Writing Program

This course provides students with opportunities to practice a range of conventions, standards of proof, and ways of knowing that characterize language in the concentration areas that make up the SUA liberal arts education: the humanities, environmental studies, social and behavioral sciences, life sciences, and international studies. In the process, students develop critical reading and thinking skills as well as competence in written and oral English so as to produce coherent, interesting, thoughtful, and largely error-free papers that are congruent with appropriate standards of academic discourse.

This course will explore writing and communication through the broad conventions of “visual rhetoric.” Visual rhetoric has historically been found in a variety of disciplinary locations (art history, American studies, communication studies, English departments, rhetoric and composition programs, history programs, media and visual studies programs). In this course we will attempt to understand the political and ideological dimensions of visual rhetoric across a wide range of genres or media such as photography, graphic novels, works of art, architecture, films (fiction and documentary), advertisements, television, journalism, televised political speeches, and more. Students in this class may use selections from ancient rhetorical texts in conjunction with contemporary theoretical writings in their written work and oral presentations.

In this course, students will explore trans-disciplinary connections between culture, empire and science around the ever-evolving concept of gender. Topics students may research and write about include: associations between “women” and “nature” that have informed intellectual, scientific, and cultural traditions; indigenous concepts of natural science and gender; female, trans, and indigenous bodies as collectible objects; notions of truth, science and gender; connections between gender, science, biopolitics and surveillance; feminist science studies, and more. We will consider a variety of written, visual and cultural texts in this course.

What is race? How is race assigned, assumed, constructed, performed, and consumed? Aiming to develop complex understandings of the production of race and its effects, this course may explore the intersections of race with gender, sexuality, class, indigeneity, nation, citizenship, and other modalities of power; intercede into the racial politics of representation and public discourse; and generate theoretically informed critical/creative interventions that grapple with the vexed issues of race.

This course focuses on how “apocalypses” manifest themselves in various academic disciplines. Work in the course will analyze cinematic and literary representations of the apocalypse; interrogate whether societies have participated in end-of-the-world thinking throughout history; scrutinize how the politics of late capitalism and globalization drive such notions; and engage in how various discourses of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality and trauma may lead to apocalypses of an internalized type. Students will be asked to examine texts and generate critical and/or creative responses to class discussions.

This course explores archives as sites for cultural interpretation, civic engagement, and social justice. We will explore a broad range of archives, including family archives, community archives, digital archives, and institutional archives. Drawing on feminist, rhetorical, indigenous, decolonial, and other perspectives, we will focus on what stories, social memories and public histories can be revealed through archival research, and just as importantly, what remains hidden, invisible, missing, absent, silenced, or excluded from archival collections. Students will learn how to engage in reciprocal and collaborative archival practices, reflect on questions of ethics and representation, and come to understand research as a lived process. Course projects may include exploring family and community archives, conducting oral histories, contributing to digital archives, and working with community organizations. Through this work, students will cultivate an appreciation for human diversity, one of SUA core values.

Bodies as sites of meaning, modes of representation, political signifiers, and lived experiences are of central concern to work across the disciplines. Taking as its purview the production, regulation, and circulation of bodies in the context of late capitalism and globalism, this course considers how bodies are politically, socially, sexually, racially, culturally, metaphorically, and historically constituted, and promotes the invention of insurgent forms for reading and writing bodies that do not reinscribe the body in narrative myths and dualistic structures that dominate conventional understandings of bodies.

What does it mean to become leaders for the creative co- existence of nature and humanity? To gain an awareness of the interdependence of ourselves, others, and the environment? These questions, central to SUA’s mission, will guide our course work as we explore questions of social and environmental justice, sustainability, and our relation with nature in the age of the Anthropocene. Students will go on self-guided field trips to natural settings to engage more deeply with environmental topics through lived experience. They will write about contemporary environmental challenges in a variety of genres. In particular, public/advocacy, natural history/science, and creative/nonfiction writing will be emphasized. Students will undertake an ambitious intellectual project, conduct extensive, in-depth inquiry and present their work to relevant audiences.

This course explores writing for social change, including rhetorics of civic engagement, rhetorics of protest and resistance, and rhetorics of civil disobedience. Students will study the impact of rhetoric and writing on activism, public protest, and social change and compose genres that can support civic engagement, intervene in social injustice, and support agency and activism. Students will also reflect on ethical uses of language and means of persuasion. The class is conducted as a writer’s workshop in which students share their work and learn from one another. Students will be asked to generate theoretically informed critical/ creative interventions that grapple with civil disobedience, unruly rhetorics, and social change.

What does it mean to live and write in the borderlands? This course examines and calls for writing in and about the borderlands; explores how writing from the borderlands resists, reshapes, and/or plays with dominant discourses and power relations; investigates the relationships among writing, ideology, hegemony, and the politics of culture; and situates the borderlands globally amidst materials conditions and the production of “others.”

Experimental critical writing is a slippery genre that challenges and breaks down traditional genre distinctions, sidestepping and/or transforming conventional expository protocols. A hybrid form, experimental critical writing challenges disciplinary boundaries and borrows, as it pleases, from various genres – personal essay, historical writing, memoir, non-fiction, drama, diary, autobiography, fiction, reportage, poetry, rant, and manifesto. Exceeding genre and discipline boundaries, experimental critical writing produces new epistemologies not possible within forms bound by conventional constraints. This course will uncover some of the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “experimental critical writing;” explore emergent “alternative” theoretical and methodological frameworks related to the production of knowledge; blur the boundaries between disciplines, genres, the academic and non-academic; and consider what it means to produce new knowledge as a socially and ethically responsible global citizen.

What does it mean to be “literate” today? How are new communication technologies impacting what it means to be literate? What cultural competencies and literacy skills are required to fully participate in the digital present? This course will involve exploring forms and examples of new media and the theories that underlie and emerge from these forms in addition to engaging and creating new media texts enabled by networked, digital environments that push the limits of writing/ composing. New media includes, but is not limited to, blogs, wikis, websites, social networking sites, audio, video, gaming, digital photography and other converged/hybrid media such as performance art and museum installations.

This course will explore topics in the field of creative writing, focusing specifically on the genres of fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. In this course, students will be asked to think of writing as a process. They will attend to and observe the world around them, invent new work, elaborate on and revise that work, and then reflect back on their own writerly development. Moreover, students will study the work of contemporary writers from a craft and technique perspective, learning how these writers manipulate narrative, subtext, point-of-view, description, metaphor, lineation, and syntax in their work. Finally, students will have their own texts evaluated during in-class workshops, and they will compile their work toward an end-of-semester portfolio.

This course will introduce students to the genre of poetry.  Students in this course will explore the craft techniques associated with writing poems, including description, imagery, metaphor, lineation, rhythm and syntax.  With these in mind, students will imitate contemporary poems and invent and revise their own.  Furthermore, this course will be an intensive study of poetry and the writing processes associated with it.  The class will be conducted as a writer’s workshop, in which students share their work and comment on that of their classmates.

This course introduces students to different genres of creative nonfiction, including autobiography, memoir, personal essay, reflection, and reportage. The course provides students an opportunity to practice these genres and emphasizes creativity of expression. Students are encouraged to experiment with a variety of first-person forms and write about subjects that they know about and that are important to them. Students will study the work of contemporary writers from a craft perspective in order to develop and hone their writing strategies. The class is conducted as a writer’s workshop in which students share their work and learn from one another. Students will prepare and submit an end-of-semester portfolio of their writing.

This course will introduce students to the genre of fiction.  Students in this course will explore the craft techniques associated with writing short stories, including narrative structure, characterization, setting, point-of-view, imagery and theme.  With these in mind, students will imitate contemporary short stories and invent and revise their own.  Furthermore, this course will be an intensive study of fiction and the writing processes associated with it.  The class will be conducted as a writer’s workshop, in which students share their work and comment on that of their classmates.

Visual rhetoric can be understood as visual argument (or an argument using images). This course encourages students to explore and write about non-traditional forms of rhetoric drawing from a wealth of topics related to film genres, ancient rhetorical genres, and film studies. This is not a film appreciation course but rather a writing and rhetoric course that encourages students to engage with the way in which visual culture communicates and makes arguments. Each week, students will explore and write about a different film genre and its particular concerns. They might, for example, explore arguments about gender and sexuality in the post-war genre of Film Noir. In this case, we students would combine psychological theory with gender studies in their written analyses of films like Double Indemnity or Gilda. Alternately, by exploring the early documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov, students might ask how do we understand “realism” and, in the process, how do we understand what is included and what is left out of their versions of reality? Analyses of movies in this course will turn on the fundamental examination of how meaning is created through the power of artistic vision and visual technology.