Fall 2021
FYS-058 | Invention
Youtubers. TikTokers. Podcasters. Influencers. These are just a few of the names given to an emerging class of “celebrities” who make a living by sharing their creativity online. Much like famous inventors from history, contemporary creators take advantage of new technologies to influence culture. But, are creatives really inventors? Or, are they something different? This class considers what it means to be an inventor. By creating our own content, we will explore the nature of modern invention by attending to issues of creativity, authenticity, and work in digital environments.
This first-year seminar will critically interrogate dominant notions of invention. We will examine invention’s complex, contentious history as a way of illuminating the various gendered, racialized, and economic forces that continue to structure conversations about genius, technology, and cultural production. We will ask what gets left out of mainstream narratives that suggest inventions are the products of isolated yet enterprising geniuses. In the process, we will inquire into the nature of self-presentation on new media platforms and how platformed selves shape social and political life.
Invention_Syllabus (Fall 2021)
ENG 350 | Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
Perhaps the idea that health is rhetorical – that is, the product of language, argument, and persuasion – might strike you as odd. Surely advancements in the fields of biomedicine, germ theory, endocrinology, and pharmacology have secured health’s sure-footed position as objective and scientific. The truth is, however, that what constitutes health and what it means to occupy a healthy body is by no means certain. In fact, if the controversies surrounding current responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have shown us anything, it is that matters of health, wellness, medicine, sickness, and death and dying are deeply social phenomena that often reflect, reinforce, and propel existing cultural hierarchies. Put most simply, the ways we understand and respond to diseases are inseparable from ways we talk about those diseases; and the ways we talk about diseases emerge overtime through dense cultural narratives that, while perhaps scientifically dubious, help us explain why some people get sick and some people don’t.
In this writing seminar, we will investigate health from a rhetorical perspective, cataloging the various ways that matters of wellness, illness, and disability are shaped and limited by text and talk. Moving beyond brute biomedical models of pathology, we will use interdisciplinary approaches to explore how competing notions of health are produced and communicated as medical professionals and everyday people interact with and try to make sense of the body and its functions. In this course, we will consider the (un)healthy body to be a cultural artifact, an ideal produced through widely circulated symbols, myths, practices, and technologies. From this vantage point, we will track the intersecting social and political forces that generate ever-shifting expectations of what it means to be healthy.
The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine_Syllabus (Fall 2021)
Other Courses
Contemporary Rhetorical Theory Syllabus (Spring 2021)