend, by Richard Matheson), visual dramatizations of apocalyptic desire (art by Kusama and Basquiat, film noir and urban pop music) and three works staging the collapse of mundane reality (excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House).

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)

Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session. 

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

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

  •  3978 ENGL 2890   SEM 105

  • Instruction Mode: In Person
    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, among others. 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, conflicts in higher education, human rights, the uses of technology, gender equality, and the ethics of journalism itself. Coursework may include an independently researched project on a subject of the student's choosing.

    Instructor Consent Required (Add)