Writing about Literature, Art and Culture

Catalog description

This mini or half-semester course (one of two minis students can choose to fulfill their FYW requirement) uses artistic, literary, and cultural texts (e.g., poetry, short story, lyrics, video clips) to introduce students to a variety of academic reading and writing practices that enable students to engage with texts and write about them with complexity and nuance. Within the course, we will discuss texts and evidence from multiple perspectives. We will examine how literary and cultural scholars write about texts (defined broadly), how they make claims, provide reasoning, and use textual support to argue for particular ways of seeing cultural objects. Throughout the semester, students will draw upon prior strategies and develop new ones for close reading and for critical analysis in order to produce their own thesis-driven arguments about why texts matter. We will consider and write about the extent to which these reading strategies are relevant for other kinds of reading and analysis by comparing texts from a variety of different disciplinary contexts. Because the course emphasizes authentic stakes and purposes for communicating with academic audiences, students will regularly share their work with their peers in oral and written forms within an interactive and collaborative classroom environment. Course Website: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/english/academic-programs/writing-and-communication/index.html