Winter 2025
LSWA 130.001 – Exploring Science Fiction through Africanfuturism
Instructor: Jimmy Brancho
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
LSWA 130.001 Course Description
Great science fiction holds great power to do two things at the same time: imagine possibilitiesfor the future, and – in so doing – teach us something about our present.
In this course, we will read samples from a relatively new movement in science fiction calledafricanfuturism (intentionally not capitalized). According to author Nnedi Okorafor, who coinedthe term, “Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology,leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa.” Africanfuturism alsocharacteristically decenters the West, which is often in decline or effectively absent fromafricanfuturist stories. We will read recent works by Okorafor, Tade Thompson, and TochiOnyebuchi, and supplement those readings with other essays and criticism on the topics ofafricanfuturism, Afrofuturism, and science fiction generally to understand what africanfuturistsare teaching us about our global present.
Student work will include short reading responses and at least one each of an analytical essayand a personal reflection. Course sessions will be discussion-based.
LSWA 140.001 – Art in Public Spaces/FestiFools and FoolMoon
Instructor: Mark Tucker
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
LSWA 140.001 Course Description
In this extremely creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets”, which will be featured in a beloved annual street performance and spectacle to be held on Main Street in Ann Arbor the weekend of April 4-6, 2025. As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design, organize, and develop this event in conjunction with local community, civic, and business partners.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical scenery and sculptural elements for the creation of large-scale public spectacles. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, community-minded environment.
In lieu of exams and papers, mandatory class attendance plus weekly studio/lab work outside of course will be required and tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class). Note: This course satisfies LSWA course requirements for Winter 2024; however, this course is not limited to LSWA students—if you are not a member of LSWA please reach out to [email protected] to ask about receiving an override. This course also satisfies LSA’s Creative Expression requirement. Lab Supply Fee $150 (Students with financial need should contact [email protected] for fee waiver assistance.)
LSWA 228.001 – Telling Stories: Rhetoric and Representations of Race and Ethnicity
Instructor: Scott Beal
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Race & Ethnicity and Humanities Requirements
LSWA 228.001 Course Description
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or reveal a deeper understanding of how power shapes narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, podcasts, speeches, fiction, historical documents, photographs, art, and performance. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
LSWA 230.001 – Making Comics: Storytelling through Art and Writing
Instructor: April Conway
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
LSWA 230.001 Course Description
In an interview about her creative process, illustrator, storyteller, and comic artist Jillian Tamaki said: “I was interested in seeing: by changing that process, how do(es) the result differ?” In this class, we will practice telling stories through writing and creating images; in short, we will be mindful of the process while reading and making comics.
The process will often look different for each class member but will include experimentation with materials, genre, and storytelling methods. You do not need an art or creative writing background, a history with comics, or even feel confident in basic drawing skills to join the class: we will play with drawing exercises, review comic design principles, and explore creative ways to tell the stories you want to tell.
Course requirements: A long-form comic project with assignments that support the composition process and completion of this final project. Participation in a regional zine festival and low-stakes assignments that give us practice with different composing practices and prompt engagement with mentor texts (i.e., published comics).
Class Format: Experiment and discussion-based course along with feedback and workshop sessions.
LSWA 230.002 – Introduction to Songwriting
Instructor: Monroe Moody
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
LSWA 230.002 Course Description
What makes a song truly unforgettable? In this course, we will examine the art of songwriting through the power of lyrics, exploring how language drives some of the most iconic songs across genres—whether it’s the poetic storytelling of folk, the rapid-fire wordplay of hip-hop, or the protest anthems that have shaped social movements. You’ll learn the building blocks of "good" lyrics by studying rhythm, rhyme, imagery, and narrative, and apply these elements to your own writing. Together, we’ll ask: What makes a lyric stick? How can words connect deeply with an audience? And what stories do songs tell about the world we live in? Whether you’re an emerging musician, a lover of language, or just curious about how your favorite songs came to be, this course will give you the tools to both analyze and write lyrics with purpose and artistry. Assigned work will include responses to course readings, analyses of influential lyrics, and exercises in crafting your own songs. Throughout the semester, you'll have the chance to practice writing and refining your lyrics, culminating in a final project where student groups (bands) will perform a live concert featuring their collaborative compositions.
LSWA 230.003 – Film and Artistic Signature
Instructor: Zainab Hussein
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
LSWA 230.003 Course Description
This course will ask you to interact with a wide variety of films and screenplays with the goal of understanding, and eventually implementing, the ways a filmmaker communicates meaning through a cohesive tone or quality identifiable as theirs, their artistic signature. We will pay close attention to written, visual, and aural languages as the building blocks that develop this artistic style and signature. To shape our thinking, we will focus on films with clarity in their artistic vision, the screenplays that accompany them, as well as some critical essays to ground us in our approach to writing for film. This will inspire our creative sensibilities and help us identify how our own artistic signatures may be expressed. Assignments include small-stakes reflections and creative writing exercises that build toward an original screenplay for a short film, or first act of a feature. This course will guide you through all stages of the development process, from the conception of your idea, to outlining, to revising and workshopping, all culminating in a short script that communicates your clear vision by the end of our time together. Along with a screenplay, you will build and focus your vision through an accompanying visual film treatment, a style of mood board capturing a signature tone or atmosphere. No previous experience with screenplays or films is required. This course aims to develop our appreciation of film as the driving force that shapes our tastes and allows us to view ourselves as filmmakers in our own right, ready to discover and express our own artistic signatures.
LSWA 230.004 – Writing for Stage and Screen
Instructor: Shelley Manis
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
LSWA 230.004 Course Description
This course is an introduction to dramatic writing. Dramatic writers of all kinds develop expertise in writing, theater/TV/film history and production, dramatic genres and structures, character development, and the like. In this course, we will practice aspects of dramatic writing in small bites, building from character and story development to planning for longer work, such as scenes, 10-minute plays, and/or pilot scripts, and our semester will culminate with a new works festival!
We’ll try to figure out what makes excellent plays/TV series/movies work, as well as what makes an excellent dramatic writer. We’ll spend the first half of the course experimenting with script writing through reading and discussing instructional texts by experts, reverse-engineering scripts, and engaging with performances to see how they got translated from page to stage/screen. We’ll shift focus in the 2nd half of the class to developing and producing a small festival of our own new work (and an accompanying website where we publish it). As you might guess, then, there will be requirements outside of class time to make this happen, but we will keep them as streamlined as possible.
This course includes active learning and discussion in-class, collaboration in and outside of class, experimentation with different kinds of writing (analyses, annotated bibliographies, pitches, series bibles, websites, and of course, scripts) and long-term collaboration. We will read craft texts, theoretical texts, and scripts (from 10-minute plays to tv scripts to film scripts), and we’ll watch the performances of those scripts when we can. Everyone will have reasonable/appropriate artistic freedom and will be provided extensive feedback--some from me, some from peers, and some from both. The course grading scheme is contract-based.
English 223.008 – Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Diego Alonso Balvin Risco
3 credits | Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression Requirement
*Note that this is the only section of English 223 that fulfills the Winter 2025 LSWA course requirement.
English 223.008 Course Description
English 223 introduces students to the craft and critique that characterize creative writing, both as a discipline in the English Department at the University of Michigan and as a profession. This course treats creative writing as a skill and a habit of mind that students can actively develop through disciplined practice. The course also encourages students to participate in the writerly community as literary citizens. In addition to doing copious writing, students read published work in multiple genres, attend local readings, and respond to one another’s creative work. Over the course of the term, students produce writing that demonstrates both deliberate attention to craft and reflective awareness of their own and others’ creative processes. English 223 prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses in fiction and poetry and is required for both the sub-concentration and the minor in Creative Writing.
(Course description including the specific section topic will be added soon)
Fall 2024
LSWA 125.001 – Writing in the Surreal World
Instructor: Scott Beal
4 credits
LSWA 125.001 Course Description
Through all that has happened since 2020, the idea of “making sense” may seem like a quaint notion of yore. Certainly the events of the last four years have shaken many of us out of our customary ways of sensemaking in our daily lives, in our understanding of relationships, of country and society and economy. And the word “surreal” has been used repeatedly to capture how strange the world has begun to feel—in response to a planned Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage match, to Donald Trump hawking gold sneakers after a $350 million dollar fraud judgment, to Kid Rock shooting cases of Bud Light with an AR-15 to protest Dylan Mulvaney’s face appearing on a single beer can, to Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce – not to mention the pandemic, racial justice protests, the Capitol insurrection, and more. But what does it mean to be surreal? Did things ever make sense, or had we just been deluding ourselves all along?
As scholars for writing and the arts, we are positioned to pursue two complementary objectives: (1) to appreciate more fully the precise ways our experience fails to make sense, and (2) to strive to make more sense of those things that we can. In this writing course, we will use writing to explore art and literature that evokes the nonsensical and surreal, and to unravel the seemingly nonsensical elements of our own observation and experience that might help us navigate a surreal world. Along the way, we will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision—to strengthen our writing voices and build skills and strategies for communicating persuasively with academic audiences and beyond.
LSWA 125.002 – What’s Good?: Writing With Gratitude
Instructor: Christopher Crowder
4 credits
LSWA 125.002 Course Description
“Friends, will you bear with me today” and “thank you. Every day.” are the bookends to Ross Gay’s poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” a work dedicated to the detail of giving thanks. In one part he writes, “the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open / like the bells of French horns.” How do we move mindfully like this, seeking out and writing vividly about moments that bring us joy?
In our class centered around delight and thankfulness, we’ll move toward investigating the large and small things that can make us feel better. And as we’re discovering, we’ll acknowledge the difficulty and ethics of capturing happiness. What does it mean to find humor in the midst of pain? Why can writing about something good feel inauthentic? Can we use positivity as an act of resistance for ourselves or others? Does writing about what we appreciate do anything?
Together, we’ll create essays, podcasts, and videos that direct our attention to whatever may impact our well-being in a positive way. We’ll interrogate our emotions to learn about revision, drafting arguments, and how to get our thoughts from our head to the page.
Course requirements: Three multimodal projects with drafts that lead up to them, along with short assignments that give us practice with different text and digital-based media.
Class Format: Experiment and discussion-based course along with feedback and workshop sessions.
LSWA 125.003 - Writing Genres
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
4 credits
LSWA 125.003 Course Description
We've grown so comfortable with algorithms predicting our preferences (sometimes unnervingly - looking at you, TikTok and Spotify Wrapped) that we overlook the strangeness of what the algorithms are predicting. They don't work without categories, and when it comes to art, particularly narrative art, categories can prove slippery and odd. But they can also entrance and illuminate! Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, sports anime, horror, coming-of-age, isekai: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate our own lives? In this section of LSWA 125, we will examine genre: what it means, why it must exist, whether anything exists outside of it, and how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars, and people just trying to make sense of it all. Genres will elude us, and genres will even shift and transform into each other, but genres will also give us a glimpse into the history of ideas as well as history itself. Writing about genres will not only deepen your engagement with all sorts of texts, it will introduce you to larger and richer conversations about culture, art, and belief. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. You'll also have a chance to familiarize yourself with local purveyors and analysts of genre in all its forms! Tolerance for stylistic excess is encouraged but not required.
LSWA 125.004 - Old Stories, New Tellings
Instructor: Megan Behrend
4 credits
LSWA 125.004 Course Description
What happens when old stories are told afresh – in new languages or media, for new audiences, or by new voices? What can translated and adapted, rebooted and remixed stories teach us about the historical and cultural contexts of their source materials? More importantly, what might they reveal about our own time and place? When, for example, do retellings perpetuate dominant narratives and existing systems of power and privilege – and when do retellings resist?
In this first-year writing requirement course, we’ll investigate these questions (and more!) by critically examining a range of cultural products – some selected by me, others chosen by you. Hardly limited to the written word, our objects of study may be drawn from visual art, theater, film, and television alongside fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
Writing assignments will ask you to analyze – and apply – what “retellings” teach us about communicating for different audiences and purposes, including but not limited to academic ones. You can expect to compose an academic essay or two, but you’ll also be invited to adapt an academic composition for a new rhetorical situation, such as journalism or social media. A final creative project will give you the opportunity to retell an existing story of your choosing into any genre or medium.
LSWA 125.005 – Dissecting Fear
Instructor: Zainab Hussein
4 credits
LSWA 125.005 Course Description
This class is about facing fear. What are you so afraid of? Things that go bump in the night. The monster. The witch. The dark forest. The old house and its creaking corners. But for what ends is our fear used? Why is our culture so preoccupied with the horror? What are the cultural values, imaginations, superstitions, and historic resonances that inform our fears? Is the horror real, or is it imagined? And perhaps the most pressing question of all: When we face the horrors of our cultural production, are we better able to face the horrors of our reality? In the words of Toni Morrison, “It is not so much that I’m afraid to face my fears, but that I fear what they reveal about me.” This course aims to do just that, to unmask the social commentary around our shared nightmares, and push us to engage with our deepest wells of thought in order to confront what lies beyond the shadowy edges of our perception, the things we would rather look away from. We will do all of this in order to better understand our human fears, our human desires, and our atmosphere of fright. By dissecting fear we will become stronger scholars and writers, and dare I say, we may even become brave.
In this first year writing course, we will investigate these questions and more by primarily interacting with the genre of horror through fiction and film, often by placing our findings in conversation with historical documents and contemporary journalism. We’ll engage with short stories by Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Shirley Jackson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others. We'll also engage with film, including contemporary horror pictures like Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Ari Aster’s Midsommar, as well as horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby. We will read theory and critique that will ground us in our understandings, and better equip you to respond to these fantasies of fear. This course takes an anti-racist approach—we will make it a point to question our biases and examine how dimensions of fear are impacted by who is telling the story, and who is afraid. In this way we will examine the historic links between fear and systemic imbalances of power. This course will guide you through all phases of the writing process, gaining you the necessary skill to locate and propel your personal voice (a powerful thing, nothing to fear in finding it!) to its ultimate potential, preparing you to communicate effectively not only with academic audiences, but across venues.
LSWA 125.006 – The Rhetoric of Television
Instructor: Shelley Manis
4 credits
LSWA 125.006 Course Description
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television makes meaning, makes arguments—whether that meaning arises from high drama like When They See Us or goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it! or who are new to it!): How does TV make meaning(s)? How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]?
This is a writing class. The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with careful thinking, writing, and revising processes. We will practice close reading, analytical description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series, academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications.
This course uses Labor-Based Grading assessment.
LSWA 140.001 – From Kansas to Munchkin Land
Instructor: Mark Tucker
3 credits
LSWA 140.001 Course Description
This course will explore our perceptual world in terms of color and composition by introducing students to basic design, color theory, and reproduction techniques via the production of a large-scale mural to be permanently installed in a public building on U-M campus.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale public murals. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the finished mural it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, environment.
In lieu of exams, papers and traditional homework assignments, there will be extensive creative work required outside of class time with weekly Lab times TBD on the first day of class.
Grades in this course are labor-based and therefore require 100% attendance.
All art supplies are included and there is no Lab Fee for this course. (Art supplies for this course provided courtesy U-M Facilities and Operations).
Course Archives
Fall 2024 Course Archive
LSWA 125.001: Writing int the Surreal World
Instructor: Scott Beal
4 credits
Through all that has happened since 2020, the idea of “making sense” may seem like a quaint notion of yore. Certainly the events of the last four years have shaken many of us out of our customary ways of sensemaking in our daily lives, in our understanding of relationships, of country and society and economy. And the word “surreal” has been used repeatedly to capture how strange the world has begun to feel—in response to a planned Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage match, to Donald Trump hawking gold sneakers after a $350 million dollar fraud judgment, to Kid Rock shooting cases of Bud Light with an AR-15 to protest Dylan Mulvaney’s face appearing on a single beer can, to Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce – not to mention the pandemic, racial justice protests, the Capitol insurrection, and more. But what does it mean to be surreal? Did things ever make sense, or had we just been deluding ourselves all along?
As scholars for writing and the arts, we are positioned to pursue two complementary objectives: (1) to appreciate more fully the precise ways our experience fails to make sense, and (2) to strive to make more sense of those things that we can. In this writing course, we will use writing to explore art and literature that evokes the nonsensical and surreal, and to unravel the seemingly nonsensical elements of our own observation and experience that might help us navigate a surreal world. Along the way, we will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision—to strengthen our writing voices and build skills and strategies for communicating persuasively with academic audiences and beyond.
LSWA 125.002: What's Good?: Writing With Gratitude
Instructor: Christopher Crowder
4 credits
“Friends, will you bear with me today” and “thank you. Every day.” are the bookends to Ross Gay’s poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” a work dedicated to the detail of giving thanks. In one part he writes, “the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open / like the bells of French horns.” How do we move mindfully like this, seeking out and writing vividly about moments that bring us joy?
In our class centered around delight and thankfulness, we’ll move toward investigating the large and small things that can make us feel better. And as we’re discovering, we’ll acknowledge the difficulty and ethics of capturing happiness. What does it mean to find humor in the midst of pain? Why can writing about something good feel inauthentic? Can we use positivity as an act of resistance for ourselves or others? Does writing about what we appreciate do anything?
Together, we’ll create essays, podcasts, and videos that direct our attention to whatever may impact our well-being in a positive way. We’ll interrogate our emotions to learn about revision, drafting arguments, and how to get our thoughts from our head to the page.
Course requirements: Three multimodal projects with drafts that lead up to them, along with short assignments that give us practice with different text and digital-based media.
Class Format: Experiment and discussion-based course along with feedback and workshop sessions.
LSWA 125.003: Writing Genres
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
4 credits
We've grown so comfortable with algorithms predicting our preferences (sometimes unnervingly - looking at you, TikTok and Spotify Wrapped) that we overlook the strangeness of what the algorithms are predicting. They don't work without categories, and when it comes to art, particularly narrative art, categories can prove slippery and odd. But they can also entrance and illuminate! Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, sports anime, horror, coming-of-age, isekai: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate our own lives? In this section of LSWA 125, we will examine genre: what it means, why it must exist, whether anything exists outside of it, and how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars, and people just trying to make sense of it all. Genres will elude us, and genres will even shift and transform into each other, but genres will also give us a glimpse into the history of ideas as well as history itself. Writing about genres will not only deepen your engagement with all sorts of texts, it will introduce you to larger and richer conversations about culture, art, and belief. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. You'll also have a chance to familiarize yourself with local purveyors and analysts of genre in all its forms! Tolerance for stylistic excess is encouraged but not required.
LSWA 125.004: Old Stories, New Tellings
Instructor: Megan Behrend
4 credits
What happens when old stories are told afresh – in new languages or media, for new audiences, or by new voices? What can translated and adapted, rebooted and remixed stories teach us about the historical and cultural contexts of their source materials? More importantly, what might they reveal about our own time and place? When, for example, do retellings perpetuate dominant narratives and existing systems of power and privilege – and when do retellings resist?
In this first-year writing requirement course, we’ll investigate these questions (and more!) by critically examining a range of cultural products – some selected by me, others chosen by you. Hardly limited to the written word, our objects of study may be drawn from visual art, theater, film, and television alongside fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
Writing assignments will ask you to analyze – and apply – what “retellings” teach us about communicating for different audiences and purposes, including but not limited to academic ones. You can expect to compose an academic essay or two, but you’ll also be invited to adapt an academic composition for a new rhetorical situation, such as journalism or social media. A final creative project will give you the opportunity to retell an existing story of your choosing into any genre or medium.
LSWA 125.005: Dissecting Fear
Instructor: Zainab Hussein
4 credits
This class is about facing fear. What are you so afraid of? Things that go bump in the night. The monster. The witch. The dark forest. The old house and its creaking corners. But for what ends is our fear used? Why is our culture so preoccupied with the horror? What are the cultural values, imaginations, superstitions, and historic resonances that inform our fears? Is the horror real, or is it imagined? And perhaps the most pressing question of all: When we face the horrors of our cultural production, are we better able to face the horrors of our reality? In the words of Toni Morrison, “It is not so much that I’m afraid to face my fears, but that I fear what they reveal about me.” This course aims to do just that, to unmask the social commentary around our shared nightmares, and push us to engage with our deepest wells of thought in order to confront what lies beyond the shadowy edges of our perception, the things we would rather look away from. We will do all of this in order to better understand our human fears, our human desires, and our atmosphere of fright. By dissecting fear we will become stronger scholars and writers, and dare I say, we may even become brave.
In this first year writing course, we will investigate these questions and more by primarily interacting with the genre of horror through fiction and film, often by placing our findings in conversation with historical documents and contemporary journalism. We’ll engage with short stories by Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Shirley Jackson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others. We'll also engage with film, including contemporary horror pictures like Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Ari Aster’s Midsommar, as well as horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby. We will read theory and critique that will ground us in our understandings, and better equip you to respond to these fantasies of fear. This course takes an anti-racist approach—we will make it a point to question our biases and examine how dimensions of fear are impacted by who is telling the story, and who is afraid. In this way we will examine the historic links between fear and systemic imbalances of power. This course will guide you through all phases of the writing process, gaining you the necessary skill to locate and propel your personal voice (a powerful thing, nothing to fear in finding it!) to its ultimate potential, preparing you to communicate effectively not only with academic audiences, but across venues.
LSWA 125.006: The Rhetoric of Television
Instructor: Shelley Manis
4 credits
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television makes meaning, makes arguments—whether that meaning arises from high drama like When They See Us or goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it! or who are new to it!): How does TV make meaning(s)? How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]?
This is a writing class. The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with careful thinking, writing, and revising processes. We will practice close reading, analytical description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series, academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications.
This course uses Labor-Based Grading assessment.
LSWA 140.001: From Kansas to Munchkin Land
Instructor: Mark Tucker
3 credits
This course will explore our perceptual world in terms of color and composition by introducing students to basic design, color theory, and reproduction techniques via the production of a large-scale mural to be permanently installed in a public building on U-M campus.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale public murals. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the finished mural it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, environment.
In lieu of exams, papers and traditional homework assignments, there will be extensive creative work required outside of class time with weekly Lab times TBD on the first day of class.
Grades in this course are labor-based and therefore require 100% attendance.All art supplies are included and there is no Lab Fee for this course.
(Art supplies for this course provided courtesy U-M Facilities and Operations).
Winter 2024 Course Archive
LSWA 140.001 – Art in Public Spaces: FestiFools and FoolMoon
Instructor: Mark Tucker
F 2:30-5:30 pm | FestiFools Studio (1239 Kipke Dr.) | 3 credits
In this extremely creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets”, which will be featured in a beloved annual street performance and spectacle to be held outdoors in the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area the weekend of April 5-7, 2024. As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design, organize, and develop this event in conjunction with local community, civic, and business partners.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical scenery and sculptural elements for the creation of large-scale public spectacles. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, community-minded environment.
In lieu of exams and papers, mandatory class attendance plus weekly studio/lab work outside of course will be required and tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class). Note: This course satisfies LSWA course requirements for Winter 2024; however, this course is not limited to LSWA students—if you are not a member of LSWA please reach out to the instructor for an override. This course also satisfies LSA’s Creative Expression requirement. Lab Supply Fee $75 (Students with financial need should contact [email protected] for fee waiver assistance.)
LSWA 140.002 – Year of Sustainability Mural Painting
Instructor: Mark Tucker
T/Th 6-7:30 pm | ALH Art Studio | 3 credits
This course will explore our perceptual world in terms of color and composition by introducing students to basic drawing, design, color theory, paint handling, color mixing, and reproduction techniques culminating in the production of a large-scale mural based on the Year of Sustainability Theme to be permanently installed in Angell Hall.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale public murals. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the finished mural it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, environment.
Mandatory attendance and active class participation required. Expect extensive outside work on homework assignments. Museum trips (TBA) may be required. Note: This course satisfies LSWA course requirements for Winter 2024; however, this course is not limited to LSWA students—if you are not a member of LSWA please reach out to the instructor for an override. This course also satisfies LSA’s Creative Expression requirement. Lab Supply Fee $75 (Students with financial need should contact [email protected] for fee waiver assistance.)
LSWA 228.001 – Telling Stories: Rhetoric and Representations of Race and Ethnicity
Instructor: Naomi Silver
T/Th 1-2:30 pm | ALH 2012 | 3 credits
*Fulfills Race and Ethnicity Requirement
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or reveal a deeper understanding of how power shapes narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, podcasts, speeches, fiction, historical documents, photographs, art, and performance. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
LSWA 230.001 - Handmade: DIY Culture and Crafting
Instructor: Catherine Cassel
M/W 2:30-4 pm | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
What was the last thing you made? Did you write a song? Paint a picture? Knit a pair of socks? Letterpress a card? Choreograph a dance? Do you think of yourself as an artist? As a crafter?
In this course, we will explore DIY (do it yourself) culture and the meaning of making. We will consider the values, ethics, politics, and communities of practice involved in DIY, and ask what making has to do with empowerment and resistance. We will also investigate how gender, race, and class figure into DIY social movements and craftivism in such examples as the rise of DIY in 1950s American homemaking, punk and riotgrrl counterculture, yarnbombing, the pussyhat project, subversive textile arts, and more!
This course will challenge you to develop your curiosity, flex your autodidactic muscles, and create things that matter to you and in the world. We will consider a range of DIY artifacts. Class will be a balance of discussion, maker labs, and excursions. Composition assignments will include critical reading responses as well as your own DIY creations.
LSWA 230.002 - Poetry, Magic, and Science
Instructor: Scott Beal
M/W 11-12:30 pm | ALH 2012 | 3 credits
Can a poem lift a curse or turn lead into gold? Can it make sense of cell biology or mimic fractals? Can it save a life or raise the dead? Poetry has a rich history of association with both magic and science. We may describe a poem as “experimental” or say it has “transformed” us. However, we commonly see science and magic in opposition. (Consider Arthur Weasley's enduring bewilderment over muggle technology as one illustration.) This course will invite students to question how these seemingly opposing forces operate within poetry, and to practice their own poetics of scientific verbal magic. To develop our thinking we will read a large variety of poems with an emphasis on contemporary poets, with a few critical essays and magical and scientific treatises sprinkled in. Writing assignments will include weekly reflections and a hefty dose of creative writing, building toward a final portfolio of poems that enacts each student's vision for how science and magic collide. No experience with poetry, science, or witchcraft required. We will use in-class exercises to play with concepts and construction of poems, and both skeptics and avid poets should leave the course with a richer understanding and enjoyment of poetry.
LSWA 230.003 – Unpacking Experience and Personal Aesthetic
Instructor: Chris Crowder
T/Th 10-11:30 am | ALH 2012 | 3 credits
In the midst of writer’s block, while surveying the vastness of our lives, we’re often left wondering what we should write about. As we venture back toward interacting with the outside world more, how do we reconnect with ourselves and cultivate a new voice?
The poet Jericho Brown says, “I don’t write because I have something to say; I write because I don’t know what I have to say. I want to figure it out.” This class on personal experience and aesthetics will guide us to campus field trips and your own individual excursions. By embracing mindfulness and being observant, we’ll practice writing about under-discovered things that have happened in our lives—with our unique choices of medium and voice.
Our final projects could look like a chapbook of confessional poems, a few chapters of a memoir, a long autofiction short story, and more. Readings and inspiration will come from texts such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me, Jon Fosse’s Septology, and Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. Together, we’ll analyze what makes the speaker in these works engaging while slowing the Earth down, writing to understand how it moves around us and reflecting on why certain moments might have transformed us.
Course requirements: Two long-form projects with other smaller projects that lead up to them, along with short writing assignments that give us practice with different text and digital-based media.
Intended audience: LSWA students interested in telling personal stories through poetry, memoir, and fiction—no prior experience required.
Class Format: Experiment and discussion-based course along with feedback and workshop sessions.
LSWA 230.004 – Dramatic Collaborations
Instructor: Shelley Manis
M/W 10-11:30 am | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
This course is an introduction to the collaborative processes of dramatic writing and dramaturgy. Playwrights (and to some extent, screenwriters) tend to get what limited glory there is around critically and/or popularly celebrated plays, TV series, and movies, but what many people outside the world of theater/TV/film don’t know is that dramaturgs (another kind of dramatic writer you may not have heard about) often play as crucial a role in the development of new work and production of existing work as playwrights/screenwriters themselves. Dramatic writers (dramaturgs, playwrights, screenwriters) all develop expertise in writing, theater/TV/film history and production, dramatic genres and structures, character development, and the like--and their collaboration can make all the difference between an “ok” play, series, or movie and a major success.
In this course, we will practice aspects of dramatic writing in small bites, building from character and scene development/planning to longer work, such as scenes, 10-minute plays, and/or pilot scripts, and our semester will culminate with a new works festival! We’ll try to figure out what makes excellent plays/TV series/movies work, as well as what makes an excellent dramatic writer. We’ll spend the first half of the course experimenting with the arts of dramaturgy and script writing through reading and discussing instructional texts by experts, reverse-engineering scripts and recorded performances, and talking with working dramatic writers. We’ll shift focus in the 2nd half of the class to developing and producing a small festival of our own new work (and an accompanying website). As you might guess, then, there will be requirements outside of class time to make this happen, but we will keep them as streamlined as possible.
This course will include active learning and discussion in-class, collaboration in and outside of class, experimentation with different kinds of writing (analyses, annotated bibliographies, pitches, series bibles, audience outreach materials such as program notes and websites, and of course, scripts) and long-term collaboration. We will read theoretical texts, instructional texts, and scripts (from 10-minute plays to tv scripts to short film scripts), and we’ll watch the performances of those scripts when we can. Everyone will have reasonable/appropriate artistic freedom and will be provided extensive feedback--some from me, some from peers, and some from both. The course grading scheme is contract-based.
English 223.016 – Creative Writing
Instructor: Michael O’Ryan
T/Th 11:30-1 pm | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
English 223 introduces students to the craft and critique that characterize creative writing, both as a discipline in the English Department at the University of Michigan and as a profession. This course treats creative writing as a skill and a habit of mind that students can actively develop through disciplined practice. The course also encourages students to participate in the writerly community as literary citizens. In addition to doing copious writing, students read published work in multiple genres, attend local readings, and respond to one another’s creative work. Over the course of the term, students produce writing that demonstrates both deliberate attention to craft and reflective awareness of their own and others’ creative processes. English 223 prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses in fiction and poetry and is required for both the sub-concentration and the minor in Creative Writing.
Fall 2023 Course Archive
LSWA 125.001: Writing About Arts and Resistance
Instructor: Scott Beal
M/W 11-12:30 pm | ALH 2012 | 4 credits
In July 2020, a resident of Redwood City, California painted a 17-foot mural of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on a downtown street using yellow poster-board paint provided by the city. Two weeks later, the city removed the mural after another resident complained that she should be allowed to paint “MAGA 2020” on the same street. If the mural began as an act of artistic resistance – a message to protest police violence against unarmed black Americans following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police – it is also true that the mural itself became an object of resistance, resulting in its destruction. What does it mean to consider “arts” and “resistance” together, as the college of LSA has done by naming Fall 2023 the “Arts and Resistance” theme semester? In this first-year writing course, we will build our academic writing knowledge, skills, and strategies through an examination of the intersection between arts and resistance. We will consider a range of art genres and objects, from protest poetry to graffiti to mirror shields to pride flags, and we will interrogate the roles of art in a variety of resistance movements and events. We will also think critically about why art sometimes inspires such resistance, and what’s at stake in debates about whether we should remove confederate statues from public parks or an illustrated story about gay penguins from school libraries. Written work for the course will include multiple essays to reflect on, analyze, and argue about works of art that promote or catalyze resistance, culminating in an opportunity for each student to propose or create their own work of resistance-themed art.
LSWA 125.002: Creative Obsessions and Discovering the Self
Instructor: Chris Crowder
T/Th 10-11:30 am | ALH 2012 | 4 credits
The poet Carl Phillips once said, “Poetry’s not a box for storing unexamined experience, but a space instead—a field, really—within which to examine experience and to find that the more we examine it, the more we’re surprised or disturbed by what we see, things that don’t go away…” This quote not only applies to poetry, but the entire act of writing. What do we need to discover? What will that process of discovery tell us? What will it reveal about ourselves? What’s something that doesn’t go away?
Our class will guide you through unpacking these questions while thinking about your creative obsessions, such as your favorite characters, artists, sports teams, or activities that define your life. From stone skipping to white whales, our obsessions can consume us, leading to mountains of greatness or unexpected distraction.
We’ll analyze texts and projects from creators like Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jesmyn Ward, and Jon Bois while building our own reading lists. Together, we’ll dig into writing prompts, discuss what “argument” and “revision” really mean, and explore how to move beyond five-paragraph formality to create complex and challenging essays.
LSWA 125.003: Writing Genres
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
M/W 4-5:30 pm | ALH 2012 | 4 credits
We've grown so comfortable with algorithms predicting our preferences (sometimes unnervingly - looking at you, TikTok) that we overlook the strangeness of what the algorithms are predicting. They don't work without categories, and when it comes to art, particularly narrative art, categories can prove slippery and odd. But they can also entrance and illuminate! Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, sports anime, horror, coming-of-age, seinen: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate our own lives? In this section of LSWA 125, we will examine genre: what it means, why it must exist, whether anything exists outside of it, and how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars, and people just trying to make sense of it all. Genres will elude us, and genres will even shift and transform into each other, but genres will also give us a glimpse into the history of ideas. Writing about genres will not only deepen your engagement with all sorts of texts, it will introduce you to larger and richer conversations about culture, art, and belief. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. Tolerance for stylistic excess is encouraged but not required.
LSWA 125.004: Old Stories, New Tellings
Instructor: Megan Behrend
T/Th 2:30-4 pm | ALH 2012 | 4 credits
What happens when old stories are told afresh – in new languages or media, for new audiences, or by new voices? What can translated and adapted stories teach us about the historical and cultural contexts of their source materials? More importantly, what might they reveal about our own time and place? When, for example, do retellings perpetuate dominant narratives and existing systems of power and privilege – and when do retellings resist?
In this first-year writing requirement course, we’ll investigate these questions (and more!) by critically examining a range of cultural products – some selected by me, others chosen by you. Hardly limited to the written word, our shared objects of study will be drawn from visual art, theater, and film alongside fiction, poetry, and memoir.
Writing assignments will ask you to analyze – and apply – what translation and adaptation teach us about communicating for different audiences and purposes, including but not limited to academic ones. You can expect to compose a couple of academic essays, but you’ll also be invited to adapt one of these essays for a new rhetorical situation, such as social media or journalism. A final “creative adaptation” project will give you the opportunity to retell an existing story of your choosing into any genre or medium.
LSWA 125.005: Border Crossings
Instructor: Naomi Silver
T/Th 1-2:30 pm | ALH 2012 | 4 credits
Walking across a bridge from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. Starting to take T. Marrying someone who isn’t Jewish. Finding just the right word for the line of poetry you’re translating. Driving south across 8 Mile to go to a club downtown. Coming out. Letting your new friends think
you’re white. Leaving your small town for a prestigious college in another state.
What do these actions have in common? They can all be read as examples of border crossing – some literal, some metaphorical, some more dangerous or more policed, some more liberatory or more mundane. In this class, we will investigate border crossings in all of these forms. We will ask: What are the dominant narratives we have been told about borders and border crossing? What stories do we tell ourselves? What makes a border appear threatening or inviting? How do personal and social identities play a role in who gets to cross which borders, and how safely? How do history, politics, and power structures play a role?
To help us answer these questions, in this first-year writing course, we will explore materials from fiction to film, from historical documents to contemporary journalism, from visual art to live performance. By composing analytical essays, narratives, and multimedia, we will think and write about others’ border crossings and our own. We will also test the “border” between writing for academic and more general audiences, learning to shape our own voices as we also practice thorough research, precise argumentation, and other habits important for college writing.
LSWA 125.006: TV and Resistance - What if the revolution IS being televised?
Instructor: Shelley Manis
M/W 12:30-2 pm | ALH 2060 | 4 credits
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” This course takes the position that there is no such thing as “just” TV. Television makes meanings, makes arguments—whether those arise from “prestige tv” series like When They See Us, or goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. TV can embody and inspire resistance!
In this course, we’re going to study how TV makes meaning(s), and what it might offer as a tool for resistance. How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]? What if the revolution is being televised? What’s happening in television now that can spark resistance to the status quo? What creators, showrunners, and producers are changing the way we represent ourselves and others, and what potential does their work have for ever more cultural and political equity? Some creators whose work we will explore include: Shonda Rhimes; Quinta Brunson; Sterlin Harjo & Taika Waititi; Mike Schur; Sierra Teller Ornelas; Kenya Barris; Joss Wheedon; Isa Rae; Mike Flanagan.
This is a writing class. The content that we study will be television & resistance; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with careful thinking, writing (both “academic” and “creative”), and revising processes. We will practice close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, and revision, as we respond in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series, academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. You need not be a superfan of tv, or an expert in any way to participate fully in this course.
Class sessions in this course are interactive and require careful attention to the class prep, because we put the ideas to work in our communal space. This is a labor-based grading course with major projects that invite you to think in a variety of ways and write in a variety of genres, with at least half of the major projects giving you multiple options from which to choose. Some of these are: close readings, reviews, analytical essays (which may be prose and/or video essays), series pitches, series bibles, episode re-writes, podcasts, panel discussions, zines, and more. There are no tests, and there is a fair amount of collaboration.
LSWA 140.001: Art in Public Spaces
Instructor: Mark Tucker
F 2:30-5:30 pm | Art in Public Spaces Studio (1239 Kipke Dr.) | 3 credits
In response to LSA’s Fall Theme Semester, Art and Resistance, this class will collaborate on the making of a large-scale mural to be permanently installed inside Palmer Commons. This mural making process will allow students time and space to explore what it means to be an artist (even if only for one semester) and how producing a stimulating public mural can be perceived and/or leveraged as a pure and effective act of non-violent resistance.
Students will be invited to co-create this public artwork which will be collaboratively designed based on a wide range of current/historical issues that resonate with students personally and culturally, including, but not limited to, social, human, animal, and environmental concerns. Using Art and Resistance as a springboard, this course will also explore our perceptual and imaginary world in terms of color and composition by introducing students to basic design, color theory, paint handling, and reproduction techniques and to explore new ways of creating images that are effective at communicating contemporaneous subject matter.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring a wide variety of techniques and tools for the making of large-scale public murals. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the finished mural it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, environment.
In lieu of exams, papers and traditional homework assignments, there will be 3 hours/week of studio time outside of class required and tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class).
Winter 2023 Course Archive
LSWA 230.001: Handmade: DIY Culture and Crafting
Instructor: Catherine Cassel
T/Th 10-11:30 am | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
What was the last thing you made? Did you write a song? Paint a picture? Knit a pair of socks? Letterpress a card? Choreograph a dance? Do you think of yourself as an artist? As a crafter?
In this course, we will explore DIY (do it yourself) culture and the meaning of making. We will consider the values, ethics, politics, and communities of practice involved in DIY, and ask what making has to do with empowerment and resistance. We will also investigate how gender, race, and class figure into DIY social movements and craftivism in such examples as the rise of DIY in 1950s American homemaking, punk and riotgrrl counterculture, yarnbombing, the pussyhat project, and subversive textile arts.
This course will challenge you to develop your curiosity, flex your autodidactic muscles, and create things that matter to you and in the world. We will consider a range of DIY artifacts, such as alt comics, collage, dioramas, independent games, mixtapes, modding and life-hacking, and zines. Class will be a balance of discussion and maker labs. Composition assignments will include critical reading responses as well as your own DIY creations. This course will also potentially include a field trip to local reuse centers as well as the Ann Arbor Maker Lab.
LSWA 230.002: Fantasy Worldbuilding
Instructor: Scott Beal
M/W 11-12:30 pm | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
The great Marianne Moore famously described success in art as the ability to present “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This course is about collaborative worldbuilding and fantasy storytelling, about imagining new realms and bringing powerful stories to life in them. We will explore what makes fantasy “fantasy” and what relationship it has to our lives: as escape from our despair, as complex mirror of our world, and as alternative vision of what’s possible. We will approach these questions from the point of view of both literature and tabletop roleplaying games. We will study novels, stories, and essays by fantasy authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Saladin Ahmed, and N. K. Jemisin, and we will try several techniques for building fantasy stories from the ground up, including through games like The Quiet Year and Dungeons & Dragons. Assigned work will include written reflections on course readings; practice worldbuilding tasks from brainstorming to mapping to roleplaying; and a final project involving a short story or one-shot adventure set in your own original fantasy setting.
LSWA 230.003: Unpacking Experience and Personal Aesthetic
Instructor: Chris Crowder
M/W 4-5:30 pm | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
In the midst of writer’s block, while surveying the vastness of our lives, we’re often left wondering what we should write about. As we venture back toward interacting with the outside world more, how do we reconnect with ourselves and cultivate a new voice?
The poet Jericho Brown says, “I don’t write because I have something to say; I write because I don’t know what I have to say. I want to figure it out.” This class on personal experience and aesthetics will guide us to class trips like poetry readings and nature walks and your own individual excursions. By embracing mindfulness and being observant, we’ll practice writing about under-discovered things that have happened in our lives—with our unique choices of medium and voice.
Our final projects could look like a chapbook of confessional poems, a few chapters of a memoir, a long autofiction short story, and more. Readings and inspiration will come from texts such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me, Victoria Chang’s poetry collection OBIT, and Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. Together, we’ll analyze what makes the speaker in these works engaging while slowing the Earth down, writing to understand how it moves around us and reflecting on why certain moments might have transformed us.
LSWA 228.001: Telling Stories - The Rhetoric and Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Instructor: Naomi Silver
T/Th 1-2:30 pm | ALH 2012 | 3 credits
*Fulfills Race and Ethnicity Requirement
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or reveal a deeper understanding of how power shapes narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, podcasts, speeches, fiction, historical documents, photographs, art, and performance. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
LSWA 228.002: Engaging Performance
Instructor: Shelley Manis
T/Th 11:30-1 pm | USB 2260 | 3 credits
This course connects undergraduate students directly to the touring, world-class artists who perform music, theater, and dance on the U-M campus. Students will attend five live performances, talk with the artists and arts administrators, and explore how the performing arts are an integral part of our lives and the world at large. Class will include lectures (including some by guests and visiting artists), weekly discussion sections, required attendance at evening performances, interactive classroom activities, weekly readings, response papers about the performances, and group presentations from students in class.
Students are required to attend five live performances: two theater performances, two musical performances, and one dance piece. The theater pieces include Plastic Bag Store, part film, part installation, a tragicomic ode to the foreverness of plastic; and Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, a one-woman show triangulating the love letters of dead artists, contemporary sexts, and a meditation on the construction of the queer female body. The musical performances include Chineke! Orchestra,a premiere european orchestra composed of black and ethnically diverse classical musicians; and Julius Eastman’s Femenine, a recently rediscovered minimalist masterpiece. The dance performance Step Afrika! and ensemble which blends percussive dance styles practiced by historically African American fraternities and sororities, traditional West and Southern African dances, and an array of contemporary dance and art forms
This course requires attendance at these performances:
Plastic Bag Store - January 19, 2023 12PM (during class time)
Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters - February 5, 2023 2PM
Step Afrika! - March 12, 2023 4PM
Chineke! Orchestra - March 25, 2023 8PM
Julius Eastman’s Femenine - April 16, 2023 4PM
These performances constitute the course’s primary “texts,” and the full package of tickets is available to students enrolled in the course for the reduced rate of $75. Additional funds are available to support students who cannot cover the cost. Engaging Performance is made possible through a partnership between the University of Michigan and the University Musical Society (UMS).
ENGLISH 223.003: Introduction to Creative Writing: Screen, Stage, Page
Instructor: Emily McLaughlin
M/W 2:30-4 PM | ALH 2060 | 3 credits
Our course is designed as an intensive introduction to the writing of short fiction and “drama”—plays and screenplays. Students will be asked to read, write and actively contribute every day. In our readings, we will encounter outstanding practitioners in each genre, and we will look at specific elements of craft in order to understand how the many styles of fictional and dramatic writing contribute to the ever-growing literary landscape. We will read a variety of short stories, plays and screenplays, as well as the in-progress work of your peers. Ultimately, as we hone our skills as writers—and, critically, as peer editors—we will discover what can drama learn from fiction, and what can fiction learn from drama. We will strive each week to create a welcoming, vibrant and collaborative workshop environment for writers of all backgrounds.
LSWA 140.001: Art in Public Spaces: Mural Painting
Instructor: Mark Tucker
F 2:30-5:30 pm | Art in Public Spaces Studio (1239 Kipke Dr.) | 3 credits
This course will explore our perceptual world in terms of color and composition by introducing students to basic design, color theory, paint handling, color mixing, and reproduction techniques via the production of a large-scale mural to be installed in Palmer Commons.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale public murals. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the rigorous nature of the course mandatory attendance and active class participation are required. It will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, environment.
In lieu of exams, papers and traditional homework assignments, there will be 3 hours/week of studio time outside of class required and tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class).
Note: This course satisfies LSWA course requirements for Winter 2023; however, this course is not limited to LSWA students—if you are not a member of LSWA please reach out to the instructor for an override. This course also satisfies LSA’s creative expression requirement. There is a $150 lab fee, which covers all necessary art supplies. Please note that Course Fees are required to cover the costs of materials; however if any student finds these fees to be cost prohibitive, please contact the LSWA office ([email protected]) to request a fee waiver.
LSWA 140.002: From Kansas to Munchkinland: Drawing and Painting
Instructor: Mark Tucker
M/W 6-8 pm | ALH Art Studio | 3 credits
Close your eyes and imagine that you were born completely without sight. Now imagine that your sight was miraculously restored. What would you “see”? Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers. Is this what you expected your hand to look like? Would you be able to comprehend the world around you, and the people within it, or would everything be such a confusing mass of shapes, lines, colors, textures, spaces, shadows and light that you would feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all?
In this course we will demystify the art of seeing. Learning to draw and paint requires you to look at the world more closely and to record what you see more clearly. Learning to see, not what you think you see, but what you actually see, is the key that can unlock the door to your inner vision. Once you can access visual phenomenon through drawing and painting you will find out how much there is to see and how beautiful things really are.
The first half of the course will be in black and white, drawing the human body; something simultaneously intimate and yet completely foreign. The second half of the course will concentrate on seeing the world in color through painting.
No previous experience necessary, however due to the rigorous nature of the course, students will be expected to possess a positive, open attitude and strong work ethic.
Mandatory attendance and active class participation required. Expect extensive outside work on homework assignments. Museum trips (TBA) may be required.
Note: This course satisfies LSWA course requirements for Winter 2023; however, this course is not limited to LSWA students—if you are not a member of LSWA please reach out to the instructor for an override. This course also satisfies LSA’s creative expression requirement.
There is a $150 lab fee, which covers the hiring of the model(s) and all art supplies; however if any student finds these fees to be cost prohibitive, please contact the LSWA office ([email protected]) to request a fee waiver.
Fall 2022 Course Archive
LSWA 125.001: Writing in the Surreal World
Instructor: Scott Beal
Credits: 4
Class Time: Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:30-4 pm
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2012
Class Number: 11619
Through all that has happened since 2020, the idea of “making sense” may seem like a quaint notion of yore. Certainly the events of the last year have shaken many of us out of our customary ways of sensemaking in our daily lives, in our understanding of relationships, of country and society and economy. And the word “surreal” has been used repeatedly to capture how strange the world recently began to feel—in response to the pandemic, racial justice protests, the presidential election and its aftermath, and the Capitol insurrection, to name a few prominent examples. But what does it mean to be surreal? Did things ever make sense, or had we just been deluding ourselves all along?
As scholars for writing and the arts, we are positioned to pursue two complementary objectives: (1) to appreciate more fully the precise ways our experience fails to make sense, and (2) to strive to make more sense of those things that we can. In this writing course, we will use writing to explore art and literature that evokes the nonsensical and surreal, and to unravel the seemingly nonsensical elements of our own observation and experience that might help us navigate a surreal world. Along the way, we will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision—to strengthen our writing voices and build skills and strategies for communicating persuasively with academic audiences and beyond.
LSWA 125.002: Creative Obsessions
Instructor: Christopher Crowder
Credits: 4
Class Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:30-1 pm
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
Class Number: 11620
The poet Carl Phillips once said, “Poetry’s not a box for storing unexamined experience, but a space instead—a field, really—within which to examine experience and to find that the more we examine it, the more we’re surprised or disturbed by what we see, things that don’t go away…” This quote not only applies to poetry, but the entire act of writing. What do we need to discover? What will that process of discovery tell us? What will it reveal about ourselves? What’s something that doesn’t go away?
Our class will guide you through unpacking these questions while thinking about your creative obsessions—whether that looks like your favorite movies, songs, and recipes or love interests, social identities, sports teams, and the number of likes you get on Instagram. From childhood crushes to white whales, our obsessions can be self-defining and often drive us to create incredible things. But as much as they define us, they can occasionally delude or even destroy us.
We’ll analyze texts and projects from creators like Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jesmyn Ward, and Jon Bois while building our own reading lists. Together, we’ll navigate through writing effectively for college—and dig into parsing writing prompts, what words like “argument” and “revision” really mean, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay to create complex and challenging essays.
LSWA 125.003: Writing Genres
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
Credits: 4
Class Time: Mondays and Wednesdays, 4-5:30 pm
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2012
Class Number: 11621
We've grown so accustomed to algorithms predicting our preferences (sometimes unnervingly - looking at you, TikTok) that we sometimes overlook the strangeness of what the algorithms are predicting. They don't work without categories, and when it comes to art, particularly narrative art, categories can prove slippery and odd. But they can also entrance and illuminate! Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, sports anime, horror, coming-of-age, seinen: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate our own lives? In this section of LSWA 125, we will examine genre: what it means, why it has to exist, whether anything exists outside of it, and how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars, and people just trying to make sense of it all. Genres will elude us, and genres will even shift and transform into each other, but genres will also give us a glimpse into the history of ideas. Writing about genres will not only deepen your engagement with all sorts of texts, it will introduce you to larger and richer conversations about culture, art, and belief. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. Tolerance for stylistic excess is encouraged but not required.
LSWA 125.004: Monsters and Beasts
Instructor: Angela Berkley
Credits: 4
Class Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10-11:30 am
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2012
Class Number: 17989
Zombies, vampires, werewolves, cyborgs, yetis, witches, ghosts, demons and countless others—they stalk us relentlessly from the pages of our favorite novels and stories. Their creepy images haunt us from movie and TV screens—and we love every minute of it, however frightened we might be. Plenty of these monsters are beastly, but many of the beasts we love just as much as we love monsters aren't scary at all. What, if anything, do the monsters who scare us and the beasts who charm us, have in common? Why do we fear these beastly monsters, and why do we love them? What's behind our enduring urge to create and consume narratives of these inhuman imaginary beings? Are they as inhuman as they seem—or is what captivates us about monsters the unsettling suggestions and foreboding images they offer us about who and what we really are?
In this course, we'll be reading plenty of fictions and critiques about monsters and beasts and writing some of our own. We'll read and discuss and write towards expertise about the cultural and political meanings of the monsters we create and the literary and multimedia genres they haunt—from academic works of literary scholarship to online fan fiction forums; from novels taught in college English courses to comic books. We'll engage with each other as we develop insights and conclusions about what it means to be a monster-and-beast lover in 2021, practicing our readerly and writerly skills together—skills that you'll readily be able to apply to the writing that awaits you beyond this course.
LSWA 125.005: Border Crossings
Instructor: Naomi Silver
Credits: 4
Class Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-2:30 pm
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2012
Class Number: 27536
Walking across a bridge from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. Starting to take T. Marrying someone who isn’t Jewish. Finding just the right word for the line of poetry you’re translating. Driving south across 8 Mile to go to a club downtown. Coming out. Letting your new friends think you’re white. Leaving your small town for a prestigious college in another state.
What do these actions have in common? They can all be read as examples of border crossing – some literal, some metaphorical, some more dangerous or more policed, some more liberatory or more mundane. In this class, we will investigate border crossings in all of these forms. We will ask: What are the dominant narratives we have been told about borders and border crossing? What stories do we tell ourselves? What makes a border appear threatening or inviting? How do personal and social identities play a role in who gets to cross which borders, and how safely? How do history, politics, and power structures play a role?
To help us answer these questions, we will explore materials from fiction to film, from historical documents to contemporary journalism, from visual art to live performance. By composing analytical essays, narratives, and multimedia, we will think and write about others’ border crossings and our own. We will also test the “border” between writing for academic and more general audiences, learning to shape our own voices as we also practice thorough research, precise argumentation, and other habits important for college writing.
LSWA 125.006: Our TV, Our Selves: The Rhetoric of Television
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Credits: 4
Class Time: Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00-11:30am
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
Class Number: 18460
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television—from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers—makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Riverdale or the next season of Queer Eye, or who would rather eat glass than watch Game of Thrones: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]?
The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.
We will practice strategies of close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conducting research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virtues and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will “live every week like it’s shark week.”
This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we’ll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
LSWA 140.001: Art in Public Spaces
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Credits: 3
Class Time: Fridays, 2:30-5:30 pm
Location: TBD
Class Number: 35338
This art class will introduce students to a variety of creative processes involved in the making of public art. Students in this course will work individually and collaboratively on projects ranging from the creation of a Pop-Up Luminary Sculpture Processional to be presented at ArtPrize (an internationally renowned art competition located in Grand Rapids, Michigan) to creating public artworks based on students individual passions with a focus on designing innovative ways to introduce these creative works into the public sphere.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical and sculptural elements. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects, it will be expected that the student already possesses an excellent work ethic as well as the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly in a flexible and creatively demanding, team-oriented environment.
This course satisfies LSWA course requirements for FALL 2022; however, this course is not limited to LSWA students. This course also satisfies LSA’s Creative Expression requirement.
A $150 lab fee is accessed to help defray the direct expenses for materials required for this course.
*Due to the public nature and size of the projects, additional flexible weekly homework hours will be scheduled on an individual/group basis. A required class field trip to ArtPrize is [tentatively] scheduled for the weekend of Sept. 30/Oct. 1.
Winter 2022 Course Archive
LSWA 140.001 Art in Public Spaces/FestiFools
Fridays 2:30-5:30 pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
*Fulfills Creative Expressions Requirement
*150 lab fee
In this creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets”, which will be featured in our 15th-annual FestiFools extravaganza to be held on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor on April 3rd, 2022. As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design creative content for FestiFools and for likely display next summer in the Stenn Gallery at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of larger-than-life theatrical and sculptural elements for the creation of a giant public spectacle. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects, it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply new aesthetic principles, in a physically demanding, team oriented, community-minded environment.
Note: This course is open to all students and is especially geared towards non-art majors. FestiFools was founded in LSWA by Mark Tucker in 2007. This year’s 15th FestiFools will be the last time this course will be offered so please do come be a part of this historic FINAL FestiFools course and celebration!
Note: There are no readings, exams and or graded papers for this course, instead studio lab work outside of course time is required as “homework” (schedule TBD first day of class). A weekly 3-hr time commitment on Saturdays is generally when this studio lab is scheduled in order to accommodate volunteers from the Ann Arbor community who will be coming to the studio to help us bring the giant puppets to life. If you have any questions about any of this please contact Mark directly via email.
LSWA 140.002 From Kansas to Munchkinland: Drawing, Painting, and Museum Installation
Mondays & Wednesdays 4:30-6:00 pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
*Fulfills Creative Expression Requirement
Close your eyes and imagine that you were born completely without sight. Now imagine that your sight was miraculously restored. What would you “see”? Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers. Is this what you expected your hand to look like?Would you be able to comprehend the world around you or would everything be such a confusing mass of shapes, lines, colors, textures, spaces, shadows and light that you would feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all?
In this course we will demystify the art of seeing. Learning to draw and paint requires you to look at the world more closely and to record what you see more accurately. Learning to see, not what you “think” you see, but what you actually see, is the key that can unlock the door to your inner vision. Once you can access visual phenomena through drawing and painting you will find out how much there is to see and how complex and beautiful the world around you really is.
During the first half of this course you will expand your visual literacy skills through focused drawing and painting exercises. For the second half you’ll be making your own original artwork based on research using primary works from the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s extensive collection. Work from this class may be exhibited as part of a larger community based project in an exhibition at UMMA this summer.
No previous experience necessary; however, due to the rigorous nature of the course, students will be expected to possess a positive attitude, willingness to learn from others, and a strong work ethic.
Note: There is a $150 lab fee, which covers the hiring of a nude model and all art supplies. Mandatory attendance and active class participation required. Expect extensive outside work on homework assignments. Museum trips (TBA) may be required.
LSWA 228.001 Telling Stories: The Rhetoric and Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30-4:00 pm
Instructor: Scott Beal
*Fulfills Race and Ethnicity Requirement; Humanities Requirement
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or reveal a deeper understanding of how power shapes narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, television, speeches, fiction, poetry, photographs, art, comedy, and music. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
LSWA 228.002 Engaging Performances
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00-2:30 pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
In collaboration with the University Musical Society (UMS) and the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, this course is built around UMS performances in Winter 22. You will attend 5-8 performances chosen by the instructors, and engage in a variety of projects and discussions around the performances, including class visits from performers, directors, and writers. If you love to experience live theatre, dance, music, and all types of performances, then this is a great opportunity for you. If you have little or no experience with performances, it’s a great chance to be introduced to them.
Please note that there are 18 seats reserved in this class for LSWA students, and the class is cross-listed with ALA260 and MUSPERF200, capped at 55 seats. Students will get a reduced rate for the cost of performance tickets. If you have challenges with the costs, please contact LSWA.
LSWA 230.002: Fantasy Worldbuilding
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30-1:00 pm
Instructor: Scott Beal
*Fulfills Creative Expressions Requirement
The great Marianne Moore famously described success in art as the ability to present “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This course is about collaborative worldbuilding and fantasy storytelling, about imagining new realms and bringing powerful stories to life in them. We will explore what makes fantasy “fantasy” and what relationship it has to our lives: as escape from our despair, as complex mirror of our world, and as alternative vision of what’s possible. We will approach these questions from the point of view of both literature and tabletop roleplaying games. We will study novels, stories, and essays by fantasy authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Saladin Ahmed, and N. K. Jemisin, and we will try several techniques for building fantasy stories from the ground up, including through games like The Quiet Year and Dungeons & Dragons. Assigned work will include written reflections on course readings; practice worldbuilding tasks from brainstorming to mapping to roleplaying; and a final project involving a short story or one-shot adventure set in your own original fantasy setting.
LSWA 230.003 Children’s Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00-2:30 pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
*Fulfills Creative Expressions Requirement
“… I don’t write children’s books… I write, and somebody says: that's for children.” --Maurice Sendak
The best children’s books and films stay with us; they grow and deepen as we ourselves mature. Rather than label these pieces of artwork as “childish,” in this class we will embrace their artistry, sophistication, humanity, and courageous themes. We will examine the complex ways that children (and animals) are depicted, and consider how children’s books portray different social identities and traumas. We’ll be reading diverse genres of children’s literature: storybooks (The Cat and the Hat, Eloise, Hair Love, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Snowy Day), fairy tales, children’s poetry (Shel Silverstein), novels (Charlotte’s Web); we’ll also watch two films (probably Black Panther, The Florida Project). These will be our models: The emphasis will be on your own creative work. For your culminating project, each of you will write and illustrate your own children’s book.
Writing 201.003 Digital Media and the Arts (a mini-course)
Fridays 1:00-3:00 pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Are you a visual artist, slam poet, performer, creative writer, musician, or arts activist? Have you always wanted to explore digital platforms to curate and promote your work, and collaborate with other artists in similar or complementary genres? This mini-course will consider the role that digital media has played in promoting artists, transforming museums and other in-person spaces, and building arts communities and activism. Students will write an artist’s statement and create their own digital arts projects on a platform of their choice.
Please note: This class is open to all LSA students and is not exclusively for LSWA students.
Fall 2021 Course Archive
LSWA 125.001 Writing in the Surreal World
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am-1:00pm
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
Through all that has happened since 2020, the idea of “making sense” may seem like a quaint notion of yore. Certainly the events of the last year have shaken many of us out of our customary ways of sensemaking in our daily lives, in our understanding of relationships, of country and society and economy. And the word “surreal” has been used repeatedly to capture how strange the world recently began to feel—in response to the pandemic, racial justice protests, the presidential election and its aftermath, and the Capitol insurrection, to name a few prominent examples. But what does it mean to be surreal? Did things ever make sense, or had we just been deluding ourselves all along?
As scholars for writing and the arts, we are positioned to pursue two complementary objectives: (1) to appreciate more fully the precise ways our experience fails to make sense, and (2) to strive to make more sense of those things that we can. In this writing course, we will use writing to explore art and literature that evokes the nonsensical and surreal, and to unravel the seemingly nonsensical elements of our own observation and experience that might help us navigate a surreal world. Along the way, we will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision—to strengthen our writing voices and build skills and strategies for communicating persuasively with academic audiences and beyond.
LSWA 125.002 Creative Obsessions and Writing
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00pm-2:30pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
What are your obsessions? Are they quirky and unique (and maybe embarrassing) (a schlocky song, a character from a book, your family recipe for meatloaf), or more mainstream but no less haunting (a love interest, a social identity, a sports team, the number of likes you get on Instagram)? From childhood crushes to white whales, our obsessions can be self-defining and often drive us to write/create beautiful things. But as much as they define us, they can occasionally delude or even destroy us.
This introductory writing class will allow you to explore—and write about—intellectual, aesthetic, and personal obsessions—both your own and those of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians. We’ll read texts (from such writers as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, and Maurice Sendak), watch a film or two (Brokeback Mountain or Parasite), and listen to podcasts, all of which will explore obsessive love, work, and creativity. We’ll also be thinking about how our current global health crisis may have inspired or shifted our own obsessions, particularly with health, isolation, and anxiety. But most of all, you’ll be figuring out how to write effectively for college—and hopefully become obsessed with how to parse a writing prompt, what words like “argument” and “revision” really mean, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay to create complex and challenging essays.
LSWA 125.003 Border Crossings
Mondays & Wednesdays 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Naomi Silver
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
Walking across a bridge from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. Starting to take T. Marrying someone who isn’t Jewish. Finding just the right word for the line of poetry you’re translating. Driving south across 8 Mile to go to a club downtown. Coming out. Letting your new friends think you’re white. Leaving your small town for a prestigious college in another state.
What do these actions have in common? They can all be read as examples of border crossing – some literal, some metaphorical, some more dangerous or more policed, some more liberatory or more mundane. In this class, we will investigate border crossings in all of these forms. We will ask: What are the dominant narratives we have been told about borders and border crossing? What stories do we tell ourselves? What makes a border appear threatening or inviting? How do personal and social identities play a role in who gets to cross which borders, and how safely? How do history, politics, and power structures play a role?
To help us answer these questions, we will explore materials from fiction to film, from historical documents to contemporary journalism, from visual art to live performance. By composing analytical essays, narratives, and multimedia, we will think and write about others’ border crossings and our own. We will also test the “border” between writing for academic and more general audiences, learning to shape our own voices as we also practice thorough research, precise argumentation, and other habits important for college writing.
LSWA 125.004 Monsters and Beasts
Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Angela Berkley
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
Zombies, vampires, werewolves, cyborgs, yetis, witches, ghosts, demons and countless others—they stalk us relentlessly from the pages of our favorite novels and stories. Their creepy images haunt us from movie and TV screens—and we love every minute of it, however frightened we might be. Plenty of these monsters are beastly, but many of the beasts we love just as much as we love monsters aren't scary at all. What, if anything, do the monsters who scare us and the beasts who charm us, have in common? Why do we fear these beastly monsters, and why do we love them? What's behind our enduring urge to create and consume narratives of these inhuman imaginary beings? Are they as inhuman as they seem—or is what captivates us about monsters the unsettling suggestions and foreboding images they offer us about who and what we really are?
In this course, we'll be reading plenty of fictions and critiques about monsters and beasts and writing some of our own. We'll read and discuss and write towards expertise about the cultural and political meanings of the monsters we create and the literary and multimedia genres they haunt—from academic works of literary scholarship to online fan fiction forums; from novels taught in college English courses to comic books. We'll engage with each other as we develop insights and conclusions about what it means to be a monster-and-beast lover in 2021, practicing our readerly and writerly skills together—skills that you'll readily be able to apply to the writing that awaits you beyond this course.
LSWA 125.005 Weird Things: Critical Thinking about Extraordinary Phenomena
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Cat Cassel
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
Three out of four Americans believe in the paranormal. One in four Americans believe in haunted houses. One in eleven Americans believe in Bigfoot. In Michigan alone, there have been over two hundred purported sightings of Bigfoot, seven of which were recorded in Washtenaw County, according to the Bigfoot Researchers Organization. A recent poll of Americans asked whether they believe that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media”—17% responded yes, and 37% said they didn’t know. Superstitious, magical, pseudoscientific, and conspiracy thinking all share in common ungrounded beliefs not supported in current evidence. Pitting reason against faith, credible claims against anecdotal evidence and personal beliefs, these ways of thinking have the capacity to unravel our sense of shared social reality.
We will explore critical thinking and writing through the lens of “weird things.” To do this, we will investigate a range of analytical, evaluative, argumentative, and creative strategies for writing. We’ll also dabble in a range of perspectives and cultural documents, including television, film, fiction, poetry, art, research-based podcasts, Reddit’s r/changemyview, philosophy, long-form popular journalism, and academic writing from a range of disciplines. Topics include the paranormal, the fantastic, cryptozoology, lore, urban legends, mentalism, cognitive biases and fallacies, baloney and bullshit detection, skepticism, illusions of causality, speculative futurism, superstition, magic, pseudoscience, and conspiracy thinking.
You can expect to explore the concepts raised in our course in essays that target core college-level analytical and argumentative writing skills, including developing intriguing and original claims, supporting those claims with credible and clearly explained evidence, conducting independent research, structuring the progression of your argument, anticipating and responding to counterarguments, and more! We will understand writing as a process and a practice, and you’ll have abundant opportunities to share ideas and writing with myself and peers.
LSWA 125.006 Our TV, Our Selves: The Rhetoric of Television
Tuesdays & Thursdays 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television—from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers—makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Riverdale or the next season of Queer Eye, or who would rather eat glass than watch Game of Thrones: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]?
The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.
We will practice strategies of close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conducting research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virtues and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will “live every week like it’s shark week.”
This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we’ll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
LSWA 151.001 Mini-Course on Creativity and Creative Projects
Fridays 2-3pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Room 2060
College is a time not just to pursue a major or profession, but to ask big questions of ourselves and our world: Who are we? What do we want? What kind of creative work might we produce that helps us explore these questions?
In this discussion-based seminar, we will explore how different writers and artists interpret such topics as identity, purpose, community, and aesthetics. But the major focus of the class will be your creative work. Students will work on their own long-term creative project in the genre of their choice, get feedback on their project, and reflect on the experience.
LSWA 230.001 Creative Communities
Fridays 11:00am-2:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Art Studio
LSWA Student Assistants (SAs) in this class will co-design a creative community within Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts while collaborating and building community connections in the Ann Arbor region. This year we will be working closely with the Youth Arts Alliance, helping to develop arts- and writing-related projects we can share virtually with underserved youth in after-school programs, community centers, and carceral settings. Through inventive planning, organizing, and implementation, SAs will also collaborate to create their own community-oriented public artworks. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to attend professional arts events and theatrical performances on- and off-campus. Throughout the course SAs will analyze and synthesize their creative experiences via dynamic group discussions and reflection projects.
Note: LSWA 230.001 is limited to sophomore student leaders in Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts.
Winter 2021 Course Archive
LSWA 140.001 Art in Private Spaces
Mondays & Wednesdays 4-5:30pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Remote
This course will explore how rethinking our limitations in the time of Covid-19 could actually have a positive effect on our creative process. Being limited in studio space, art materials, human contact, and more, may open us up to a deeper exploration of our interior worlds culminating in the creation of intimate artworks designed primarily by and for an audience of one. No prior art experience required for this online course; however, it will be expected that students possess an excellent work ethic including a strong desire to revise and improve their creative work based on constructive criticism. All art supplies, including delivery, are included in the lab fee.
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression requirement
This is an online course with mandatory synchronous attendance required. This course employs labor-based grading. Grading is not dependent on talent, but on effort and personal growth. This course will require the regular use of Zoom (with camera), Google Drive, and email.
LSWA 140.002 Discovering Yourself through Drawing and Painting
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4-5:30pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Remote
This course will introduce students to several principles of drawing and painting through a series of challenging projects, including self-portraits, still-life drawing and painting, color theory, painting from nature, and drawing/painting from the imagination. These projects are designed to assist students at all levels of visual literacy and are scaffolded to help students learn to “see” while becoming more adept at expressing themselves creatively and purposefully. No prior art experience required for this online course; however, it will be expected that students possess an excellent work ethic including a strong desire to revise and improve their creative work based on constructive criticism. All art supplies, including delivery, are included in the lab fee.
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression requirement
This is an online course with mandatory synchronous attendance required. This course employs labor-based grading. Grading is not dependent on talent, but on effort and personal growth. This course will require the regular use of Zoom (with camera), Google Drive, and email.
LSWA 228.001 Telling Stories: The Rhetoric and Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Mondays & Wednesdays 11:00am-12:30pm
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Remote
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many
different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or reveal a deeper understanding of how power shapes narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, television, speeches, fiction, poetry, photographs, art, comedy, and music. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Race and Ethnicity distribution requirement and LSA’s Humanities requirement.
Twice weekly class meetings will be held synchronously via Zoom, with an emphasis on discussion and collaborative activities. Required reading and writing assignments will be completed asynchronously via Canvas. We will also make use of tools such as Google docs for collaborative and interactive activities. No exams. Weekly reflective writing assignments and three analytical essays will be completed and submitted asynchronously.
LSWA 230.001 The Playwright and the Dramaturg
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am-1:00pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Remote
This course is a deep-dive into collaborative processes of playwriting and dramaturgy. Playwrights tend to get what limited glory there is around critically and/or popularly celebrated plays, but what many people outside the world of theater (and increasingly TV and film as well) don’t know is that dramaturgs often play as crucial a role in the development of new work as playwrights/screenwriters themselves. Successful dramaturgs and playwrights alike develop expertise in writing, theater history and production, theatrical genres and structures, character development, and the like—and their collaboration can make all the difference between an “ok” play and a major success. In this course, students will try their hand at both playwriting and dramaturgy, and we’ll create and produce a (virtual) 10-minute play festival by the end of term. We’ll try to figure out what makes an excellent play work, as well as what makes an excellent playwright and/or an excellent dramaturg. We’ll spend the first third of the course on an overview of the arts of dramaturgy and playwriting through reading and discussing instructional texts by experts, reverse-engineering playtexts and recorded performances, and talking with working playwrights and dramaturgs. We’ll shift focus in the 2nd third of the
class to developing and, ultimately, producing a small festival of our own new work. (As you might guess, then, there will be requirements outside of class time to make this happen.)
This course will include active learning and discussion in-class, experimentation with different kinds of writing (analyses, proposals, annotated bibliographies, audience outreach materials such as program notes and websites, and of course, play texts) and long-term collaboration. Students will read theoretical texts, instructional texts, and plays (short and full-length), and they’ll have the opportunity to (virtually) watch live and recorded performance as well as discuss playwriting and dramaturgy with working professionals. Everyone will be provided extensive feedback both from me and from peers and will have reasonable/
appropriate artistic freedom. The course grading scheme is labor-based.
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression requirement.
Discussions will be both synchronous (on Zoom) and asynchronous (Slack), and full-class workshops will be synchronous; small group workshops will be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous, depending on each group's preference. This is a labor-based grading course with no tests--only projects. We will use Zoom for our synchronous meetings and one-on-one conferences, Canvas for course schedule, assignment slots, and course grades; a shared Google Drive for readings, collaborative session notes, drafts, and critique letters; and Slack for asynchronous discussions.
LSWA 230.002 Poetry & Justice
Tuesdays & Thursdays 10:00-11:30am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Remote
Have you read “Imagine the Angels of Bread” by Martín Espada? You should read it now. Or better, watch his performance from the 2009 Dodge Poetry Festival, which is fire. In his brief intro, he claims this work as “a poem of the political imagination” and quotes the visionary poet William Blake: “What is now proved was once only imagined.” In this course we’ll read a lot of fiery, imaginative poems like Espada’s, with a focus on very contemporary work published within the last two years, including brand-new work being published online in 2021. We’ll consider what “poetry of the political imagination” might mean, and how the visions we imagine might pave the way for more honest, generous, compassionate, just lives. Written assignments will include weekly reflections on course readings, weekly poetry prompts, and a final portfolio and statement of purpose.
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression requirement.
Twice weekly class meetings will be held synchronously via Zoom, with an emphasis on discussion and collaborative activities. Required reading and writing assignments will be completed asynchronously via Canvas. We will also make use of tools such as Google docs for collaborative and interactive activities. No exams. Writing assignments (weekly reflections and poetry prompts) will be completed and submitted asynchronously, with a final portfolio and statement of purpose due at the end of the semester.
LSWA 230.003 The Children’s Story: Re-thinking Children’s Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00-2:30pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Remote
“. . . I don’t write children’s books. . . I write, and somebody says: that’s for children.” --Maurice Sendak
The best children’s books stay with us; they grow and deepen as we mature. Rather than label these pieces of artwork as “childish,” in this class we will embrace their artistry, sophistication, humanity, and courageous themes. We will examine the complex ways that children (and animals) are depicted, and consider how children’s books portray different social identities and traumas. We’ll be reading diverse genres of children’s literature: storybooks (The Cat and the Hat, Eloise, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Snowy Day), fairy tales (the Brothers Grimm), children’s poetry (Shel Silverstein), novels (Charlotte’s Web, The Hunger Games); we’ll also watch a few films (The Lion King, The Florida Project). But the emphasis will be on your own creative work. For your culminating project, each of you will write and illustrate your own children’s book.
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression requirement.
Students will be expected to attend each meeting synchronously during the scheduled time. The course will be discussion-based. Along with readings and short experimental assignments, each student will be required to write, illustrate, and workshop a children’s book in the genre of their choice. All assignments will be turned into Canvas. There are no exams. We will use Zoom and Canvas.
LSWA 230.004 Writing in Motion: Composing with Bodies, Words, and Other Media
Mondays & Wednesdays 10:00-11:30am
Instructor: Naomi Silver
Location: Remote
This class will explore the ways we can make arguments, tell stories, and test ideas through movement in space and through moving images on a screen, as well as through words written on a page or spoken aloud. We will enter this process through the thematic frame of how arts—and movement arts, such as dance, in particular—engage with and enact social justice. To that end, we will read texts in a variety of genres and media that consider this relationship, including films, reviews, literary works, photographs, and more. Because our class will be meeting online, we will explore how members of the dance world have adapted their art for virtual, distanced spaces, and we will view and try our hand at composing screendances—that is, movement compositions that are created for the screen rather than for live performance. Our writing this semester will consist of reflections, interpretations, analyses, and arguments created both in words, in movement, and other media, such as video. We will be moving almost every class—in our own home spaces—in short improvised and composed responses to prompts of various kinds, and we will create longer compositions to share at the end of the semester. No prior dance experience is necessary to succeed in this class—just a willingness to move and to experiment with new compositional modes and media!
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Creative Expression requirement.
Class meetings will be synchronous, though they will also be recorded and available on our Canvas site. We will be engaging together in movement exercise and discussion during each session. We may schedule small-group workshops outside of class time, as needed, and there will be asynchronous reading, writing, and viewing assignments. Most assignments for this class will be asynchronous, though small-group collaborations will likely need to take place synchronously, outside of the regular class time. We will view student compositions together in class. There are no exams for this class. Canvas will be the primary platform for course materials, assignments, and some interactive components, such as the Discussion tool. We will use Zoom for all of our synchronous meetings. Students should have access to a camera and microphone. We will also use video recording and editing software, though the precise tools will depend on student access and preferences.
ENG 223.003 Creative Writing
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30-4pm
Instructor: TBD
Location: Remote
Note: Though this course is offered by the English Department, it does fulfill your LSWA course requirement for the winter semester. The class is capped at twenty students, and ten seats have been reserved specifically for Lloyd Scholars. Only one section of this course fulfills the LSWA course requirement.
Fall 2020 Course Archive
LSWA 125.001 Writing in the Surreal World
Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30am-11am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: TBD
Through all that has happened in 2020, the idea of things “making sense” may seem like a quaint notion of yore. Certainly recent events have shaken many of us out of our customary ways of sensemaking in our daily lives, in our understanding of relationships, of country and society and economy. And the word “surreal” has been used repeatedly to capture how strange the world began to feel this year—in response to the coronavirus pandemic, of course, but also the sight of Sarah Palin popping out of a psychedelic bear costume. But what does it mean to be surreal? Did things ever make sense, or had we just been deluding ourselves all along?
As scholars for writing and the arts, we are positioned to pursue two complementary objectives: (1) to appreciate more fully the precise ways our experience fails to make sense, and (2) to strive to make more sense of those things that we can. In this writing course, we will use writing to explore art and literature that evokes the nonsensical and surreal, and to unravel the seemingly nonsensical elements of our own observation and experience that might help us navigate a surreal world. Along the way, we will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision—to strengthen our writing voices and build skills and strategies for communicating persuasively with academic audiences and beyond.
LSWA 125.002 Creative Obsessions and Writing
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am-1pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: TBD
What are your obsessions? Are they quirky and unique (and maybe embarrassing) (a schlocky song, a character from a book, your family recipe for meatloaf), or more mainstream but no less haunting (a love interest, a social identity, a sports team, the number of likes you get on Instagram)? From childhood crushes to white whales, our obsessions can be self-defining and often drive us to write/create beautiful things. But as much as they define us, they can occasionally delude or even destroy us.
This introductory writing class will allow you to explore—and write about—intellectual, aesthetic, and personal obsessions—both your own and those of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians. We’ll read texts (from such writers as Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, and Maurice Sendak), watch a film or two (Brokeback Mountain, An Education), and listen to and create podcasts, all of which will explore obsessive love, work, and creativity. We’ll also think about how our current global health crisis may have inspired or shifted our own obsessions, particularly with health, isolation, and anxiety. But most of all, you’ll be figuring out how to write effectively for college—and hopefully become obsessed with how to parse a writing prompt, what words like “argument” and “revision” really mean, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay to create complex and challenging essays.
LSWA 125.003 Genre Wonderland
Mondays & Wednesdays 4:00pm-5:30pm
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
Location: TBD
Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, thriller, horror: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate our own lives? In this section of LSWA 125, we will examine: what it means, why it has to exist, whether anything exists outside of it, how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars and people just trying to make sense of it all. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. Tolerance for stylistic excess encouraged but not required.
LSWA 125.004 Monsters and Beasts
Tuesdays & Thursdays 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Angela Berkley
Location: TBD
Zombies, vampires, werewolves, cyborgs, yetis, witches, ghosts, demons, and countless others—they stalk us relentlessly from the pages of our favorite novels and stories. Their creepy images haunt us from movie and TV screens—and we love every minute of it, however frightened we might be. Plenty of these monsters are beastly, but many of the beasts we love just as much as we love monsters aren't scary at all. What, if anything, do the monsters who scare us and the beasts who charm us, have in common? Why do we fear these beastly monsters, and why do we love them? What's behind our enduring urge to create and consume narratives of these inhuman imaginary beings? Are they as inhuman as they seem—or is what captivates us about monsters the unsettling suggestions and foreboding images they offer us about who and what we really are?
All good writing starts with good questions, and in our course, we will explore a range of texts (novels, stories, comics, photos, paintings, TV shows, and movies) that raise questions and make arguments about the cultural and political meaning of the monsters we create. You will read and write in response to these questions and arguments, through essays, images, sounds, and stories. You will engage with each other as you explore these questions as readers and writers, using the experiences of your peers to develop your insights and conclusions about what it means to be a monster-and-beast love in 2020. You will practice readerly and writerly skills together—skills that you can readily apply to the writing that awaits you beyond this course.
LSWA 125.005 The Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things
Mondays & Wednesdays 11:00am-12:30pm
Instructor: Cat Cassel
Location: TBD
In this writing-intensive course, we will explore the personal, cultural, historical, and philosophical significance of the material objects that surround us in our everyday lives, and develop original insights and arguments in a series of writing assignments designed to introduce you to personal narrative, analytic writing, argumentative writing, and multimodal composition. Good arguments stem from good questions, and academic essays allow writers to write their way toward answers, toward figuring out what they think. Using things as an anchor for our inquiry, we will focus on the creation of complex, analytic, well-supported arguments addressing questions that matter in academic contexts. The course also hones your critical thinking and reading skills with readings from a variety of genres, which will serve as models or prompts for your writing assignments. Working closely with your peers and the instructor, you will develop your essays through peer review workshops and extensive revision and editing. The specific questions that you pursue in your essays will be guided by your own interests.
LSWA 125.006 Our TV, Our Selves
Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: TBD
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television—from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers—makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Riverdale or the next season of Queer Eye, or who would rather eat glass than watch Game of Thrones: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]?
The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.
We will practice strategies of close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conducting research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virtues and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will “live every week like it’s shark week.”
This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we’ll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
LSWA 151.001 What Matters Most?: Big Questions, Fabulous Failures, and Creative Genres in Writing and the Arts
Fridays 2-3pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: TBD
College is a time not just to pursue a major or profession, but to ask big questions of ourselves and our world: Who are we? What do we want? How shall we live in the world? As our world transforms due to the impact of our global health crisis, all of these questions resonate.
One essential way of understanding such questions is through writing and the arts. In this discussion-based seminar, we will explore how different writers and artists interpret such topics as identity, purpose, community, and aesthetics. We’ll think about labels like “success” and “failure,” and what it means to take an aesthetic risk. Yes, these are hefty subjects for a mini-course—but we’ll discuss and respond to them in concrete ways through specific pieces of writing and artwork. Each week we’ll examine a different genre—tv and film (Black Mirror to Black Swan), poetry and fiction (Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison), and music (Bob Dylan to Beyonce) and the visual arts. We’ll visit an art museum, attend a University performance, and explore the role of social media in writing and the arts. Along with short assignments and weekly blogging, students will produce their own creative, semester-long project in the genre of their choice.
LSWA 230.001 Creative Communities
Fridays 11:00am-2:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: TBD
Students in this class will co-design a creative community within Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts while collaborating and building community connections in the Ann Arbor
region/online realm. Through inventive planning, organization, logistics, and implementation, students will have the opportunity to work together, and with other communities, to experience first-hand what it takes to create their own relevant public arts related exhibitions/performances/installations. Additionally, students will attend artist talks and performances and will examine and critique these varied creative experiences via dynamic group discussions and written reflections.
Note: LSWA 230.001 is limited to sophomore student leaders in Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts.
Winter 2020 Course Archive
LHSP 140.001 Art in Public Spaces/FestiFools
Fridays: 2:30pm-5:30pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
In this creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets,” which will be featured in our 14th-annual FestiFools extravaganza to be held on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor on April 5th, 2020. As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design, organize, and develop FestiFools in conjunction with local community, civic, and business partners.
This will be a full “hands-on” experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical scenery and sculptural elements for the creation of large-scale public spectacles. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects, it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team-oriented, community-minded environment.
In lieu of exams and papers, studio/lab work outside of course will be required and tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class). Course Fee: $150
LHSP 140.002 From Kansas to Munchkinland: Drawing and Painting
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 6:00-8:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Close your eyes and imagine that you were born completely without sight. Now imagine that your sight was miraculously restored. What would you “see”? Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers. Is this what you expected your hand to look like? Would you be able to comprehend the world around you or would everything be such a confusing mass of shapes, lines, colors, textures, spaces, shadows, and light that you would feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all?
In this course, we will demystify the art of seeing. Learning to draw and paint requires you to look at the world more closely and to record what you see more accurately. Learning to see, not what you “think” you see, but what you actually see, is the key that can unlock the door to your inner vision. Once you can access visual phenomenon through drawing and painting you will find out how much there is to see and how beautiful things really are.
One half of the course will be in black and white, drawing the human body; something simultaneously intimate and yet completely foreign. The second half of the course will concentrate on seeing the world in color through painting.
No previous experience necessary, however due to the rigorous nature of the course, students will be expected to possess a positive, open attitude, and strong work ethic.
Note: There is a $150 lab fee, which covers the hiring of the nude model(s) and all art supplies. Mandatory attendance and active class participation required. Expect extensive outside work on homework assignments. Museum trips (TBA) may be required.
LHSP 230.001 The Playwright and the Dramaturg
Tuesdays & Thursdays 10:00-11:30am
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
This course is a deep-dive into collaborative processes of playwriting and dramaturgy. Playwrights tend to get what limited glory there is around critically and/or popularly celebrated plays, but what many people outside the world of theater (and increasingly TV and film as well) don’t know is that dramaturgs often play as crucial a role in the development of new work as playwrights/screenwriters themselves. Successful dramaturgs and playwrights alike develop expertise in writing, theater history and production, theatrical genres and structures, character development, and the like—and their collaboration can make all the difference between an “ok” play and a major success. In this course, I hope to pair students interested in playwriting with students interested in dramaturgy to create and produce a 10-minute play festival by the end of term. We’ll try to figure out what makes an excellent play work, as well as what makes an excellent playwright and/or an excellent dramaturg. We’ll spend the first third of the course on an overview of the arts of dramaturgy and playwriting through reading and discussing instructional texts by experts, reverse-engineering playtexts and recorded performances, and talking with working playwrights and dramaturgs. We’ll shift focus in the 2nd third of the class to developing and, ultimately, producing a small festival of our own new work. (As you might guess, then, there will be requirements outside of class time to make this happen.)
This course will include active learning and discussion in-class, experimentation with different kinds of writing (analyses, proposals, annotated bibliographies, audience outreach materials such as program notes and websites, and of course, play texts) and long-term collaboration. Students will read theoretical texts, instructional texts, and plays (short and full-length), and they’ll have the opportunity to watch live and recorded performance as well as discuss playwrighting and dramaturgy with working professionals. Everyone will be provided extensive feedback both from me and from peers and will have reasonable/appropriate artistic freedom. The course grading scheme is labor-based.
LHSP 230.002 Poetry, Magic, & Science
Mondays & Wednesdays 10:00-11:30am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
Can a poem lift a curse or turn lead into gold? Can it illuminate cell biology or mimic a fractal? Poetry has a rich history of association with both magic and science. We may describe a poem as “experimental” or say it has “transformed” us. However, we commonly see science and magic in opposition. (Consider Arthur Weasley's bewilderment over muggle technology as one illustration.) This course will invite students to question how these seemingly opposing forces operate within poetry, and to practice their own scientific verbal magic. To develop our thinking we will read critical essays, magical and scientific treatises, and a large variety of poems with an emphasis on contemporary poets. Writing assignments will include critical reflections and close readings as well as a hefty dose of creative writing, building toward a final portfolio of poems that enacts each student's vision for how science and magic collide. No expertise with poetry, science, or witchcraft required. We will use in-class exercises to play with concepts and construction of poems, and both skeptics and avid poets should leave the course with a richer understanding and enjoyment of poetry.
LHSP 230.003 The Children’s Story: Re-thinking Children’s Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 1pm-2:30pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
“… I don’t write children’s books… I write, and somebody says: that’s for children.”
--Maurice Sendak
The best children’s books and films stay with us; they grow and deepen as we ourselves mature. Rather than label these pieces of artwork as “childish,” in this class we will embrace their artistry, sophistication, humanity, and courageous themes. We will examine the complex ways that children (and animals) are depicted, and consider how children’s books portray different social identities and traumas. We’ll be reading diverse genres of children’s literature: storybooks (The Cat and the Hat, Eloise, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Snowy Day), fairy tales (the Brother’s Grimm), children’s poetry (Shel Silverstein), novels (from Charlotte’s Web to Harry Potter); we’ll also watch some films (The Lion King). But the emphasis will be on your own creative work. For your culminating project, each of you will write and illustrate your own children’s book.
LHSP 230.004 Event Zero: Writing Into Mystery
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:00-5:30pm
Instructor: Ray McDaniel
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
Every major event leaves impressions on the culture that receives it. Those events influence the art and narratives we produce, but we also understand those events through and because those works of art. But what happens—what COULD happen—if we only had the art and no direct knowledge of the event? What if the event never happened?
In this section of LHSP 230, we will combine creative work and scholarship to investigate and also practice the relationship between social and civic events and popular art and media. In essence, we will create the trace evidence and residual arts in reference to an event that never occurred—we will essentially engineer fantasy or sf or speculative fiction for the purposes of understanding what culture can do. The class will determine as a group the details of the hypothetical event, and then individuals and teams will produce the arts and writing that obliquely refer to or reflect that event, depending on their artistic skills, habits, and interests. The class will culminate in a collection of artifacts that could only exist in a world in which Event Zero—whatever it is—transpired.
LHSP 230.005 Writing in Motion: Composing with Bodies, Words, and other Media
Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30-11:00am
Instructor: Naomi Silver
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall Dance Studio
This class will explore the ways we can make arguments, tell stories, and test ideas through movement in space as well as through words written on a page or spoken aloud. We will enter this process through the thematic frame of how arts—and movement arts, such as dance, in particular—engage with and enact social justice. To that end, we will read texts in a variety of genres and media that consider this relationship, including films, reviews, literary works, photographs, and more. As a class, we will attend two UMS performances that engage questions of identity, community, and social justice in unique ways. Our writing this semester will consist of reflections, interpretations, analyses, and arguments created both in words and in movement (and possibly other media, depending on students’ interest). We will be moving almost every class, in short improvised and composed responses to prompts of various kinds, and we will create longer compositions to share at the end of the semester. The class will meet in the Alice Lloyd Hall dance studio. No prior dance experience is necessary to succeed in this class—just a willingness to move and to experiment with new compositional modes and media!
ENG 223.003 Creative Writing
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30-4pm
Instructor: Hannah Webster
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
Note: Though this course is offered by the English Department, it does fulfill your LSWA/LHSP course requirement for the winter semester. The class is capped at twenty students, and ten seats have been reserved specifically for Lloyd Scholars. Only one section of this course fulfills the LSWA/LHSP course requirement.
Fall 2019 Course Archive
LHSP 125.001 Writing and Seeing
Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30am-11am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
When William Blake wrote in 1799, “As the Eye is formed such are its Powers,” he noted what we see is shaped by who we are and what we believe. Almost 200 years later, Alice Fulton wrote “let my glance be passional / toward the universe and you,” calling for vision as an active approach to the world, a form of attention that clarifies truths and embraces hidden possibilities. In this course we will use writing to explore our visions of ourselves and each other, of our natures and cultures. We will investigate art and artifacts—some we know well, and some we will discover on field trips to museums and other spots of interest—to question how they both embody and challenge our ways of seeing. Writing is often (as John Berger has pointed out) “an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things.’” Our course will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision—to make our glances more passional, to see our subjects more sharply and deeply, and to communicate our ways of seeing most effectively to audiences.
LHSP 125.002 Creative Obsessions and Writing
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am-1pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
What are your obsessions? Are they quirky and unique (and maybe embarrassing) (a schlocky song, a character from a book, your family recipe for meatloaf), or more mainstream but no less haunting (a love interest, a social identity, a sports team, the number of likes you get on Instagram)? From childhood crushes to white whales, our obsessions can be self-defining and often drive us to write/create beautiful things. But as much as they define us, they can occasionally delude or even destroy us.
This introductory writing class will allow you to explore—and write about—intellectual, aesthetic, and personal obsessions—both your own and those of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians. We’ll read texts (from such writers as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Maurice Sendak), watch a film (Brokeback Mountain), and listen to and create a podcast, all of which will explore obsessive love, work, and creativity. But most of all, you’ll be figuring out how to write effectively for college—how to parse a writing prompt, what words like “argument” and “revision” really mean, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay to create complex and challenging essays.
LHSP 125.003 Genre Wonderland
Mondays & Wednesdays 4:00pm-5:30pm
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, thriller, horror: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate out own lives? In this section of LHSP 125, we will examine: what it means, why it has to exist, whether anything exists outside of it, how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars and people just trying to makes sense of it all. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. Tolerance for stylistic excess encouraged but not required.
LHSP 125.004 Monsters and Beasts
Tuesdays & Thursdays 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Angela Berkley
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
Zombies, vampires, werewolves, cyborgs, yetis, witches, ghosts, demons and countless others—they stalk us relentlessly from the pages of our favorite novels and stories. Their creepy images haunt us from movie and TV screens—and we love every minute of it, however frightened we might be. Why do we fear these beastly monsters, and why do we love them? What's behind our enduring urge to create and consume narratives of these inhuman imaginary beings? Are they as inhuman as they seem—or is what captivates us about monsters the unsettling suggestions and foreboding images they offer us about who and what we really are?
All good writing starts with good questions, and in our course, we will explore a range of texts (novels, stories, comics, photos, paintings, TV shows and movies) that raise questions and make arguments about the cultural and political meaning of the monsters we create. You will read and write in response to these questions and arguments, through essays, images, sounds, and stories. You will engage with each other as you explore these questions as readers and writers, using the experiences of your peers to develop your insights and conclusions about what it means to be a monster lover in 2019. You will practice readerly and writerly skills together—skills that you can readily apply to the writing that awaits you beyond this course.
LHSP 125.005 The Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things
Mondays & Wednesdays 10:30am-12:00pm
Instructor: Cat Cassel
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
In this writing-intensive course, we will explore the personal, cultural, historical, and philosophical significance of the material objects that surround us in our everyday lives, and develop original insights and arguments in a series of writing assignments designed to introduce you to personal narrative, analytic writing, argumentative writing, and multimodal composition. Good arguments stem from good questions, and academic essays allow writers to write their way toward answers, toward figuring out what they think. Using things as an anchor for our inquiry, we will focus on the creation of complex, analytic, well-supported arguments addressing questions that matter in academic contexts. The course also hones your critical thinking and reading skills with readings from a variety of genres, which will serve as models or prompts for your writing assignments. Working closely with your peers and myself, you will develop your essays through peer review workshops and extensive revision and editing. The specific questions that you pursue in your essays will be guided by your own interests.
LHSP 125.006 Our TV, Our Selves
Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television—from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers—makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Riverdale or the next season of Queer Eye, or who would rather eat glass than watch Game of Thrones: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our senses of self—as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank]?
The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.
We will practice strategies of close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conducting research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virtues and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will “live every week like it’s shark week.”
This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we’ll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
LHSP 151.001 What Matters Most?: Big Questions, Fabulous Failures, and Creative Genres in Writing and the Arts
Tuesdays 4-5pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.
- Czesław Miłosz, “A Photograph”
College is a time not just to pursue a major or profession, but to ask big questions of ourselves and our world: Who are we? What do we want? How shall we live in the world? One essential way of understanding such questions is through writing and the arts. In this discussion-based seminar, we will explore how different writers and artists interpret such topics as identity, purpose, community, and aesthetics. We’ll think about labels like “success” and “failure,” and what it means to take an aesthetic risk. Yes, these are hefty subjects for a mini-course--but we’ll discuss and respond to them in concrete ways through specific pieces of writing and artwork. Each week we’ll examine a different genre--tv and film (Black Mirror to Black Swan), poetry and fiction (Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro), and music (Bob Dylan to Beyonce) and the visual arts. We’ll visit an art museum, attend a University performance, and explore the role of social media in writing and the arts. Along with short assignments and weekly blogging, students will produce their own creative, semester-long project in the genre of their choice.
LHSP 230.001 Literary Journal Publishing & Editing (ended up being canceled this semester)
Thursdays 11am-2pm
Instructor: Alexander Weinstein
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
In this class you will learn the necessary techniques to critically discuss poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and music in order to become successful editors. We will examine a wide variety of leading national and international literary magazines and small press journals, focusing our attention on the creative work of contemporary writers. Much of this class will focus on gaining experience in literary editing and publishing in order to produce your own literary and art journals and online magazines. During the semester the class will take field trips to the Duederstadt center, Hatcher Library, and Hollanders to become familiarized with the resources available to you on campus and in the community. You will learn to use Adobe Creative Suite programs (including Photoshop and InDesign) in order to gain the experience and confidence needed to produce your own journals. These workshops will lead to you creating your own posters (to advertise the LHSP Arts and Literary Journal), your own artistic/literary websites, and your own print journal. The class culminates with you designing and publishing you own printed literary journals.
LHSP 230.002 Creative Communities
Fridays 10:00am-2:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Students in this class will co-design a creative community within the Lloyd Scholars Program for Writing and the Arts while collaborating and building community connections with students at Ypsilanti Community High School. Through inventive planning, organization, logistics, and implementation, students will have the opportunity to work together with other communities to experience first-hand what it takes to create their own relevant public arts exhibitions/performances/installations. Additionally, students will attend artist talks and performances and will disseminate these varied creative experiences via dynamic group discussions and written reflections.
Note: LHSP 230.002 is limited to sophomore student leaders in the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program.
Winter 2019 Course Archive
LHSP 140.001 Art in Public Spaces/Festifools
Fridays: 2:30pm-5:30pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
In this creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets”, which will be featured in our 13th-annual FestiFools extravaganza to be held on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor on April 7th, 2019. (See: WonderFoolProductions.org) As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design, organize, and develop FestiFools in conjunction with local community, civic, and business partners.This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical scenery and sculptural elements for the creation of large-scale public spectacles.
Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects, it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, community-minded environment.
In lieu of exams and papers, studio/lab work outside of course will be required and tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class).Course Fee:
$150
LHSP 140.002 From Kansas to Munchkinland: Drawing and Painting
Mondays & Wednesdays: 6:00-8:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Close your eyes and imagine that you were born completely without sight. Now imagine that your sight was miraculously restored. What would you “see”? Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers. Is this what you expected your hand to look like? Would you be able to comprehend the world around you or would everything be such a confusing mass of shapes, lines, colors, textures, spaces, shadows and light that you would feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all?
In this course we will demystify the art of seeing. Learning to draw and paint requires you to look at the world more closely and to record what you see more accurately. Learning to see, not what you “think” you see, but what you actually see, is the key that can unlock the door to your inner vision. Once you can access visual phenomenon through drawing and painting you will find out how much there is to see and how beautiful things really are. One half of the course will be in black and white, drawing the human body; something simultaneously intimate and yet completely foreign. The second half of the course will concentrate on seeing the world in color through painting.
No previous experience necessary, however due to the rigorous nature of the course, students will be expected to possess a positive, open attitude and strong work ethic.Note: There is a $150 lab fee, which covers the hiring of the nude model(s) and all art supplies.
Mandatory attendance and active class participation required. Expect extensive outside work on homework assignments. Museum trips (TBA) may be required.
LHSP 228.001 Telling Stories: The Rhetoric and Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Mondays & Wednesdays: 9:30am-11am
Instructor: Scott Beal
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or reveal a deeper understanding of how power shapes narratives around race.
In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, television, speeches, fiction, poetry, photographs, art, comedy, and music. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
Note: Fulfills LSA’s Race and Ethnicity distribution requirement
LHSP 230.001 Hamilsations: How a Concept Album-Turned Mega-Musical Challenges Everything We Thought We Knew about U.S. History
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 11am-12:30pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Hamilton is everywhere. It’s a show that wasn’t originally meant to be a show, and it has seemingly outgrown the limits of the musical, even of the mega-musical. It’s a show about who the U.S. as a nation want(ed) to be and how we got here--what arguments and debates have shaped us. It’s a show that’s generated lots of arguments and debates about who we are and what we represent. It’s a show that participates in public arguments and debates. It’s a show about history, yes, and representation, yes. But it’s really a show about writing. It cracks writing wide open, as it does everything else it touches (hearts, minds, genres), and it’s a show that generates lots of writing.
Our purpose in this course will be to explore these arguments in and about the show--how it crafts them, who it speaks to, what it invites--in order to craft our own, so that we can join conversations it raises. We’ll do this by engaging with scholarly work in theater and history, reading some of the same source material Miranda used and analyzing how he translated that knowledge to the stage, reading original historical documents, and closely, meticulously analyzing the music, lyrics, staging, and critical and fan reception of the show.
We’ll use our engagement with Hamilton and its material to think about how conversations of consequence happen, how artistic arguments work, how to figure out who we’re talking to when we join a conversation, and how best to reach them. We’ll use it to figure out how to write and why we should! If you catch Hamilaria in the process (or if you already have it!), I’m ok with that. Even if you decide you care not one bit for Hamilton, I’m ok with that, too. Either way, we’ll “write [our] way out” of the classroom, into the conversation(s), and alongside each other as artists, citizens, and scholars. And hopefully enjoy each other along the way and come out the other end better for it. The end result of our work will be our own piece of public writing.
Special note: If you're tempted to enroll in this course only because you want to see Hamilton, think twice. This is an intellectually and artistically rigorous course requiring extensive engagement with scholarly work, historical documents, multimodal research, and a lot of writing."
LHSP 230.003 The Children’s Story: Re-thinking Children’s Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 1pm-2:30pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
“… I don’t write children’s books… I write, and somebody says: that’s for children.” --Maurice Sendak
The best children’s books and films stay with us; they grow and deepen as we ourselves mature. Rather than label these pieces of artwork as “childish,” in this class we will embrace their artistry, sophistication, humanity, and courageous themes. We will examine the complex ways that children (and animals) are depicted, and consider how children’s books portray different social identities and traumas.We’ll be reading diverse genres of children’s literature: storybooks (The Cat and the Hat, Eloise, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Snowy Day), fairy tales (from the Brother’s Grimm to Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke), children’s poetry (Shel Silverstein), novels (from Charlotte’s Web to Harry Potter); we’ll also watch some films (The Lion King, Beasts of the Southern Wild). But the emphasis will be on your own creative work. For your culminating project, each of you will write and illustrate your own children’s book.
LHSP 230.005 Writing in Motion: Composing with Bodies, Words, and other Media
Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30am-11:00am
Instructor: Naomi Silver
This class will explore the ways we can make arguments, tell stories, and test ideas through movement in space as well as through words written on a page or spoken aloud. We will enter this process through the thematic frame of how arts—and movement arts, such as dance, in particular—engage with and enact social justice. To that end, we will read texts in a variety of genres and media that consider this relationship, including films, reviews, literary works, photographs, and more. As a class, we will attend two UMS performances at the Power Center—by Camille A. Brown & Dancers and by the multimedia artist Carrie Mae Weems—that engage questions of identity, community, and social justice in unique ways. Our writing this semester will consist of reflections, interpretations, analyses, and arguments created both in words and in movement (and possibly other media, depending on students’ interest). We will be moving almost every class, in short improvised and composed responses to prompts of various kinds, and we will create longer compositions to share at the end of the semester. The class will meet in the Lloyd Hall dance studio. No prior dance experience is necessary to succeed in this class— just a willingness to move and to experiment with new compositional modes and media!
Fall 2018 Course Archive
LHSP 125.001 Writing and Seeing
Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30am-11am
Instructor: Scott Beal
When William Blake wrote in 1799, “As the Eye is formed such are its Powers,” he noted what we see is shaped by who we are and what we believe. Almost 200 years later, Alice Fulton wrote “let my glance be passional / toward the universe and you,” calling for vision as an active approach to the world, a form of attention that clarifies truths and embraces hidden possibilities. In this course we will use writing to explore our visions of ourselves and each other, of our natures and cultures. We will investigate art and artifacts — some we know well, and some we will discover on field trips to museums and other spots of interest — to question how they both embody and challenge our ways of seeing. Writing is often (as John Berger has pointed out) “an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things.’” Our course will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision — to make our glances more passional, to see our subjects more sharply and deeply, and to communicate our ways of seeing most effectively to audiences.
LHSP 125.002 Creative Obsessions and Writing
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am-1pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
What are your obsessions? Are they quirky and unique (and maybe embarrassing) (a schlocky song, a character from a book, your family recipe for meatloaf), or more mainstream but no less haunting (a love interest, a social identity, a sports team, the number of likes you get on Instagram)? From childhood crushes to white whales, our obsessions can be self-defining and often drive us to write/create beautiful things. But as much as they define us, they can occasionally delude or even destroy us. This introductory writing class will allow you to explore—and write about—intellectual, aesthetic, and personal obsessions—both your own and those of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians. We’ll read texts (from such writers as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Maurice Sendak), watch a film (Brokeback Mountain), and listen to and create a podcast, all of which will explore obsessive love, work, and creativity. But most of all, you’ll be figuring out how to write effectively for college—how to parse a writing prompt, what words like “argument” and “revision” really mean, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay to create complex and challenging essays.
LHSP 125.003 Genre Wonderland
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Raymond McDaniel
Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, thriller, horror: we take categories like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do they have to do with how we imagine and narrate out own lives?
In this section of LHSP 125, we will examine: what it means, why it has to exist, whether anything exists outside of it, how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars and people just trying to makes sense of it all. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. Tolerance for stylistic excess encouraged but not required.
LHSP 125.004 Monsters and Beasts
Tuesdays & Thursdays 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Angela Berkley
Zombies, vampires, werewolves, cyborgs, yetis, witches, ghosts, demons and countless others--they stalk us relentlessly from the pages of our favorite novels and stories. Their creepy images haunt us from movie and TV screens--and we love every minute of it, however frightened we might be. Why do we fear these beastly monsters, and why do we love them? What's behind our enduring urge to create and consume narratives of these inhuman imaginary beings? Are they as inhuman as they seem--or is what captivates us about monsters the unsettling suggestions and foreboding images they offer us about who and what we really are?
All good writing starts with good questions, and in our course, we will explore a range of texts (novels, stories, comics, photos, paintings, TV shows and movies) that raise questions about the cultural and political values and meanings of the monsters we create. You will read and write in response to these questions, generating a series of polished essays and developing a useful set of reading and writing skills that you can apply to the writing that awaits you beyond this course.
LHSP 125.006 Our TV, Our Selves
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00-2:30pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television—from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers—makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Scandal or the next season of Daredevil, or who can. not. even. with Game of Thrones: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our sense of self—as individuals, as a nation, as [you-fill-in-the-blank-based-on-your-interests]? The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.
We will practice strategies of close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conducting research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virtues and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will “live every week like it’s shark week.” This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we’ll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
LHSP 230.001 Literary Journal Publishing & Editing
Mondays 11am-2pm
Instructor: Alexander Weinstein
In this class you will learn the necessary techniques to critically discuss poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and music in order to become successful editors. We will examine a wide variety of leading national and international literary magazines and small press journals, focusing our attention on the creative work of contemporary writers. Much of this class will focus on gaining experience in literary editing and publishing in order to produce your own literary and art journals and online magazines. During the semester the class will take field trips to the Duederstadt center, Hatcher Library, and Hollanders to become familiarized with the resources available to you on campus and in the community. You will learn to use Adobe Creative Suite programs (including Photoshop and InDesign) in order to gain the experience and confidence needed to produce your own journals. These workshops will lead to you creating your own posters (to advertise the LHSP Arts and Literary Journal), your own artistic/literary websites, and your own print journal. The class culminates with you designing and publishing you own printed literary journals.
LHSP 230.002 Creative Communities
Tuesdays & Thursdays 5:00pm-7:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Students in this class will co-design a creative community which will help initiate and produce public artwork for ArtPrize, (Grand Rapids, Michigan), The U-M Bicentennial and YES - Ypsilanti Experimental Space (Ypsilanti, Michigan). Through inventive planning, organization, logistics and implementation students will have the opportunity to work together with other communities to experience first-hand what it takes to create their own relevant public arts exhibitions/performances/installations. Additionally, students will attend artist talks and performances and will disseminate these varied creative experiences via dynamic group discussions and written reflections.
WRT 302.001 Global Communication: Rhetorical Approaches to Multilingual Conversation
Wednesdays 3:00-4:00pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
This course prepares students to lead conversation groups with multilingual undergraduates. Among the topics to be considered are seeking clarification, planning for a conversation, taking a position, celebrating successes and overcoming nervousness, approaching different communicative contexts, engaging in casual conversation, and using social media. Students in this course lead weekly conversation groups beginning in the second week of the semester. Students also observe one other conversation group and develop a creative outreach project that builds upon bi-weekly blog posts.
Winter 2018 Course Archive
LHSP 140.001 Art in Public Spaces/Festifools
Fridays: 2:30pm-5:30pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
In this creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets,” which will be featured in our twelfth-annual FestiFools extravaganza to be held on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor on April 8th, 2017. (See: WonderFoolProductions.org) As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design, organize, and develop FestiFools in conjunction with local community, civic, and business partners.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will challenge students’ aesthetic assumptions while exploring techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical scenery and sculptural elements for the creation of large-scale public spectacles. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects, it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a physically demanding, team oriented, community-minded environment.
In lieu of exams and papers, studio/lab work outside of course will be required and individually tailored to students’ schedules (TBD first day of class).
LHSP 140.002 From Kansas to Munchkinland: Drawing and Painting
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 6:00pm-8:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall Art Studio
Close your eyes and imagine that you were born completely without sight. Now imagine that your sight was miraculously restored. What would you “see”? Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers. Is this what you expected your hand to look like? Would you be able to comprehend the world around you or would everything be such a confusing mass of shapes, lines, colors, textures, spaces, shadows and light that you would feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all?
In this course we will demystify the art of seeing. Learning to draw and paint requires you to look at the world more closely and to record what you see more accurately.
Learning to see, not what you “think” you see, but what you actually see, is the key that can unlock the door to your inner vision. Once you can access visual phenomenon through drawing and painting you will find out how much there is to see and how beautiful things really are.
One half of this course will be in black and white, drawing the human body; something simultaneously intimate and yet completely foreign. The second half of the course will concentrate on seeing the world in color through painting.
No previous experience necessary, however due to the rigorous nature of the course, students will be expected to possess a positive, open attitude and strong work ethic.
LHSP 230.001 Tony Kushner and his Antecedents
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 11:00am-12:30pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2060
You probably know Tony Kushner for his Oscar-Nominated screenplays of 2012’s Lincoln. Or you may be familiar with 2005’s Munich (about terrorists who kidnapped and killed several Israeli athletes during the 1977 Olympics). Both were directed by Steven Spielberg. Also in 2005, HBO produced his self-adapted screenplay of his Pulitzer Prize-Winning Angels in America (starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and a long list of other ridiculously amazing actors).
In this class we’ll read/watch these films as well as some of his other drama to think about how plays/movies in general “work” and how his kind of work argues for a complicated idea of “justice” in a complicated world. We’ll also read supplementary material (articles, poems, op-eds, etc.) that help us put Kushner’s work into perspective, culminating in a class-produced staged reading of “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy” as the semester-long project.
In a 1994 essay for Newsweek, “American Things,” Kushner refers repeatedly to the notion of “justice” without ever fully, explicitly, defining it. For him, justice in America is linked to democracy (with a lower-case “d”), as well as to a sense of collective responsibility to the past and to the future, to progress, to exploring the tensions “between the margin and the center, the many and the few, the individual and society, the dispossessed and the possessors.” In this class we’ll ask, among other things: What is justice? Do his plays/screenplays help advance it? If so, how?In this course, we will read and write about Kushner’s plays and screenplays as dramaturgs (who have an artistic role lying somewhere between director and playwright) do:
·By looking closely at the dramatic structure, language, content, and themes of the plays (that is, by analyzing their internal dramaturgy);
·By becoming conversant in the historical and artistic moments in which his plays appear (that is, by analyzing their contexts);
·By considering what implicit or explicit arguments his plays make or questions they ask;
·By creating analytical production and outreach materials of different genres for a variety of audiences; and ultimately
·By conceptualizing and mounting a staged reading of one of Kushner’s shorter plays
As we read and write about Kushner’s work, we’ll be analyzing, reverse-engineering, and practicing genres like script analysis and annotation, staging techniques, dramatic criticism, performance reviews, program notes, publicity posters, websites, etc. All of this will provide practice for planning and producing our own production, and will build to help us achieve the ultimate course goals of:
Course Goals
·Establishing Genre Knowledge and Facility: Exploring and analyzing a genre (or genres) or writing/art that integrates another art form, such as music, the visual arts, film, dance, or theater.
·Practicing Reverse-Engineering & Analysis: Analyzing models in that genre and writing both formal and informal essays and critiques.
·Sustaining Long-Term Focus & Production: Creating and turning in a semester-long project. These projects are the centerpiece of the course, but the focus should be not only on the project itself but also on the process. Instructors will integrate (or “scaffold”) aspects of that process into the course—students will therefore create storyboards, write proposals, develop blogs, or pitch/promote projects to the class for critique.
·Engaging in peer critiques: Practicing effective peer review methods on short- and long-term projects.
·Cultivating Reflective Processes: Reflecting on the experience of creating a long-term creative project.
LHSP 230.003 The Children's Story: Re-envisioning Children's Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 9:30am-11:00am
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2012
“…I don’t write children’s books…I write, and somebody says: that’s for children.”
–Maurice Sendak
The best children’s books and films stay with us. They grow and deepen as we ourselves mature. Rather than label these pieces of artwork as merely for “children,” in this class we will embrace their artistry, sophistication, humanity, complexity, and use of images to heighten our experience of words. We will examine different genres of children’s literature: storybooks, fairy tales, children’s poetry (from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to Shel Silverstein), and two young adult novels (including Harry Potter, we’ll vote on which one). We will also view a film adaption (The Wizard of Oz). But the emphasis will be on your own creative work. For your culminating project, each of you will write and illustrate your own children’s book.
LHSP 230.005 Writing in Motion: Composing with Bodies, Words, and other Media
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 1:00-2:30pm
Instructor: Naomi Silver
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall Dance Studio and Classroom 2060
This class will explore the ways we can make arguments, tell stories, and test ideas through movement in space as well as through words written on a page or spoken aloud. We will enter this process through the thematic frame of how arts and movement arts, such as dance, in particular—engage with and enact social justice. To that end, we will read texts in a variety of genres and media that consider this relationship; we will attend two UMS dance performances at the Power Center by the Urban Bush Women and Company Wang Ramirez, both of which engage social issues in unique ways; and we will be joined in the first part of the semester by Detroit based dancer and dance-maker Jennifer Harge—whose work takes on themes of race, gender, memory, and loss—as artist-in-residence and co-teacher of the course. Our writing this semester will consist of reflections, interpretations, analyses, and arguments created both in words and in movement. We will be moving almost every class, in short improvised and composed responses to prompts of various kinds, and we will create longer compositions to share at the end of the semester.The class will meet both in a Lloyd Hall classroom and in the Lloyd Hall dance studio. No prior dance experience is necessary to succeed in this class—just a willingness to move and to experiment with new compositional modes and media!
LHSP 228.001 Telling Stories: The Rhetoric and Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Mondays & Wednesdays 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2012
In Storytelling for Social Justice, Lee Anne Bell writes, “The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.” Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves “tell” or revealing a deeper understanding of how powe shapes narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, applying a set of critical perspectives to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, television, speeches, fiction, poetry, photographs, art, comedy, and music. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways different stories “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
LHSP 130.001 Writing in the Arts
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Dave Karczynski
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2012
This section of Writing in the Arts will require students to attend a wide variet of readings, performances and exhibitions. The writing we’ll do over the course of the term (poetry, critical review, fiction and non-fiction) will be a response to those encounters with art. There is a strong workshop component in this class: that is, your writing will be regularly workshopped by your peers. The class itself will culminate in a retrospective performance project in which you will discover a creative way to share your body of work with the class.
Fall 2017 Course Archive
LHSP 125.001 Writing and Seeing
Mondays & Wednesdays: 9:30-11:00am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, 2012
When William Blak wrote in 1799, "As the Eye is formed such are its Powers," he noted what se see is shaped by who we are and what we believe. Almost 200 years later, Alice Fulton wrote "let my glance be passional / toward the universe and you," calling for vision as an active approach to the world, a form of attention that clarifies truths and embraces hidden possibilities. In this course we will use writing to explore our visions of ourselves and each other, of our natures and cultures. We will investigate art and artifacts - some we know well, and some we will discover how they both embody and challenge our ways of seeing. Writing is often (as John Berger has pointed out) "an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, 'you see things'." Our course will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision - to make our glanecs more passional, to see our subjects more sharply and deeply, and to communicate our ways of seeing most effectively to audiences.
LHSP 125. 002 Creative Obsessions and Writing
Mondays & Wednesdays: 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
What are your obsessions? Are they quirky and unique (and maybe embarrassing) (a schlocky song, a character from a book, your family recipe for meatloaf), or more mainstream but no less haunting ( a love interest, a sports team, the number of likes you get on Instagram)? From childhood crushes to white whales, our obsessions can be self-defining and often drive us to write/create beautiful things. But as much as they define us, they can occasionally delude or even destroy us.This introductory writing class will allow you to explore -- and write about -- intellectual, aesthetic, and personal obsessions -- both your own and those of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians. We'll read texts (from such writers as Helen MacDonald, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, JK Rowling, Jon Krakauer), and watch films (possibly "Brokeback Mountain," "Rear Window," others), and listen to podcasts (Serial and others), all of which explore obsessive love, work, and creativity. But most of all, you'll be figuring out how to write effectively for college -- how to parse a writing prompt, what words like "argument" and "revision" really mean, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay.
LHSP 125.003 Genre Wonderland
Mondays and Wednesdays: 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Ray McDaniel
Loccation: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
Noir, fantasy, romantic comedy, thriller, horror: we take categoreis like these for granted when we talk about film or literature, but what (if anything) do thye have to do with how we imagine and narrate our own lives? In this section of LHSP 125, we will examine: what it means, why it has to exists, whether anything exists outside of it, how we use it to construct experience and knowledge as consumers, scholars, and people just trying to make sense of it all. Texts will include both literature and multimedia references both high and low, common and obscure, and skills will be developed in analysis, argument, narrative, and writing into and across academic curricula. Tolerance for stylistic excess encouraged byt not required.
LHSP 125.005 Writing and Photography
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 10:00am-11:30am
Instructor: Angela Berkley
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
Photographs matter: we cherish photos of our friends and loved ones, whether in material or digital form, and we rely on photos to show us evidence of horrors or wonders we might not otherwise believe. I hereby claim the following: images get under our skin, they prove things, and thye make things happen. Throughout the course of this semester, we will be reading, talking -- and most of all, writing -- to interrogate these claims about the power of the photographic image. The best essays start with genuine interrogations, and in this class, photographs amd photography will the by the stimulus we use to spark our curious questions. You will look long and hard at photographs, and you will write about what you see and what it means. You will read, discuss, summarize, and analyse important theories and ideas about photography, as well as contemporary debates about how photographs signify and function in our world today. You will enter into these debates and conversations, writing essays that consider and respond cogently and argue persuasively for a particular way of seeing and understanding photographs.The old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words is a cliche we will not stoop to use in our own critical appraisals of photographs. Let us, instead, use this tiersome old claim in the age old competition between image and word as an invigorating challenge: let us search for what it is that makes photographs seem to say so much, and let us read, write, revise and write again toward essays as potent as any thousand-word photograph.
LHSP 125.006 Your Best Version: Writing and Representation
Tuesdays & Thursdasy: 1:00pm-2:30pm
Instructor: Julia Babcock
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2060
Instagram. Twitter. Snapchat. Finnstagram. There are more opportunities to create and curate versions of ourselves than ever before. These opportunities have also led to skepticism about truth and authenticity. If everything is a version, then what are the criteria that makes once version better, more accurate, or more necessary than another?In this course, we will be exploring multiple versions of the same stories in order to explore answers to this question. In the process, you will practice and increase your ability to analyse, to argue, and to connect to communities that share similar passions and concerns. Writing will include a course blog, a narrative essay, an analytic essay, and a researched project where you get to choose a text and create your own new, best version.Texts will include short stories, essays, film, music, journalism, histories, and art that connect to a wide range of civil rights issues. Get ready to watch Zorro movies, reimagine some fairy tales, listen to some Coltrane and hang out with Congressman John Lewis!
LHSP 125.007 Our TV, Our Selves: The Rhetoric of Televison
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 9:30am-11:00am
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall 2012
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), "It's just TV!" In this class, those, as they say, are "fightin' words." Television -- from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob's Burgers -- makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult , conversations. I've designed this course around one major question that should be imporant to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Scandal or the next season of Daredevil, or who can. not. even. with Game of Throes: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our senses of self -- as individuals, as citizens or residents of the U.S. and/or other home nations, as [you-fill-in-the-blank-based-on-your-interests]? The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.We will practice strategies of close reading, thick discription, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conduction research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virutes and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will "live every week like it's shark week." This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we'll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it. "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."
LHSP 230.001
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 2:30pm-4:00pm
Instructor: Micheline Maynard
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall
"We didn't go into journalism to be popular," said the legendary White House Reporter Helen Thomas. "It is our job to seek the truth and put constant pressure on our leaders until we get answers."Journalism as a craft has immovable underpinnings. Journalism as a profession has never been under more pressure.In this course, students will take part in theoretical and practical discussions about journalism, the news, and what constitutes fake news. They will learn how to research a story, how to interview a subject, and how to tell the difference between objective journalism and opinionated stories.Followng in the footsteps of journalists turned writers, such as Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and Joan Didion, students will become informed readers, listeners and viewers of all types of coverage, from world affairs and politics to local news, business and sports. They will compare and contrast the approach taken by news organizations such as the New York Times and Washington Post, the BBS and NPR, and CNN and Fox News.Students also will write their own news stories and create a class website where they decide which stories are the most important and choose how to illustrate them. Even if you have no interest in becoming a journalist, this class will help you understand the role of journalism in society, how journalism tools can help improve any type of writing, and why reporting objectively is much harder than it looks.
LHSP 230.002 Creative Communities
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 5:00pm-7:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Art Studio
Students in this class will co-design a creative community which will help initiate and produce public artwork for ArtPrize (Grand Rapids, Michigan), The U-M Bicentennial, and YES - Ypsilanti Experimental Space (Ypsilanti, Michigan). Through inventive planning, organization, logistics and implementation students will have the opportunity to work together with other communities to experience first-hang what it takes to create their own relevant public arts exhibitions/performances/installations. Additionally, students will atend artist talks and performances and will disseminate these varied creative experiences via dynamic group discussions and written reflections.
This course is limited to sophomore student leaders in the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program.
Winter 2017 Course Archive
LHSP 140
LHSP 140.001 From Kansas to Munchkinland
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 6:00pm-8:00pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Art Studio
Close your eyes and imagine that you were born completely without sight. Now imagine that your sight was miraculously restored. What would you “see”? Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers. Is this what you expected your hand to look like? Would you be able to comprehend the world around you or would everything be such a confusing mass of shapes, lines, colors, textures, spaces, shadows and light that you would feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all?
In this course we will demystify the art of seeing. Learning to draw and paint requires you to look at the world more closely and to record what you see more accurately. Learning to see, not what you “think” you see, but what you actually see, is the key that can unlock the door to your inner vision. Once you can access visual phenomenon through drawing and painting you will find out how much there is to see and how beautiful things really are.
One half of the course will be in black and white, drawing the human body; something simultaneously intimate and yet completely foreign. The second half of the course will concentrate on seeing the world in color through painting.
No previous experience necessary, however due to the rigorous nature of the course, students will be expected to possess a positive, open attitude and strong work ethic.
Note: There is a $150 lab fee, which covers the hiring of the model(s) and all art supplies. Mandatory attendance and active class participation required. Expect extensive outside work on homework assignments. Museum trips (TBA) may be required.
LHSP 140.002 Art in Public Spaces/Festifools
Fridays: 2:30pm-5:30pm
Instructor: Mark Tucker
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Art Studio
In this creative course students from all disciplines will be designing and producing their own large-scale animated sculptures, or “puppets” which will be featured in our 11th annual FestiFools extravaganza to be held on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor on April 9th, 2017. (See: FestiFools.org) As the originators of this artistic spectacle, students in this class will design, organize, and develop FestiFools in conjunction with local community, civic, and business partners.
This will be a full ‘hands-on’ experience which will explore techniques and tools for the making of large-scale theatrical and sculptural elements for the creation of large-scale public spectacles. Although this course does not require any previous art experience, due to the public nature of the projects, it will be expected that the student already possess an excellent work ethic, great attitude, and the ability to grasp and apply aesthetic principles quickly, in a team oriented, community-minded environment.
Studio/lab work outside of course will be individually tailored to students’ schedules (TBD on first day of class).
Lab Fee $150
LHSP 228
LHSP 228.001 The Rhetoric and Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Mondays & Wednesdays: 10:30am-12:00pm
Instructor: Paul Barron
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2060
“The diverse groups that make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally, acknowledged, valued, or affirmed…Some stories are supported by the power structure, while others must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
--Lee Anne Bell, Storytelling for Social Justice
Bell's words imply two meanings of “telling stories”: by telling and being open to many different stories we can expand our understanding of what it means to live in this country; but also, stories themselves are “telling,” or revealing of, a deeper understanding of how power has worked and continues to work to shape narratives around race. In this course on writing and rhetoric you will examine an array of stories that shed light on race and ethnicity, as well as learning a set of critical perspectives to be able to look beyond the surface of the stories apparent in all sorts of texts, including film, television, speeches, images, articles, and videos. Course materials will also include fiction, poetry, photographs, art, comedy, and music. Writing for this class includes a personal journal in which you track your responses and the development of your ideas, an end of semester reflection, and three papers examining the ways in which different sorts of story “tell” us something about which “stories are supported,” and why and how others “must fight tenaciously to be heard.”
LHSP 230
LHSP 230.001 Poetry, Magic, and Science
Mondays & Wednesdays: 9:30am-11:00am
Instructor: Scott Beal
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2012
Can a poem lift a curse or turn lead into gold? Can it make sense of cell biology or mimic fractals? Poetry has a rich history of association with both magic and science. We may describe a poem as “experimental” or say it has “transformed” us. However, we commonly see science and magic in opposition. (Consider Arthur Weasley's enduring bewilderment over muggle technology as one illustration.) This course will invite students to question how these seemingly opposing forces operate within poetry, and to practice their own poetics of scientific verbal magic. To develop our thinking we will read critical essays, magical and scientific treatises, and a large variety of poems with an emphasis on contemporary poets. Writing assignments will include critical reflections and close readings as well as a hefty dose of creative writing, building toward a final portfolio of poems that enacts each student's vision for how science and magic collide. No expertise with poetry, science, or witchcraft required. We will use in-class exercises to play with concepts and construction of poems, and both skeptics and avid poets should leave the course with a richer understanding and enjoyment of poetry.
LHSP 230.002 Theater for Social Change: Resistance & Progress
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 11:00am-12:30pm
Instructor: Shelley Manis
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2060
Why does theatre matter? “The theatre, when it’s good, is always dangerous.” So Hallie Flanagan, the Director of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), famously said in response to accusations that the Living Newspapers and other FTP productions were “dangerous,” potential agents of social upheaval. In large part because of the fear of what theatre could do, the FTP was shut down in 1939. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Emmy winning screenwriter Tony Kushner has argued that “art is not merely contemplation, it also action, and all action changes the world, at least a little.” In this course we will pursue answers to two questions: What makes theatre “good” (and hence, “dangerous”)?, and can theatre make change in the world? We will explore a few historical moments in world theatre, specifically considering how theater practices have imagined and enacted resistance to the status quo socially and artistically.
The content of this course will be case studies of plays written and/or performed in response to fraught issues of their times: plays about feminism and women’s issues, plays about labor, plays about war, and plays about race, among others. With each play we read, we will read and discuss one or two articles that put the plays in context and/or outline a theory useful to understanding the plays. We will also, as a class, determine a social intervention we’d like to make on our campus, select and/or create a play that enacts that intervention, and mount a performance (either a staged reading or a full production, depending on what we choose) to put our ideas into action.
While we will be creating a LOT of on-our-feet creative work, we will also be doing a number of different kinds of writing this semester. In addition to formal (one brief, one a little longer) revised essays, we will create small reading responses and other low-stakes writing assignments—such as script analysis exercises, annotations, close readings, quick applications of research, visual inspiration, etc.—designed to give you experience responding to drama and thinking about the socially significant work theater can do in a multitude of forms and modes. We’ll also do a variety of types of reflective writing.
LHSP 230.003 The Children's Story: Re-imagining Children's Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 1:00pm-2:30pm
Instructor: Carol Tell
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2060
Do you have a favorite children’s book? One that seems to grow and deepen as you’ve gotten older? Have you ever wanted to write one?
The best children's books and films stay with us, and often feel mislabeled as exclusively for “children." Rather than dismiss these pieces of artwork as childish and inconsequential, in this class we will embrace their artistry, sophistication, humanity, and complexity. We will examine different genres of children's literature: storybooks (remember Cat in the Hat? Where the Wild Things Are?), fairy tales, children's poetry (Blake's Songs of Innocence, Shel Silverstein), and young adult novels. We will also watch The Wizard of Oz and one other film. But the emphasis will be on your own creative work. For your culminating big project, you will write and illustrate your own children's book.
LHSP 230.004 Photobook: The Artifact and The Project
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 2:00pm-3:30pm
Instructor: T. Hetzel
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2012
For this class, we will begin to explore the history of the photobook as we investigate our relationship to images and the stories we can tell with them. We will consider the photobook as an artistic endeavor, an artifact and a project.
We will study The Americans (1959) by Robert Frank, and, by using it as a model, you will make your first photobook titled The Wolverines. We will explore a range of photobooks including ones by Helen Levitt, Elliott Erwitt, Weegee, Daido Moriyama, and Cindy Sherman. We also will have an opportunity to see rare photobooks from the Art, Architecture & Engineering Library’s special collections, including Edward Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Twentysix Gasoline Stations.
By the end of the term, you will have taken many photos, created a photobook called The Wolverines, and also designed and built a photobook of your own chosen subject. We’ll experiment with the beauty and strangeness of the photobook’s possibilities. What story will you tell? What will you reveal?
English 223
English 223.002
Mondays & Wednesdays: 12:00pm-1:30pm
Instructor: Patricia Khleif
Location: Alice Lloyd Hall, Classroom 2012
This course will function as an introduction to the strategies for successfully reading and writing poetry and short fiction. Good writing starts with good reading, and this course will focus on developing strategies for close, comprehensive reading in order to advance creative writing skills. You will read and study examples of published poetry and prose in order to better understand the craft of writing in these two genres. This class will rely heavily on the workshop model, which means you will engage in the close study and critique of classmates work as well. The workshop process helps you become proficient in offering critical feedback on poetry and fiction. The workshop process also helps you to hone your own writing skills and establish successful strategies for expanding and revising their work. You will be asked to develop a number of original creative compositions and will be responsible for daily writing assignments and a revised portfolio of writing. An important aspect of this course will be revision and progression throughout the semester based on workshop feedback and individual work with the instructor. This course will challenge participants to read often, write frequently, and participate in class discussions, projects, and experiments. The final goal of this course, along with a better understanding of how to read and write poetry and fiction, is to explore individual creative writing goals and projects.
Fall 2016 Course Archive
LHSP 125.001 Writing and Film
Instructor: Carol Tell
This writing course will introduce you to college-level writing through an investigation of film. Along with viewing and analyzing a variety of films, you will analyze film reviews (summary, analysis, evaluation, persuasion) and develop a movie blog. You will also collaborate with peers to select, introduce, and discuss films for our class film series. Our readings will include a range of texts and will tackle the idea of adaptation. You will also consider the rhetorical strategies of argumentation employed in films, including documentaries and political satire. But most of all, you’ll be figuring out how to write effectively for college—how to parse a writing prompt, what revision really means, and how to move (quickly) beyond the five-paragraph essay. Please note that this is not a film course, in which you learn the techniques of film production or formal analysis. Rather, we’re simply using this powerful and potent medium in order to develop our skills in critical reading and writing.
LHSP 125.002 Writing and Seeing
Instructor: Scott Beal
When William Blake wrote in 1799, “As the Eye is formed such are its Powers,” he noted that vision is not objective; what we see is shaped by who we are and what we believe. Almost 200 years later, Alice Fulton ended her poem “Cascade Experiment” with the lines, “…let my glance be passional / toward the universe and you.” Here Fulton calls for vision as an active approach to the world, a form of attention that clarifies truths and embraces hidden possibilities. In this course we will explore through writing how our ways of seeing ourselves and each other, our natures and cultures, are shaped by artists, writers, and producers. And we will use writing to activate our ways of seeing – to let our glances be more passional, to see our subjects more sharply and more deeply. Writing is often (as John Berger has pointed out) “an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things.’” Our course will engage with all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to collaboration and revision, to communicate our ways of seeing most effectively to audiences.
LHSP 125.003 What You See is What You Get: Exploring Image and Identity of Place and People through Street Photography
Instructor: T. Hetzel
This first-year writing course invites you to think and write about image and identity using street photography as our lens. How do images illuminate or disguise a truth? How can images build an argument? Or tell a story?
As we ask these questions and more, our class will first investigate and analyze the changing image and identity of Detroit and take a class trip to the city with our notebooks and cameras (&/or phones!). Later we will explore the work of street photographers before turning the focus on our own experiences taking photographs of people and places in Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.
During the term, we will examine the work of photographers, writers, activists and artists including Tyree Guyton, Grace Lee Boggs, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, and Brian Day. We will watch and deconstruct films that may include Detropia, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, and Finding Vivian Maier. Students will take their own original photos and produce new prose – analytical, reflective and imaginative--as we explore academic argument and the interplay of text and image. We’ll draft and revise essays, have pitch meetings and workshops, and create photo essays. We will examine the power and potential of visual rhetoric while working toward a final photo essay project of each student's own design.
Is what you see what you get? What will you discover and reveal about the world?
LHSP 125.004 Writers Writing About Writing: On Rhetoric and Voice
Instuctor: Louis Cicciarelli
In Words Like Loaded Pistols (2012), Sam Leith says that "rhetoric is language at play--language plus." His book on rhetoric will provide a backdrop to our study of writing in this first-year writing course. We will read and analyze rhetoric in academic writing, fiction, film, adaptions, current visual and cultural artifacts, and political speech to better understand the ways rhetoric and voice work. And we'll get to play with language in our own academic and creative writing.
Our course will center your position as the writer and raise questions about how we "play with language" and develop the range of our writing voices to reach various audiences. Students will write three academic essays, one creative story project, and contribute regular responses to a course blog. This class will emphasize the practice of revision in the development of good college-level writing; we will cultivate revision strategies, using both peer and whole-class workshops, to produce our best work. Through the course, students will grow as critical readers, thinkers, and writers able to communicate in an academic community. Ultimately, this class will improve your ability to write clear, organized, and cohesive essays -- and improve your confidence and your skills as both interpreters and communicators of ideas and information.
LHSP 125.005 Telling True Stories
Instructor: David Karczynski
LHSP 125, Telling True Stories, will provide you with a chance to practice and hone your thinking and writing skills in ways that will serve you during your college years and beyond. The writing we’ll do borrows from conventions of long-form investigative journalism in that we’ll be asking big questions and telling complex stories in our attempts to answer them. Each of the four essays we write will have a different center and a different purpose. During the course of the term you will write a personal narrative, undertake a journey, conduct a social experiment and write an in-depth profile. In writing these essays and investigating the questions they raise, you’ll also be developing your toolkit of academic inquiry. You’ll learn how do research both while sitting at the computer and while moving through a living, breathing city. You’ll learn how to argue using evidence, how to persuade using rhetoric and how to evoke using imagistic language. By the end of the semester, my hope is that you will have new and exciting lenses through which to perceive your world and your place in it.
In addition to doing a lot of writing (both inside and outside of the classroom), we will also focus on strategies for reading and analyzing a variety of texts. We will also do a lot of talking; think of this class less as a lecture than as a discussion group, one in which everyone will be expected to make meaningful contributions on a daily basis. Last of all, this course is centered around the idea that the best writing comes from regular revision. Through workshopping your drafts with your peers, you will obtain a better grasp on how significantly your writing can improve with each revision. Like a muscle, writing only gets stronger with use.
LHSP 125.006 Alter Ego/Persona: Other Selves
Instructor: Paul Barron
“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?...I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself.”—From Either/Or, by Søren Kierkegaard
What if, rather than having a singular true self, our “selves” are richer and more varied? What “masks” do we find ourselves wearing? Are they sometimes necessary, and do they change depending on our identities? Is it possible that experimenting with, trying on, and playing with identities, is also a kind of truth? Questions like these will emerge as leaping off points for thinking and discussion. But above all else, this is a writing course! You will get a thorough grounding in writing for college and will practice skills like weighing evidence, making claims, organization, and developing your writing towards increasing complexity.
You may be familiar with David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust, or Nikki Minaj’s Roman and Barbie, etc. But what messages do these “other selves” communicate? And is there something about these messages that means they must be delivered via alter egos? A persona is a related kind of other self and refers to the ways we present and adapt ourselves purposefully, even playfully. As you write, draft, revise, and collaborate, you’ll consider, What is your voice as a writer? And how does it change depending on the subject, the audience, and genre? Do you have one true voice, or are there several types of voice you can employ depending on the circumstances?
We’ll draw from film, sports, drama, politics, fiction, poetry, and music journalism, and from a list of writers who offer rich entry points into these issues, such as: James Baldwin, Kobe Bryant, Anne Carson, Meghan Daum, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, Mark Landler, and Cheryl Strayed. We will also read the script for and view the UMS production of RoosevElvis, by The TEAM, a Brooklyn-based theater company.
LHSP 125.007 Our TV, Our Selves: The Rhetoric of Television
Instructor: Shelley Manis
How many times have you heard someone say (or have you said), “It’s just TV!” In this class, those, as they say, are “fightin’ words.” Television—from high drama like Breaking Bad to goofy animation like Bob’s Burgers—makes meaning, makes arguments. Television both reflects and creates current attitudes about public issues; and it can and should inspire important, sometimes difficult, conversations. I’ve designed this course around one major question that should be important to those of us who love TV (or who hate it!), who live for the next episode of Scandal or the next season of Daredevil, or who can. not. even. with Game of Thrones: How does TV make meaning? How does it contribute to our sense of self—as individuals, as a nation, as [you-fill-in-the-blank-based-on-your-interests]? The content that we study will be television; the end result of our study will be an intimate relationship with rigorous thinking, writing, and revising processes.
We will practice strategies of close reading, thick description, research, analysis, reflection, revision, and responding in writing to a variety of texts: television episodes and series (some chosen by me, some by you), academic articles, podcasts, and mainstream publications. We will engage in the kinds of tasks you will be asked to do often as a college student: blogging, social media writing, informal writing, planning and conducting research, review writing, analytical essay writing, etc. We will argue about the virtues and shortcomings of the shows we watch. We will disagree (respectfully but enthusiastically) about all manner of things. We will “live every week like it’s shark week.” This will all help you look anew at something you likely know well (tv) as you practice making dynamic, savvy, even artistic academic arguments. And we’ll hopefully have a lot of fun doing it. “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
LHSP 230.001 Literary Journal Editing and Publishing
Instructor: Alexander Weinstein
In this class you will learn the necessary techniques to critically discuss poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and music in order to become successful editors. We will examine a wide variety of leading national and international literary magazines and small press journals, focusing our attention on the creative work of contemporary writers. Much of this class will focus on gaining experience in literary editing and publishing in order to produce your own literary and art journals and online magazines. During the semester the class will take field trips to the Duederstadt center, Hatcher Library, and Hollanders to become familiarized with the resources available to you on campus and in the community. You will learn to use Adobe Creative Suite programs (including Photoshop and InDesign) as well as audio editing tools (Quick Time and Garage Band) in order to gain the experience and confidence needed to produce your own journals. These workshops will lead to you creating your own posters (to advertise the LHSP Arts and Literary Journal), your own artistic/literary websites, and learning bookbinding to create your own print journal. The class culminates with you designing and publishing you own printed literary journals.
LHSP 230.002 Creative Communities
Instructor: Mark Tucker
From visiting artists and writers to world-renowned productions sponsored by UMS, the U-M campus has a thriving arts culture, with unique opportunities for students to engage with cutting-edge works and the artists who make them. Students in this course will attend readings, artist talks, performances, and other arts-related events, and will engage in dynamic group discussions, critical writing assignments, and creative expression projects.
Simultaneously, student leaders in this class will help initiate and produce a brand new public art project/event/performance to be unveiled in the Ann Arbor community in 2015/2016. Through inventive planning, organization, logistics and implementation students will have the opportunity to work together as a team to experience first-hand what it takes to create their own large-scale arts event while becoming a part of the vibrant creative arts community in Ann Arbor.
This course is limited to student leaders in the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program.
Writing 201.002 Audio Essay
Instructor: Carol Tell
In this course on the audio essay, students will learn how to compose and publish their own podcasts, using a mixture of narration, interviews, sound effects, and music. Students will begin by developing several short sound-based narratives (“audio postcards”), focusing on such elements as voice, non-verbal sound, and interviews. Using the creative nonfiction genre as a model, students will then write an original audio essay, which they will record and workshop with their peers. In doing so they will examine what role sound plays in the development of voice and point of view, and what particular limitations and opportunities are afforded by writing in this medium. By listening to a variety of audio essays and shorter audio pieces, students will also learn effective techniques for pacing, audio layering, and balancing anecdote with reflection.