Course Syllabus
Synchronous Teaching: M&W 11:30-12:20,
https://washington.zoom.us/j/98785057229
As a First-Year Composition course, English 111 uses literature as our primary object of study to develop the skills of critical thinking and good writing at the college level. Regardless of your academic disciplines and future career goals, this course will provide the tools and skills to think critically about the world, cultures, cultural products and landscapes you navigate while preparing you to articulate your thinking through written language.
Your career at UW and beyond will require you to produce a diverse range of writing that varies in research methods, argument forms, organizations, tones, and styles for different audiences. However, in the context of any academic discipline you will be asked to clearly articulate your ideas and provide compelling evidence to support your claims. As such, this class will do its best to prepare you with the academic toolkit you need to be successful as college writers at UW. For this reason, our course will be geared towards developing the following skills as listed in our course outcomes:
- To compose strategically for a variety of audiences and contexts, both within and outside the university
- To work strategically with complex information in order to generate and support inquiry
- To craft persuasive, complex, inquiry-driven arguments that matter
- To practice composing as a recursive, collaborative process and to develop flexible strategies for revising throughout the composition process
Our section of English 111 will engage with two contemporary American novels written by Asian American female authors. Though it has no single specific theme (definition is negation!), this course will provide us opportunities to explore the ways in which literature generates and shapes questions regarding contemporary issues such as race, sexuality, class, labor, family, community, etc. I invite you to think about questions such as: How does literature mediate reality? How do imaginary literary texts reflect and refract human experiences both individual and collective, ecstatic and traumatic? How do works by minority writers shape our view and understanding of society and culture? In what ways can reading and writing about literature help us make better sense of the world in which we live, a world haunted by post-Cold War antagonism, racial capitalism, and profit-driven globalization, and resist being further estranged, both cognitively and emotionally, as we live through a pandemic of our own in 2020?
We will continually (re)engage these questions as we work to analyze literature in service of developing skills as writers and researchers at the college level. What I ask is that we all work to be respectful and open to the views of others throughout the quarter (This includes the authors and the content/themes of the texts). Through all this discussion about literary and nonliterary texts, we will always be focused on developing your writing and analytical abilities, as they are related to the four course outcomes. If you are willing to put in the effort into required readings and writing assignments, you will leave this class with the tools to be a successful writer and a critically engaged thinker, not only with your coursework, but also with the world around you.
Course Summary:
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