Fall 20063 credits. Each section limited to 16 students. Students must have completed their colleges’ first-year writing requirements or have the permission of the instructor. S. Davis and staff. Web site: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/engl288-289/ English 288-89 offers guidance and an audience for students who wish to gain skill in expository writing. 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. Since these seminar-sized courses depend on members’ full participation, regular attendance and submission of written work are required. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term. English 288-89 does not satisfy requirements for the English major. Section 1 Making the News CID 187706 What is news? Who makes it? For whom? The mass media are central to the life of societies. In Europe, they’ve been called the fourth estate; in the United States, our fourth branch of government. In this course, we will talk, think, and write about journalists, reporting and the media. We will inform ourselves of current events and read critics across the political spectrum from Noam Chomsky to Marshall McLuhan to Richard Viguerie. In a series of papers culminating in a final research project, students will write critically about the readings, discussions and the wider world. Films such as Network and Wag the Dog and brief field trips at regular intervals should keep things interesting. Section 2 Endsight: Apocalyptic Fictions CID 187755 In the first century ever to run the risk of a real apocalyptic disaster (nuclear, environmental, or pathological), apocalyptic speculation has flourished as almost never before. “Apocalypse,” however, indicates not only destruction of the world as we know it, but a vision of a radically different one. In this course, we will examine postapocalyptic works to see what they posit about the natural world, the continuity of knowledge over time, and human nature itself. Films (The Matrix, Akira), a TV series (Firefly), and fiction (Galápagos, The Handmaid’s Tale, Riddley Walker, The Shadow of the Torturer, Always Coming Home) will provide students with opportunities to write analytically and creatively about the age in which they live from arrestingly new perspectives. Section 3 The Reflective Essay CID 187804 In this course, we'll tackle the essay at its root: essai, an effort, a trial. A good essay starts with an itch in the writer's mind -- a question, a preoccupation, a live issue -- and the writer's desire to scratch it, grapple with it and make a whole-hearted effort to understand it through language. We will explore the essay in its reflective and critical moods, considering issues of personal voice and public audience. We will read widely, for content and craft, essays by such writers as James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Barry Lopez, Arundhati Roy, and Barbara Kingsolver. Students will be one another's editors and advisors, and will build their work from brief to longer compositions through frequent revision. Section 4 Constitutional Law and the Media: Issues CID 187860 Controversial issues like abortion, affirmative action, and gay marriage seem to surface in the news almost daily: what are the legal principles behind these conflicts, and how do the media handle them? This course will read Supreme Court opinions, scholarly commentary and relevant Constitutional provisions that have sparked debate and will make comparisons with media portrayals of the cases, their outcomes, and the judges who decide them. We'll also pay attention to media-specific questions like reportorial privilege. Students will write shorter papers on selected cases and controversies and undertake a final research project on a topic of their choosing. Section 5 The Essay: Personal to Public CID 187909 How are the personal and the public intertwined in the essay? How does author come to understand his or her situation in context: in history, in politics, in place? How does the author reconstruct and present his or her memories? In this course we explore how memory and identity are interpreted and reinterpreted, and in what ways such writing informs us not only about the author, but the society we live in and the beliefs we hold. The focus of this course will be on reading carefully, and learning to write about your own personal experience and its relation to the larger, collective experience. We will use essays by authors such as Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Meredith Hall as models. Section 6 Issues, Audiences, and Ourselves CID 187958 Language, personality traits, cultural differences, education, and the popular media -- these forces shape us as members of a complex society. This course explores the challenges they present and the choices we make as writers addressing readers in such a society: the goal is to help students discover what they want to say in the most audience-friendly and the most authentic manner. Section 7 American Political Satire After 9-11 CID 188007 It's been said that on September 11, "The Age of Irony" suddenly, painfully came to an end. Yet in the months that followed, political satire--brash, ironic, reform-minded--revived with unexpected success. In this seminar, we will analyze works of political satire from the likes of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, The Onion, Dave Chappelle, David Rees, and Sacha Baron Cohen. We will locate these works within the historical tradition of American political satire (Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks) and study them as indexes of the post-9/11 political and cultural climate. Students will write critically about the form and function of political satire, and they will experiment with writing topical political satires of their own.
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