"Time" is one of the most important concepts we use to organize our understanding of the world. Heraclitus famously observed that no one steps into the same river twice, and we typically think of our lives as journeys through time. Almost every story we tell, whether of growth or decay, success or failure, involves some orientation within time. Although we generally think of time as flowing in one direction, we are also fascinated by the idea of time travel, of returning to the past or visiting the future.
In this course, we will analyze works which explore the nature of time as inspiration for writing our own pieces dealing with temporality. We will explore short stories, poetry, novels, drama, and film as we consider various questions related to time: What is the relationship between memory and identity? How do literary texts portray the past and imagine the future? How do disruptions in narrative time, such as flashbacks, affect our experience of a given text? This is a writing and thinking intensive course: we will practice (re)writing a number of genres for different audiences and revising our work throughout the semester.

In this class we will study the cultural and narrative significance of gamesÐvideogames mostly, but we will also examine some other types of games as well. We will consider some early arcade games like Pac-Man, some of the latest blockbusters games for the newer consoles, and some "indie" experimental games as well. We will also read one novel, John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van, which is "about alienation and despair and the search for meaning, which Sean [the protagonist] finds in a postapocalyptic role-playing game he invents, turns into a business and administers in analog fashion, by exchanging letters with its players." As products of a complicated network of social, economic, and technological forces, videogames are dense objects, deeply layered with multiple meanings and hidden histories. Videogames reveal much about our cultural values, hopes and anxieties, and assumptions about the world. We will examine a range of games this semester as we strive to understand both their narrative and formal aspects. At the same time we will map connections between videogames and their broader social contextsÐhow games are designed and manufactured, who plays them and where, and in what ways videogames can be more than entertainment. When you think about taking a class described in the Emory course catalog as "writing about literature," listed as part of the first-year composition curriculum, you might expect to spend the semester reading some traditional poems and novels and then composing a series of analytical explanations of those books in Microsoft Word. However writing, traditionally conceived as stringing words on paper, is only one mode employed in effective communication. The writing you do in this class will include not only words on paper but also oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication. As the games we'll be studying are such deeply multimodal texts, we'll engage our critical thinking and writing skill across multiple modes as well.

This course is part of Domain of One's Own @ Emory, and as such you will author and administrate a personal website, close read multimodal texts for form and theme, and compose with a variety of digital tools. No prior experience with web design or digital authoring is required for successful completion of coursework. Please note that a significant portion of your work for this course will be published to the web and available to reading publics beyond the class and university. Once you have completed the course, the site you build is yours to continue to develop into a personal cyberinfastructure that may include, but is not limited to, course projects, a professional portfolio, resume/CV, social media feeds, and blogs.

In this writing course students will explore representations of adolescence in Indigenous literature. We will read a range of contemporary young adult fiction by American Indian and Canadian Aboriginal writers including Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan), Eric Gansworth (Tuscarora), and Drew Hayden Taylor (Anishinaabe). While we will primarily focus on fiction, we will also engage short pieces of non-fiction, poetry, hip-hop, and visual art by Indigenous composers. Students will compose in a variety of genres themselves as well including fictional dialogues, book covers, artist statements, and mutli-media essays. This being a Domain of One's Own course, students will post some of their course work to a personal website that they create and manage. No previous web design, creative writing, or visual art experience is necessary for success in the course.

Every day, we are asked to differentiate truth from lies: on the news, in conversation with friends, and on the cover of tabloids. In this class, we'll read literary hoaxes, and look at how "real-life" hoaxes blur the line between literature and everyday life. This course is designed to develop your writing skills by having you write about literary texts, which for the purposes of this class will include not only fiction and poetry, but also film, television, and a variety of cultural artifacts. Our own writing will be one of our major course texts. Using close reading, research, and analysis, we will compose our own essays and creative projects examining truth, lies, and the immense grey area in between. We might ask, what are the motives behind and uses of hoaxes and lies? who gets to determine the truth? how do we decide when to be skeptical, and when to be trusting? what makes something true, anyways? We will think deeply about these and similar questions while becoming stronger writers through intensive practice.

Ireland is a haunted country. From its mythological foundations in a mysterious Otherworld to the abandoned suburban homes that litter today's post-recession landscape, Ireland has always had a close relationship with the supernatural. In this class, we'll look at Irish faeries, vampires, mermaids, zombies, and ghosts. We will ask what these representations of the supernatural mean in the Irish context. What can they tell us about fear, memory, and difference in Ireland? We will examine short stories, poems, plays, films, novels, websites, and digital art projects. Students will be exposed to a wide range of literary texts and become comfortable reading and writing about different genres. This is a writing intensive course; students will be asked to write brief blog posts about the readings for each class. In addition, students will build a portfolio with short assignments about the literature we've studied. For the final project, students write an academic research paper on a country and supernatural creature of their choosing.

This course will take a closer look at how animals have been portrayed in literature across time. We will start with English author Anna Sewell's 1877 novel Black Beauty, and then read Kenneth Grahame's 1908 classic The Wind in the Willows, George Orwell's renowned 1945 novel Animal Farm, and the American avant garde feminist writer Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog (1988). By studying how animal characters are constructed and represented in novels, we will try to understand not only what it means to be human but also how it is reflected in the novelistic genre.

This course is designed to help first-year students develop writing skills that will allow them to deal confidently with writing projects undertaken at and beyond Emory. Moreover, by looking at the various representations of animals that are so familiar or unfamiliar to them, students will have an opportunity to challenge their established conceptions not only of animals, but also of the relationship between humans and animals and even of relationships between humans. As they explore lines of inquiry related to the course theme, students will be expected to compose four major projects: a personal essay, an analytical essay, an annotated bibliography, and a multimodal project.

In our modern industrialized society, science fiction allows us to reflect on our present by imagining our future. In this composition course, we'll explore elements of writing through the lens of speculative fiction, considering the position of humans in relation to the environment, technology, time and space, and each other. We'll look at how increased globalization and rapid technological changes have altered human relations and power dynamics, and we'll evaluate arguments about whether we should welcome or resist these changes. Readings and screenings include classic examples of the genre (Frankenstein and the film version of Fahrenheit 451) and more recent representations of the not-so-distant future (Super Sad True Love Story, The Fly, and Her, among others). We'll consider how each of these works of art takes a position about current cultural and technological trends, and in order to develop our own arguments about the role of science fiction, we'll develop a portfolio with a variety of artifacts: weekly blog posts, a visual presentation, a literary response letter, and a researched analysis.

In this course, students will develop critical reading, analytical writing, and rhetorical presentation skills while exploring the way that exemplarity (meaning, worthy of imitation) and monstrosity are constructed in medieval literature and art. Reading assignments include Beowulf, The Voyage of St Brendan, The Hammer of Witches, medieval saints' lives, romances, sermons, chronicles, and visual narratives of monsters and heroes in manuscripts, stained glass, and wall paintings. All texts in the course engage with the question of exemplarity broadly, including the rhetorical strategies authors use to construct heroes and the ideological motivations for labeling certain figures as monstrous. Reading and writing assignments will engage with the visual as a form of "text" or argument, and students will compose in multiple modes, including traditional written essays, oral presentations, and a final multimodal research project.

In this course, we will explore stories of origin in the Americas, looking primarily at literature and art produced by Native Americans and peoples of African descent. These stories in many ways respond to the displacement experienced post European colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. We will examine and discuss stories that appear in a variety of art forms, their potential origins, and the ways in which they connect to the social conditions of specific times and spaces. Selected texts include Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Maryse Conde's Windward Heights, excerpts from Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale, and Carlos Museum exhibitions including Grandfather Sun, Grandmother Moon: Wix‡rika Arts of Modern West Mexico, Creating Matter: The Prints of Mildred Thompson, and African Cosmos: Stellar Arts. We will also engage composer Christopher Theofanidis' Creation Oratoria as performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. 

English 181 is designed to help students develop as reflective, critical, effective, and creative readers and writers. Therefore, while the course theme asks students to examine the authoring of creation stories throughout the Americas, the primary focus of the course will be on the craft of critical reading and effective written expression.

This course is supported in part by a grant from the Mellon-funded Creation Stories project.

From Frankenstein's creature to George Romero's zombies, disabled bodies have long played significant roles in gothic narratives. This course will investigate that phenomenon to consider how distinctive bodies both operate as narrative devices loaded with symbolic meaning and speak to the real material conditions of the text's readership. Students will engage these debates and related discussions through a series of individual and collaborative writing assignments designed to develop both writing skills and critical reading strategies. This class participates in the Domain of One's Own initiative. You will create media projects and publish them to your own personal web domain using readily available, easy-to-use tools. No prior technical knowledge or media-making experience is required.

This semester, we will dive into literature and art created by women that responds inventively to the irresistible allure of the idea of "nature," such as the writing of Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ursula K. LeGuin, and the visual art of Louise Bourgeois, Allison Hunter, Ana Mendieta, and Jee Young Lee. Our secondary readings include a variety of analyses of and observations about nature, as well as television shows, films, and other media. The works we'll concentrate on all have one thing in common: they reject, upend, and combust views about human-nature relationships and human social dynamics that rely on hierarchies like Aristotle's Great Chain of Being, in which kings sit at the top of a ladder of organisms. In contrast, the pieces we'll explore and inhabit contain weird, wild, and extraordinary worlds.

The most important text in this class will be your own writing. This course is a section of Writing About Literature, which means that it is a writing-intensive course and its primary focus is training you in a variety of academic writing styles as well as literary analysis. You will write both formally and informally; your major assignments will involve three main genres (the personal essay, the close reading essay, and the research paper) and one collaborative project.

This course will take up a diverse set of works from across this African diaspora. Broadly defined, the African Diaspora refers to the scattering of African peoples as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. With an attentiveness to both shared origins and unique experiences, we will be looking at texts by Caribbean, African American, and Black British authors. The works in this course will challenge you to make connections and distinctions regarding themes, formal devices, and political outlooks of the different authors and regions. We will engage questions related to cultural dominance, the representation of "the other," and the enduring legacy of colonization. Because the issue of representation is central to the course, we will be looking at a variety of genres such as poetry, short story, novel, film/ documentary, academic essay, etc. to explore the difference genre makes in representation.

The title of this course draws from the Negro spiritual of the same name to explore representations of family within African American literature and culture. What constitutes family? What makes another person kin? What does family do? In this course, we will explore many features of kinshipÑincluding familial roles, affective attachment, generational inheritance, and the familial structure of communityÑprimarily within 19th and 20th century African American women's writings, song, film and criticism. We will consider gender, emotions and the confluence of past and future within works such as the myth "All God's Chillun Had Wings," Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, Bessie Griffin's rendition of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Ava DuVerney's Middle of Nowhere and Erykah Badu's "My People." We will also briefly discuss projects such as Finding Your Roots,sponsored by Henry Louis Gates and Ancestry.com, as well as the Human Genome Project.

In this course we will explore the role of the train in literature, music, and film of the United States, from antebellum period to contemporary moment. Students will engage with literary texts -- poems, novels, short stories -- as well as pop-culture forms like blues music. Our goals will be (1) to investigate how reading, listening, and watching carefully can contribute to a fuller sense of the past and present of the nation; and (2) to take on analytical writing and research assignments in order to produce scholarly work that offers insight into that national past and present. A final assignment will require students to create multimedia projects that incorporate their own field recordings of train activity on campus and beyond.

Writing sometimes leaves us feeling trapped or claustrophobic: there's never enough time to say what we mean, and the rules seem arbitrary and cruel. In this first-year writing class, we will learn to use the inherent limitations of written forms to our advantage, and we will ask why literary genres can be tools for surviving real confinement and oppressionÑbe it a prison cell, a detention hall, or a family home turned sinister. We will build outwards from the "nuts and bolts" of rhetorical grammar to the fundamentals of web design and digital storytelling, all with the aim of doing more (revealing, advocating, proving) with less (time, space, gimmicks). Authors may include Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Natasha Trethewey. We will also examine and create 140-character tweets, 60-second documentaries, and low-budget films.

This intensive writing course aims to develop techniques of writing and analysis through writing about literature. We will practice techniques most commonly used in the study of literature ÊÐ close reading and rhetorical analysis Ð as well as develop research skills and learn how to incorporate other people's ideas into our own writing. Our discussions and writing exercises will focus primarily on literature and film, but close reading and rhetorical analysis skills will have value beyond the course.
Our discussions, analysis and writing will converge around the theme of place, real and imagined, and the ways it is characterized, evoked, pictured, and deployed in written, visual and cinematic texts. How does the meaning of a place emerge? Who creates it? We will explore how writers communicate the meaning of place(s) in texts and images and use this exploration as a framework for understanding the way we can, similarly, create meaning by engaging a text through literary analysis.


This course will focus on the significance of memory as expressed in 20th Century African American literature. Because African American literature often utilizes the reoccurring theme of reflection as an avenue into the dynamics of oppression, in its various forms, and the desire to eliminate that oppression, within multiple forms of liberation, this course will highlight 20th Century texts which utilize memory to excavate a tortured past in order to obtain a bearable future for its protagonists. Our readings will provide plentiful opportunities to analyze and articulate expressions of the construction of self in narrative as constituted by the ever occurring mental imagery of Black lived experiences. We will also analyze the ways in which authors use their characters' memories as a rhetorical gesture intended to provoke readers to investigate the influence of their own memories upon their futures and personal philosophies. As students engage the course's texts, through writing assignments and class participation, they will learn to demonstrate both effective, persuasive writing and critical readings of texts. In writing, students must demonstrate competency in argumentation, and demonstrate writing that is strengthened by the use of multiple textual illustrations.

Late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain is a fascinating place (not to say it wasn't fascinating at earlier times too!). The end of World War II and the collapse of the British Empire brought many seismic cultural changes to the island nation. These changes feature large in contemporary debates in Great Britain about society, culture, politics, arts, healthcare, education, religion... you name it! In this English 181 course, you will be writing about contemporary British literature and film while drawing on secondary sources to help inform the texts you generate.
As you work on your own writing about contemporary Britain, we will discuss such issues as imperialism, multiculturalism, war, identity, immigration, racism, and neocolonialism. You will be doing a variety of both out-of-class and in-class assignments that will enable you to practice writing in several academic genres, including traditional research papers, creative compositions, and others. By looking at the film and literature of Britain today, you will be able to shape your own understanding of writing and editing processes.

In this course, we will focus our reading, discussions, and compositions on texts that use strangeness as artistic and rhetorical strategies. How do writers use the unfamiliar (monsters, aliens, robots, fantasy lands, and such) to examine ethical, philosophical and social problems with which we are familiar? Why would a writer choose to make strange something that is commonplace or well-known? As we consider these and other questions, we will view films and read poems, short stories, and novels across several genres, especially science fiction and fantasy (readings will include The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, excerpts from Alice in Wonderland, and others). Your compositions will derive from these readings and themes.

This course is designed to develop your composition skills by writing about literature. We'll practice writing techniques typically associated with literature, including close reading, analysis, and evaluation, as well as developing research skills. You'll learn strategies for incorporating other authors' words and ideas into your own writing and making arguments about and in response to literature and other texts. Additionally, you will learn use digital media as a way engaging with and responding to literary texts.
This class participates in the Domain of One's Own initiative. You will create media projects and publish them to your own personal web domain using readily available, easy-to-use tools. No prior technical knowledge or media-making experience is required.
 
Music operates as a powerful genre of inspiration and expression for musicians, visual artists and writers alike. Poets select words that evoke a certain tone whereas many artists view music as the driving force that invigorates their visual imaginations. As an art form that pervades and shapes a host of different media outlets, music helps to deliver the emotional impact of a movie, television program, or video game. This course, therefore, will examine the concept of music as it relates to the following four genres: video games, superhero movies, Japanese anime, and literature. As the class explores each genre in sequence, we will return to the fundamental issue of how music adds to and defines the imaginative world it depicts. To answer this question, the course will explore a wide variety of source material including Sonic the Hedgehog, Dragon Ball Z, Romeo and Juliet, and The Amazing Spider-Man. As a writing-intensive course students will be required to produce weekly blackboard posts, weekly critical reaction papers, two soundtrack reviews and a capstone music-scoring project. Video gamers, anime enthusiasts, musicians and movie fans are welcome!