Course Description and Goals

This course is one of the English Department’s new writing seminars, courses that make writing and language their explicit subject.  Individual sections of ENG 202 focus on different topics, but all seminars emphasize the processes of academic reading and writing and use student writing as a primary text (that is, they give the same kind of critical attention to writing by students as to writing by published authors).

The reading and writing assignments in this section of ENG 202 focus on the topic of “Representing Animals.”  Animals are our companions, our scientific “models,” our evolutionary kin, our food, our genetic playthings, our fashion statements. We experience animals at home, in zoos, in the grocery store, in labs, in the “wild” and throughout the spectrum of popular media such as television, film and the internet.  This course will investigate how animals are represented in language and the value systems that underwrite those representations. Among our chief considerations will be what our descriptions of animals say about us; the intersections of gender, race, and animality in language; and the question of animals “talking back.”

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this course, you will be able to

  • identify and employ a range of strategies for discovering, developing, organizing, revising, editing and proofreading ideas.
  • learn how to focus your writing on a specific purpose
  • learn to identify and respond to the needs of different audiences and rhetorical situations
  • practice integrating your ideas with those of others
  • apply technologies commonly used to discover, research, and communicate ideas within academic and professional environments
  • identify, explore, and analyze some common representations of animals and constructions of the human/animal binary