33 courses with the subject WRIT, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
WRIT 102Rhetoric in Liberal Arts Trad
Artes liberales--the liberal arts--those arts that are proper for a free citizen, according to Cicero. These arts numbered seven in the medieval curriculum, the language arts--grammar, logic, and rhetoric--constituting the first three or trivium. While the trivium has all but disappeared in today's college curriculum, increasingly scholars across the disciplines are discovering the integral role rhetoric plays in equipping citizens for effective participation in a democracy. Drawing upon the liberal arts tradition, the aim is to cultivate students' capacity for eloquence through inquiry. To foster this human impulse to inquire, students will engage in a number of inquiry projects that will ask them to reflect on their personal experiences, to analyze the forces that shaped those experiences, and to look critically at the way that social and cultural identity is formed. In conjunction with the three inquiry projects, students engage in an intense amount of work on rhetorical invention (the discovery of ideas for writing), composing a workable draft, reading and revising the draft, and rereading and editing it for fluency in grammar, punctuation, and style.
Teaches the key elements of college writing, strategies for reading, the discovery and development of ideas, thesis development, organization and coherence, and revision skills. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
By taking a rhetorical approach to academic writing, this course asks students to cultivate sustained and reasoned understandings of the relations between writer, audience, subject/text, and disciplinary contexts. Students engage in analytic essays and research projects within the discipline of rhetoric, developing facility with analytic habits of mind, discursive moves typical in academic writing, and the construction of clear, complex, and logical arguments about civic discourse. The course focuses on several essential elements of college writing and research: strategies for active analytic reading and effective note taking; compiling and critical reading of research sources; the discovery and development of a strong thesis supported by persuasive evidence; the skills of summary, definition, analysis, interpretation, and synthesis; organization and coherence; revision processes; and editing skills. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Students in this course learn critical techniques for argumentation by analyzing the arguments of other writers and applying these techniques to their own writing. Both academic and popular sources are analyzed for their use of evidence, the presence of logical appeals, and their use of rhetorical devices. Special attention is paid to problems arising from more complex critical analysis, such as appropriate ways to treat conflicting sources, detecting the biases in both primary and secondary source material, and examining the
In ancient Greece and Rome, teachers of rhetoric taught style (L. elocutio) as one of five essential canons, or considerations, for effective language use. Students study how the stylistic choices of non-fiction writers can affect readers' reception and interpretation of texts. With the goal of improving the clarity and power of their own writing, students closely analyze published authors' diction, syntactical structures, punctuation, and figures of speech. Students also study conventions of mechanics and usage to make increasingly conscious, informed choices regarding varieties of English and levels of formality across genres. Writing assignments include essays, exercises, peer reviews, and a culminating final exam. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
To engage students in both the analysis and production of public discourse through examining the rhetoric of citizenship. It is through the language and symbols of citizenship that individuals come to understand themselves as political subjectivities and engage with others as democratic agents. Students examine how the meaning of citizenship is shaped and contested through public discourse. Students analyze debates over citizenship, mainly in the context of immigration debates in the US and in other parts of the world. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None Formerly: WRIT 350
Since the origins of western democracy, rhetoricians have taught the study and practice of public speaking as an essential art of public life and civic responsibility. This course fuses theory to praxis in introducing
Introduces students to the theories and analytic practices of rhetoric. Students explore the debates and discussions that have informed rhetorical theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and simultaneously learn and practice rhetorical analysis. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Approaches the study of rhetoric by focusing on the relationship between text and image. How does the combination of verbal and visual elements communicate different arguments to different audiences? How do verbal/visual texts reflect or even create cultural identities, norms, values, and practices? With the goal of becoming effective rhetorical critics, as well as incisive consumers and producers of visual culture, students both study and create a variety of visual texts. Crosslisted: FMST 225 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Students are immersed in the study of narrative craft, initially grounding them in the print essay tradition, but soon departing into multi-media narrative forms, including the audio essay, the photo essay, and the video essay. At its root, the word "essay" means "inquiry" from the Latin exagere, "to weigh, try, prove, measure, adjust, ascertain, examine, inquire into." A central premise for this course, then, is that every narrative - every story - inquires into experiences and ideas, and that writers compose not just what they know but in order to know. Thus, students are asked to mediate the subjective and objective positions of what Roland Barthes terms the "writerly" text in an effort to invite readers to see anew and to read and experience stories through aural and visual media. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Students understand and examine questions related to memory and public memory, their differences, and how the influences of public memory shape our contemporary understanding of society. Students engage with the processes through which memory becomes public and is shaped by the conditions of the everyday. Furthermore, students come to understand the intricate relationship between the past and present and how they influence each other. While students are introduced to foundational concepts related to public memory in rhetorical studies, they are simultaneously encouraged to think beyond the frameworks of memory as simply emerging from Greco-Roman-Western traditions. Memory is understood from a postcolonial/decolonial/anticolonial perspective to further comprehend the politics of public memory. Students learn how to consider memory as not simply evoked or codified in memorials, monuments, and museums. In order to do that, students visit a museum where they have an opportunity to engage with artifacts–more importantly with their historical and cultural context–and reflect on how memory is often relegated to artifacts that are collected and stored in a museum setting. Students think about the connections between public memory and trauma, archival practices, oral history, cultural heritage, and digital lives. Ultimately students collectively reflect on how meanings can be stabilized and destabilized through the circulation of public memory depending upon the social, cultural, and political conditions of the time.
WRIT 242Stand and Speak: Feminist Rhetorics and Social Change1.00
As an introduction to rhetoric, rhetorical history and criticism, and feminist rhetorics, this course fore-grounds the study of how 19th-century women used both pen and voice with rhetorical precision to "stand and speak" to issues that marked their personal lives and their times. By studying women who composed and embodied what is now understood as the early years of the first wave of U.S. feminism, students access a genealogy of women rhetors who serve as exemplars - and cautions - for later waves and for their own contemporary visions of social change. By positioning the study of rhetoric as the study of language as it constitutes social relations, power, and knowledge, students become more acutely aware of and fluent in the composition, circulation, and criticism of private and public discourses, the verbal material through which they construct social worlds. The work for this course requires close reading and active discussion of course texts through a rhetorical lens and through the category of gender. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Until the late 17th century in Europe, nobody thought to classify or divide the people of the world by race. With no basis in biology, race is a purely social construct existing only in thought and language. Accordingly, this course will consider the many different social discourses of race and racism, how they have evolved in different ways around the globe and how they are employed today in multiple trans-national contexts. The course will adopt a multidisciplinary approach, examining a variety of texts from different intellectual perspectives. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Examines the various ways that writers and speakers draw on the Bible for rhetorical force. Many of the works that call on the Bible for inspiration are not of a religious nature at all, raising questions about the nature of biblical style. Readings range from the Venerable Bede and Queen Elizabeth I to Bob Marley and Douglas Rushkoff, in addition to source material from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. No previous knowledge of the Bible is needed. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Focuses on the ways that comics - often defined as the interplay of words and images - convey specific messages, whether instructional, narrative, persuasive, or other. Close analyses draw on principles of visual rhetoric, comics scholarship, photography, and related disciplines. Readings cover the theory, history, terminology, and genres of graphic narratives. Crosslisted: FMST 270 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Although rhetoric is typically thought of as originating in ancient Greece, persuasive writing and speaking practices are prevalent throughout a variety of cultural contexts and traditions. To address this gap in understanding, students take up recent scholarship in rhetorical studies that makes up the subfield of cultural rhetorics, an area that focuses on culturally specific persuasive practices, the resulting objects and meanings, and how power and marginalization shape the effect of both. Where is rhetorical practice inextricable from the influence of ethnicity, race, language, and/or geography, and how do these factors come into play when speaking across cultural boundaries? Students survey the evolution of cultural rhetorics and explore prominent conversations currently occurring in the field. Readings include scholarship from leading voices, such as Christina Cedillo, V. Jo Hsu, Malea Powell, and Jacqueline Royster. Writing
Considers the essay as a dynamic medium for creativity and intellectual exploration, demonstrating its unique ability to trace the contours of thought through personal storytelling, critical analysis, and narrative exposition. Beginning with the form's origins in self-reflection and inquiry, students survey its development through a variety of historical and cultural contexts. Students engage with a wide array of texts to explore how the essay differs from other modes of writing, such as fiction and academic prose; and also develop a distinctive writerly voice in their own creative work, learning to use the essay as a means to think deeply, articulate complex ideas, and explore the intersections of the personal and the universal. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
WRIT 303The Rhetoric of Data Visualization & Infographics1.00
Our world is increasingly visual; more and more of the information we consume and produce is presented in images. This course focuses on the visual presentation of numerical information — everything from box-and- whisker plots to flashy infographics — and specifically how such information can effectively persuade its readers. Emphasis will be on both analyzing and making visualizations; there will be no attention to data collection or analysis. Students can expect to improve their visual literacy skills. No facility with statistics or software packages is required. Crosslisted: FMST 303 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
WRIT 345Crafting Bodies: Movement, Gender, and Performance1.00
This class engages with recent developments in the field of rhetoric to consider how persuasion and meaning making are impacted by movement, gender, and performance. To this end, the course will introduce students to the dominant conversations, theories, and methods for studying embodiment within rhetoric and related fields. Students will apply these ideas to case studies from sports, dance, popular culture, politics, and law to better understand how dominant narratives constrain or enable certain types of bodily behavior. Through this theoretical and practical study, students will become critically aware of the intersections of bodies and their representations and how these intersections influence our capacity for engaged deliberation and social action. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
WRIT 346Hip Hop: Race, Sex, and the Struggle in Urban America1.00
Examines the ways in which language has reinforced racial and ethnic identities and divisions in post-Civil Rights America. Explores the conceptual origins of race, ethnicity, and other categories of difference, particularly those produced through legal, political, socioeconomic, and humanistic discourses. Recognizing that the United States is not just a multicultural society but a multilingual one, students investigate how urban American youth have "talked back" to power and seized the power to name. Focuses in particular on uses of the Hip Hop vernacular by urban Latin Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and white Americans to give voice to their reality and the urban struggle. Students also trace the causes and consequences of historical silences, as suggested by Martin Luther King's dictum: "A riot is the language of the unheard."
Claims that whiteness--white racial identity--is more about language than biology. Whiteness is a rhetorical construct that exists only in discourse, yet its concrete effects impact societies all over the globe. Drawing on texts from around the world, students trace the evolution of this construct from its inception up to the present day, examining the rhetorical strategies whereby whiteness is both hidden and revealed in a variety of genres: personal memoirs, philosophical essays, scientific investigations, political writings, legal documents, critical analyses, historical essays, and such mass media as television, film, newspapers, and magazines. By engaging in the rhetorical analysis of these texts, students examine how the discourses of whiteness continue to frame reality and mediate power relations. A required evening film series accompanying the class has students viewing, discussing, and analyzing feature films, documentary films, and television shows. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation or Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Required corequisite to WRIT 348. Credits: 0.00 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
WRIT 354Dialogue and Deliberation in Democratic Life
Public communication is a vital part of democratic life. It is through the circulation and exchange of public speech that citizens shape the contours of public life, build community, and determine their core civic values. More importantly, it is through the work of democratic dialogue that citizens struggle with their inevitable differences and seek to find ways of working together despite those differences. The purpose of this class is to examine both the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, with the aim of better understanding how communities might use dialogue and deliberation to effectively engage across different perspectives. Students are asked to think critically about the possibilities and challenges of democratic dialogue. Students are also trained in facilitation techniques, with the major project for this class providing students an
Students navigate the turbulent histories of maritime piracy by analyzing "the pirate" as a rhetorical construction. Beyond the parrots, peglegs and buried treasure, pirates challenged the boundaries of so- called civilization, earning them the name hostis humani generis, the enemy of all. Students analyze historical pirate rhetorics in legal, economic, political, and artistic contexts, examining texts on their own terms and exploring how they intersect with contemporary questions of identity, justice, equity, and violence. Emphasis is on the methods of rhetorical history, including the skills of original archival research. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None Formerly: WRIT 263
Focuses on the ways that comics - often defined as the interplay of words and images - convey specific messages, whether instructional, narrative, persuasive, or other. Close analyses draw on principles of visual rhetoric, comics scholarship, photography, and related disciplines. Readings cover the theory, history, terminology, and genres of graphic narratives. Crosslisted: FMST 371 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None Formerly: WRIT 270
Cultures are shaped by controversy, which is especially true of controversies in the public sphere. Though often framed through the lens of division, moments of controversy are also moments of possibility in which
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
