About
About "What Is a Text?"
Building on what you have learned in HoTT, WEPO, and Rhetoric (among other courses), ENG 4815 is an investigation into the nature of textuality and its relationship to various media and technologies. For the purposes of this class, we understand "texts" through processes of creation, reproduction, circulation, and interpretation. We assume that the experience of texts is not reducible to just forms of phenomena (i.e., books, words, media, screens, structures, symbols, or codes) but is a "coming-into-being" of a combination of institutions, principles, and beliefs that need to be actively explored.
Our exploration of "what is a text?" will be closely tied to the question of how textuality gets challenged by the crossing of cultures, nations, and locales. So, we will look at cross-cultural spectacles and human rights events in a variety of modes and forms--including hypertext, trauma narratives, testimonials, essays, archives, memorials, and comics journalism. We will study these modes and forms as manifestations of a critical process--as lenses or methodologies for asking questions about individuals, nations, and discourses from both local and global points of view. In short, we will try to understand how texts come to mean in transnational or cross-cultural contexts. How can we think critically about textual production while we are also interacting with texts in the world? How can we be, do, or live differently after interacting with them?
Course goals and outcomes include the following:
Building on what you have learned in HoTT, WEPO, and Rhetoric (among other courses), ENG 4815 is an investigation into the nature of textuality and its relationship to various media and technologies. For the purposes of this class, we understand "texts" through processes of creation, reproduction, circulation, and interpretation. We assume that the experience of texts is not reducible to just forms of phenomena (i.e., books, words, media, screens, structures, symbols, or codes) but is a "coming-into-being" of a combination of institutions, principles, and beliefs that need to be actively explored.
Our exploration of "what is a text?" will be closely tied to the question of how textuality gets challenged by the crossing of cultures, nations, and locales. So, we will look at cross-cultural spectacles and human rights events in a variety of modes and forms--including hypertext, trauma narratives, testimonials, essays, archives, memorials, and comics journalism. We will study these modes and forms as manifestations of a critical process--as lenses or methodologies for asking questions about individuals, nations, and discourses from both local and global points of view. In short, we will try to understand how texts come to mean in transnational or cross-cultural contexts. How can we think critically about textual production while we are also interacting with texts in the world? How can we be, do, or live differently after interacting with them?
Course goals and outcomes include the following:
- learn how to critically examine academic and non-academic texts;
- learn a set of concepts for explaining textuality as a transnational, cross-cultural, or post-colonial phenomenon, and be able to apply selected concepts to your own work;
- practice ways of reading by questioning representational traps and diabolic assumptions;
- consider the un-universality of fairly "universal" terms (e.g., gender, language, environment, economy, globalism, privilege, techno-determinism, etc.);
- establish an ethic for textual study and textual production--a sense of what we can (or cannot) and should (or should not) reasonably do when interpreting human rights events as texts;
- strengthen your abilities to write and speak about connections that might otherwise go unnoticed;
- produce a final project that demonstrates your expert attention to all of the above concerns as you make text of your own.