Students improve their critical reading skills and increase their confidence and abilities in writing poems and criticism through practice. We develop a lexicon to discuss poetic craft with which we can more accurately talk about combinations of forms and techniques of poetry, thereby measuring their success. Early in the course, each student creates an academic web page, examining ways that hypertext and electronic conversations can inform the content and structure of poems and criticism. Other texts guide us when we begin experimenting with a more liberal mixture of rhetorical strategies commonly associated with other genres of writing and fields of knowledge. A humanities core, this course is often taught to highlight 'voices' which appear at the margins of American culture to better balance the curricula with which most are familiar.
Students read novels and collections of essays, responding with critical essays.
Some texts fit precisely into a sub-genre known as 'environmental' literature, such as The Rediscovery of North America, by Barry Lopez, The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, and Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. For other texts such as Leslie Marmon Silko's, Ceremony, Cabeza de Vaca's, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, and even the Declaration of Independence, students conduct eco-critical readings. Introduction to Writing Fiction 202. This course introduces students to the techniques of writing and reading short stories through analysis of fiction written by students and published writers across time and the world. The course is half literary seminar and half workshop.