WRCT107 American English Pronunciation and Idioms

This course is designed for anyone who would like to explore American English at a deeper level. We will look at the sounds and speech patterns of various American English dialects, practice difficult-to-pronounce words, discuss the issues of one's first language transferring into their other languages, and the oddities of idioms and colloquialism that don't translate literally. This course is recommended for those wanting to learn more about American English as well as those who are planning to teach it.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT108F Real Reels: Exploring Documentary Film (FYS)

Since the early days of film, the documentary form has grown and evolved as an attempt to capture the "real" onscreen. This course offers exposure to a broad array of documentary films and poses questions on topics ranging from story modes to spectatorship, criticism to ethics, propaganda to audio design. What can an immersion in the form teach us about the meaning of truth? What can it teach us about ourselves?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT109F Writing About Your First Year in the United States (FYS)

This course is designed for incoming international students who would like to reflect on their first year in the United States while exploring U.S. academic writing formats, the philosophies of liberal arts education, their own bilingual identities, and other topics related to U.S. academia. Assignments will involve keeping a journal, reading and writing a variety of essays, pre-writing activities, academic vocabulary exercises, and advanced grammar analysis. The reading will focus on essays about immigrant experiences. Authors such as Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alain Mabanckou, and Ariel Dorfman will be included as examples of excellent essay writing and to provide materials for discussion. The workshop-style format of the class will encourage academic exchanges, critical analysis, and peer editing. The course is recommended for international students, students who immigrated to the U.S. after middle school, and students whose dominant language is not English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT110F Academic Writing in the US for International Students (FYS)

This course explores United States culture and history through the art of writing essays. Students will analyze renowned works by US authors while concurrently writing their own essays and focusing on essay structure, analytical writing, cohesiveness, conciseness, and the mechanics of grammar. The course is designed to prepare international students for the expectations their US professors will have for their academic writing. Assignments will involve reading and writing a variety of essays, pre-writing activities, journal entries, academic vocabulary exercises, and advanced grammar analysis. As models for their own work, students will study exemplary essays from a variety of essay genres by authors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Reginald Rose. The workshop-style format of the class will encourage academic exchanges, critical analysis, and peer editing. The course is recommended for international students, students who immigrated to the US after middle school, and students whose dominant language is not English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Prereq: None

WRCT111F Writing About Culture (FYS)

In the age of social media, pithy critiques and quick reads circulate quickly. Whether on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit, the Internet provides a space for everyone to share their opinions on popular culture and current events. This course asks us to slow down and rewind a bit to consider what scholars in cultural studies might teach us when it comes to writing about culture. We will ask the following: What is culture? What can culture teach us about the powerful structures and ideologies that shape our worlds? How might this understanding of culture help us fashion our selves and imagine new realities and ways of being?



To address these questions, students will read theory alongside contemporary cultural criticism both for content and for style and method of analysis. In addition to reading and discussion, students will practice writing about culture through multiple lenses, discovering and developing their own writerly values in order to produce a publishable piece of cultural criticism to be submitted to a publication of their choice by the end of the semester.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT112F The Logistics of Climate Change (FYS)

According to the World Bank, an increase in global temperatures of more than 2°C by the year 2100 will likely submerge coastal cities from New York to Shanghai beneath rising seas. Yet as many theorists note, the global supply chains the World Bank helps facilitate also fuel global warming. How do we make sense of economic institutions warning us of disasters their actions may hasten? Why is there so much disagreement among scholars concerning the quickening pace of climate change alongside the emergence of supposedly postindustrial economies in the developed world? And what can we do about that pace today? This class surveys two sweeping transformations of social life in recent decades to pose such questions. Climate change, we will wager, can't be understood apart from the logistics revolution that made globalization possible: The massive freeway systems, ports, algorithms, microprocessors, and container ships transporting goods and money from one corner of the globe to another. Along the way we will pay particular attention to the uneven racial and gender dynamics governing who lives where, who acquires what they need to survive, and how they survive in a world arranged by the logistics revolution driving climate change today.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT113 A Nation of Immigrants?

America is a nation of immigrants. This ideological epithet has come to define the American experience as one of opportunity, advancement, and national incorporation. This course will approach this narrative from the perspective of im/migrants, refugees, exiles, displaced persons, and colonized minorities. To do so, we will read sociology, history, and political theory alongside literary texts, inquiring into discourses of migration, mobility, and (un)belonging through an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ENGL113
Prereq: None

WRCT113F A Nation of Immigrants? (FYS)

America is a nation of immigrants. This ideological epithet has come to define the American experience as one of opportunity, advancement, and national incorporation. This course will approach this narrative from the perspective of im/migrants, refugees, exiles, displaced persons, and colonized minorities. To do so, we will read sociology, history, and political theory alongside literary texts, inquiring into discourses of migration, mobility, and (un)belonging through an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ENGL113F
Prereq: None

WRCT114F Why You Can't Write (FYS)

Institutions of higher education have required first-year students to take writing courses for well over a century. In doing so, they have made it clear that educational and professional success are deeply tied to writing skills. But why is this? This class asks what it means to teach students how to write by probing seemingly stable concepts and practices like language and communication. We will discuss the history of writing studies in higher education before taking up debates over literacy, language standardization, education as imperialism and colonialism, theories of writing instruction, assignment design, and assessment practices. In addition to introducing students to the field of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies, so, too, will this course center the practice of writing. As such, students can expect to write, revise, and comment on classmates' writing regularly. Assignments will include a personal literacy narrative, response papers, weekly journals, and creative projects like assignment and rubric design.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: EDST114F
Prereq: None

WRCT115 Writing Mentoring

Have you ever wanted a personal writing collaborator? Someone who would meet with you privately to help you with your writing?



Your writing mentor will work with you on your particular writing concerns, whether you need help generating ideas, structuring your essay, improving sentence clarity and grammar, or managing your time. As mentors and mentees meet on a weekly basis, this program is designed for students who enjoy regular collaboration. If you participate, you will enroll in a 0.25-credit tutorial and have a peer assigned to meet with you throughout the semester.



We work with students of all writing abilities and in all disciplines. All services are free.



For more information, contact the Ford Fellow at writingworks@wesleyan.edu. Applications will be live at the start of the semester and will close five days before the end of add/drop. Students will be selected based on their applications and enrolled in the course after add/drop.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT115F Diffusion of Innovation (FYS)

Most inventions never make it out of the laboratory. Few reach the public. Why? Innovations and great ideas are not self-evident. Rather, inventors must persuade their fellow citizens that their ideas have merit and are worth adopting. This course will survey the broad field of "Diffusion of Innovations." Through case studies from around the globe and discussions of diffusion theory, students will learn how innovations ranging from vaccines to the world's largest particle accelerator gained acceptance through analog and digital communication. Students will also learn about diffusion failures ranging from water boiling to the DVORAK keyboard. They will then design a strategy for disseminating an existing but underappreciated scientific or technological innovation to United States adopters. The strategy will demonstrate a keen appreciation of scientific merit, diffusion of innovation theory, and the nuances of U.S. culture. This first year seminar course will also familiarize students with the methods used to collect, interpret, analyze, and present evidence in the social sciences, particularly in the field of communication.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL115F
Prereq: None

WRCT116F The Literature of Travel (FYS)

Travel literature has been one of the most fundamental subgenres of writing since humans first began to explore and record their thoughts. Much of what was first known about the world as we know it comes down to us from travelogues of early explorers, and this rich subgenre explores issues of identity and race, knowledge and power, while also often being alternately infused with longing for home or longing for difference. The literature of travel, exploration, and foreign milieus actually falls under various categories including journalism, nonfiction writing, and fiction. Any study of travel literature prompts us to ponder the theoretical problem of understanding people and places that are alien to us. This seminar will expose students to a wide variety of 'travel literature,' including novels, essays, travelogues, and documentaries. Throughout this course, we will compare received, conventional notions of particular places with what we discover through our readings. Come prepared to read and write intensively.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT117F Instances of Collective Memory (FYS)

Both history and fiction tell stories. They evaluate facts, construct contexts, and foreground patterns and associations--all using language as their primary tool. In this course, we will analyze key moments in the formation of collective and cultural memories in 20th-century history, philosophy, and literature. We will think about how individual memory and collective remembrance connect, how larger stories are built up from archives and personal stories, and how these narratives are shaped by changes in the world around them. We'll pay special attention to how the World Wars and the Cold War are memorialized and to the importance of these narratives to contemporary Jewish identity and remembrance in Germany, Israel, and the United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CJST234F, GRST234F
Prereq: None

WRCT118F Off-Broadway: Contemporary American Playwriting (FYS)

This writing course focuses on plays by contemporary American writers from 1995 to the present and asks students to begin thinking deeply about how plays work. How are they constructed? How can story, plot, character, dialogue, spectacle, and theme work together to create magic onstage? What are plays trying to do? Focusing on work by women, queer artists, and writers of color, we will respond to plays that have appeared Off-Broadway in recent years. Playwrights we consider will include Suzan-Lori Parks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kristoffer Diaz, Lucy Thurber, Adam Bock, Hansol Jung, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, Jaclyn Backhaus, Thomas Bradshaw, and Diana Son.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: THEA118F
Prereq: None

WRCT120F Uncertainty and the Future (FYS)

The world we live in is full of risk and uncertainty. Science, politics, and economics all tell us that this is a hazardous era in which great changes are inevitable and catastrophes are possible. How do people manage living in such an uncertain world? This first-year seminar introduces students to research and writing in the social sciences by studying a driving factor in the human search for knowledge: the uncertainty of the unknown future. We will consider how the ways in which humans define, relate to, and experience uncertainty influence social well-being and the production of the future. We begin with the anthropological study of uncertainty, which is rooted in the study of ritual and magic, and then consider perspectives in psychology, economics, and ecology. While we will reflect on the "negative" side of uncertainty, such as risk, precariousness, and insecurity, we will also examine the way the creative management of uncertainty is sometimes romanticized and consider the opportunities for creativity, adaptation, resilience, and imagination in uncertain times.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: SISP120F
Prereq: None

WRCT121F Are You a Feminist? (FYS)

Taking our cue from Beyoncé and the debates her music has produced, this First Year Seminar investigates the meaning of feminism by considering how writers, artists, activists, academics, and public intellectuals discuss the topic. Students' curiosity about feminism - as topic, politics, identity, and practice - will guide class meetings where we will discuss readings by prominent feminist writers, scholars, and critics. Students will leave the course with a clear sense of themselves as writers and thinkers, as well as an understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, and other social identities and of the multiplicities of feminisms in our contemporary moment.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: AMST121F, ENGL121F, FGSS121F
Prereq: None

WRCT130F Living within the Bio-Logical (FYS)

How do biology and society relate to each other? This first-year seminar provides an introductory overview of how the biosciences have been entangled in social contexts, from the Enlightenment to the current technoscience era. We will examine contemporary case studies where society impacts biology and biology impacts society, particularly those that show the complex interplay between the body and the environment. We will look at how rates of obesity relate to inequality and insecurity, consider the impact of toxins on the body and environment, and discuss emergent research that challenges longstanding beliefs about medical science. This anthropologically informed course provides ethnographic accounts that give crosscultural context to the questions posed. Throughout the course, students will learn to discuss the interrelation of the biological with the social, political, and economic, and we will critically reflect on the influence of politics and economics on human biological agency.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: SISP121F
Prereq: None

WRCT133F Race and Representation (FYS)

This first-year seminar will introduce students to theories and understandings of race, racism, and racial inequality as debated in the academy and the public (US) sphere. So, too, will the course consider race as it is lived and represented in cultural objects such as film, literature, law, television, and music. Reading and writing will be heavily emphasized. Through regular writing activities, students will find comfort with and a voice for discussing a range of cultural texts, preparing them for everyday discussions about race in US culture.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT135 Writing about Research: U.S. Style

This course is designed to prepare non-native speakers of English to write about research in U.S. academia. Students will focus on the structure, cohesive devices, citation styles, and academic vocabulary commonly used in literature reviews, theoretical papers, and primary research studies. As a topic of common interest, example readings will focus on language research including statistical analyses of language learners; anthropology studies of how gender, race, and socioeconomic group affect language; and overviews of theories about language acquisition. Throughout the course, students will learn organizational skills for longer papers, summarize numerical and theoretical data, and practice the mechanics of writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ENGL135
Prereq: None

WRCT135F How Language Works: The Beliefs and Bias that Affect our Social World (FYS)

This first-year seminar takes an in-depth look at how we communicate. What do we believe about language? How does that affect our interactions on personal and societal levels? Drawing on readings from the fields of linguistics and anthropology, we will challenge common language myths and beliefs related to multilingualism, language and dialectal stereotypes, gendered language, and language learning. To synthesize those ideas, students will write reflectively and discuss their own oral and written language, conduct short research projects, and synthesize their ideas into a final paper related to a topic in the course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CGST213F
Prereq: None

WRCT136F TV as Cultural Touchstone (FYS)

Why do we watch TV? What makes a good show good? What does television do for us? This writing course focuses on television as a sociocultural phenomenon. We will scan TV history, from its precursors and twentieth-century origins through the present moment. Areas of focus will include the game show, the MTV music video, the soap opera, the half-hour sitcom, the late-night show, the hour-long drama, and reality TV (Real Housewives, RuPaul's Drag Race). We'll read some accompanying cultural and anthropological writing as well as story theory and TV criticism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT137 Public Speaking

This course is designed to help students understand the key aspects of public speaking and increase their confidence with speaking in front of audiences. Each section of the course will be dedicated to preparing for and practicing different forms of public speaking, including presentations, speeches, debates, and more. This course will be led by the Kim Frank Multilingual fellow, Cyn Le.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.25
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT140L Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

This course explores theories and teaching methods related to learning English as a second language (ESL). Students will critically examine current and past "best practices" for teaching ESL and the seminal theories they are based on. In addition, we will discuss the various needs of English language learners coming from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, at varying levels and varying ages. As a service-learning course, students will have the opportunity to actively work with ESL students at SAWA, a refugee organization, or Beman Middle School. They will be asked to apply the theories and pedagogical techniques they are learning to their sessions at the school and reflect on their experience. They will also critique ESL textbooks, give teaching demonstrations, and add resources to the Wesleyan English Language Learners (ELL) Program.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: EDST140L, ENGL143L
Prereq: None

WRCT200 Integrative Learning Project 1: Crafting Your Digital Identity

Wondering about how you will explain your Wesleyan experience to someone who doesn't get what it is like to attend an eclectic liberal arts institution? Worried about how your experiences at Wesleyan will translate to your post-graduate life? Want to practice talking about yourself so you are ready to enter the job market or apply for graduate school? This course is for you!



Throughout the semester, you will practice writing about yourself and will ultimately place what you write in WordPress, the world's most popular platform for website design. Along the way, you will learn about user experience (UX) design principles and research methodologies, so that the website you create draws in your audience and makes them want to learn more about you. Throughout the semester, we will meet once a week to do all of these things in a relaxed, collaborative environment. Join us and bring along some friends!
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: RL&L250, AFAM250, CSPL200
Prereq: None

WRCT201 Writing Theory and Practice

Writing is central to education in the U.S., but how does someone learn to write? In this course, students will consider this question by reading theories of composition, debating key concepts of writing such as reflection, transfer, and translanguaging, as well as discussing scholarship out of cultural studies, literacy studies, genre studies, technical and professional writing, and public writing. Together we will explore the potential of writing education, carefully considering how we, as educators, can foster just and innovative writing education. As we read about writing instruction, literacy, and assessment, students will be expected to bring scholarship in dialogue with lived experience. To do so, they will engage in a number of praxis-based assignments, including group work to develop assignments, assessment practices, and curricular recommendations. The course will culminate in a final project of each students' design, that tackles the practicalities of teaching writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: EDST201
Prereq: None

WRCT201Z Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)

This course is designed for students that are considering teaching English outside of the United States in the future. It may be particularly useful for those considering applying for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, the JET program, the Peace Corps, or continuing after Wesleyan to get a TEFL or TESOL certificate or master's degree. The course will include basic language acquisition theory, TEFL teaching techniques, readings by sojourners in various programs, and opportunities to reflect on personal reasons for choosing to teach abroad.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CGST201Z, EDST201Z
Prereq: None

WRCT202 Pedagogy for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Tutors

This course offers an introduction to pedagogical techniques and theories for teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). The class is ideal for students considering a career in K-12 education, as the number of students whose first language is not English is rising in the US every year. Students enrolled in this course will gain practical experience by committing to volunteer with an organization working with English Language Learners (options will be provided). They are encouraged, but not required, to continue their service afterward with the Wes ELL Program. There is a volunteering commitment of two hours/week, or 20 hours a semester, minimum during the semester.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: EDST202
Prereq: None

WRCT203 Investigative Storytelling

This creative writing workshop is designed for students who aim to craft new narrative work through investigative or documentary research. Students might create a play, a screenplay, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, a digitally driven project, or something else. We will study some existing investigative artworks--dramatic pieces by Moises Kaufman, nonfiction by Leslie Jamison, poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, documentary film by the Maysles brothers, long-form journalism by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and podcasts by Brian Reed. We will cover interview techniques, research strategies, issues of rights and intellectual property use, and structure/dramaturgy as we plan, research, write, and workshop material together. Class members will regularly share work-in-progress and offer feedback to one another. By the end of the semester, students will be well acquainted with best practices for crafting investigation-based pieces and will have completed full or partial drafts of their projects, depending on project scope. Students are expected to have some workshop experience.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ENGL202
Prereq: None

WRCT204 Extreme Landscapes of the Anthropocene

The "Anthropocene," a term coined to categorize the current geological epoch, has become a way in which social scientists can critically and creatively engage with the impact of humanity on the ecological well-being of the Earth. The interdisciplinary and uncertain nature of this subject matter provides space for experimental writing styles, innovative approaches to storytelling, and critical discussion and debate. This course is designed to explore and challenge the term "Anthropocene," questioning how narrative and drama are entangled in the dissemination of complex truths, for better or worse.



In this course, we will consider texts, short films, and other mixed media that investigate the everydayness of extreme landscapes, from "capitalist ruins" to the depleting seas. We will dive into the social, political, economic, and scientific power-scapes that influence narratives about the environment, from late liberal ideology to corporate influence on science and the news. Through the course materials and activities, we will question how to communicate complex information with a broad range of people, particularly surrounding issues of climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice. Each student will build their own writing portfolio of short essays for specific audiences. The class will collectively build and design a storytelling website where they can share their work. Students are encouraged to apply an ethics of care and the art of "non-judgmental attention" to their critical engagement with the Anthropocene.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SISP204, ENVS204, ANTH204
Prereq: None

WRCT205 English Language Learners and US Language Policy

This course explores how explicit and implicit language policies in institutions of power affect businesses, schools, and the legal system. More specifically, the course investigates how language choices, translations, and the policies regarding both affect ESL programs in K-12 education, bilingual businesses, immigration policies, and the US legal system. We will also discuss the recommendations of scholars for increasing multilingualism in business and education, improving education for English-language learners, and efforts to improve non-native English speakers' ability to navigate the legal system. The course is recommended for non-native speakers of English and anyone considering working with English-language learners such as teachers, tutors, NGO personnel, and legal or business professionals.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: AMST227, EDST205
Prereq: None

WRCT206 Writing in Multiple Languages

This course explores the theories and practices of writing in languages other than your native language(s). The course will cover additional language writing development theory, translanguaging (using more than one language at a time), multilingual writing identity, and ample opportunities to explore these topics while writing in multiple languages. In order to adequately participate in this class, you must be able to write in a language other than English at at least a low intermediate level. All additional languages are welcome!
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT207 ELL Literacy Development

In 2021, in the state of Connecticut, approximately 14% of the K-12 population were English Language Learners (ELL) (https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/SDE/Performance/Research-Library/EL-DEMOGRAPHICS-10012020.pdf). This growing population includes students whose written languages vary considerably from English, students whose education has been interrupted due to the chaos of war and resettlement in the U.S., and students who have undiagnosed learning disabilities. This service-learning course focuses on an area of great need for this population -- English literacy. This course will offer students an opportunity to tutor ELLs for 20 hours during the semester while studying and applying the theories and best practices of ELL literacy development. In addition, this course will discuss best practices for teaching math to ELLs, lesson planning, classroom management, and other necessary skills for successful teachers in any field.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: EDST307
Prereq: None

WRCT208 Special Topics: Young Adult Novels in Verse and Other Poetic Intersections

In this generative workshop and discussion-based class, students will study story, arc, poetic dialogue, and the literary landscape of the booming Young Adult Novel world along with writing. This class will require both readership and a readiness to speak to the authors and poets of text including but not limited to: Me Moth, Poet X, Brown Girl Dreaming, When We Make It, and Long Way Down.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: ENGL220
Prereq: None

WRCT209 Learning to Write

Ask any writer and they'll tell you: writing is a process. In college, however, writing is often reduced to a rapid act of drafting before an imminent deadline. The question for most college writers, then, is this: If you want to learn to write, and if writing is a process, when do you get to practice your process? In this course, students will do just that: practice, practice, practice. We will read what scholars and practitioners say about writing to frame our own thinking about our relationships to writing and our practices as writers. Most importantly, students will write regularly, revise often, and review/workshop their peers' work just as often as they process feedback from the instructor. This course is especially appropriate for students who want to develop their writing skills and bolster their agency as writers particularly in academic settings. Assignments will include weekly reflections, a variety of writing assignments including personal writing, response papers, and two formal argumentative essays, regular writing workshops (peer review), and final writing project based on each student's individual disciplinary interests.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT210 Translation in Theory and Practice

This seminar is a workshop devoted to helping students from a range of disciplines and departments hone their practices of translation. Translation is part of a wide range of academic, publishing, and creative activities: humanities and social science scholars read texts in translation, translate while doing field work and archival research, and include translations in their articles and books; translation is an engine of creativity for many writers, bilingual or not. This course will begin by looking at various alternate translations of the same texts, to expand our sense of options and possibilities. The next five weeks of reading will introduce students to some of the main debates, theories, and practices of translation into English.



The second half of the course will focus on students' own translation projects. While you are welcome to pursue a project you already have in mind, most students will be choosing and starting a new project, guided by the discussions and topics in the first half of the course. The scope can be small (a single short story, a chapter of a novel or biography, a few poems or song lyrics), or you can have an eye to a bigger project you want to pursue after the end of the semester (a senior thesis, a short-story submission for publication, a book pitch). Week by week, all students will respond in class and in writing to translations-in-progress. In the last week, we will get to see and respond to everyone's revisions.



Facility in a language other than English is required; perfect fluency is not required.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: COL308, ENGL273
Prereq: None

WRCT210Z Contemporary Short Stories in Translation

This course will introduce students to a wide range of contemporary short stories from around the world, translated into English. We will read fiction from four geographical clusters--Nordic Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Western Europe--as well as from outside these relatively well-defined categories. Along with exploring the fiction itself, we will consider how the English-language publishing industry treats these different zones, as we acknowledge the risk of ending up with national or regional stereotypes. We will also keep in mind the translator's role as an active creator of the works we are reading. In week two, we will pay special attention to the crucial professional role of the translator in getting these authors published and recognized, and there will be in-class visits from one translator in each cluster. The objective of the course is to get a basic overview of different contemporary trends and traditions, and their various paths to publication in English, as well as hopefully finding one or two new favorite writers.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: COL308Z, ENGL202Z
Prereq: None

WRCT211 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: Legal Advocacy for Disabled Veterans

The public rarely understands what it takes to fight for one's legal rights or benefits. Good writers can translate those battles in ways that teach, empower, and (re)build community support for struggling individuals. This course is a study in the translation of legal challenges into civic advocacy.



In this course, students will write about real plaintiffs and legal cases for public audiences. As part of their journey, students will delve into the military and medical files of a disabled veteran applying for a discharge upgrade from the military. Most discharge upgrade applicants suffer from addiction and/or mental health issues, the same issues that cut short the veterans' military careers. Using academic legal writing, news sources, and confidential personnel and medical files, students will describe issues facing veterans in general, and our veteran client specifically. Students will write for a disability blog, a legal services organization (LSO) website, a middle school social studies magazine, a podcast, and a newspaper. Students' writings will inform the instructor's writing--as the veteran's pro bono legal counsel--of a discharge upgrade brief.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL211
Prereq: None

WRCT213 Pitch It: Persuading Diverse Audiences to Support Original Theater Projects

You have a script, some songs, and a production design...but you need support to make your project happen. Inspiring people to support original ideas requires research, skill, and craft. This course will offer students the insight, skills, and judgment needed to pitch their projects to writers, producers, donors, designers, and audiences. We will examine a range of creative projects launched in New York City and smaller arts communities to answer the questions: Where did these start? What made them captivating? And who brought them to life? We will then discuss best practices for communicating future projects orally and in writing.



Ideally, students should come to the first class with several ideas for arts projects that they would like to pitch. These can be students' own creations or others' work that students believe should be seen by a wider audience. The first half of the semester will focus on successfully-launched theater projects. In the second half of the semester, students will conceptualize and develop an arts idea they are passionate about. They will learn what makes arts proposals competitive, and will practice pitching to classmates and others. Students will have the opportunity to revise and expand their ideas and work. Students will be graded on a written portfolio and an end-of-semester pitch to the class.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: THEA211
Prereq: None

WRCT225 Creative Writing in Spanish

This course offers students the tools to articulate their ideas and experiences in Spanish narrative forms. The course is designed to achieve this in two ways: learning specific techniques through readings of short stories in Spanish and by working throughout the semester on crafting at least one short story or nonfiction piece. The professor will make in-class observations and written suggestions on student texts as drafts of their work are presented. During the semester students will practice extensive writing, critical reading, and peer editing. The course introduces students to literary terminology and places significant emphasis on vocabulary building.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN225
Prereq: None

WRCT225F Writing Biography: Denis Diderot, a Case Study (FYS)

How does one re-create someone else's life, in words? How does one conjure up the historical context that surrounds a far away existence? How does one bring together different forms of evidence--from the archive, primary sources, secondary sources, and written shreds of a life--to create the illusion of knowing the dead? In this course, we will ask these questions about the most fascinating figure of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot (1713--1784). In addition to editing the greatest encyclopedia of the 18th century, this would-be priest turned atheist also dreamt of natural selection before Darwin, the Oedipus complex before Freud, and a form of genetic manipulation centuries before Dolly the Sheep was born, all the while making significant contributions to art criticism, dramaturgy, natural history, and political philosophy. His private life, which includes affairs and prison, is also worthy of scrutiny and examination. While reading about his existence and studying a selection of his works, students in this class will undertake a series of biography-related written exercises that seek to resurrect various aspects of this intriguing thinker or members of his cohort. This course and readings are in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L225F
Prereq: None

WRCT226 Ethnographies in Medicine

Biomedicine looks different in different places. Biotechnologies change under new moral frameworks. The same pharmaceutical pill can offer freedom to some and evoke colonialism in others. And in some contexts hunger is more pressing than curing a specific disease. How do we go about challenging our biomedical assumptions and understanding medicine in context? Medical anthropologists have relied on the art and science of ethnography to provide cross-cultural accounts of health and healing that are accessible, provocative, and timely. In this writing-intensive course, we will read exemplary ethnographies in medical anthropology to explore the intersection of medicine, culture, and narrative text. We will explore four themes that cover provocative discourses in the field: the challenges of participant observation during vulnerable encounters with sickness and disease; regimes of power; local-global encounters; and food, eating, and the gendered body.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ANTH227
Prereq: None

WRCT227 Life Writing: Writing About the Self and from Experience

This course will examine both the power and the complexities of writing that derives from personal experience. Topics to be addressed, in turn, are memory (and its reliability); experience (authoritative/reportorial vs. interpretative/symbolic); identity and voice of the narrator; and agency (the degree to which the narrator is in control, or not in control, of the narrative). Types of life writing that will be explored are coming-of-age narratives, illness and trauma narratives, confessional narratives, autobiographical poetry and song lyrics, and interviews/oral histories. Readings and materials include Shadd Maruna, William Styron, Mary Karr, Donna Tartt, James Joyce, and many others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL227, ENGL228
Prereq: None

WRCT227Z Life Writing: Writing about the Self and from Experience

This course will examine both the power and the complexities of writing that derives from personal experience. Topics to be addressed, in turn, are memory (and its reliability); experience (authoritative/reportorial vs. interpretative/symbolic); identity and voice of the narrator; and agency (the degree to which the narrator is in control, or not in control, of the narrative). Types of life writing that will be explored are coming-of-age narratives, illness and trauma narratives, confessional narratives, autobiographical poetry and song lyrics, and interviews/oral histories. Readings and materials include William Styron, Mary Karr, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Donna Tartt, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL227Z, ENGL228Z
Prereq: None

WRCT228 The Art of the Personal Essay

The personal essay is short-form, first-person, narrative nonfiction that encompasses many genres: memoir, reflection, humor, familial and social history, and cultural criticism. Yet even these boundaries often blur within a single essay, and the personal essay can expand to include almost any topic. Writing personal essays--what author and critic Philip Lopate calls "the self-interrogative genre"--helps us find out what we think, often makes us change our minds, and, ideally, leads us to new insights. In class, we will discuss the assigned readings, participate in group responses to each others' writing (workshops), and write in response to prompts. We will study both traditional and unconventional techniques of nonfiction, focusing on the elements of craft: structure, voice, clarity, the use of descriptive detail, and revision.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL259
Prereq: None

WRCT228Z The Art of the Personal Essay

We all have stories to tell. But there is hard work in the act of transforming our intimate experiences into meaningful and captivating stories. This course dives into this labor by focusing on the craft of essay writing. Quite specifically, students will practice a variety of creative nonfiction writing techniques as a means of critically reflecting and analyzing personal experiences in order to produce essays that speak to readers in and outside of our immediate communities and contexts. Course assignments will include a writer's journal, workshop letters to classmates, three short personal essays, and a final essay whose subject and style is decided by the writer. Readings will include essays published in the past 30 years by authors such as (but not limited to) Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Jose Antonio Vargas, Zadie Smith, and Karla Villavicencio.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL259Z
Prereq: None

WRCT235 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: Radical Sustainability

The environmental challenges widely known and discussed for the past 50 years not only remain: they have grown. Maybe we haven't worked hard enough, or maybe we've been going about sustainability the wrong way. Radical sustainability explores the intersection of these now-critical challenges--extinction, climate change, and many others--as well as the physical and social constraints on action to address them. Our aim is to identify the pressure points for an effective response within the geo-ecosystem and the human systems embedded within it, and then to focus on making change through writing.



Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing are writing-intensive courses that emphasize writing for general audiences about expert subject matters. Students work with their peers to hone the skills that enable them to translate scientific understanding of sustainability for the public. Using an intensive author/editor model, students will explore public communication in a variety of forms, including news articles, radio features, and editorials. The goal is prose that is polished and persuasive. Course readings are chosen to highlight the physical nature of human systems as they relate to natural systems. While there is no prerequisite, the course is intended for upper-level students with experience in environmental and sustainability studies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-PHYS
Identical With: PHYS105, ENVS235
Prereq: None

WRCT237 Communicate for Good: Public Speaking and Persuasion for Social Mobilization and Change

The world needs more...democracy, justice, equality, civility, love. Diagnosing that need is only the first step in changing society. To achieve social good, you must persuade your fellow citizens that the change is worthwhile and the path to change is worth it. In this public speaking and persuasion seminar, you will learn how to communicate for good. In the first half of the seminar, you will adopt the persona of a public organizer and develop mass media messages and public speeches to promote your public good. In the second half of the seminar, you will assume the mantel of leadership and produce a short speech and video storyboard for the leader of a nonprofit organization closely associated with your public good. In both halves of the course, you will be graded on your speech preparation and implementation (i.e., writing and speech).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL237
Prereq: None

WRCT242 The Sociological Imagination: Poverty, Inequality, and Ethnography

In this course, we will examine the history of poverty, incarceration, racial and economic inequality, and other issues in the United States through critical works of ethnography and narrative journalism. Drawing on readings from Charles Wright Mills, Alex Kotlowitz, Katherine Boo, Alice Goffman, Matthew Desmond, Victor Rios, and other scholars and journalists, we will examine sociological concepts, public policies, and ethnographic methodologies and understand how social structure shapes agency and the dramas of everyday life.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL242
Prereq: None

WRCT250 An Introduction to Data Journalism

This course is designed to familiarize students with the basic principles and tools of data journalism and to provide a wider understanding of the role of basic data analysis in society. To that end, the course will focus on developing a solid familiarity with basic data analysis and visualization software. It will also focus on developing the tools of journalism: retrieving public data, interviewing people and databases, and the basic principles of journalistic writing. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze data, identify stories within the data, and create a news story complete with data visualizations of publishable quality--a skill transferable to many fields and disciplines. Both online and traditional print platforms will be covered.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-QAC
Identical With: QAC250, CSPL250
Prereq: None

WRCT250M Science Journalism: Why Animals Matter

This is a writing intensive course on journalistic and nonfiction writing about animals. The reading will cover the importance of animals in the study of climate change, disease and environmental degradation, and the evolution of human nature. It will also consider animals as independent beings worth attention as subjects in their own right. Writing projects will emphasize basic journalistic skills and the techniques needed to translate technical material on science and public health to make it accessible and appealing to the public.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CSPL250M
Prereq: None

WRCT250N Writing Reality: Journalism in an Era of Polarization and "Fake News"

How should the news media cover Donald Trump? How did the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle, and rising polarization help change the nature of journalism itself, but also lead to an era of "Fake News" accusations in which Americans exposed to different sources of information come away with completely different sets of facts? This class will explore our new digital and highly partisan media landscape, grounded in a close study of current events. We will study the impact and consequences of today's media -- both how to consume it, and how to write for it.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CSPL250N
Prereq: None

WRCT250P "It's a Mess": An Academic and Practical Look at Digital Media in the Late 2010s

Hot mess. Dumpster fire. Steaming turd pile. Commentators, journalists, and the public have all used these terms to describe the state of American digital media in 2018. While the profession of journalism is more noble in this era than in previous decades, the world of media creation and consumption is far more complicated than ever before. For young people hoping to get their start in the world of digital media in the late 2010s, catching a break is even harder.



The purpose of this class is twofold: It will introduce students to the larger issues spanning digital media--from a lack of diversity and inclusion to problems with monetization and "Fake News"--while also giving them the chance to walk through what it's actually like to pitch, write, and edit for an internet publication. Students will have the opportunity to write for a class blog using strategies that the digital media world uses today, and they'll spend time giving and receiving feedback on writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL250P
Prereq: None

WRCT250Q The Journalist as Citizen

In this weekly writing seminar, we will explore how journalists exercise their roles as citizens and, in turn, how journalism affects the functioning of our democracy. Using historic and contemporary examples, we will examine how, at its best, the media exposes inequity, investigates wrongdoing, gives voice to ordinary people, and encourages active citizenship.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT250R First Person Singular

This course will examine the techniques and skills of first person reportage, where the writer is present and part of the story. We will find and hone your own voices and points of view. We will examine the myth of objectivity; issues of fairness, accuracy, and moral relativity; the perils of cultural appropriation; the savior complex; and exoticism.



The course will include several short essays and one longer final project. It will draw on readings from The London Review of Books, The New York Times magazine, National Geographic magazine, Granta, Paris Review, The New Yorker, and the following authors: Lyn Freed, Rian Malan, Jonny Steinberg, Doris Lessing, Ryszard Kapuscinski, W.G. Sebold, Bruce Chatwin, VS Naipaul, Justice Malala, George Orwell, Zawe Ashton, Julian Sayararer, Cathy Renzenbrink, Sisonke Msimang, Thomas Paige McBee, Ahmet Altan, and Peter Godwin.



This course is offered by 2019 Koeppel Journalism Fellow, Peter Godwin. He is the author of five nonfiction books and is an award-winning journalist, war correspondent, and documentary filmmaker. Godwin's bio can be found here: https://petergodwin.com/about/
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: CSPL250R
Prereq: None

WRCT250T First Person Singular

This course will examine the techniques and skills of first person reportage, where the writer is present and part of the story. We will find and hone your own voices and points of view. We will examine the myth of objectivity; issues of fairness, accuracy, and moral relativity; the perils of cultural appropriation; the savior complex; and exoticism.



The course will include several short essays and one longer final project. It will draw on readings from The London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Granta, Paris Review, The New Yorker, and the following authors: Lyn Freed, Rian Malan, Jonny Steinberg, Doris Lessing, Ryszard Kapuscinski, W.G. Sebold, Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, Justice Malala, George Orwell, Zawe Ashton, Julian Sayararer, Cathy Renzenbrink, Sisonke Msimang, Thomas Paige McBee, Ahmet Altan, and Peter Godwin.



This course is offered by 2020 Koeppel Journalism Fellow Peter Godwin. He is the author of five nonfiction books, and is an award-winning journalist, war correspondent, and documentary filmmaker. Godwin's bio can be found here: https://petergodwin.com/about/.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT250V The Voice(s) of Expertise: How Podcasting Is Changing the Way We Listen and Learn

In this course, students will examine the changing nature of audio news and storytelling, and the extent to which traditional understanding of the voice of expertise is being disrupted by the rise of podcasting and other on-demand audio forms. The evolving digital media landscape has brought about an historic shift in the delivery of news and information. The shift has been celebrated--"the media has been democratized"--and reviled--"the media is too fractured and people are living in information bubbles." The shift is, at the very least, unsettling, in particular for journalists who find themselves working in an environment where the old rules and training seem outdated. But it also presents significant opportunities, especially in audio and broadcast journalism. The rise of podcasting, in particular, may challenge norms on how journalists explore and explain complex issues, and on who we hear as voices of expertise. This course will be a combination of media criticism, a study of best practices in journalism, and design thinking. As students examine the impact of new media on news and journalism, they will also develop their own ideas for on-demand audio (including podcast design) throughout the semester, working on an individual project, and in collaboration with other students.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL319
Prereq: None

WRCT250W Topics in Journalism: The Art and Craft of Journalistic Nonfiction

Journalistic nonfiction uses the tools of the newsroom to create long-form stories that read like novels. Students will learn the skills to ensnare readers in any medium of narrative nonfiction writing, from articles and books to screenplays and teleplays. Journalists excel in conducting interviews and marshaling facts. But few journos ever master the art of narrative storytelling. Nonfiction book writers can wield a narrative arc to tell a story. But many book writers are weak on basic reporting. We will read the work of newspaper reporters who learned to write long-form narratives, and magazine writers who learned the skills of the newsroom. By semester's end, students will know tools of both trades. We will hear from some of the writers about their work. To keep the focus on journalism, we will mostly skirt the genres of history and memoir. Students will write mostly in the third person, and primarily about events in living memory.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CSPL250W
Prereq: None

WRCT256 Writing for Television

This demanding, writing-intensive course focuses on (1) the creative development of a script, individually and collaboratively; (2) scene structure, character development, plot, form and formula, dialogue, and the role of narrative and narrator; and (3) understanding the workings and business of television. Each student will conceive of, synopsize, and pitch a story idea with their "producing partners" to "network executives." Each student will also serve as producer and as an executive for others. After absorbing the feedback, students will construct a detailed beat outline and will turn in an original script at the end of the semester.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM455
Prereq: None

WRCT262 Practical Criticism

In the early twentieth century, I.A. Richards, an instructor in English Literature at Cambridge, ran an experimental class he called "practical criticism." Each week, he distributed a single poem to his students without revealing the poem's title, author, and date of publication. He asked students to take the poem home, read it as many times as they felt necessary, and write a brief essay that simultaneously judged and interpreted the poem. This course revives Richards's experiment for the twenty-first century. We will follow Richards's protocols for a different set of twelve poems, which students must read, judge, and interpret. (Students must vow not to use Google to identify the authors.) The first half of seminar will be spent discussing the poems and the students' judgments of them; the second half will be spent reflecting on the discussions in the first half, with the help of theoretical writings by Immanual Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Theodor Adorno, Frank Sibley, John Guillory, and Sianne Ngai.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL267
Prereq: None

WRCT265 Creating Children's Books I

The goal of the course is to develop the skills necessary to create stories and sequential art specifically aimed at young readers. In an industry that welcomes unique voices and styles, there are underlying guidelines that inform children's literature and typically apply to most picture books. The course covers the creation, style, layout, and pacing of sequential art as well as the structure, content, and specific considerations for writing manuscripts for children.



In addition to studying the craft of effective storytelling and visual narration, we'll take a look at the business of publishing that will familiarize students with practices in the industry.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT267 Reporting on Global Issues: International Journalism in Action

This course is designed to introduce students to various mediums of international reporting beyond the traditional print format, like video and podcasting. Visual and auditory formats have gained widespread prominence, making journalism more accessible to diverse audiences. After delving into sourcing, research, and reporting techniques, students will engage in discussions with accomplished innovative journalists, hosts, and reporters who possess extensive experience in covering international issues. Throughout the semester, students will gain valuable insights from these conversations and collaborate in teams to produce a podcast episode for a class series focused on migration.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL268, CGST261
Prereq: None

WRCT270 Writing Fiction

Chinua Achebe was famous for his quote "If you don't like another person's story, write your own." Although disliking another's story could inspire creative writing, there are various reasons why people write, ranging from the basic human desire to understand the world through storytelling down to the desire to respond to the issues of the day--be it moral, political, religious--through fiction. The course is designed to help students gain skills in writing fiction; recognizing the literary conventions of fiction; reading and critiquing published work from a writer's perspective; making deliberate creative choices; engaging the work of others in a workshop setting; and revising their work using feedback from their peers and other writing strategies. As such, our reading list will be diverse in scope, cutting across various continents, races, and creeds. We will hope to use the work on the reading list as stepping points for creating our own stories whether in response to various prompts or as original stories to be discussed in workshops. At the end of the semester, you will not only have read a good chunk of fiction and have a good sense of how fiction works, you will also have produced--and substantially revised--some of that writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: AFAM281, COL370, ENGL277
Prereq: None

WRCT272 Knowing Their Place: Two Centuries of Women Generating Wonder in the Natural World

This seminar will examine the intersection of natural science, women's history, and poetic prose through the writings of Rachel Carson, author of the groundbreaking environmental manifesto Silent Spring, and the women who both preceded and succeeded her. What does it mean to know a landscape or an ecosystem intimately? How does a sense of place become political? How does gender affect perspective on the natural world and environmental stewardship? In addition to Carson, we will read authors including Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Treat, Anna Botsford Comstock, Terry Tempest Williams, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Camille Dungy, and Margaret Renkl. Writing assignments will include both textual analysis and personal nature writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS272, FGSS272
Prereq: None

WRCT300 Integrative Learning Project 2: Website Incubator

Have you developed knowledge or expertise about a topic through an internship, engagement in a student organization, time studying abroad, or through some other experience that you would now like to share with the world? This is the class for you!



Throughout out the semester, you will work to translate your experience into a website. I will help you do this by asking you to think about the content you would like to share, the audience with whom you would like to share it, and the goal you have for that audience. Ultimately, you will share your experience through WordPress, the world's most popular platform for website design. Along the way, you will learn about user experience (UX) design principles and research methodologies, so that the website you create draws in your audience and makes them want to learn more about your chosen topic. Throughout the semester, we will meet once a week to do all of these things in a relaxed, collaborative environment. Join us and bring along some friends!
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: RL&L350, AFAM320, CSPL300
Prereq: None

WRCT301 Promoting Early Civic Engagement: The Middle School Debate Project

Civic participation starts early. Students begin to find their place in public life in middle school. Debate can provide students with tools and a platform for expressing their ideas in public. Through debate, students learn to critically analyze texts, see multiple perspectives, and advocate for change to the status quo. This service-learning course pairs civically-engaged Wesleyan students with middle and high school teachers and students. Wesleyan students will design and test parliamentary debate training materials on our campus. Then, the class will help to implement the training materials at public schools in Middletown and Hartford. Our class will also mentor high school student apprentices who will help to run two interscholastic debate competitions. Wesleyan students will be assessed on their: 1. contributions to training materials, 2. preparation for mentoring and coaching sessions, 3. contributions to middle school debate competitions and campus trips, 4. reflection papers/presentations on effectiveness in working with public school partners, and 5. contribution to the class report: "Supporting Middle School Debate Collaborations in Connecticut."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT302 All the Feels: Affect Theory and Cultural Studies

Butterflies in your chest. Perspiration on your upper lip. A racing heart. Every day we witness and manage sensorial experiences; quite often these negotiations illuminate the ways in which powerful norms and institutions shape our daily lives. This course explores the relationship between the seemingly individualized experience of feeling and the social world of power by introducing students to the vibrant field of affect studies. A recent "turn" in critical theory, affect theory is interested in embodiment, the senses, and sensorial experience, questioning the dominance of rationality and cognition by exploring the role emotions and feelings play in our social worlds. This course will focus predominantly on affect theory as it emerged from queer, feminist, and racialized minoritarian discourses in order to ultimately contemplate the ways theories of affect, feeling, sensation, embodiment, and emotion open up literary and cultural texts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ENGL308, FGSS314
Prereq: None

WRCT303 Post Cold War Narratives of Migration to the U.S.

In this course, we will study post-cold war U.S. immigrant literature. Published in a period of shifting politics, particularly for racialized migrants, these texts illuminate new iterations of what it means to be and belong in a world where capital, labor, materials, products, and people were experiencing new forms of global im/mobility. We will read a variety of diasporic fiction from a range of localities to consider the ways imperialism, colonialism, militarism, religious proselytizing, and racial capitalism are in dialogue with the murky experiences of family, desire, loss, home, mobility, culture, trauma, and belonging. In doing so, we seek to understand how macro, micro, interpersonal, and intrapsychic experiences and institutions shape migratory routes and the stories that emerge across them. We will address literature through an interdisciplinary lens by reading fiction alongside sociology, history, economics, political theory, and more in order to consider what the world of the fictive can tell us about migration that other disciplines may not be able to articulate with such emphasis and attunement as literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: AMST263, ENGL331
Prereq: None

WRCT304 Love and Other Useless Pursuits

What is love? Is it an emotion? A judgment? A way of coming to know ourselves or others? What is the point of love? Does it have a defined object, a purpose, or an end? Does it have a logic or does it defy logic? What good or evil can it do in the world? "Love and Other Useless Pursuits" is an upper level seminar that approaches these questions through a comparative history of literature, literary theory, and philosophical aesthetics. The authors we read will likely include Plato, Andreas Capellanus, Tullia d'Aragona, Margaret Cavendish, Immanuel Kant, Stendhal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, and Lauren Berlant.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: COL312
Prereq: None

WRCT305 The Critic and Her Publics

The critic and her public are difficult concepts to define or fix. The critic is not a creative writer, an academic, a journalist, or a reporter, yet criticism borrows from the protocols of all four professions. The critic's publics are not made up exclusively of scholars, specialists, artists, or lay readers, but span these divisions. The aim of this course is to trace the evolution of the critic, her function, her style, and her publics from the seventeenth century to the present. Readings will include essays by Jane Anger, Margaret Cavendish, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, Clement Greenberg, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Renata Adler, Michael Warner, Anne Carson, Margo Jefferson, and Elif Batuman. The class will be linked with the Shapiro Center talk series, "The Critic and Her Publics," and the Shapiro Center Master Classes.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL305
Prereq: None

WRCT306 Foundations of Playwriting from the Global South

Cimientos (Spanish for "foundations") is a play development program run by NYC-based Latinx theater company IATI Theater. Since 2001, this program has showcased authors from around the world. However, in most recent years, the experience of working with playwrights from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Kenia, and Uganda has opened up the possibility of addressing playwriting as a deterritorialized praxis in which political, thematical, and historical discussions intertwine with shared aesthetics and new forms to understand theater in the Global South. In this workshop-seminar, students will analyze canonical texts and unpublished plays from contemporary authors based in the Global South to participate in the discussion of decolonizing playwriting. Students will analyze critical scholarship on the Global South to trace a contemporary South-South relationship within playwriting as a literary and political device. Authors from the Cimientos program will join the class as guest speakers to prompt students to develop creative writing techniques. Students will present a draft of a short play that integrates the material covered in class.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WLIT376
Prereq: None

WRCT308 Ancestral Writings: (Re)Tracing AfroCaribbean and Indigenous Frameworks for Creative Writing

Coined by Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos-Febres, "ancestral writing" elicits a reconceptualization of creative writing and its techniques from the point of view of our ancestors in Latin America, more particularly, the Afro-diasporic and indigenous. In this course, students will explore theoretical, literary, and cinematic material that encourages decentralizing creativity and writing as a political praxis. Concepts such as the ch'ixi in Aymara culture and biocultural memories from Andean indigenous nations will work as points of departure to develop decolonizing, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist writing techniques. Guest speakers, who include specialists in the Quechua language and Afro-Caribbean folklore, will encourage students to (re)formulate techniques for their creative writing. Students will analyze texts by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Mayra Santos-Febres, Odi Gonzales, Frantz Fanon, Guaman Poma, Elicura Chihuailaf, and Solimar Otero, among others. Students will present a creative writing piece that puts into practice the material studied in class.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WLIT377
Prereq: None

WRCT309 The 21st Century Novel

This course is designed to introduce you to some great works of contemporary fiction. The reading list is not meant to be comprehensive, nor do I claim that these are the very best of all the contemporary novels in the world, but the course should provide an orienting overview of various contemporary styles and themes, as well as, ideally, give you one or two new favorite books. We will experiment with organizing our study by time rather than nation or language (Does the category of "the 2010s novel" make as much or more sense than, say, "the American novel" or "the Francophone novel"?)--the reading list includes work from eight countries, half in translation. In exploring what if anything makes the 21st Century novel different, I don't have a particular theoretical perspective in mind, but if you are interested in one you can bring it up in discussion and apply it in your final paper.



We will neither ignore nor treat as an unfortunate if indispensable crutch the fact that four of our books will be read in translation. No one can read all books in their respective original languages; translation is how we experience international literature--we always read books from language contexts outside our own with a double focus, as texts produced by a doubled authorship. This dynamic is worthy of attention and appreciation in its own right. I am a translator, including of one book on the reading list; I will bring my translation experience into our discussions, but even when none of us knows the original language, we can engage more fully with the work by remembering the translator's role in the creation of what we're reading and considering the translator's choices.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT310 Literary Movements: Conceptual and Experimental Fiction

The course seeks to examine the modern novel by focusing on fiction structured around a concept ("conceptual fiction") and fiction which deviates from the traditional modes of storytelling in a coherent enough way ("experimental fiction"). Together, we will examine novels and short stories in which an idea, an image, or metaphor directly informs the structure, plot, characterization, or all of the above of the work. We will also look at works of formal invention and/or subtle experimentation as far as they are constructed around a discernible and coherent pattern. There have been countless such works in the modern/contemporary period and some of the notable practitioners include Virginia Woolf, Moshin Hamid, George Saunders, Cormac McCarthy, Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, and John McGregor, amongst others have work in this "movement." We will also look at critical essays around these books including from David Lodge, James Baldwin, and Victor Schlovsky, amongst others.



We will study texts from some of these writers (Woolf, Hamid, Saunders, McCarthy) closely and try to determine what it means to create fiction around a "concept." Implicit in this inquiry would be the broader question of form, formal invention, and the vagaries of experimentation. What makes a novel unique? What new grounds does this novel or story break? Does the experimental mode help or hinder meaning? What makes a novel unique? How does structure distinguish a novel rather than plot or characterization, or, for that matter, ideas? What are the ways by which a novel can subvert the traditional form of the novel? What are the strictures of genre and how do they constrain or help expand the art of storytelling?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: COL326
Prereq: None

WRCT317 Writing and Drawing Comics

This is an intensive workshop course for students interested in making comics. We will read comic strips and books that vary widely in genre and style, and learn to identify and emulate cartooning techniques. This is a permission of instructor course. No comic experience is necessary, but students will be expected to create work each week, so some comfort with drawing/artmaking is encouraged. To apply, please email srwarren@wesleyan.edu with 2-3 samples that show both writing and drawing/artmaking (e.g., a creative essay and a selection of sketches, a painting and a poem, etc.).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Prereq: None

WRCT350 Literature in the Age of Social Media

What does it mean to write, and to read, when the predominant form of self-expression for many of us resides in social media? What does it mean to construct a digital self, separate and apart from the selves that exist IRL? To interact primarily through the mediation of screens? In what ways do we commodify ourselves, and are we commodified? What risks do we run in revealing our inner most thoughts and feelings in an age of autocratic and capitalist surveillance, in which algorithms direct the attention once guided by more organic social forces? And how do all these issues affect the core mission of literature, which is to tell stories that reflect both the public self and the private one? We'll examine all these questions through a collection of texts, ranging from novels (Megha Majumdar's A Burning, Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, Tao Lin's Taipei), essays (Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, Samantha Irby's wow, no thank you), and poems (Emily Berry's "Paris," Tommy Pico's "Junk"). We'll also consider these questions through some short writing assignments that ask students to engage in the creative act through the lens of social media.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: ENGL374
Prereq: None

WRCT357 Saving the Republic: Lessons from Plato for our Time

More than two thousand years ago, Plato addressed the pressing issues of the day: the rise of the oligarchy, dwindling of public deliberation, increasing political factionalism, and erosion of credible information. Some argue that the lessons of his Socratic exchanges, captured in The Republic, are valuable to this day. In this course, students will immerse themselves in 403 B.C.E., a crucial moment in Athenian democracy. Following a close reading of The Republic, the classroom will become the Athenian state. Each member of the class will assume a particular place in Athenian society and in the factions of the day using highly-developed roles from the Reacting to the Past curriculum. As members of the gathered assembly, students will debate divisive issues such as citizenship, elections, re-militarization, and the political process. Then, students will develop, rehearse, and publicly perform a one-act play at the Russell Library in Middletown. The play will be set in ancient Athens and will demonstrate factionalism, information asymmetry, political brokering, and other political issues of that era. Following the performance, the students will engage the audience in a Q&A about the relevance of the play's themes for today. Students will be assessed in five ways: 1. Content quizzes on The Republic, 2. Written preparation for debates/assemblies, 3. Oral presentations in debates/assemblies, 4. Contribution to the class public performance, and 5. A short paper analyzing The Republic's relevance for contemporary United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: CSPL357, GOVT357
Prereq: None

WRCT357Z Saving the Republic: Lessons from Plato for our Time

More than two thousand years ago, Plato addressed the pressing issues of the day: the rise of the oligarchy, dwindling of public deliberation, increasing political factionalism, and erosion of credible information. Some argue that the lessons of his Socratic exchanges, captured in The Republic, are valuable to this day. In this course, students will immerse themselves in 403 B.C.E., a crucial moment in Athenian democracy. Following a close reading of The Republic, the classroom will become the Athenian state. Each member of the class will assume a particular place in Athenian society and in the factions of the day using highly-developed roles from the Reacting to the Past curriculum. As members of the gathered assembly, students will debate divisive issues such as citizenship, elections, re-militarization, and the political process. Then, students will develop, rehearse, and publicly perform a one-act play at the Russell Library in Middletown. The play will be set in ancient Athens and will demonstrate factionalism, information asymmetry, political brokering, and other political issues of that era. Following the performance, the students will engage the audience in a Q&A about the relevance of the play's themes for today. Students will be assessed in five ways: 1. Content quizzes on The Republic, 2. Written preparation for debates/assemblies, 3. Oral presentations in debates/assemblies, 4. Contribution to the class public performance, and 5. A short paper analyzing The Republic's relevance for contemporary United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: GOVT357Z, CSPL357Z
Prereq: None

WRCT400 Ford Seminar

The Ford Seminar continues the training and professional development of the Writing Workshop staff.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: EDST400
Prereq: None

WRCT401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT419 Student Forum

Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

WRCT491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

WRCT500 Writing as a Multilingual Graduate Student

This course is designed to support graduate students who do not speak English as their first language while writing about research in their graduate programs. Students will learn about the process of writing academic journal articles including writing an abstract, literature review, and methods, results, and discussion sections. They will also focus on sentence- and paragraph-level issues in their writing and elements of writing style such as conciseness, ambiguity, and clarity. Throughout the course, students will review and practice organizational skills for longer papers, summarize numerical and theoretical data, and practice the mechanics of writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U