This section of FYS will treat questions such as the following: How can we understand cognition as spatial? How and why do we relate to important spaces in our lives? How do we order our world with spatial frames and metaphors? How have our conceptions of space changed because of new technologies? And what effects have these changes had on human cultures? In pursuing answers to these questions, we will examine how cognitive scientists increasingly understand the human mind as "networked" and "connectionist," and we will look at how spatial knowledge is becoming more important to educators in a range of disciplines. From a cultural standpoint, we will think about ways in which spatial transformations have altered our connections with other people, and we will consider how geography has profound effects on how we see ourselves. In addition to the FYS common book, Stephen L. Carter's Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, we will read a variety of books, articles, essays, poems, and book chapters that use spatial knowledge as a guiding framework. Some such reading will include all or parts of books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, and Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder.

This section of First Year Writing will consider zombies in their historical, literary, and cultural contexts and look at "zombie rhetoric"—how zombie depictions contain cultural arguments. The recent popularity of the zombie trope will help us think about the walking dead from angles involving popular culture, new media, remediation, and narrative theory. We will read two longer novels involving the undead, I Am Legend and World War Z, as well as a short theoretical text entitled simply Zombies. We will also look at films and shows, including George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead. Much of the reading, writing, and discussion in the class will center around interpretations of zombie texts and artifacts, and while we engage these endeavors, we will practice a range of strategies aimed at clear written communication and argumentation. The final project in the class will be a research paper focusing on an example of zombie rhetoric.

In this section of Third Year Writing, we will explore three broadly connected themes: service, poverty, and literacy. As part of our process, we will examine academic research and narrative accounts that expand our understanding of these key concepts. In addition, throughout the semester, we will engage in a service relationship with a Nashville community partner. This work will enable us to approach course themes from an embodied, experiential perspective and will inform the course's reflective writing components. In addition to reflective writing, the course involves writing in an academic mode, including the completion of an annotated bibliography and a research project. Here, students will be encouraged to pursue research connected to a major or minor field of study or to another personal interest. For all writing efforts, the course will consistently stress ways to make prose clear and graceful through drafting, reviewing, and revising.

The history of human rights is one of progressive struggle. In this course, we will track this progression and examine a number of important themes. Beginning with the philosophical traditions out of which human rights arose, we will unpack origins and then focus on areas such as civil rights, equal rights, economic rights, and environmental rights. We will also examine the rhetorical nature of key events and texts—highlighting the types of arguments and persuasive strategies that have advanced human rights. Major questions will include: What exactly are human rights? How did they arise? And how, when, and where did people successfully argue for the expansion of such rights?

What makes us laugh? And how do we leverage this tendency toward action? This class will unpack the salient characteristics that make thoughts and actions funny. And it will examine the ways in which humor often becomes rhetorical expression. This interdisciplinary learning community connects English studies and communication studies by way of a common theme: rhetoric. Both classes will explore this topic using questions, analytical methods, and formats appropriate to each discipline. In this section, we will examine a number of genres and media forms connected to humor—often doing so through theoretical lenses that will help us understand the form and function of these texts.

What is composition and rhetoric? Both terms suggest the study of how we use language to convey ideas and persuade others; together, they mark a growing interdisciplinary field that informs our identities, investigates our uses of language, and aids in our communication. In ENW 2210, designed as an introduction to comp/rhet, we will explore core conversations in the field and apply foundational texts as interpretive frameworks, all while building a critical awareness of writing. We will look specifically at literacy, genre, and rhetoric, and using these conversations as lenses, you will be asked to complete a digital ethnography that scrutinizes and interprets an online culture.

Taking up the five canons of rhetoric as starting points, the class encourages students to broaden their artistic skills as rhetorical analysts and as writers and composers. Within the framework of each canon, students will encounter classical ideas regarding the rhetorical arts as well as more modern theories of rhetoric, and the class will use these foundations to understand the persuasions embedded in modern communications.

When advertisers pitch for your attention on social media feeds, during the Super Bowl, or even on interstate billboards, they pull you into a dynamic that traces back millennia. Such moments are inherently persuasive at their cores. But rhetoric, as a concept and as a practice, runs much deeper than mere salesmanship. Rhetorical arts underscore time-honored traditions of give and take that sit at the heart of any culture. No matter the time and place, our rhetoric, just like our literature and our music, says something important about who we are and what we value. This class will look across a long range of times and places, examining as we go the ways in which persuasive arts have evolved. We will examine questions such as: What is rhetoric good for anyway? What are the many ways in which rhetoric has been understood? And subsequently, how might understanding these first two questions help us make sense of western intellectual history? From philosophers to poets and from cognitive psychologists to cultural theorists, considerable ink has been spilled over how messages might produce intended effects on audiences. This course introduces students to the depth and breadth of these conversations, considering rhetoric as an essential art form that is just as applicable to a classical oration as it is to a modern meme.

College students often take literacy for granted, reading and writing the world without fully considering the historical, social, material, and political elements of these acts. In this course, we will address literacy from a variety of angles and make connections between literacy, rhetoric, and the social world. We will consider historical interpretations, narrative approaches, discursive definitions, social-justice angles, pedagogical perspectives, as well as digital understandings of literacy. Our readings will range from historical accounts like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to current takes on literacy like James Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Exploring literacy as both contextual and social, we will compose in different modes—print-based as well as digital.

In conjunction with the 24th Annual Belmont Humanities Symposium, a weeklong event that will treat the theme of Neighbors, this course will consider Nashville as a diverse place made up of distinctive neighborhoods and as a unified place in its own right. Students will experience, research, and write about various sites of interest in Nashville—artistic, musical, gustatory, natural, commercial, political. At the same time, we will discuss theories of place, space, and rhetoric and relate them to the everyday experience of our city. Finally, with notions of neighborhood and neighbors in mind, we will consider Nashville as a networked space with important social ties within its borders as well as considerable reach beyond its physical geography. Come learn and write about Nashville!

QAnon. Covid denial. Government-generated snow. These are but a few of the conspiracy-laden theories that have filled news feeds of late. However, such “explanations” of phenomena are nothing new. In ancient Greece, the Attic orators offered up conspiratorial charges regarding many aspects of Athenian life. The cutthroat politics of the European Renaissance made conspiracy theories a useful rhetorical tool. Enlightenment conspiracy theories frequently pushed back against rational impulses during the Age of Reason. And today, we occupy what many social theorists regard as a post-truth age—one in which societal consensus is increasingly harder to achieve and in which conspiracies abound. Given the lengthy historical sweep of conspiratorial thinking, we might begin to wonder: are conspiracy theories a natural part of human nature? If so, why? In this course, we will examine such questions, approaching conspiracy theory through the specific lens of rhetoric and associated disciplines like psychology, which examines individual motives, and sociology, which examines the power of group identities. Such connections will be especially important as we grapple with queries like the following: How does modern conspiratorial thinking have historical precedent? What compels conspiracy theories and makes them appealing and persuasive? What rhetorical strategies do conspiracy theories employ? What cognitive and logical problems are embedded in conspiratorial thinking? Why have conspiracy theories become more mainstream?

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”

“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

from “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) by Donna Haraway

We have become increasingly comfortable with machines that shape our realities. From smartphones to smart cars, and from algorithms to artificial intelligences, the gaps between humans and machines grow smaller by the day. In fact, we inhabit what many critical theorists call a posthuman age. This course will examine such modern conditions through texts like The Cyborg Handbook (critical collection), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (novel), and The Matrix (film). In addition, the class will consider social and rhetorical theories that highlight the power of nonhumans and reinforce the connections between things and people. Along the way, the class will explore what makes human beings distinctive at the same time it stresses inescapable ties to the things around us that persuade every day.

What does it mean when we say that a novel held our rapt attention? Are we merely expressing our gratitude to the author? Or are we also saying something deeper about the titillating, physical act of reading? Who—or perhaps what—is responsible when we transform physical symbols on a page or screen into imaginative worlds that affect us deeply? And what of the many people and objects, including other texts, that prepared us to be captivated by a novel? Do they deserve any credit? This class will explore such questions as we look at reading and writing practices through the lens of “new materialism,” a growing body of work that stretches ideas of agency to include not just humans, but also nonhumans and environmental contexts. This work contends that things do a great deal of autonomous work in the world. A timely example here involves the growth of Internet connectivity and the ubiquity of peripheral devices—material conditions that actively give shape to distinct forms of reading, writing, and thinking. As we pursue such ideas connected to technologies of writing, we will also follow a related line of inquiry involving the emergence of technology writing as a distinct genre. In this vein, we will read and write extensively about technology’s connections to our literate lives, casting our gaze on everything from tech blogs to the “Best Technology Writing” series of books. Other readings for the course will include theoretical work like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, historical investigations such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, fictional pieces like Bruno Latour’s Aramis, and other work—creative and academic—that suggests connections between materiality, technology, writing, and culture.

When we write, what happens? In other words, what forces are in play, and how do these forces shape writers, texts, and audiences? Moreover, why do we study these dynamics, and what have we learned so far? Such questions frame our course, which examines the relatively young, highly interdisciplinary field of composition studies. Over the semester, we will trace key theories, movements, and debates that address how writing works as well as how we might best teach the writing craft. Topics will include disciplinary narratives, rhetorical directions, discourse theories, social constructions, identity politics, literacy connections, pedagogical practices, and new media effects. The class, its readings, and its weekly conversations will benefit a wide range of students—including those who want to understand their own writing practices, those who pursue further graduate work in English, and those who teach English at the college level.

How do we belong? And how do we signal these connections? Such questions sit at the center of this course, which draws upon lenses commonly taken up in composition/rhetorical studies to explain and to describe group memberships and communications. Focusing on the linguistic and rhetorical ties that create identification with groups, the course will include discussions of constitutive rhetoric (James Boyd White), identification (Kenneth Burke), sociolinguistics (Norman Fairclough, James Gee), genre theory (Carolyn Miller, Anis Bawarshi), and theories of discourse communities and communities of practice (Étienne Wenger, James Porter, John Swales). The course will engage these ideas by way of an extended ethnographic project/paper that applies theoretical perspectives, methods of data collection, and methods of data analysis.

New media afford a wealth of personal, expressive opportunities. With respect to Web 2.0 venues, their inherent interactivity, and their varied rhetorical modes, this seminar will explore ways in which new media and new versions of literacy have altered the landscape of reading and writing practices. Central to this process, we will survey a variety of theoretical and rhetorical approaches to new media and consider the close ties between media and identity. In addition, we will engage the very practical matter of new media composition, and we will write about as well as write in new media forms, including weblogs, websites, digital stories, and social media.