ENGL 381 B -Writing, Rhetoric, and Genre in Legal Institutions
Whenever we take out a student loan, buy something online, or catch an MIP, we interact with the law and its agents. We mediate and are mediated by such interactions through a variety of written and spoken genres — police reports, contracts, depositions, and a whole host of other recognizable and not-so-recognizable textual artifacts. This class seeks to build upon this observation by using the genres of legal discourse to investigate advanced principles of rhetoric, writing, and argumentation. Without considering the law as the law, this course will prepare you to write, argue, and think about the role that we all play as subjects of what philosopher Ronald Dworkin called the “law’s empire.” Whether you intend to major in law, STEM, or underwater-basket weaving, this class has something for you — as a thinker, as a citizen, and as a human being.
ENGL 382 A – Digital Storytelling: The Hero’s Journey
According to scholars like Joseph Campbell, all storytelling traditions—regardless of geographical or cultural origin, historical context or political agendas—have a common genre, which he calls “the monomyth,” or “hero’s journey.” This epic structure consists of three phases with several milestones each, at the end of which the mortal who began the journey returns transformed into a mythic hero. Though these traditions are old, they certainly aren’t dead. In fact, we could argue that the hero’s journey is the structure we’re most familiar with, whether we realize it or not, via movies, TV, ads, songs, etc. etc. Thus, in this class, we’ll aim to track the hero’s journey in contemporary pop culture, and then use what we’ve gained to produce our own texts—ones which connect with audiences with particular effectiveness. Specifically, we’ll focus on multimodal texts, which engage multiple senses (vision, hearing, emotions, etc.) in order to achieve their goals. Any level of computer/digital expertise (or lack thereof) is totally fine, and there’s no need to have any pre-existing knowledge of the monomyth, Joseph Campbell, mythology, etc.
ENGL 382 B – Feminist Research Methods, Design Approaches, and Project Development
In this multimodal composition course, we will broaden our definition of writing to produce various types of texts that employ multiple modes of communication like sounds, words, images, body movement, etc. Our subject of inquiry in this course will be the intersection of feminism and multimodality. As such, we will create social justice oriented texts. We will also use our feminist lens in the qualitative and theoretical research methods that we employ to gather data for the texts we create, and a feminist approach when composing multimodal projects, meaning we will have increased attention to issues of ethics and accessibility in product design.