English 201 Sections

English 201 / For Students

Section Descriptions from Past Semesters

These descriptions from past semesters provide a view of the variety and depth of intellectual challenge that can be found in English 201 sections. You can also browse sample syllabi. (please note that sections vary from semester to semester)

The Ethics of Representation
Instructor: MatthewCapdevielle
This section of English 201 seeks to explore generally the ethical issues of representation of several sorts. We spend a good deal of our time examining a series of texts that pose questions about the goodness or rightness or even the very possibility of representing reality using language. The course texts include selections of poetry, fiction, philosophy, history, and newspaper accounts of current events. Ultimately, we attend most closely to the "texts" of the stories we tell, to ourselves and to others, in an attempt to represent ourselves to the world in which we find ourselves. While the coursework is designed to challenge our assumptions about the connection between language and the things that we use language to represent, our goal in using this approach is not to promote a view of language as wholly arbitrary, but rather to heighten our awareness of the ethical implications of our own language use, specifically in our endeavors to persuade other people to accept our representations of things as true.

Representation: Media(ted) Gender
Instructor: Rasha Diab

The theme chosen for this course is representation. Representation, very simply, is the way we perceive of and refer to people, things, groups, etc. In referring to people, or things we tend to pick and choose from their attributes. This is a ploy of selection. We will look at gender representation: i.e. the representation of men and women. Together, we will try to look at how women and men are represented, and what the representation of one implies about the other. In looking at their representation, we will look at texts, pictures and films. I will refer to this as media (ted) gender. Then we will see the potential consequences of the metaphoric use of gender.

This is a writing course that integrates receptive and productive skills, namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, the main focus is on the development of writing. Based on the academic environment and, therefore, the need to write argumentative essays, the instruction revolves around the enhancement of the capacity to analyze, critique and structure arguments. In spite of the fact that this implies being solely limited to one way of writing (academic argument), argumentative discourse is so versatile and productive that you will find yourself investing in a number of ways of writing and non-verbal communication. We will also find out that different audiences require different writing styles. Because we mainly write for the academic community, our focus will be on academic writing.

Writing Places - Varieties of Nonfiction
Instructor: Mary Fiorenza
This section of English 201 uses the concept of place as a focus for exploring and practicing various approaches to nonfiction writing, including personal essays, memoir, literary journalism, and academic essays. Since every place implies a journey, this course is designed to first make you more aware of the familiar terrain you inhabit and then to help you explore ways to move beyond what is comfortable and taken for granted.

The writing assignments give you choices about how to approach them. At the same time, they encourage you to engage with texts and ways of writing that challenge your abilities and stretch your thinking. The movement from home out into the world supplies the structure that supports the central journey of this course: your progress from where you are today as a writer to where you decide you want to be after the last day of class. Your development as a writer is central to the mission of this class. To develop as a writer, you must practice writing, and you must practice the work that precedes and accompanies writing--in other words, doing the intellectual, physical, and emotional labor that turns experiences, ideas, research, and observations into texts. This course requires a deep engagement with such practices and a fairly large time commitment. You will be expected to immerse yourself in the work that writers do: not only writing and rewriting, but also reading, responding, observing, reflecting, analyzing, imagining, questioning, and listening.

Writing/Values/Place
Instructor: David Grant
This course aims to develop student writing skills through a semester-long investigation of language, value, and their circulations at a particular site of their own choosing. Much of the work in this course is focused on ethnography, supplemented with practical and theoretical readings and intensive workshopping of student drafts. Students are able to write in any particular genre they choose, but emphasis is placed upon the conventions of standard academic English and students are encouraged to investigate and write about a place that has some bearing on their particular major.

Big Hits: Style and Intermediated Compositions
Instructor: Ereck Jarvis

The English Department identifies English 201 by the enticing, elegant title, Intermediate Composition. What does this mean for Ereck's version of the class? First, Intermediate Composition is a class about writing and requires a lot of written work. The section approaches writing in two ways: 1) as a process of individual discovery; a procedure for investigating and thinking through complicated issues; a method we can use to wrap our minds completely around complex ideas and texts. 2) as a deeply social medium through which we can communicate clearly and persuasively; a tool with which we can build stronger understandings of one another. The class relies heavily on Joseph Williams' book Style: Ten Lessons Towards Clarity and Grace, which provides invaluable guidelines for composition and helps students build a vocabulary for the discussion of writing.

Ereck's section also twists the intended meaning of English 201's given name: this class about writing focuses on intermediated compositions. In this instance, composition refers to how we create our individuality, our identities. The class questions whether we compose ourselves or are created by the culture that surrounds us. Do we mediate and make sense of popular culture or does it mediate and determine our understanding of what makes sense? Do we, as a collection of individuals, create popular culture or does it create us and in the process trick us into believing that we possess individuality? Or, must these questions be couched in either/or constructions? Is there some sort of inter-mediation that occurs between the individual and popular culture?

To get at these questions, the class focuses on fashion and celebrity, topics that are saturated with issues concerning individuality and popularity. The complicated relationship between the individual and the social with regard to identity creation and popular culture parallels our consideration of writing both as a mode of individual exploration and as a highly social operation.

Writing of the "I"
Instructor: Melanie Hoftyzer
This section focuses on how narrative exposition often works as an argument. We will explore how we are persuaded to see the world through an author's eyes by investigating techniques that help make a human connection with the reader. We will then practice using these techniques ourselves by turning our critical eyes inward, and seeing how we can use our own personal experiences to support arguments. The class will focus on student writing and authentic responses. I hope to publish a collection of student writing as the culmination of our work.

Humanity in Crisis
Instructor: Amanda Kenny

This class will be run as a writing workshop. Although we do have a topic for the course, you will spend much more time with your workshopping group discussing topic ideas for papers, developing your essays, and learning from each other's approaches to the assignments. Learning to talk about writing and to become a confident reader of others' work is one of the most important ways to improve your own writing. In addition to intensive work within your workshopping groups, you will develop your research skills, your rhetorical skills, and your individual writing style.

We will begin the semester with a case study of humanity in crisis, the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. We will use this case study as a starting point to begin to think about questions of humanity and what it means to be human. Are we, as humans, inherently violent? How much free will do we have? Do we have a responsibility in the human community? Does it depend on how we define ourselves as humans? The second unit will be organized around the notion of an overlooked human crisis of your choice. It is your job to propose an issue you consider to have been overlooked to the class. You must have the approval of the class to continue developing your project-because the class is your audience, you must persuade them that your topic offers them new and interesting information. Once you have received approval, you will then begin to research and write a persuasive essay on your topic that incorporates as much research as is necessary. You will also prepare a formal presentation for the class on your topic. The third unit will consider ways of critiquing or offering solutions to a human crisis. We will consider utopia and dystopia as philosophical experiments, and then you will create your own utopia or dystopia based on your own personal concerns.

Uncreative Writing
Instructor: Corey Mead

It’s clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does composition respond to this new environment? This course will attempt to answer that question by examining such sites of appropriation as hip-hop, comic books, and the military-entertainment complex. We will also consider the ethical and legal implications of these practices as they relate to intellectual property.

In addition to traditional academic research and writing, this course will give students experience in employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, and plundering as compositional methods for writing.

Rafah, Athens, Madison; or, Persuasion, Truth and Justice
Instructor: Mark Pettus

The tradition of rhetorical pedagogy, which aims at increasing rhetorical ability through varied analyses and exercises, guides this particular section of English 201. Via a selection of exemplary texts from various genres, we will develop critical reading habits that translate into critical thinking and writing skills.

The course gathers around three nodes--persuasion, truth and justice--whose disciplinary intersections form the most basic object of inquiry for the semester. Initially, the course engages with how two ancient rhetorical theoreticians, Plato and Aristotle, approach persuasion. As both are preeminent philosophers as well, we will then look at how two key modern philosophers, Descartes and Nietzsche, take up their concerns about truth. In order to look both at ethics particularly and its relation to the previous disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric, in the last section we will focus on Sophocles' play Antigone, Christopher Nolan's film Memento and the recent Madison-Rafah sister city debate.

Some of the questions we will address include: What is justice? What is knowledge? How can one use each to persuade someone? What else can one use to persuade? For acts of persuasion, what considerations about truth and justice does one need to make? What are the differences between rhetoric, philosophy and ethics?

I have designed a set of papers and other assignments to progressively move toward more critical and more personally informed modes of writing. The first paper will be a critical review of a Platonic dialogue; it will serve as a preliminary exercise in representing the work of another author, a basic skill that you will repeatedly exercise in different guises throughout the semester. The second and longest paper will involve research; while it functions as a sort of extension of the type of work involved in the first paper, it will also ask you to reach a conclusion based on your selective negotiation of the relationship between primary and secondary texts. The third paper will focus primarily on establishing your position on a particular aspect of a contemporary debate. The abstracts and condensed critical reviews you will write will help hone the interpretative skills involved in the first paper and the deliberations you will write will develop your critical faculties. Additionally, this course substantially emphasizes basic grammatical and stylistic concerns.

The Jury Project
Instructor: Alice Robison

This section of English 201 is titled The Jury Project. It offers practice in written and spoken argument through the use of mock jury deliberations. In this class, students act as members of a mock jury, working together with their classmates to solve shared problems, negotiate conflict and difference, and shape the class "community" in mutually beneficial ways. Through the reading of actual, as-yet-undecided Supreme Court case briefs, students deliberate on and decide each case together as a class, eventually writing their own opinions of each case. The oral and written communication practiced in this course will help students develop skills in arguing, critiquing, analyzing, summarizing, visualizing, and listening to difficult conflicts and concepts. Primarily, students are taught to use their writing to think about their reasons for knowing and believing what they do, and why they think others in their communities should agree.

Professor Michael Bernard-Donals - Chair
Professor Jane Zuengler - Associate Chair
Professor Jacques Lezra - Director of Graduate Studies
Professor Sherry Reames - Undergraduate Director