WRT1001 Writing Across Contexts
4 Foundation Liberal Arts Credits

This course introduces students to key concepts in meaning-making and helps them develop rhetorically sophisticated approaches to reading, writing, and composing across contexts. Students refine and reflect on their own composing practices and processes past, present, and future as they read, analyze, and create texts for a wide variety of audiences, purposes, and media forms. At the end of the term and with the vocabulary developed in the course, each student articulates in an essay their own working theory of and approach to writing that they can mobilize and adapt for future academic and professional contexts.

ENG4620 Writing Creative Non-Fiction
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsIn this class, you will have the chance to write about moments in your life, and passionate interests, you wish to deeply explore. You will "read like a writer" to learn the elements and forms of creative nonfiction, including memoir, contemplative, nature, and travel essays. We will read creative nonfiction by such writers as Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, and consider both what the writers say and how they say it. You will write your own personal essays, developing your facility with such elements as conflict, persona, and character development, and, by sharing your work with peers, you will gain a critical understanding of your own writing. You will find, like creative nonfiction writer Dinty Moore, that "the happy by-product" of exploring, expressing the previously unspoken, "is that one has a richer life."

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ENG4605 Writing Fiction
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsShort-story writer Flannery O'Connor believes that there is _a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once._ This class develops and nurtures close attention to the art and craft of making short stories. We will read excellent practitioners of the short story form in order to understand the elements of fiction: character, dialogue, place/setting, plot, and so on, and we will look for pleasure in our reading. Throughout the semester you will write short stories of varying length, aiming for authority over language, characterization, plot, and more. Your fiction will be received and read by your peers and professor. You will be a willing, open and active participant, prepared to discuss the work of others, and to reflect on responses to your own work. Short-story writer Tobias Wolff suggests that "in the short-story form you sense… that perfection is attainable. That's an amazing invitation to have: here, at last, is something I can control."

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

ENG4604 Writing Poetry
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsA poet is a maker, an architect of words, spaces, and ideas and seeks expression through the use of various poetic techniques. This course challenges students to make original poetry through the study of contemporary American poetry and poetics. In addition to exploring the creative process through the crafting of poems, students read the poetry and essays of a wide variety of modern poets, work collaboratively to respond to peers' poems, attend poetry readings, and pursue independent study in an area of their own choice.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

AMS4672 Working in America: Labor in the US Since 1892
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

How has blue, white, and pink collar work changed in the U.S. across the past centuries, and how sustainable are our models of work? This course focuses on the historical experiences of American workers, beginning with the mills of early industrialization and ending with the global corporations and big box chain stores of the contemporary U.S. We will study workers' unions, and also look at how workplaces have changed with the liberation movements of women, people of color, and LBGTQ+ workers. We will use written texts, films, and other rich sources to study how workers have shaped and adapted to the new, global economies of labor.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)