English 201 Sections

English 201 / For Students

Section Descriptions, Spring 2009

The descriptions on this page provide an overview of the sections being offered in the current semester. Descriptions of sections that have been offered in the past give an even broader view of the variety and depth of intellectual challenge that can be found in English 201. You can also browse sample syllabi. (please note that sections vary from semester to semester)

Writing and Technology
Instructor: Scot Barnett

In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, written sometime in the 4th century BCE, Socrates famously disparages the emergence of a new technology that in his view would lead to simplemindedness and forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. Whereas speech allows conversants to engage each other’s ideas and pose questions of them in the here-and-now of face-to-face communication, this new technology writing, Socrates argues, distances the author temporally as well as spatially from his/her readers, making it difficult if not impossible for readers to interact with the author in the ways speech allows. Thus, he worries, “when it’s been once written, every speech rolls around everywhere, alike by those who understand as in the same way by those for whom it is not fitting, and it does not know to whom it ought to speak and to whom not.” At the heart of Socrates’s concern is an understanding that technology—even a relatively “simple” one such as alphabetic writing—is by no means neutral and that its introduction into everyday practices can have considerable effect on people’s perceptions of themselves and the world around them.

In this course, we will follow Socrates’s lead by questioning what technology contributes to the act of writing and, further, how various technologies mediate and inform what we come to see and know about the world and ourselves within the world. More specifically, we will focus considerable attention on what technology contributes to the production of knowledge in areas that include the humanities as well as the sciences and social sciences. In each of these areas, we will read and discuss a range of scholars who are beginning to address the important—and often overlooked—role technology plays in the daily work of research and communication across the university. Over the course of the semester, students will extend their understanding of these issues by learning at least one new writing technology and contributing to a group project that will provide online information and support for future instructors and students at UW interested in using new technologies in the writing
classroom. In addition, each student will complete a semester-long research project examining a specific technology in their field of study and reporting on it in the form of presentations to the class and a final research paper.

(Scot's course website.)

Writing Pain: Memoirs of Disease, Trauma, and Treatment
Instructor: Rush Daniel

The purpose of my course is to investigate theories, memoirs, and case histories under the rubric of disease and disorder. The purpose of this investigation is primarly to nuace our understanding of the various rhetorical arguments and discourses that attend the writing of disease and disorder, and secondly to interrogate the sociological understanding of disease. The course asks broad questions: how do people write about their own disease, versus the disease of others? How do we understand disease, and how do we respond to it? What cultural meaning does disease have for us? What sociological realities do our relations to disease illuminate?

(Section 11)
Instructor: Todd Goddard

In the course bulletin, English 201 is titled “Intermediate Composition” and described as a course with a “Main emphasis on various types of exposition.” This particular offering of Eng 201 will focus on the vital relationship between writing and environmental thought and values. We will read and discuss a range of works that address the complex interactions between people and their nonhuman environments and which attempt, through various writing and rhetorical strategies, to persuade, influence, and/ or educate a diverse readership. In fact many of these works have shaped environmental thinking and policymaking in America. In addition, the course will include a significant service-learning component (see below). Students will be asked to volunteer time each week for an environmentally-focused organization and to consider the ways that our classroom discussions and readings relate to the work being done in our community. Over the course of the semester, students will keep a regular journal and write a variety of essays on related topics. As with all sections of 201, the focus of this course will be on your writing – drafting and revising at least two significant essays, as well as keeping a regular journal and responding to shorter assignments.

Todd's class was recently the focus of a Wisconsin Week article about environmental education. Click here to see the story!

Writing and Social Choice
Instructor: Andrew Karr

The focus of this course is writing. We will consider writing as a social activity, and all assignments will revolve around writing as an activity with many social uses. The four units of the course center on different uses of writing: conveying information, persuading others, analyzing and evaluating the positions of others, and presenting oneself through writing. Each unit will culminate in a final project that embodies the use of writing we focus on in that unit. Our interest in writing as an activity with a social use necessitates that we pay special attention to issues such as audience and voice, which we will address through class discussion and peer review.

Our project this semester is to explore various social uses of writing. We will do so mainly through writing assignments and activities, but we will also consider the writing of others. Sometimes this will take the form of reviewing the work of peers, but it will also often take the form of critically reading the work of others. These readings range from seminal articles in the social sciences to philosophical discussions of social life to contemporary pieces in the mass media. Though the course focuses on your own writing, the writing of others will be important in feeding our discussions, providing topics for writing, and allowing us to consider different social uses of writing outside the classroom.

Digital Writing in Networked Environments
Instructor: Tim Laquintano

Course Description Coming Soon!

Food Writing and Rhetorics
Instructor: Rebecca Lorimer

In this section of English 201, “Food Writing and Rhetorics,” we will read and write about food. Perhaps the matter you put into your body may be nothing more than fuel to you, but the way in which food evokes cultural, social, political, and historical issues is often surprising. So this semester, we'll explore how food serves as muse, drives arguments, inspires, and creates problems in contemporary writing. The class will begin with reading and writing food memoirs, move into critique and analysis of food advertising, organizations, websites, and short film, move on to researching and writing about a food issue of your choice (think: slow food movement, "locavores," current food shortages and prices, genetically modified food, eating disorders, food and gender, diabetes, etc.), and then finally research and write about how this issue manifests itself on campus or in Madison.

The goal of such food analysis and research is not to convert you to veganism or to make you love food as much as I do, but simply to read, analyze, and write arguments through the lens of food. We will practice refining research strategies, analyzing complex concepts, and reading and thinking rhetorically about this topic that is not only very current—open up any local or national paper and you’ll see it everywhere—but is also, inescapably, part of being human.

Rebecca's class was recently featured in Wisconsin Week's profile of Humanities Exposed (HEX) projects. Click here to see the story!

(Section 4)
Instructor: Annie Massa-Macleod

Course Description Coming Soon!

Cultural Representation of Generations
Instructor: Kim Moreland

The theme of this 201 course is cultural representations of generations. A generation is more than a biological term that describes a group of people born around the same time. It is a top-down social idea that allows us to situate ourselves with and against others. I argue that it can also lead to us to overlook complexities in our knowledge of past and present cultures. In this class we will focus on some American generational experiences in the twentieth century through the present. We will be looking at writings of sociologists who attempt to make sense of generational differences as well as cultural artifacts and individual voices in writing that speak to the times and culture they experience, analyzing these different perspectives.

In our discussion, we will ask ourselves the following questions: What defines a generation? How do concepts about generations shape our daily lives, our understanding of the world, and our understanding of history? How does a social group come to be known as a generation? And where do we fit in? Yet another question might be: how do we understand the impulse to place ourselves and others in generations? You will be asked to formulate thoughtful arguments and at times, you will be asked to compose responses to your own arguments and those of your classmates.

The Writer and Social Change
Instructor: Kevin Mullen

"True, This! —
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! — itself a nothing! —
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! — Take away the sword —
States can be saved without it!"
-Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1839

“Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”
-Nelson Algren, 1951

This course begins with the argument that writing is not simply a powerful way of affecting social and political change, but really the only way. The words that swirl around us and enter our collective consciousness shape the way we perceive the world--both in illuminating how it is, and nudging us towards how it could, or should, be. In offering a vast audience a worldview that is internalized during the process of reading, the writer has a staggering ability to affect the "the public." The techniques writers employ are varied, each with its own strength; journalism, satire, realism, horror, film, poetry, and fantasy are just a few of the methods and genres writers employ to convince readers of their particular point of view. In this course we will examine how the written word can have direct, physical affects on the world around us through the stylistic choices (not just the subject) that the writer chooses.

From Travel Writing to Ethnography
Instructor: Kevin Piper

Both travel writing and ethnography are genres that pertain to writing about place. Both possess independent sets of conventions for how to make that place make sense in the eyes of a reader, whether he or she be a newcomer, outsider, or potential traveler. As such, these genres also engage in acts of interpretation, blurring the boundary between straightforward physical description and intellectual speculation. While travel writing has a history of incorporating the imaginative reflections of the writer, ethnography adds method to those reflections, pushing them into the realm of analysis. The variety of interpretive skills spread out across this spectrum provide the framework for this section of English 201. Over the course of the semester, we will read examples of these genres and theories of their construction for the purpose of assembling our own personal collection of analytical tools.

You will apply these skills to your own writings about the one place that we all have in common: Madison, WI. Madison offers a wealth of local history from its status as Wisconsin’s capital to its central role in the birth of the progressive party. Within its permeable borders lies a mixture of ethnic, professional, historical, and political cultures, all interacting along the pathways that its denizens travel through the city everyday. With the tools that you acquire from the readings in this course, you will find your own path through Madison, an investigative one that opens up your view of the city by situating it (and yourself) within the wider contexts of history and culture.

Engaging the Polis
Instructor: Christine Stephenson

Once language exists only to convey information, it is dying. ~Richard Hugo

Man [sic] is an animal whose nature it is to live in a polis. ~Aristotle

Engaging the Polis is, first and foremost, a course about writing and rhetoric. Throughout the next fifteen weeks, our primary objective will be working together to explore our language; understand argument, reason, and expression; manipulate and interpret symbols, and craft text. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the study and practice of composition involves a multitude of disciplines: art, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and politics, just to begin. It is for this reason that professionals in the field often remark that “rhetoric is at once everywhere and nowhere.”

This course is designed to offer substantial instruction and practice in the four modes of literacy: speaking, reading, writing, and listening by directly engaging the many forms of public argument we have at our disposal, namely those concerning presidential campaigning, domestic and foreign issues, activism, and civic discourse. The subject matter of the course will likely inspire strong opinions in some and stir the passions of others; thus, it is essential to remember that the focus of the course is not politics and political positions per se, but the way we engage politics and political positions. In other words, it is not what we talk about, but how we talk about it. You are encouraged to express your views as germane to our discussions as they are essential to our course objectives, below; however, it is important to remain mindful of our purpose here, and that is, simply put, cultivating rhetorical awareness.

(Course Blog)

Writing in the Prison: A Service Learning Course
Instructor: David Stock

In this service-learning section of English 201, students study writing and the teaching of writing while reading about and researching prison issues in the United States. Students also tutor incarcerated individuals in the essay portion of the GED exam at a nearby prison. This course is meant to provide students opportunities to practice writing and to reflect both on and through writing in order to develop greater rhetorical awareness and skill in writing while helping others improve their writing.

Voice in Culture, Voice in Philosophy, Voice in Medicine—Toward a (Rhetorical) Understanding of Voice
Instructor: Christopher Syrnyk

This English 201 section will focus on the idea and arguments of "voice" as voice variously manifests itself within our culture. We will focus on how our society popularly conceives of voice, the more philosophical and theoretical understandings of voice, and lastly how voice is seen in the world of illness and disability. We will work to develop an increasingly complex appreciation of this often overlooked idea--voice--in order to develop our skills at managing complex ideas and arguments in our own writing. As we progress, we will continuously consider how our reading affects our writing, and how our writing helps us to improve as critical thinkers and readers. This section will be highly "conference oriented" in that there will likely be teacher-student conferences every three-four weeks. There will be small writing assignments tied to each reading, three units that will each culminate in a 5-7 p. paper, and toward the end of the semester, students will be encouraged to take one of the three papers and develop it into a larger research paper. The readings will be challenging and if fortunate enlightening.

Professor Thomas Schaub - Chair
Professor Jane Zuengler - Associate Chair
Professor Lynn Keller - Director of Graduate Studies
Professor Cyrena Pondrom - Undergraduate Director