English 350, Fall 2011

Expository Writing: Rhetorics of Place

University of Massachusetts Amherst

INSTRUCTOR: David Fleming, PhD

CLASS MEETINGS: TTh 9:30 - 10:45 am, 127 Bartlett

CLASS EMAIL LIST: english-350-01-fal11@courses.umass.edu

OFFICE: 267 Bartlett Hall

OFFICE HOURS: W 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, & gladly by appt.

PHONE: 545-2972 (o)

EMAIL: dfleming@english.umass.edu

Description

English 350 is an intermediate-level, expository writing course designed to develop your skills and repertoire as a writer, guide you through the production of a series of original written texts, and foster the building of a community of writers around shared activities and projects.  Although we’ll also do a good bit of reading, this is not a course in literary history, theory, or analysis.  And although the course will at times resemble a writing studio, we won’t be working on the classic creative writing genres of fiction and poetry.  Instead our focus will be the nonfiction essay – traditionally, the fourth genre of literature (alongside poetry, fiction, and drama) and, historically, an intellectually agile kind of writing that, given its role in school, journalism, politics, and popular culture, is also an exceptionally accessible genre to ordinary writers and everyday experience.

This is not, however, a course about a particular genre of discourse: it’s a course in writing itself, and our focus will therefore be your own writing, with open and fluid parameters for what and how you’ll write this semester.  You’ll practice writing in a variety of conditions, for a variety of goals, with a variety of opportunities to experiment, stretch your rhetorical and linguistic muscles, and get feedback from others.  Of course, there will also be required reading assignments, high expectations for careful editing, firm due dates, and responsibilities to one another for response and collaboration.

The theme of this section of English 350 is place, and most of the reading and writing you’ll do this semester will be about home, community, travel, nature, environment, and related topics.  Why this focus?  Because writing today often feels curiously placeless.  Sitting in front of our screens, communicating with our online “friends,” it’s easy to feel that, as writers, we are everywhere and nowhere at once: our subject, life in all its instantaneousness; our scene, the universe of social media; our audience, the faceless society of the world wide web.  This can be thrilling as we try on new identities, new genres, new ways of composing ourselves and the world.  But it can also exacerbate the modern tendency to see writing as a matter of absence and our time on screen as an excuse to neglect the world around us.  And that’s a shame because writing is a powerful way to become more engaged in the world, more responsible to our communities, more present in the everyday places that ground and sustain us.  This course is an opportunity to think about how place writes us and how we can write, and re-write, our place in the world.

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Assignments

Work in the course will include:

Reading and discussion.  Reading is important for writers: as inspiration, as model, as prompt, as material to center reflection and discussion.  We’ll try to do some reading every week.  To prepare and enrich discussion, I ask that you come to designated class meetings with a half-page (single-spaced) response to the assigned reading that engages it in some way: summarizes a key point, connects it to something you’ve read or experienced elsewhere, analyzes how a particular passage is constructed, locates a problem of some kind in the text, asks a question that might be pursued later in more depth, or makes some other kind of intervention.  I will collect these responses at the end of class and read but not grade them.

Writing.  The main work of the class, of course, will be your writing.  There will be a series of linked projects, increasing in length and challenge as we proceed, all focused on place but approaching that topic in a variety of ways and practicing different rhetorical skills along the way.  Tentatively, we'll undertake the following projects (click headword for a PDF of assignment):

1. memoir: writing about the places in your life, especially your past life: family, self, town – wild places, peopled places, treasured places, fraught places
2. map/sketch: describing, recording a place and the lives that take place there, a carefully-observed report from the field, including non-verbal representations
3. travelogue: writing about movement through space and time, dealing with places far away or near at hand, with your evolving presence inserted in them
4. restoration: re-imagining, re-creating, the history of a place, excavating its past, uncovering its secrets, re-peopling its emptinesses
5. case study: in-depth reporting about a community, project, scene, group, with the goal of understanding and possibly improving life in that place

Each project will go through a similar process: generative writing, drafting, revision, editing, publication.  There will be multiple opportunities for peer commenting and one required one-on-one conference with me.  The last project will be collaborative, with everyone writing in and for a group.  There will also be opportunities to integrate pictures and sounds into your writing.

Final portfolio.  At the end of the course, in lieu of a final exam, you will turn in a final portfolio with a selection of your work from the semester, along with a reflective piece in which you talk in general about your writing for this class.

Texts

Most of our readings will come from the following texts, all available for loan from Five Colleges Libraries and purchase at the Textbook Exchange.

• Fermor, Patrick Leigh.  A Time of Gifts.  New York: New York Review Books, 2005.  978-1-59017-165-3.

• Richmond, Theo.  Konin: One Man’s Quest for a Vanished Jewish Community.  New York: Vintage, 1995.  978-0-679-75823-2.

• Solnit, Rebecca.  Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.  Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2011.  978-0-520-26250-8.

• Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden.  Ed. Brooks Atkinson.  New York: Modern Library, 2000.  978-0-679-78334-3.

I’ll have more to say about particular editions, and alternatives to them, on the first day of the semester.  There will also be a few readings distributed as photocopies in class or electronically as PDFs or put on reserve in Du Bois Library.

Class Policies & Grades

Please read the following policies carefully and let me know if you have questions about any of them.

Attendance:  Regular attendance in this class is required.  If you must miss class for an unavoidable, legitimate reason – serious illness, death in the family, religious observance, etc. – let me know as soon as possible and remember that you are responsible for any missed work.  For other absences, you may miss two class meetings without penalty, although I urge you not to miss any.  Beyond two absences, your final grade will be reduced 1/3 letter grade for each day missed.  Coming to class excessively and/or repeatedly late, or turning in work late, may also result in penalties.

Final grade.  Your final grade for the semester will be based on the following formula:

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Calendar (tentative)