Moon Landing: A Memory

A personal account of a feminist awakening during the Vietnam War era

Culture Shock!

This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience--specifically, prose grounded in, but not confined to, personal narrative.That is, you will write essays that engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of articles that address current issues in popular culture along with essays, pieces of carefully-crafted nonfiction, by writers, scientists, philosophers, poets, historians, literary scholars, and many others. These essays will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world, using personal narrative and memoir to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal in the variety of forms that the essay genre embraces, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write

Writing About Race

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the great cultural critic W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that "...the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." A century after Du Bois penned those words, most Americans would agree that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the color line remains one of our most pressing social issues. In this course, we will explore the terrain of race in America by reading the works of writers of color and others concerned with the issue of race, by viewing films that address racial issues, and by writing to explore how the fictions and facts of race condition all our lives, social and civic, private and public. We will consider the complex question of racial identity, test the givens of history by uncovering histories that have been more elusive or more thoroughly suppressed, and explore how writing and reading can both reflect and challenge racial categories, hierarchies, and perceptions. We will read the work of such writers as Suzan-Lori Parks, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and William Faulkner, among others, as we consider the story of race in its peculiarly American dimensions. We will also view films such as Skins, The Long Walk Home, and Crash. Both the reading and the writing of members of the class will be the focus of class discussion and workshops. Students explore race and ethnicity in personal essays, pieces of cultural criticism or analysis, or (with permission of instructor) fiction

Advanced Essay Workshop

This course is a workshop for students with some experience in writing essays, nonfiction prose. Our focus will be negotiating and representing identities grounded in gender, race, class, nationality, sexuality, and other categories of identity, either our own or others', in prose that is expository, exploratory, investigative, persuasive, lyrical, or incantatory. We will read nonfiction prose works by a wide array of writers who have used language to negotiate and represent aspects of identity and the ways the different determinants of identity intersect, compete, and cooperate

Writing on Contemporary Issues: Culture Shock! Writing, Editing, and Publishing in Cyberspace

This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience—specifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write. The end result of our collaborative work will be a new edition, the seventh, of Culture Shock!, an online magazine of writings on American popular culture, which we will post on the Web for the worldwide reading public to enjoy

Imagining the Future

Turn-of-the-century eras have historically been times when people are more than usually inclined to scrutinize the present and speculate about the future. Now, the turn not just of a century but of a millennium having recently passed, such scrutiny and speculations inevitably intensify. What will the future that awaits us in this twenty-first century and beyond be like? And how do visions of that future reflect and respond to the world we live in now? In this writing course we will read and write about how some twentieth-century writers and filmmakers have attended to the present as a way of imagining-and warning about-possible worlds to come. Guided by our reading and discussion, we will scrutinize our own present and construct our own visions of the future through close readings of the texts as well as of some aspects of contemporary culture-urban and environmental crises, economic imperialism, sexual and reproductive politics, issues of race and gender, the romance of technology, robotics and cyborg cultures, media saturation, language and representation-and the persistent questions they pose about what it means to be human at this threshold of a new millennium

Writing on Contemporary Issues: Imagining the Future

Turn-of-the-century eras have historically been times when people are more than usually inclined to scrutinize the present and speculate about the future. Now, the turn not just of a century but of a millennium having recently passed, such scrutiny and speculations inevitably intensify. What will the future that awaits us in this twenty-first century and beyond be like? And how do visions of that future reflect and respond to the world we live in now? In this course we will read and write about how some writers and filmmakers have responded to the present as a way of imagining—and warning about—possible worlds to come. Guided by our reading and discussion, we will scrutinize our own present and construct our own visions of the future through close readings of the texts as well as of some aspects of contemporary culture—urban and environmental crises, economic imperialism, sexual and reproductive politics, the ethics of biotechnologies, issues of race and gender, the romance of technology, robotics and cyborg cultures, media saturation, language and representation—and the persistent questions they pose about what it means to be human at this start of a new millennium