Graduate Writing Seminar: Global Issues

Catalog description

This course aims to improve the critical reading and writing skills of MA students while deepening their familiarity with current debates on global theory and critical methods. Through close readings of essays by major thinkers of globalism who are also persuasive writers of critical prose, we will sharpen our understanding of how the concept of “the world” has traveled and been transformed in a variety of discursive and cultural contexts. Through frequent critical writing, students will be asked to engage carefully with these essays, not only with the ideas each essay advances but with its ways of advancing them—its writing practice. We will focus on identifying how scholars from a range of disciplines (comparative literature, history, anthropology, political philosophy, art history) and interdisciplinary fields (diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, Africana studies, translation studies, environmental humanities and ecocriticism) structure their arguments (including at the level of the sentence and the paragraph), develop their central and supporting claims, select and integrate their sources, and craft their diction (including jargon, figurative language, and colloquialisms) so as to be heard and trusted in their chosen fields—to belong but also to distinguish themselves in robust debates.