ENG 2012 Summer 2023 Bradley

This course helps students to think about what it means to be an English major. It reviews the history of the discipline in ways that are accessible and meaningful to students and talks about the current practices and areas of inquiry, including the broadening of categories of interest to other forms of writing and media. It also helps students to acquire skills that will be useful to them in their other courses. It will guide students through annotation and analysis, drafting, workshopping and revision, introduce the concepts of thesis and argumentation, and give students vocabulary for specialization. This class is intended to prepare students to be English majors, to show how English studies can be used both in college and their career choices and to expose them as well to the sheer pleasure of reading and writing. This course also intends to prove to students that English is fun! We will spend time analyzing a variety of media forms including traditional texts such as Brit Bennett’s Vanishing Half, Nella Larsen’s Passing and Rebecca Hall’s Passing 2021 film adaptation of Larsen’s novel as well as song lyrics, music videos, commercials, etc. in order to build and strengthen analytical skill sets.