Below is a sample of courses taught at Belmont University.Click each course title to open and close its description.
BELL CORE (GENERAL EDUCATION)
GND 1015 – First Year Seminar (Space, Knowledge, & Culture)
This section of FYS, designed around the theme of “Space, Knowledge, and Culture,” 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.
ENG 1010 – First Year Writing (Zombie Rhetoric)
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.
ENG 1010 – First Year Writing (Life Writing)
This section of ENG 1010 is organized around the theme of life writing, a category that involves texts about people’s lived experiences. Life writing encompasses genres such as travel writing, biography, diary, memoir, confession, essay, and autobiography. Our models of life writing will include books like A.J. Jacob’s My Life as An Experiment and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. All this work has in common an assumption that one primary way of knowing the world involves embodied experience and associated memories. As such, the core of this class will be a three-week “experience experiment” that you design, conduct early in the semester, and write about in a variety of ways. Your writing assignments will include journals, a narrative essay, and a digital story. In addition, you will be asked to develop a question connected to your experience and to write an academic research paper in response. Key to the class is the idea of genre and how different types of writing both afford and constrain how you approach a topic.
ENG 3010 – Third Year Writing (Service-Learning)
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.
ENW 2015 – Rhetoric of Human Rights (Interdisciplinary Learning Community)
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?
ENW 2015 – Rhetoric of Humor (Interdisciplinary Learning Community)
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.
ENGLISH MAJOR (UNDERGRADUATE)
ENW 2210 – Writers in Context
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.
ENW 2310 – Introduction to Rhetoric
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.
ENW 2510 – The Art of the Essay
What is an essay exactly? You may be surprised and relieved to learn that the genre is far more varied, intimate, and malleable than the reductive five-paragraph structure many educators have come to call an “essay.” True to Michel de Montaigne’s notion of the art form, it is a “trial” or an “attempt” to follow the pattern of one’s thinking when examining one’s experiences, observations, and inner life. In this section of The Art of the Essay, we will read, discuss, and even emulate a wide variety of essay forms, including newer manifestations involving image and sound. The course will be broken into different units, including personal essay/memoir, food writing, place/travel writing, profile writing, and digital essays. Our food writing segment will coincide with this year’s Humanities Symposium, which features the topic of food in multiple ways. We will spend time reading and writing essays in each vein, using source texts as a loose guide. This course is both reading and writing intensive. In addition to reading essays, students will be responsible for their own technical reflections on the genre and for their own "attempts" to create engaging essays.
ENW 3020 – Theories of Writing
Designed as an introduction to the study of writing, this course invites you to examine in-depth and from a wide variety of perspectives how, when, where, and why people read and write. Drawing on the work of theorists, educators, and writers, we will consider how the writing act ranges across various descriptors—classical to modern, cognitive to social, personal to academic, material to digital, private to public. You will be asked to read key texts connected to these perspectives, examine the nature of your own writing, and analyze writing practices as they exist in the wider world.
ENW 3560 – Reading and Writing in the Genres: Ecocomposition
This course will engage the growing genre of ecocomposition, a body of work that positions writing as connected to place and that examines interconnections between place, identity, and the ecology of written texts. Ecocomposition often considers natural places/spaces, raises questions about environmental ethics, and unpacks the ways in which place is imbued with social and political impulses. In addition to reading longer pieces by Lee Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies), Janice Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood), John Krakauer (Into the Wild), and C.S. Lewis (Prince Caspian), we will take up a number of short stories and critical essays. Students will be asked to write essays and stories connected to ecology and place as well as experience a number of natural spaces in and around Nashville.
ENW 3570 – Professional Writing
When you visit a website, how do shapes and colors influence your reading? How can a résumé redesign attract attention at the same time it conveys information more efficiently? This section of Professional Writing will take up such questions and consider at length how a message’s form rivals its content in conveying meaning. InLiteracy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress argues, “The world of communication is now constituted in ways that make it imperative to highlight the concept of design.” This idea stems from the ways in which modern textual practices increasingly emphasize visual elements alongside alphabetic text. As a class, we will study related best-practices in composition, combiningvisual domains (form, space) with writing style (diction, syntax). We will also work in a variety of professional genres (emails, news stories, résumés, web pages, etc.) to put design principles into practice.
ENW 3660 – History of Rhetoric
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.
ENW 3670 – Perspectives on Literacy
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.
ENW 4370 – Advanced Studies in Rhetoric: The Rhetoric of Conspiracy
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?
GRADUATE
ENG 6300 – Special Topics: Materialism, Technology, and Writing
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.
ENG 6420 – Composition Theories
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.
ENG 6420 – Modern Tribes: Marking Memberships with Writing and Rhetoric
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.
ENG 6460 – Writing and Identity: Composing and New Media
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.
