ENG 4815-02 Fall2024 - Neal

This class investigates the nature of textuality and its relationship to various media and technologies and explores theoretical and practical questions related to the production and reception of texts in a variety of different forms and media. The word “text” comes from the Latin texere, which means “to weave.” A traditional definition of a text is a linguistic structure woven out of words, phrases, or sentences produced by an author to an audience for a purpose. More recently, however, “text” has been defined more broadly to include anything deliberately made in a certain way for a purpose that can be read or analyzed, such as a person’s clothes, the design of a classroom space, a company’s brand or image, the advertisement that pops up on your phone when playing a game, a true crime podcast, or the nutritional information on food packaging. In this course, students will explore over the course of the semester key words that highlight text-based concepts. From this research, they will develop four texts: a bibliography of the source materials; a visual map, timeline, diagram, or infographic to help explain the term; a webtext that illustrates the term in action; and a synthetic multimedia text that represents their larger understanding of the term and learning process.