GRADUATE COURSES
WRT 614: Rhetorics and/of/with the Body
This seminar will introduce you to rhetoric’s complex relationship with the material body by asking how a concern for corporeality and embodiment might challenge and productively reimagine lines of power drawn around ambiguous yet consequential political categories like “the public,” “the private,” “the citizen,” and “the human.” To do this, class readings and discussions will investigate three themes. First, we will consider how rhetoric and the body have been conceptualized as distinct—if not competing—entities. Next, we will speculate about the body’s rhetorical force, inquiring into rhetorics of the body, or those supposedly “natural” qualities that sort bodies along intersecting axes of race, ethnicity, gender, and ability. Finally, we will examine how activists have pursued more just worlds with their bodies, using fleshy, visceral tactics to reveal and critique violent cultural norms.
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
WRT 305: Writing for the Health Professions
In this seminar-style course, we will ask what writing has done for the health professions by assuming a rhetorical orientation toward health writing, cataloging the various ways that matters of health and wellness, death and dying, and dis/ability are structured by text and other symbolic means of communication. We will consider the (un)healthy body to be a cultural artifact, an ideal produced through widely circulated discursive practices. Moving beyond brute biomedical models of pathology, we will use interdisciplinary approaches from the health humanities to explore how competing understandings of health are produced and communicated as medical professionals and everyday people interact with and try to make sense of the body and its functions.
WRT 303: The Personal Essay
We all have stories to tell about our lives. In this course, we will explore how to tell them through the personal essay, a notoriously slippery and flexible form that we will engage by writing our own personal essays, as well as by reading and responding to writers who work in that genre. Students will also prepare a personal statement for their application to graduate or professional school, or for another academic or professional opportunity.
WRT 102: Intermediate Writing Workshop
A study of strategies for extended academic writing assignments including critical analysis, argument or point of view, and multi-source, college-level research essays. Students continue to develop rhetorical awareness, analytical proficiency, and academic research skills.