WRPR College Writing Courses
Courses offered in the past four years. Courses offered currently are as noted.
WRPR 0202
Upcoming
Writing To Heal
Course Description
Writing to Heal
This writing-intensive course examines writing as a catalyst for healing after loss or grief. In a workshop focused on student writing, we will analyze fiction, drama, poetry, and creative nonfiction as a basis for discussions. To this end, we will read creative non-fiction, memoir, and novels. Assignments for this course will include formal analytical essays, creative work (published online), and oral presentations.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0203
Upcoming
The Rhetorics of Sports
Course Description
The Rhetorics of Sports
In this course we will examine the relationship between media, sports, and the formulation of one’s identity. We will examine issues pertaining to gender identification, violence, and hero worship. Reading critical essays on the subject, studying media coverage of sporting events, and writing short analytical essays will enable us to determine key elements concerning how sports are contextualized in American culture. Student essays will form the basis of a more in-depth inquiry that each student will then present, using media, at the end of the course. (Not open to students who have taken WRPR 1002)
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0205
Race, Rhetoric, and Protest
Course Description
Race, Rhetoric, and Protest
In this course we will study the theoretical and rhetorical underpinnings of racial protest in America. We will begin by studying movements from the 1950s and 1960s, moving from bus boycotts to Black Power protests, and will build to analyzing recent protests in Ferguson, Dallas, and New York. Readings will include texts from Charles E. Morris III, Aja Martinez, Shon Meckfessel, Gwendolyn Pough, and various articles and op-eds. Students will write analyses of historical and contemporary protest, op-eds about the local culture, and syntheses on the course readings. 3 hrs. Lect
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0206
Upcoming
Narratives in News Media
Course Description
Narratives in News Media
In this course we will consider questions such as: What linguistic strategies do the news media use to craft compelling stories? What are the dominant narratives at play about national and global social issues, and how are some journalists working to counter those narratives? We will employ Critical Discourse Analysis as a central framework, reading theoretical and empirical work by linguists such as Teun van Dijk, as well as from sociologists and political scientists. We will engage with “On the Media” and other podcasts, TED talks, documentaries such as Outfoxed (2004), and online magazines. Students will write for a variety of audiences. 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0211
Trickery, Bodies: Rhetoric
Course Description
Trickery, Bodies, and Resistance: The Tradition(s) of Rhetoric
How do female identifying subjects position themselves (and their bodies) rhetorically in a male-dominated society? How do Black and Latinx rhetorical traditions of call-and-response and code-switching connect with and resist classical traditions of oration and stylistics? In this course we will study the tradition(s) of rhetoric by moving from the trickery of sophists to budding works in feminist rhetorics and cultural rhetorics. Students in this class will learn to synthesize the various traditions of rhetoric in historical and contemporary terms and to critically understand cultural customs that exist outside the white, heteronormative Greco-Roman tradition. 3 hrs. lect.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0212
Issues&Methods Tutor Writing
Course Description
Issues and Methods in Tutoring Writing: A Practicum Course
This course will prepare students to work with writers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and to develop their own writing practices and habits. We will learn about composition theory and writing pedagogy, tutoring strategies, and current topics in writing center studies, such as linguistic justice, anti-racism, wellness and care, and inclusion. After completing ethics training, we will conduct ethnographic research using the Middlebury Writing Center as our research site. Upon successful completion of the course, students will be invited to work as paid tutors in the Writing Center. In addition to Writing Center activities, students will complete a semester-long research project that positively impacts the Middlebury Writing Center. 3 hrs. lect.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0225
Feminist Blogging
Course Description
Feminist Blogging
Blogging is a genre that lends itself to both feminist theory and practice because it involves writing from a particular place and a particular embodiment, about how power operates in our social worlds. Feminist theory demands intersectionality: an ability to weave race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of power into a single theoretical approach. Feminist blogging transforms intersectionality into a single narrative arc. In this course we will think about blogging as a genre and how feminist theory can infuse that genre into a more vibrant, complex, and even transformative site. Throughout the course we will read feminist theory, analyze feminist blogs, and produce our own feminist blogs. 3 hrs. lect.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0288
Writing Race and Class
Course Description
Writing Race and Class
In this course we will take a literary and intersectional approach to topics of race and class. Readings include stories, essays, poems and videos by writers such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and Kelly Tsai. Students will respond to critical and creative writing prompts, conduct fieldwork, and design two writing projects of their own. The class format will include conversations with guest writers, writing workshops, contemplative activities, and individual conferences with the instructor. Students will preferably have prior experience in discussing issues of race and class, although introductory theories will be made available to provide frameworks for discussion.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0304
Documentary Rhetorics
Course Description
Documentary Rhetorics
In this course students will explore the rhetorical performances of documentary film—in terms of production, ethics, and editing—and how documentaries are used for different means: investigation, activism, and even propaganda. After watching contemporary documentaries and reading reviews, interviews, analyses, and theories of filmmaking, students will analyze specific films (with cultural rhetorics and social consciousness lenses), conduct and transcribe interviews, and write a code of ethics for documentary filmmakers. The final project has students either produce or storyboard their own short documentaries.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0333
Writing on Contemporary Issues
Course Description
Writing On Contemporary Issues: Writing, Editing, and Publishing Online
This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience. Students will create both critical and personal essays that feature strong ideas and perspectives. The readings and writing will focus on American popular culture, broadly defined. Essays will critically engage elements of contemporary American popular culture via a vivid personal voice and presence. Readings will address current issues in popular culture – Gladwell, “Brain Candy,” Klosterman, “Campus Confidential,” for instance. ReMix: Reading in Contemporary Culture is the central text. The end result will be a new online magazine of writings on American popular culture 3 hrs. lect.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0334
Upcoming
Writing and Experience
Course Description
Writing and Experience: Exploring Self in Society
The reading and online writing for this course will focus on what it means to construct a sense of self in relation to the larger social world of family and friends, education, media, work, and community. Readings will include nonfiction and fiction works by authors such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Andre Dubus, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Walker. Students will explore the craft of storytelling and the multiple ways in which one can employ the tools of fiction in crafting creative nonfiction and fiction narratives for a new online magazine on American popular culture. This magazine will have been created by students in Writing on Contemporary Issues. Narratives about self and society will therefore lean towards aspects of American popular culture. 3 hrs sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 0354
Upcoming
Rhetoric of Public Memory
Course Description
The Rhetoric of Public Memory
This course focuses on public memory and the various statues, memorials, sites, and spaces that construct public memory in contemporary U.S. society. In this course, we will study local Middlebury and Vermont public memories, Civil War and Confederate memories, and spaces of contention and controversy, while visiting nearby memorials and museums. Students in this class will compose analyses on these public memories and create arguments on the viability of memories in different shapes and forms. Overall, students will leave this class with a stronger understanding of not only public memory rhetoric but the various components that keep these memories alive. 3 hrs. lect.
Terms Taught
Requirements
WRPR 1008
Art & Science of the Interview
Course Description
The Art and Science of the Interview
Interviews are everywhere, from celebrity “freak-outs” to NPR’s StoryCorps to applying to your first job. We will use rhetorical and generic approaches to better understand the purpose and structure of the interview as it arises in different public and professional contexts. We will learn how to become better and more ethical interviewers, and we will conduct interviews on subjects that interest us. Along the way, we will write and reflect on the ethics, purposes, techniques, and psychosocial effects of interviewing. This course prepares students for the social-cultural and contextual nuances of conducting academic, activist, and personal interviews.
Terms Taught
Requirements