Maymester
The following list is by Term. The course offerings below are for the Summer 2019 semester.
ADVANCED CREATIVE NON-FICTION, Dr. Sigman Byrd
This course will build on your experience with creative nonfiction (CNF) and give you practice writing in innovative, hybrid CNF sub-genres like the poetic/epistolary memoir, the lyric essay, the visual essay, and literary journalism. Hybrid essays like the ones you will write this semester incorporate two or more CNF essay types—and often include elementsfrom other arts, including poetry, painting, and/or photography. Why hybrid forms in an advanced CNF course? Jacqueline Kolosov answers this well in one of our course texts, Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres: “Because [hybrid forms] resist the impulse to classify, and bringing them into the classroom both challenges and enlarges ways of thinking about genre and can prompt analysis and interrogation of such aspects of literary art as syntax, setting, and character, as well as more philosophical questions surrounding the nature of truth, identity, and memory.” If, as Lee Gutkind says, CNF is true stories well told, then CNF at its best and most engaging allows us to ask big philosophical questions. What is the self? What is the world and our experience of it? What is truth, beauty, and and what is ethical truth telling that is aesthetically beautiful? At its most basic, this course grapples with how complex the world is and how challenging our lives are to define. It acknowledges that traditional narrative forms may not represent or enact truth as truly as they should, and that hybrid forms of CNF can help us. To best facilitate our work together this semester, class will frequently be conducted as a full-class or small-group workshop in which you give feedback and respond critically to your classmates’ writing and in which you receive feedback about your own writing. Class will also be conducted as a seminar in which you discuss assignments, readings, and writing strategies, do writing exercises, and share particular insights or questions about the reading and writing at hand.
EUROPE IN CRISIS, Dr. Damian Doyle
This course focuses on role of the European Union in Europe and how it has informed the geopolitical, economic, social and cultural landscape of our contemporary world. We will examine the overarching theme of the integration of the European Union using writings that illuminate its history, institutions, policies, politics and culture. Europe is in crisis: it has not experienced such refugees numbers since World War II; it’s monetary system is being stretched to its limits with the bailout of Greece; its immigrant populations are changing the cultural landscape and many countries are experience a pushback from ultra-nationalists groups. Europe is the United States main trading partner and in that context, is it important and expedient for us to understand the history and complexity of this relationship. The course readings consist of writings that appeal to several different discourse communities examining the emergence of the European Union, and in working with them we learn how writers adapt content and style conventions, such as tone, genre, vocabulary, and organization to respond to multiple audiences and different rhetorical situations. By reading and analyzing different types of texts---including required course readings, texts you discover through research and peer essays—you will learn more sophisticated ways of communicating knowledge, particularly how audience, purpose, and context (rhetorical situation) in a text intersect with one another to make meaning. This writing course is designed to develop your critical thinking and analytical skills, increase your awareness of the relationship between writing and how knowledge is disseminated, better understand how rhetoric works in our lives and using research to draw connections between your ideas and those of others—both scholarly and non scholarly.
DON'T FENCE ME IN, Dr. Jay Ellis
This course conducts disciplinary (literary studies) and interdisciplinary inquiry into a range of ideas and feelings. How is it that so many Americans feel entitled to open spaces? How can it also be the case that we often seem so determined to avoid social contact, that we seek out privacy in wilderness? Our inquiry may range as widely as considerations of public policy, the bloody history of manifest destiny, readings in gender studies, and criticism on literature and film. Individual essays, though, may pursue questions as confined as how one character, or poem, exhibits ambivalence about space. Essays will ultimately display a similar variety in topics: literary studies, civic rhetoric, political science, philosophy, and many other disciplines may provide scholarship for this course. In genre, successful writing for this course must at times employ advanced scholarship and diligent close reading where appropriate, but may also include Creative Nonfiction techniques and other modes of expressive evidence. Our work will follow this feeling of simultaneous desire for, and fear of, space without limits. We will consider the ambivalent feelings Americans have for towns and other urban spaces, and that many people have for domestic enclosure and the promised safety within civilized spaces. Ultimately, however, this remains a writing workshop; ideas need not conform to the course’s regular consideration of “space” in any sense of that word; any idea successfully argued and expressed may succeed here.
WAYS OF TELLING THE STORY, Kerry Reilly
In this class, we will study an array of nonfiction genres including vignettes/shorts, autobiographical poetry, radio essays, humorous and satirical essays, lyric essays, graphic memoir and other types of work by nonfiction writers known for risk-taking and originality in content and form. We will consider and practice the techniques nonfictionists use to suit different purposes and appeal to various audiences. We will also discuss the philosophical questions raised by the acts of nonfiction writing and reading. While most of the focus will be on contemporary nonfiction writers, we will reflect on the genre as part of a diverse, evolving, long-standing literary tradition. Like professional writers, you will develop strategies for brainstorming ideas and for writing, revising and editing drafts. You will practice critiquing your own work, the work of your classmates and the work of published writers. You will also practice conducting research within the CU Library system and beyond.
WRITING ON BUSINESS & SOCIETY, Dr. Levente Szentkirályi
This interdisciplinary course teaches conventions of research and writing by examining current domestic and global economic policy problems—which challenge students to engage difficult texts in international affairs and political economy, U.S. foreign policy, business law and ethics, and social justice. Some of the issue-areas we will explore include trade liberalization and domestic influences on trade policies, foreign direct investment and the WTO, economic reactions to international political tensions, Citizens United v. FEC and the influence of economic special interests on the public policy process, environmental externalities and public health, corporate social (ir)responsibility and MNCs in developing countries, and eminent domain takings and corporate bailouts. Through diverse course readings, independent research, formative writing assignments, and the critical evaluation of contemporary scholarship on these issue-areas, students will learn to identify, critique, and apply common conventions of research, analysis, and writing that define scholarship in their respective majors. And in having students apply lessons of rhetorical analysis learned in the classroom to complex, real-world policy problems, this course strives to motivate students to think critically about the economic and political principles we generally take for granted, the influence that corporate special interests should have on the decision-making process, and the responsibilities the educated citizen and researcher has to her community.
WRITING ON SCIENCE & SOCIETY, Dr. Lonni Pearce
This course is a rhetorically informed introduction to science writing that hones communication skills as we examine the relationships among science, engineering, and society, and the manner in which scientific and technical information moves across different rhetorical contexts and becomes relevant to a variety of audiences. The course is intended for upper-division students in Engineering and for students in Arts and Sciences majoring in the sciences. Taught as a writing seminar emphasizing critical thinking, revision, and oral presentation skills, the course focuses on helping students draw on their technical expertise while engaging audiences beyond their own disciplines. The course draws on broad rhetorical principles for cogent writing and speaking, and applies them to the demands of communicating in the fields of science and engineering and in the work environments of organizations.
WRITING ON SCIENCE & SOCIETY, Petger Schaberg
This course is a rhetorically informed introduction to science writing that hones communication skills as we examine the relationships among science, engineering, and society, and the manner in which scientific and technical information moves across different rhetorical contexts and becomes relevant to a variety of audiences. The course is intended for upper-division students in Engineering and for students in Arts and Sciences majoring in the sciences. Taught as a writing seminar emphasizing critical thinking, revision, and oral presentation skills, the course focuses on helping students draw on their technical expertise while engaging audiences beyond their own disciplines. The course draws on broad rhetorical principles for cogent writing and speaking, and applies them to the demands of communicating in the fields of science and engineering and in the work environments of organizations.