ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as MEDS 214) This course is a study of the ways in which the Academy mediates knowledge: What is an argument? Are there fundamental differences between popular and scholarly arguments? What about critical and creative arguments? And how should knowledge/scholarship be communicated in the 21st century? What is authorship for that matter? It is also interested in the ways scholars undermine the structures of the Academy from the center and the periphery alike in order to challenge, if not change, the system. What are their methods? What are their agendas? One thing is certain, the ways in which scholars present their work and their reasons for doing so are becoming as diverse, complex, and unique as the scholars themselves.

As such, we pay particular attention to the boundaries between argument and opinion or fact, creative and critical work, popular and scholarly discourses, old and new media, and between producers and consumers of knowledge. The aim of this course, then, is to help you develop both a practice and a habit of mind––a way of writing and a way of thinking about writing. As scholars, we all must attend to an extraordinary and disparate set of concerns ranging from matters of argumentation and evidence to questions of style, coherence, and correctness; therefore, our multimodal texts span the deeply theoretical and insistently practical––even the imaginative––as we consider selections of rhetoric, fiction, and creative non-fiction that foreground their status as arguments. Matthew Schultz.