ENG 4815 Howell Fall 2021

This class is an adventure in trying to answer the question posed in the course’s title. If you are up for this adventure, you can begin this class thinking that you know the answer, sure that you do not know the answer, or even believing that the question cannot really BE answered.

We will be exploring texts and textuality by creating a lot of different kinds of texts ourselves, by discussing how many other people have tried to answer the “What is a text?” question, and by looking for textuality in uncommon places. Can clouds be texts? What about dreams? By experiencing texts both as creators and as audience, we will gain a fuller understanding of what a text can be.

Success in this class depends almost entirely on your honest and energetic engagement with the course activities and almost not-at-all with the instructor’s agreement with your final anwer to the course’s primary question.