Course Catalog Literature, Lanuage, Composition
Literature, Language, Composition Writing + Inquiry I: Basic Composition + Contemporary Ideas LLC 101 A composition-intensive course that emphasizes basic composition skills, while introducing basic research and documentation skills. Along with cultivating the concomitant skills in critical reading and thinking, this course also introduces an explicitly theoretical approach to contemporary culture. Twenty pages of student expository writing will be required. Offered fall. 3 credits.
Writing + Inquiry II: Research and Intellectual Traditions LLC 102 An intermediate writing and research course based in readings on the western intellectual and cultural heritage and their global contexts. The course will emphasize the basic research skills involved in both academic writing and studio processes. Twenty pages of student expository writing will be required. Prerequisite LLC 101. Offered spring. 3 credits.
Writing + Inquiry III: Narrative Forms LLC 203 This course continues to build students’ skills in writing, research, critical thinking, and argument, while introducing a survey of narrative forms and critical methods based in narratology to be used in the analysis and understanding of narrative. Offered fall and spring. Prerequisite LLC 101. 3 credits.
Writing for the Art + Design Career LLC 204W This course offers students the opportunity to develop strong writing skills for the types of writing involved in art and design careers. The first and biggest part of this course is devoted to these career-related forms and is predicated on an exploration of the relationship between the rhetorical and the design arts. The culminating project for this section of the course, therefore, will be a portfolio containing the final versions of each of the writing assignments, designed to showcase visually the collected written works, and thus also to demonstrate the extent to which the student has pursued the relationship between rhetoric and design. Each student’s portfolio will contain the types of career documents relevant to her/his own particular emphases or goals within the art/design fields represented by the particular group of students in the class. A later, smaller part of the course will explore the theories and argument strategies of art critical essays and reviews as models for the students’ own assignments in critical writing. These assignments will include one art or design show review and one critical essay on an art or design subject selected by the student for the relevance of its subject to his/ her own studio work. Class work will focus on writing, tutorials, and peer editing/critique, allowing students ample opportunity to become comfortable with, and even accomplished in, the kinds of writing necessary for self-presentation and critical engagement in visual arts careers. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.
Arts Journalism LLC 205WX In this elective course, students will study various forms and stages of writing about art for publication. In addition to reading and discussing effective examples of published writings on art, students will produce a total of 20 pages of writing throughout the semester in the form of reviews, interviews, profiles, and feature stories. Students will alternately function as writers and editors as they produce written work that is expressly conceived and shaped for publication. 3 credits.
Hybrid Writing LLC 206X Sophomore level writing seminar focusing on intergenre hybrid writing, with an emphasis on the New Narrative movement, open to all students, of special interest to students interested in writing adventurously and creatively about their chosen art and design forms. The method of instruction for this class will combine short lectures with class discussion, workshops, and in-class writing experiments. The class will be structured around the idea of creative research, and will potentially involve research days utilizing the museum or the library. Peer feedback sessions and a final short critical paper are designed to assist students in developing a constructive, original vocabulary to critically assess both their own creative work and that of others. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.
Autobiographical Narrative in African Literature LLC 207W This course consists of six first-person accounts, which highlight the socio-historical and psychological significance of the autobiographical narrative in the black experience. The autobiographical mode is one of the predominant forms of literary expression in black literature, dating back to the “slave narrative” of the eighteenth century, just as it is in the hands of African artists a prominent literary form that is characterized by its predominantly collective and communal narrative voice. The course will focus on the interface between individual life-story and collective (social) history. It will also consider in the postmodernist sense the thin line between fiction and history (art and life), while exploring individual consciousness as an art of rhetorical self-definition and subjectivity. The last two books include two generational responses to womanist issues; and both of them problematize the autobiographical art-form. There are six videos primarily to provide socio-historical background to the course. The videos, as visual texts, are also meant to create a critical interface with the 6 literary socio-constructs, with a view to stimulating your deep insights into the course. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits. 143