Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101
NOTE: OSCAR contains the most up-to-date information about course section schedules and locations.
Please double-check course section times and locations before registering.
ENGL 1101: Sound: Silence, Listening, Speaking. Did you know that we hear faster than we see?
This introduction to multimodal communication emphasizes the role of sound and listening in Georgia
Tech’s WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, Nonverbal) approach to composition and critical
thinking. Taken for granted or else overshadowed by the visual, what we hear is crucial to
understanding, misunderstanding, and the desire to make ourselves understood. Each of three units—
on silence, listening, and speaking—challenges students to listen more consciously and conscientiously
in order to develop their ideas and arguments. A variety of primary (e.g., podcasts, film, poetry
readings) and secondary (The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne) sources will model a
variety of rhetorical strategies for students to study and incorporate into their individual repertoires.
Instructor: Lauren Neefe, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1101 D
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
TR
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL 1101
F
9:35 am - 10:55 am TR
Skiles 302
ENGL 1101
N
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm TR
Skiles 154
686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-­‐‑0165 PHONE 404.894.2730 FAX 404.894.1287 www.lmc.gatech.edu A Unit of the University System of Georgia An Equal Education and Employment Opportunity Institution Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1102
NOTE: OSCAR contains the most up-to-date information about course section schedules and locations.
Please double-check course section times and locations before registering.
ENGL 1102: Ecocinema. This section of ENGL 1102 develops communication strategies through a
consideration of "ecocinema," a label that describes not only films that directly address environmental
issues (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc.) but also a contemporary film-viewing sensibility that is
attuned to the kinds of arguments that all films make—implicitly or explicitly, in realistic or fantastical,
imagined worlds—about the environment and the earth’s future. Taking up both of these strands, this
course invites students to explore ecocinema through the practice of film analysis and criticism. We will
survey a range of films from different time periods, genres (science fiction, drama) and modes of
filmmaking (documentary, animation, and narrative feature films), and consider them in the context of
emergent scholarship on ecocinema and larger discussions about environmental issues.
The course will also create ecocinematic culture by organizing a one-night, campus-wide film
screening. Working in groups, students will select a film that will appeal to audiences of their peers at
Georgia Tech and ignite discussion of issues surrounding sustainability. Producing a film screening
from start to finish will foster a range of communication strategies: students will practice professional
communication by writing to production companies to secure exhibition permissions and to campus
offices to secure screening spaces; they will hone design skills as they create promotional materials,
including posters, flyers, and a website; and they will strengthen public speaking skills as they introduce
films and moderate post-screening discussions. The course will contribute directly to Georgia Tech’s
Quality Enhancement Plan on sustainability, and will seek out connections with related initiatives on
campus. Instructor: Sarah O’Brien, PhD.
Note: This section of ENGL 1102 gives registration priority to students in Earth & Atmospheric
Sciences or Environmental Engineering.
Available section
ENGL 1102
H
3:05 pm - 4:25 pm
TR
Skiles 368
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Multimodal Mars. In English 1102: Multimodal Mars, we will trace the orbits of science
fictional texts around the red planet. We will think about how writers such as Ray Bradbury and Kim
Stanley Robinson have depicted Mars as a landscape shaped by a combination of their own
imaginations and scientific knowledge. Even as we learn more about this planet from missions such as
Mariner 4’s flyby in 1965 and the Curiosity Rover’s landing in 2012, Mars remains a relatively unknown
space and often reminds us of the alien other. Yet, with its theoretical potential to harbor human life in
the future, Mars can also be a strangely familiar place where we might explore issues of colonization,
ecology, and domesticity.
We will discover Mars not only through science fiction texts but also through multimodal or WOVEN
(written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal) projects. Prospective projects for this course include
archival research (with Georgia Tech’s collection of vintage science fiction magazines), a radio show
(ideally to be played for Georgia Tech’s Sci Fi Lab hosts), and a final project in which you will imagine
Mars in science fictional terms. Instructor: Andrea Krafft, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
L3
2:05 pm - 2:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
M
4:05 pm - 4:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 314
ENGL
1102
P3
1:05 pm - 1:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL 1102: Literature on Drugs. Most critics and historians locate the origins of Western drug
addiction in the Age of Empire, the introduction to European society of foreign substances such as
coffee, tobacco, cannabis, and cocaine bringing about a modernity narcotized to its core. Not
coincidentally, this period also saw the emergence of literature as it is often thought of today—that is, in
the form of the novel, fiction (though, of course, poetry, drama, and creative writing in general had
existed long before). Even today, we tend to talk about literature using the same terms we use to talk
about drugs: we speak of one writer's "intoxicating" prose while we consider that same writer's
"influence" on another.
This writing and communication course will provide students with tools and practice in critical analysis
and research as we trace the relationship of literature and drugs from the nineteenth century to the
present—from opium to MDMA. In our discussions of topics as diverse as addiction, the creative
process, urban poverty, phenomenology, science fiction, conspiracy theory, race relations,
pharmacology, and the war on drugs, we will read texts on and about drugs from Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Emily Hahn, William S.
Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Philip K. Dick, Jacques Derrida, Tao Lin, and others.
Students will complete a number of projects emphasizing written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal
communication, culminating in a final, cumulative digital portfolio. Instructor: Andrew Marzoni, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
G2
12:05 pm - 12:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 302
ENGL
1102
J7
10:05 am - 10:55 am
MWF
Skiles 370
ENGL
1102
P2
1:05 pm - 1:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 123
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: The Avant-Garde. This is a course about how, what, and why we communicate. Using a
WOVEN approach to communication that considers the interrelationship between Written, Oral, Visual,
Electronic, and Nonverbal modes, this course will give you practice in analyzing the rhetorical strategies
of others and discerning the most successful strategies for articulating your own ideas. We will develop
our own rhetorical and analytic skills by exploring a central question: what is an avant-garde? That is,
what are the unwritten rules about what literature, music, and art can be? And how do artists break
those rules to create new possibilities for communication? In this course, we will explore the rulebreaking work of poets, fiction writers, filmmakers, and visual artists in the twentieth- and twenty-firstcenturies. As we consider different strategies artists use to reimagine what art can be, we will also
explore how artists communicate new ideas to their audiences in unconventional ways. By analyzing
how avant-garde creators make claims through WOVEN modes of communication, we will also make
our own claims through non-traditional communicative strategies. Instructor: Anna Ioanes, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
E3
3:05 pm - 3:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 314
ENGL
1102
L6
2:05 pm - 2:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 131
ENGL
1102
P6
1:05 pm - 1:55 pm
MWF
Stephen C Hall 106
ENGL 1102: The Mythology of Truth: Storytelling in the Scientific Age. Every civilization circulates
stories that navigate relationships between the magical and mundane, between chaos and creation.
What happens to these stories in an age of machines, in a world where the boundaries are blurred
between mortals and gods, where mystery is managed by scientific study? In Robert Duncan’s 1968
essay “The Truth and Life of Myth,” he argues that modern man “has not only chickened out on God, on
angels, on Creation,” but also on “the common things of our actual world, taking the properties of things
as their uses and retracting all sense of creatureliness.” Forty-seven years later, the question could be
asked: what roles do faith and mystery play in our science-driven search for truth? This class will take a
look at post post-modern mythology through the lens of fiction and poetry; we will read an experimental
novel, a mixed-genre lyric, and a number of contemporary short stories that reconfigure traditional
folklore for our time. Aligning with the WOVEN curriculum, we will respond to these stories using a
variety of modes, including the production of photo and video essays, creative writing responses, radio
drama, and digital mapping of the worlds we inhabit through literature. Through creative sensing and
critical thinking, the class will examine the truths our stories reveal about ourselves, our beliefs, and our
ordering and disordering of the world. Instructor: Caroline Young, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
F6
9:35 am - 10:55 am
TR
Skiles 154
ENGL
1102
K4
8:05 am - 9:25 am
TR
Stephen C Hall 106
ENGL
1102
N4
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 325
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Locating the Real in Reality: Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Production in U.S.
Reality Television. This multimodal communication course will focus on the development of a
specifically feminized version of reality television in American culture. As we hone our communication
and critical thinking through Georgia Tech’s WOVEN method (written, oral, visual, electronic,
nonverbal), we will explore the evolution of reality television in America (with an eye to the form’s
inherently global nature) from MTV’s groundbreaking The Hills to E!’s ubiquitous Keeping Up with the
Kardashians to VH1’s wildly successful Love and Hip-Hop franchise. While reality television is now
commonplace, we will examine the emergence and rise of the genre within its cultural and industrial
contexts, emphasizing programs explicitly marketed toward and featuring women. Reality television’s
origins are usually located in PBS’ 1973 documentary mini-series, An American Family, though the
form it has taken today owes much to the simultaneous evolution of the soap opera. As we trace the
history of the genre, we will consider how various economic, social, and industrial moments define,
influence, and give language to what reality television was, is, and could be. Topics covered will include
the cultural and economic contexts of television production, the significance of technology and narrative
strategies in the development of the form, and the operations of gender, race, class, and power in
reality television.
Ultimately, the texts we examine will provide ideas, models, and (hopefully) inspiration as you conceive
of, research, and craft your own multimodal projects. The projects for this course will activate all modes
in WOVEN, resulting in a diverse portfolio that might include, but will not be limited to: blogs,
presentations, photo essays, television show pitches, and short films. Instructor: Chelsea Bullock, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
B7
11:05 am - 11:55 am MWF Skiles 168
ENGL
1102
J3
10:05 am - 10:55 am MWF Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
P7
1:05 pm - 1:55 pm
MWF Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL 1102: The New Hollywood. The main objective of this class is to develop your use and
understanding of WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal) communication. We will
meet this objective by exploring the New Hollywood. What is the New Hollywood? Is it the cinema of
auteurs or last summer’s high-priced blockbuster? Is it innovative formal departures from Classical
Hollywood or pastiche and CGI? Is it the social discontent of the late 60s/early 70s or a conservative
revolt promoting a return to 1950s values? We will attempt to answer these questions by exploring
American movies from 1967 to the present from three main perspectives: film narrative and style,
industry, and socio-historical context. Instructor: Clint Stivers, PhD.
Note: This section of ENGL 1102 is limited to students in the Honors Program.
Available section
ENGL 1102 HP4
3:05 pm - 3:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 317
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Cultures of Appropriation. According to a view widely attributed to Pablo Picasso,
"Good artists copy; great artists steal." That there is no evidence Picasso actually said this emphasizes
some of the concerns of this course, which considers various ways that authors and artists take credit
for work they did not do, take material from preexisting texts and artworks, and take from cultural
groups to which they do not belong. We'll explore questions of originality, authenticity, representation,
and attribution as we probe cultural lines between honoring, imitating, copying, borrowing, and stealing.
When does an artwork that depends on source texts become original? What is the relationship between
new texts and the ones that came before? When do attempts at cross-cultural understanding devolve
into crass imitation? How can authors represent racism without reproducing it? Students will pursue
such questions as we consider a wide variety of cultural objects from the early twentieth century to the
present, from modernist stories and poems to the memes of digital culture. Literary texts such as
Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha," Ezra Pound's poetry, and Nella Larsen's "Passing" will be put in
conversation with contemporary instances of cultural appropriation from the Washington Redskins to
Rachel Dolezal. In addition to thinking critically about the aesthetics and ethics of appropriation,
students will encounter authors and artists who argue that appropriation, even plagiarism, should be the
basis for art. Instructor: Eric Rettberg, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
G3
12:05 pm - 12:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 131
ENGL
1102
J8
10:05 am - 10:55 am
MWF
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL
1102
P5
1:05 pm - 1:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 125
ENGL 1102: Under a Veil and A Symbol: Weird Fictions. Many of the genre conventions we
associate with contemporary horror and mystery have origins in "weird fiction" published in the period
between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These novels have an important history,
emerging at the end of the 1800s as a counter-tradition to forms of high art and culture. This class will
explore the explosion of genre forms at the turn into the twentieth century. In examining the significance
of the variety of cultural and literary forms that weird fiction engages, we will explore how art and
entertainment, as well as culture and commerce, are tightly bound. Texts include M.P. Shiel's Prince
Zaleski (1895) and Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Lowndes’s The Lodger (1913). In the latter part of
the course, we’ll look at how the tropes of weird fiction are reimagined by contemporary new weird
authors like China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer. Our class projects, like our reading practices, will
engage a multimodal (WOVEN) perspective. Instructor: Gabriel Lovatt, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
F5
9:35 am - 10:55 am
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
K2
8:05 am - 9:25 am
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 123
ENGL
1102
N2
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Skiles 269
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Arthur, King of Time and Space. In this course, we will use Georgia Tech’s WOVEN
curriculum (consisting of written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal modes) to practice
communication, critical thinking, and rhetorical awareness. We will connect the process of composition
to the challenges of interpreting and adapting medieval Arthurian literature in postmedieval contexts.
Overall, we will explore what it means to transform, translate, and adapt rhetorical artifacts between
modes, media, and contexts. We will consult artifacts about King Arthur from across geographical
space and time, including Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and Sir Thomas
Malory's Le Morte Darthur as well as the 2004 film King Arthur, the board game Shadows over
Camelot, and even a webcomic based on King Arthur. Projects will include a researched article and a
board game focused on Arthurian legend. Instructor: James Howard.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
A7
ENGL
1102
C
9:05 am - 9:55 am
MWF
Skiles 370
8:05 am - 8:55 am
MWF
Skiles 317
ENGL 1102: Inventing the University: Popular Depictions of Higher Education. This 1102 course
explores and investigates the fictional lives of American colleges—as they appear in novels, stories,
movies, television, and other cultural artifacts—in order to understand the present moment at actual,
real-life colleges and universities such as Georgia Tech. Institutions of higher education across the
country face a wide range of issues that deeply impact the lives of their students, staff, administrators,
and faculties. Among those issues are: funding; financial aid; politics; sports; helicopter parents; health;
racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual identity; liberal arts training vs. technical or professional
training; tenure; religion; standardization; preparedness; elitism; crime; the job market; administration;
adjustment of international students; free speech; consumerism; and ideals. Our goal is to consider
questions such as: what is “real” about the “college experience,” and what is fictional? Where do these
mix? Are there any dependably “true” depictions of college and university life? How much do narratives
or messages about college in culture, media, and literature affect our own experiences of it? Have
these narratives or portrayals or images changed over time? How do higher education institutions
respond to portrayals of themselves? As a class, we will read, view, and listen to a variety of "texts" that
inquire after these issues, and we will create various artifacts (using our WOVEN curriculum) that raise
questions, provide depth personally and academically, and analyze the issues and the cultural artifacts.
While popular depictions of higher education will be our topic, our goals concern general critical thinking
and communication skills. You will learn to think critically—that is, to break down ideas into their
constituent parts, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and learning to apply those ideas to new
contexts. You will learn communication strategies that will prepare you to succeed academically at
Georgia Tech and professionally in the work place. In particular, this class will introduce you to the
complexities and challenges of communicating with audiences in contexts where the written word exists
as part of a larger “WOVEN” framework. Instructor: Jennifer Forsthoefel, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
D3
ENGL
1102
N8
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
TR
Skiles 170
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 125
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: The Slasher Film: Gender, Disability, and Transgression. What is a slasher film?
Perhaps better stated: What separates the slasher film from the horror genre proper? To help answer
this, students will trace the evolution and visual aesthetics of the slasher film through profiling the
subgenre’s killer(s) and victim typologies, locating the subgenre’s loci across rural and sub/urban
settings, and identifying conventions and motifs like the “final girl.” After examining early narratological
precursors like Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960), students will continue on to the film Halloween
(1978), which arguably inaugurated the subgenre, and afterwards examine the decade of the 1980s,
during which the slasher film found its heyday. Finally, students will ascertain the current state of the
slasher subgenre through recent reboots and other related media. Although students will be exposed to
more mainstream incarnations like Friday the 13th (1980-) series, the class will also focus in equal
(body) parts on a plethora of lesser-known film installments (primary texts) that were produced on
considerably smaller budgets. Slasher films were particularly marketed towards teenagers and young
adults, and we will explore precisely how and why this was (and still is) through secondary literature
and class discussions. Also at our disposal will be a gamut of critical weaponry from gender and
feminist studies to disability studies. In the course of the semester, students will produce various written
and multimodal projects and in the process enhance their written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal
(WOVEN) communication strategies. Instructor: John Browning, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
D6
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
TR
Skiles 156
ENGL
1102
H5
3:05 pm - 4:25 pm
TR
Stephen C Hall 106
ENGL
1102
N5
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Skiles 156
ENGL 1102: Mystery’s Agent… & Me, An Unlikely Sleuth. This course asks students to develop
communication strategies through narrative and modal analysis. Using traditional texts, interactive
media and videogames, both retro and new, students will refine their approaches to LMC’s WOVEN
(written, oral, visual, electronic, and non-verbal) communication model.
Course content will cover topics in what could be called the "ratiocinative" genre: detective fiction in its
finest title. The narrative form of the detective is useful for study as its structure pervades many other
forms and flavors of the aesthetic world. We will investigate narrative design as well as rhetorical and
empirical implications. We will also try to be entertained by the material, but let our intellectual appetites
be equally sustained. Simply put, we’ll view language as a system while we read old-fashioned crime
dramas.
Possible print readings include: Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Himes, Le Carré, Eco, Asimov, Márquez.
Possible interactive media, games, and film include: Gone Home, Sherlock Holmes, Grim Fandango,
Her Story, Arcadia (Iain Pears), White Night, Dear Esther, TOC (Tomasula), Shock Corridor, LA
Confidential, Fantômas. Possible projects include: traditional essay, critical assessment of a game,
Inform 7 text adventure coding software and game production, weblogs of mystery. Instructor: Joshua
Hussey, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
A2
9:05 am - 9:55 am
MWF
Skiles 308
ENGL
1102
B5
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Skiles 170
ENGL
1102
J4
10:05 am - 10:55 am
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 125
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Un-Nature Writing: Imagining Urban and Post-Apocalyptic Environments. The goal
of this course is to help you hone your critical thinking and communications skills for effective
engagement with a diverse, multimodal world. Specifically, in this class, we will be working on our
WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal) communications skills while thinking critically
about how cultural texts shape and challenge the way we imagine the environment. We will begin by
examining how Romantic rhetoric idealized certain green, escapist visions of the natural world, looking
at poets like Wordsworth and Keats. Then, we will read some critical theory and learn how modernity
has forced us to reimagine what counts as “natural.” We will think about ecology as a complex
relationship between organisms and lived space, and we will look at how film, novels, and popular
culture—including Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger
Games—have depicted urban spaces and post-apocalyptic environments as creative, challenging
“unnatural” ecologies. The critical and creative texts we read and watch should inspire your own class
projects, where we reimagine our own “unnatural” environments through essays, blog posts, and
videos. Instructor: Melissa Sexton, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
E5
3:05 pm - 3:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
G1
12:05 pm - 12:55 pm
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
L4
2:05 pm - 2:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 314
ENGL 1102: Cultures of Reading. Despite the cyclical recurrence of threats to print culture—the
perennial exclamations about the death of the novel, the end of authorship, the demise of the printed
page—reading print texts continues to remain one of the central activities that dominates our everyday
lives. We perform the action daily with written texts such as fiction, memoirs, and biographies as well as
with more multimodal texts such as instruction manuals, comics, and maps. Nonetheless, how we read
and what we read continues to change, especially given our increasingly device-dependent and
hypermedia-saturated world. Writers are inspired by our electronic world and innovative printing
technologies and, in turn, continue to manipulate spatial form, print, and the book as an aesthetic object
to engage readers anew. This multimodal composition course will interrogate different cultures and
styles of reading with a focus on close, critical, and distant reading practices. We will read
contemporary British, American, and Canadian novels about readers and writers, specifically novels
concerned with mysteries around a writer’s life or writer’s archive. Combining essays with these novels
as the course readings, students will further explore what it means to respond to written texts and
become more self-aware readers. Students will leave this course with a richer understanding of their
own reading and writing practices, research skills, and practice with visual and electronic software
programs. Instructor: Michael Griffin, PhD.
Available section
ENGL 1102
F3
9:35 am - 10:55 am
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 123
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Graphic/Visual Fiction. From comics to graphic novels to visual narrative, this ENGL
1102 course will use these textual forms as a vehicle to discuss multimodality, a central concept to
Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program. Students will learn about these forms of
composition and key concepts in the field through the reading of significant figures in comics from the
last 30 years—such as Alan Moore and Alison Bechdel. As we move from the critical to the creative
and the in-between, students will study a variety of artists who use the form of comics to tell stories,
share information, and document the human condition. In turn, students will learn how to critique and
reproduce these forms through research, the use of visual and electronic software programs, and a
mixture of critical and creative responses. Instructor: Michael Griffin, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
D
ENGL
1102
H4
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 123
3:05 pm - 4:25 pm
TR
Skiles 317
ENGL 1102: From Mockingbird to Watchman. 2015 saw the publication of Go Set a Watchman, the
manuscript that author Harper Lee originally sent to the J.B. Lippincott publishing company in 1957.
This manuscript, after significant revision, eventually became the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To
Kill a Mockingbird. In this class, we will consider the Mockingbird phenomenon from a variety of
perspectives, including the reception and legacy of the original novel; the effect of the 1962 movie
adaptation on the novel's legacy; the place of Harper Lee in literary history; the role of archival
documents and research; the historical context of the Civil Rights movement; Watchman’s release in
the context of the #BlackLivesMatter era; as well as the novel’s reflection of nascent second wave
feminism. Along with the two novels and the film, major readings will also include Sylvia Plath’s 1963
novel The Bell Jar, Truman Capote’s 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’
2015 book Between the World and Me, released the same day as Go Set a Watchman. Assignments
will include an analytical paper, a group oral presentation, and a group podcast. Instructor: Monica
Miller, PhD.
Available section
ENGL 1102
K3
8:05 am - 9:25 am
TR
Stephen C Hall 103
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Obsession. Writer and director John Waters once said, “Without obsession, life is
nothing.” When is obsession a good thing? For Waters, obsession is a necessary part of the creative
process, but contemporary society suggests there are strict notions of good and bad obsessions. What
are the consequences of having an obsession? In this course, we will use the theme of obsession to
explore other processes and desires, such as memory, creativity, genius, madness, infatuation, and
power. We might consider the fine lines that distinguish an interest from an obsession, a productive
process from a disorder, and a tool from a disability. While our artifacts of study will be literary (short
stories, novels, and poems), we will also look at contemporary studies on the nature of obsession.
Readings will include E. L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley (2009), John Fowles’s The Collector (1963),
and Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) among other shorter works. Students will create artifacts possibly
including book cover redesigns, infographics, and vlogs. Instructor: Nicole Lobdell, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 B2
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 131
ENGL
1102
G5
12:05 pm - 12:55 pm
MWF
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL
1102
L
2:05 pm - 2:55 pm
MWF
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL 1102: Mapping America: Televising the Frontier, the City, and the Suburbs. This writing and
communication course will focus on space—from country to city and suburb—as imagined in American
culture for and through television. As we hone our communication and critical thinking skills via Georgia
Tech’s WOVEN method (written, oral, visual, electronic, nonverbal), we will explore the construction
and evolution of American landscapes. We will approach this process of inquiry from a feminist and
critical race studies perspective, wherein we imagine social geographies as raced and gendered. We
will begin through discussions of how the American frontier is mobilized both historically and in
television (via shows like Have Gun, Will Travel and Gunsmoke). Then, we will consider American cities
via case studies of Los Angeles (as the location of noir via Dragnet or even Wicked City) and Atlanta
(as the location of the apocalypse via The Walking Dead). The course will end by discussing the
suburbs from Leave it to Beaver to Black-ish. We will read a combination of academic and popular
press articles and watch a lot of television; these texts will serve as inspiration and models for your
course projects, which might include an essay; blog posts; a digital mapping project. Instructor: Phoebe
Bronstein, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
B8
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Stephen C Hall 106
ENGL
1102
G6
12:05 pm - 12:55 pm
MWF
Stephen C Hall 106
ENGL
1102
J2
10:05 am - 10:55 am
MWF
Skiles 317
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Memory and Imagination in the Global South. This course aims to continue building the
strategies developed in ENGL 1101 to make you a more effective, powerful, creative communicator.
The course’s themes, readings, activities, and assessments are designed to amplify your existing
strengths—whether written, oral, visual, electronic, or nonverbal (WOVEN)—as well as build new
strategies. Our theme is public memory and the imagination, and our sites of inquiry are race, justice,
and migration in the twentieth-century global South. To explore various sites of justice struggles, from
schools swept into civil rights protests to countries in the tumult of revolution, we will look to writers,
poets, and artists. Our texts include the memoir, poetry, fiction, and drama of Cuba, Mexico, and the
Dominican Republic, as well as places closer to home—such as Atlanta, Birmingham, and Little Rock.
Through critical reading and interpretation as well as original research projects we engage with the
questions: How is history communicated? Where do private and public memory intersect? How do
imagination and memory work together to produce shared histories and identities? How do we use
commemoration and memorializing to communicate particular values and ideologies? When do
remembering and imagining hurt us, and when do they heal us? The course has two required
fieldtrips—and one optional one—to nearby museums and monuments. Instructor: Ruth Yow, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
L5
ENGL
1102
P
2:05 pm - 2:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 371
1:05 pm - 1:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 354
ENGL 1102: Finding Paradise Lost. Often considered one of the pinnacles of English literature, John
Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost has served as inspiration for authors (Neil Gaiman and Terry
Pratchett), classical composers (Joseph Haydn), rock music (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), political
radicals (Malcolm X), artists (Gustav Doré), filmmakers (Scott Derrickson), and television shows
(Supernatural). We will explore Paradise Lost as a product of the political, religious, and cultural
contexts of the seventeenth century, as well as how the poem has been adapted and used in the
centuries since—and what it might mean for us today.
But while Paradise Lost is our topic, our goals concern communication skills. The course will be
structured to foster critical thinking: you will learn to identify relevant questions about an issue,
synthesize multiple perspectives, assess the soundness of a position, revise your work based on
feedback, and apply your research to real world issues. The course will also help you formulate and
defend your point of view via written essays, oral presentations, visual analysis, and through electronic
and nonverbal communication. Instructor: Sarah Higinbotham, PhD.
Note: Registration in section HP3 is limited to students in the Honors Program.
Available sections
ENGL 1102
F4
9:35 am - 10:55 am
TR
Stephen C Hall 106
ENGL
1102
HP3
3:05 pm - 4:25 pm
TR
Skiles 302
ENGL
1102
N3
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Stephen C Hall 106
686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-­‐‑0165 PHONE 404.894.2730 FAX 404.894.1287 www.lmc.gatech.edu A Unit of the University System of Georgia An Equal Education and Employment Opportunity Institution Page 12 of 17
Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Robots. This class will trace the conceptual emergence of robots from Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein through Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots and up to modern representations and
concerns about artificial life/intelligence articulated popularly by Shirow Masamune's The Ghost in the
Shell and professionally by Rodney Brooks' findings at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Students will engage with robotics by producing a series of multimodal artifacts employing written, oral,
visual, electronic, and non-verbal communication. Instructor: Tobias Wilson-Bates, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 D7
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
TR
Skiles 368
ENGL
1102
H1
3:05 pm - 4:25 pm
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 125
ENGL
1102
I
4:35 pm - 5:55 pm
TR
Skiles 308
ENGL 1102: #Medieval. Poor plumbing is medieval; ISIS is medieval; slavery is medieval;
Shakespeare is medieval. “Medieval” has become a popular negative shorthand term that evokes the
primitive, the brutal, the inhumane, the archaic. None of these descriptions are accurate, yet the
adjective “medieval” has become a misapplication with force and meaning. Medieval thus becomes
whatever we want it to mean. This course will examine what it means to be medieval in our modern
world by examining how the term medieval is used as an adjective or a concept. Medieval has become
a hashtag, and we will question whether accuracy, relevance, passion, or deliberation matter when
something is tagged as #medieval? Can something or someone be #medieval and also be positive? In
this course students will read and research genuinely medieval texts as well as texts of medievalism to
develop a community understanding of what medieval means by considering audiences which embrace
or reject these meanings. The research students conduct during the class will trace the meaning of the
term and observe its evolution from descriptive to prescriptive, and seek to unlock new meanings for
the word “medieval.” Through the synthesis of multimodal communication, we will think critically about
the standard modes of communication, and seek to understand the impact of our language upon others
through writing, speaking, visual design, electronic communication, and non-verbal language cues.
Instructor: Valerie Johnson, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 D5
ENGL 1102 F
ENGL 1102 N6
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
9:35 am - 10:55 am
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
TR
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 131
Skiles 308
Skiles 168
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Gaming with the Victorians: Narrative and Play. This course will facilitate the continued
development of multimodal communication strategies by engaging with both nineteenth-century
literature and video games that adopt nineteenth-century and/or Victorian settings to tell their stories. In
order for students to hone their WOVEN (written, oral, visual, electronic, and non-verbal)
communication, the projects throughout this course will allow participants to design and create artifacts
that examine manifestations of nineteenth-century literature and culture in video games.
Espen Aarseth has described video games as “integrated crossmedia packages” that combine a variety
of narrative forms into a whole that gets metonymically flattened by the term “games.” Drawing on this
understanding of video games, this class will explore how the literary and historical heritage of the
nineteenth-century in general, and the Victorian period in particular, have informed a number of
contemporary games. Andrew Stauffer argues that “time and technology make plain that our Victorian
period will […] always be a simulation,” and video games offer some of the more compelling simulations
of the nineteenth century. By highlighting the immense cultural, economic, and technological changes
that occurred during this century, such video games encourage us to trace the nineteenth century’s
lasting influence on the present.
Games will include Sunless Sea, Amnesia, and 80 Days, among others. Readings will include
nineteenth-century short fiction and poetry; expect to read from authors such as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Gaskell. In addition to
a semester-long blog project, students will write a multimodal essay, develop a branching video game
narrative, and code a text-based adventure game as a collaborative project. Instructor: Stephen
Addcox, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 A6
9:05 am - 9:55 am
MWF
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL
1102
B6
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 125
ENGL
1102
C2
8:05 am - 8:55 am
MWF
Stephen C Hall 103
686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-­‐‑0165 PHONE 404.894.2730 FAX 404.894.1287 www.lmc.gatech.edu A Unit of the University System of Georgia An Equal Education and Employment Opportunity Institution Page 14 of 17
Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Power Negotiations. This course will focus on multimodal artifacts that reveal how
people gain and maintain power. To ground our study, we will examine artifacts from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries that illustrate how the British Empire became the largest the world has ever
known, and we will examine artifacts that contested its dominance. We will track how the British
Empire’s power was constructed and critiqued in a variety of modes and media: novels, exhibitions,
speeches, scientific studies, poems, and works of social activism. Analyzing these documents from the
past will help us see the ways power gets negotiated today in our own communities. Some guiding
questions for the course include “Who becomes powerful and why?” “Who comes marginalized,
disciplined, or ignored in that process?” “What are some of the ways that people have challenged
systems of power?” and “How might we challenge oppressive systems today?” You will analyze and
create multimodal (written, oral, visual, electronic, electronic, and nonverbal) artifacts that demonstrate
critical thinking, close reading skills, and mature, intelligent communication. This class will help you
become more capable readers, writers, listeners, speakers, collaborators, viewers, and designers.
Instructor: Ellen Stockstill, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 A5
9:05 am - 9:55 am
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 125
ENGL
1102
B
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL
1102
J6
10:05 am - 10:55 am
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 123
ENGL 1102: Post-colonial Hauntings. In this section of English 1102, we will engage with the theme
of hauntings in post-colonial contexts. Films and writing from various cultural contexts (in Great Britain,
Australia, America, and the Caribbean) will lead us to explore questions such as: How have
representations of cultural “outsiders” changed throughout time? How have the literatures and artwork
of colonized peoples appropriated and transformed popular myths for their own purposes? How do “the
colonized” attempt to work through the unspeakable atrocities of history via representations of a
haunting past? Using the novel Dracula as a starting point for our study, we will question popular
understandings of how the “outsider” invades the colonial center, and from there we will move into
deciphering how other “haunting” presences—such as ghosts, zombies, and soucouyants—in twentieth
and twenty-first century fiction, poetry, and films operate within the context of empire.
We will also discover that communication in these texts and contexts is rhetorical and multimodal, as
people communicate in multiple ways. Building on the strategies developed in 1101, we will hone our
communication abilities through practice of the WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and
Nonverbal) principles, while developing and exercising strategies as researchers. The projects for this
course will activate all modes in WOVEN, resulting in a diverse portfolio that might include, but will not
be limited to, forum responses, movie trailers, and websites. By constantly looking at the “bigger
picture” of colonialism, global exchange, and communities, we will situate our own WOVEN arguments
in the greater conversations that have been going on for centuries. Instructor: Amy King, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 A4
9:05 am - 9:55 am
MWF
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
B4
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Skiles 371
ENGL
1102
G7
12:05 pm - 12:55 pm
MWF
Skiles 168
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Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Feminism in the Age of Social Media. This course offers an introduction to foundational
concepts and analytical tools in the study of feminist theory. We will focus on the ways in which diverse
people have understood gender, sexuality, race, and class as categories of identity. Students will
perform close readings of cultural representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality (in literature,
history, the visual arts, film, music, television, the Internet, etc.) to investigate these intersecting
categories of identity. Some of the questions this course asks include: Why are certain mannerisms,
activities, professions, and even objects considered feminine or masculine? How is gender identity
formed by forces such as society, language, and perception? And how has social media influenced
feminism and ideas about feminism today? Throughout the course, students will have the chance to
explore, challenge, and share their own ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, and other feminist
issues. Instructor: Kristin Allukian, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 D2
1:35 pm - 2:55 pm
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 127
ENGL
1102
H2
3:05 pm - 4:25 pm
TR
Stephen C Hall 103
ENGL
1102
N
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 123
ENGL 1102: Coffeehouse Culture from the 17th Century to Starbucks. It seems like there is a
Starbucks on every corner these days—and in some cities, there is. Why is that? What draws people to
coffee shops like Starbucks? What do they do there? Do you drink coffee—do you have a favorite
coffee shop? Though the popularity of coffee and the appearance of multiple coffee shops within a half
a mile of one another may seem like a recent phenomenon, it isn’t: in the English-speaking world,
coffee culture first became popular in the 17th century. During the Enlightenment, coffeehouses in
England provided a place for knowledge to be produced, shared, and debated with political,
philosophical, and literary conversations taking center stage. England’s greatest thinkers and writers
frequented coffeehouses and all across Europe people became enamored by them—so much so that
the composer J.S. Bach poked fun at these early modern coffee addicts in his “Coffee Cantata.” Our
relationship to coffee and the coffeehouse, it is clear, has not changed all that much.
Our classroom will be our coffeehouse: we will discuss, debate, and exchange knowledge. We will
brainstorm ideas and get feedback from one another to develop them, ultimately producing texts that
we can circulate amongst ourselves and in the world beyond our class. Students will learn about the
history of English coffeehouse culture, and will reflect on the role of the coffeehouse today and in their
own lives by reading both literary texts and cultural histories. Central to the course will be three
multimodal projects: a critical observation and review of a local coffeehouse, an analysis of a primary
text related to coffeehouse culture that makes use of at least one secondary source, and a researched,
multimedia artifact that communicates to a wider audience what coffeehouse culture is and why it
matters. Short response papers and oral presentations along with assorted drafting and peer review
activities will help students develop their ideas and will create in our classroom a coffeehouse culture of
our own. Instructor: Caitlin Kelly, PhD.
Available section
ENGL 1102 F9
9:35 am - 10:55 am
TR
Clough Undergraduate Commons 131
686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-­‐‑0165 PHONE 404.894.2730 FAX 404.894.1287 www.lmc.gatech.edu A Unit of the University System of Georgia An Equal Education and Employment Opportunity Institution Page 16 of 17
Spring 2016 Course Descriptions – ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102
ENGL 1102: Weird Books. This course will study “weird books,” literary works that do interesting and
unusual things with their physical forms, layouts, and narrative structures. House of Leaves abandons
its reader in labyrinths of typography, empty space, and footnotes. Building Stories contains many
smaller bound and unbound graphic novels in just the same way that the titular building encompasses
its inhabitants’ stories. S turns a small treasury of textual scraps into a puzzle hiding a literary
conspiracy. These books are fun to read, but they also make reading into an active negotiation of form
and content. Rather than making the printed text invisible, they make it an integral part of the act of
reading. These books are demanding. They’re fascinating. And they’re weird. Students in this course
will read weird books, consider their particular forms and methods of weirdness, and create weird texts
of their own. Instructor: Joshua King, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 A3
ENGL
1102
B9
9:05 am - 9:55 am
MWF
D. M. Smith 208
11:05 am - 11:55 am
MWF
Skiles 370
ENGL 1102: Finding Paradise Lost. Often considered one of the pinnacles of English literature, John
Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost has served as inspiration for authors (Neil Gaiman and Terry
Pratchett), classical composers (Joseph Haydn), rock music (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), political
radicals (Malcolm X), artists (Gustav Doré), filmmakers (Scott Derrickson), and television shows
(Supernatural). We will explore Paradise Lost as a product of the political, religious, and cultural
contexts of the seventeenth century, as well as how the poem has been adapted and used in the
centuries since—and what it might mean for us today.
But while Paradise Lost is our topic, our goals concern communication skills. The course will be
structured to foster critical thinking: you will learn to identify relevant questions about an issue,
synthesize multiple perspectives, assess the soundness of a position, revise your work based on
feedback, and apply your research to real world issues. The course will also help you formulate and
defend your point of view via written essays, oral presentations, visual analysis, and through electronic
and nonverbal communication. Instructor: Patricia Taylor, PhD.
Available sections
ENGL 1102 F2
ENGL
1102
N1
9:35 am - 10:55 am
TR
Stephen C Hall 103
12:05 pm - 1:25 pm
TR
Stephen C Hall 103
686 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-­‐‑0165 PHONE 404.894.2730 FAX 404.894.1287 www.lmc.gatech.edu A Unit of the University System of Georgia An Equal Education and Employment Opportunity Institution Page 17 of 17