Expository Writing courses introduce students to the principles of academic
argument and guide their practice as they learn to embody those principles
in their writing.  Each individual Expos seminar focuses on the strategies and
and techniques of college writing: all courses in Expository Writing help fulfill
the univeristy writing requirement.

How do our skin, muscle-mass, eyes, and hair—our physical appearance—influence the respect that we are accorded by others?  In this writing course, we will explore ideas about sex, authority, and physical power.  It is a study structured loosely around what scholar and theorist Michel Foucault called “the political investment of the body,” the way that the appearance of our physical bodies affects the ways that others view us, our abilities, our authority, and our power.  The first unit will ask students to identify some of the arguments of Foucault himself, in which we will explore how humans have over time invested physical bodies with power.  The second unit explores race and prowess as demonstrated through the act of physical fighting.  We will read an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, in which Douglass fights with his white master, and evaluate that account against a secondary-source article about brawls among white male southerners in nineteenth-century America.  Our third unit considers the effect of masculinity and femininity on power.  We will read Elizabeth I’s famous Tilbury Speech, in which she claims her female body contains the “heart and stomach of a king,” and will analyze it in the context of other accounts of kingship and leadership from the 1500s, including Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince and James I’s Trew Law of Free Monarchies.  For our final assignment, we will each choose one contemporary figure and then evaluate his or her authority in relation to bodily power: Hillary Clinton, Muhammad Ali, Benazhir Butto, Stephen Hawking, Britney Spears, or Marine Corps General Peter Pace, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.    

060.113.05  License to Fool (MW 12:00)
David Hershinow

From African folktales to medieval England, from ancient Greece to Saturday Night Live, the figure of the wise fool appears through time and across cultures.  In this course, we will think carefully about the importance of people who engage a serious topic by making it seem foolish.  We will ask ourselves, is such foolishness a legitimate mode of critique, or is it, rather, damaging to what might otherwise be important and sober conversations?  Do wise fools play a necessary role?  And, if so, what is it exactly that they do?  In this writing class, we will take a closer look at figures who occupy the role of the socially sanctioned fool.  We take our inspiration from the licensed fool of Shakespeare’s England, who, while safely identifiable by his silly outfit, could say anything to anyone, including the King (at least in theory).  We will begin by examining Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, paying special attention to how the licensed fool, Feste, informs our understanding of the play as a whole.  For our second essay, we will consider Lucille Ball’s comic work in the celebrated sit-com I Love Lucy.  Students will weigh their own interpretation of a specific scene or episode against another interpretation of it proposed by a published academic article.  In our third and longest project, we will watch selected scenes from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show as well as Cohen’s feature film Borat, alongside a range of film reviews, interviews, and public statements that discuss the pros and cons of Cohen’s form of comedy.  Students will write a multi-source argument that evaluates the controversy surrounding Cohen, whose jokes often strike viewers as dangerously out of bounds.  In our final essay, students will call on their understanding of the wise fool in order to identify and analyze a fourth figure, either literary or real, who plays the fool in order to be wise.

060.113.06  Politics and Violence (MW 12:00)
George Oppel

When we think about political violence we tend to focus on specific examples of war, genocide, terrorism, assassination, or revolution.  But the deeper causes, meanings, and justifications of political violence are also worthy of our consideration.  In this course we explore how major political and literary thinkers have tackled the following questions: What is political violence?  Are we all implicated in political violence, or is it something we can blame solely on the actions of states and leaders?  And when, if ever, can political violence be justified?  In the first essay unit we attempt to define political violence by exploring two examples.  We look at the case of John Brown, who engaged in violence as a protest against slavery in the United States; and we examine the recent use of torture by the U.S. government as a tactic in the war on terror.  We then deepen the analysis by looking at the theories of political violence offered by Machiavelli, Hobbes, René Girard, and Hannah Arendt.  You write an essay that brings two of these important thinkers into conversation.  For the third, major essay, we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in light of the thinkers we’ve already read and in response to debates about when the assassination of a tyrant might be justified.  Finally, we consider the doctrines of non-violence advanced by Montaigne, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and you write a short essay that reflects on course themes in relation to an example of your choice.  The overriding aim is to develop your academic writing skills as you engage with these fundamental themes and classic texts. 

060.113.07  On Humor (MW 12:00)
Elena Marx

TBA

060.113.08  The Utopian Imagination (MW 1:30)
Anthony Wexler

A map of the word that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
                                                         —Oscar Wilde

How have human beings imagined the ideal society?  And what dangers are inextricably linked to these utopian impulses?  In this writing course we will consider how great thinkers and writers have imagined utopias—visionary communities embodying their ideals—and how others, suspecting the totalitarian motivations lurking behind such utopian projects, have created dystopias as a response.  By focusing on a range of fictional texts and films, we consider questions concerning the forms and limits of the utopian imagination.  After investigating a series of Biblical utopias and sections from Plato’s Republic, students will write a short analytic essay on Thomas More’s work, Utopia, which gave the literary form its name.  Next, we consider More’s social utopia by way of Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show.  Using the film as the primary source, students evaluate a series of critical articles that explore the interplay between the film’s utopian and dystopian elements.  For the major assignment of the course, students develop an argument about Freud’s theoretical text Civilization and its Discontents in relation to George Orwell’s novel 1984.  Students will evaluate how Orwell’s representation of a tyrannical utopia supports or contradicts some aspect of Freud’s text. Finally, students choose a contemporary version of utopia—fictional text, philosophical essay, or film—and analyze it in an essay of their own design.

060.113.09  Race and Its Discontents (MW 1:30)
Bryan Conn 

Although the natural sciences have long since debunked the perception that racial identity is based in biological fact, many scholars have argued that racial difference persists as an important, if often divisive, social fact.  Is the idea of race merely a false belief we should give up?  How is some literature capable of illuminating the difficulties of a genuinely anti-racist, white political position?  How does some literature critique racialism without dismissing race as a significant social identity?  In this writing seminar, students will develop and polish their critical writing skills as they seek to answer these questions.  We will begin by analyzing Grace Paley’s “Zagrowsky Tells” and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” two stories that explore the motives and political efficacy of white liberalism while refusing to accept a simplistic conception of race.  Next, we will critique a recent theoretical polemic, Walter Benn Michaels’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race Is Not a Social Construction,” in which Michaels argues that race is fundamentally different from other social identities, such as gender and sexuality, and should therefore be dismissed as both conceptual tool and political position.  For our third and longest assignment, students will read Nella Larson’s famous short novel Passing and will develop an argument about the novel’s ambivalent relation to race.  Finally, students will review a film—they choose from a list—that problematizes racial identity, in the context of the course.

060.113.10  On Humor (MW 1:30)
Elena Marx

Please see the course description listed above for Section 07 at MW 12:00.

060.113.11  Morality, Justice, and Virtue in Classic Children’s Literature (MW 1:30)
Elizabeth Steedley

In his famous “Defense of Poesy” published in 1595, Sir Philip Sydney concluded that “[‘right poets’] be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”  While Sydney limits his defense strictly to poetry, his insistence that poetry both “teach and delight” also seems applicable to the genre of children’s literature.  From the Grimm Brothers to J.K. Rowling, authors of children’s literature appear to be engaged in a project of both pleasing their readers and inculcating within them a moral sense.  In this course, we will be reading several important texts within the genre of children’s literature in order to examine the ways in which morality, justice, and virtue are accommodated to or complicated by stories and novels ostensibly designed for the pleasure of children.  Divided into four units of reading and writing, the course will begin with a selection of stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde, and students will construct their first analytical essay around one story of their choice.  In the second unit, students will read both C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, eventually writing an essay on one of these novels and a corresponding critical article.  For the third and longest essay assignment, students will develop a multi-source argument that will focus on Harper Lee’s famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird.  The fourth essay, of the students’ own design, will center on excerpts from Alice and Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh, as well as on short selections from the Babar and Curious George series. 

060.113.12  Education and the American Dream (TTH 9:00)
Sarah Manekin

In the United States, schools have long been considered the primary vehicle for achieving the American Dream.  Yet the American Dream is itself a shifting cultural construct, reflecting pervasive ideals as well as specific social and political conditions.  One way to understand the American Dream is by exploring the goals and aspirations Americans have had for their schools.  In different periods and for different reasons, Americans have turned to schools to ensure national cohesion, promote a common set of values, create economic opportunity, facilitate democracy, cultivate a skilled leadership class, and further individual mobility.  This multiplicity of goals—and the vast financial resources they require—has made education the site of vigorous debates throughout U.S. history and a potent source for studying the “American Dream.”  This writing seminar critically analyzes the relationship between education and the American Dream from the nation’s founding to the present day. The first unit examines theories of education at the dawn of the new republic and explores how Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Horace Mann understood the relationship between schools and the dream of a self-governing nation of citizens.  The second unit focuses on the dream of opportunity and inclusion through an analysis of the writings of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.  In the third and largest unit, students will examine multiple sources to develop an argument about the competing goals that have shaped American education in the post-World War II period. The fourth and final essay asks students to examine one of the contemporary debates surrounding the relationship between schools and the American Dream.

060.113.13  Altruism and Selfishness (TTH 9:00)
Haley Stephenson

In 1995, Japan experienced two devastating earthquakes which literally shook its citizens into large scale volunteerism in order to help fellow citizens recover from the damage caused by the disaster.  In 2005, Americans contributed $5.3 billion to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  And every day the news media report on heroes, like the Connecticut man who stopped his car and ran into a burning apartment building to warn the residents to get out.  In a world where only the fittest survive, how can we explain these apparently selfless acts?  Such behavior seems contrary to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, so how is it that altruism persists in a “selfish gene” pool?   In our course, we will explore these questions, beginning with an introduction to the fictional cheaters, liars, do-gooders, and heroes found in two short stories by Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut.  Students will write a close analysis of the story of their choice.  Next, we will make the transition to real life and the spin on evolutionary theory provided by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene.  Students will read a response to Dawkins’s book by philosopher Mary Midgley and will analyze Midgley’s argument against Dawkins’s theory.  For our third essay, we will focus on human language and its role in both altruism and selfishness.  Students will develop an argument based on the theories posed by Geoffrey Miller, Robin Dunbar, and W.T. Fitch.  Our semester will conclude with a fourth essay in which students draw upon what they have learned during the course to analyze an example of altruism of their choice, from literature, film, or current or past events.

060.113.14  Education and the American Dream (TTH 10:30)
Sarah Manekin

Please see the course description listed above for Section 12 at TTH 9:00.

060.113.15  Power, Development, and the City (TTH 10:30)
Blake Ethridge

Baltimore exists because of its harbor.  Capitalizing on its position as the westernmost port on the East Coast, and its connections to the South and the Midwest, Baltimore became an economic powerhouse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But in a post-World War II global economy, its power didn’t last.  Today, Baltimore harbor and its basin, the Inner Harbor, have been transformed—developed into a tourist destination, a place for ball games, restaurants, and conventions.  While some such as Martin O’Malley contend that Baltimore’s harbor has become “a living, vibrant source of pride for Baltimore,” others doubt that the new harbor is good for the city.  Critics see the harbor redevelopment as underlining the divisions between classes in the city.  This debate about Baltimore’s Inner Harbor opens up larger questions about culture, space, politics, and power in the city.  How can cities thrive, or even survive, in a globalized economy?  What sacrifices of culture and political power must cities make?  Do individuals still have a voice in local politics and development?  Taking Baltimore as a case study, we will consider these questions, and others.  We begin by analyzing Marc V. Levine’s critical assessment of “the Baltimore Renaissance.”  Students will write an essay in which they analyze and critique the author’s argument.  In the next segment of the course, students will analyze and evaluate different viewpoints on the question of redevelopment and urban growth in Baltimore.  For their third and largest assignment, students will develop a multi-source argument by entering the contemporary controversy over development, class, and power in the city.  The final essay gives students the opportunity to analyze how the dynamics examined earlier might have consequences for individuals.

060.113.16  Ethical Challenges in the Genetic Age (TTH 10:30)
Emily Laut

With the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, leading the way to rapid developments in stem-cell research, cloning, and genomic medicine, the 21st century has been termed the “Genetic Age.”  But as genetic science surges forward, we struggle to meet the ethical challenges presented by advances in organ transplant, embryology, and genetic engineering.  In this writing course, we will explore bioethics through literature, philosophy, and recent case studies.  In the first unit, students will read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birthmark," both stories that address questions of human perfectability and human engineering.  Using writing samples based on “The Birthmark,” students will formulate an essay analyzing “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”  In the second unit, students will read a case study involving “Savior Siblings,” embryos selected to be born based on tissue compatibility with an older sibling in need of a life-saving transplant.  Students will evaluate an argument discussing the case.  For our third and largest assignment, students will read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel set in the future and looking back at the world of the 1990s, a time when human beings struggled with ethical questions about cloning.  Students will formulate an argument based on their interpretation of the novel in relation to secondary sources, such as Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and the case study from the second unit.  For the fourth and final essay, students will choose a current bioethical question to write about.  They will analyze what is at stake both for the individuals involved and for society, and will offer their own view.

060.113.17  Lost in America: Vernacular Music and Forms of Departure (TTH 12:00)
Ben Parris

This writing course explores themes of departure, itineracy, and travel in popular American vernacular music of the early to mid-twentieth century.  The goal of the class is to enable students to write effective academic essays that are sharp in argumentation, clear in analysis, and tight in structure.  We will use readings of lyrical content, critical analysis, and historical context, as well as subjective listening experience to shape the content of the essays.  First, students will examine the lyrics and blues musical form popularized by Robert Johnson, with particular analytical attention to the complicated status of women and sexual desire in Johnson’s work.  The second assignment will examine figurations of itineracy, rambling, and the "outlaw," as developed in the country music of Johnny Cash.  Students will evaluate the status and significance of these themes in Cash’s music by situating their own analysis in relation to an established critical perspective.  For the longest essay of the course, students will then examine John Coltrane's departure from the formal constraints of jazz, in the contexts of the socio-political agendas of black nationalism, eastern transcendental spirituality, and consciousness expansion.  Finally, in their fourth essay, students will reflect upon a related musician or musical group of their choice, whose work draws directly from or has directly influenced one of the three artists examined in the course.  Possible topics include the Carter Family, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Led Zeppelin.

060.113.18  The Utility of Tyranny and the Cost of Justice (TTH 12:00)
Cherie McGill

When, if ever, is it permissible to sacrifice an individual for the sake of the greater good?  Can good ends justify cruel means?  With these questions as our guide, this writing course will examine the relationship between utilitarian ethics and the politics of tyranny.  We will begin by considering the classic statement of utilitarian ethics in John Stuart Mill’s essay Utilitarianism.  Students will analyze Mill’s argument that the rightness of actions is constituted by consequences alone.  Next we will read selections from one of the most famous (and infamous) books on politics ever written, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli—a text long considered to be a recommendation of tyranny.  In the second essay, students will analyze and evaluate Machiavelli’s argument that the absolute power of the sovereign is justified as a means to the end of peace and security.   For our third and largest assignment, we turn from philosophy to literature with a careful reading of Arthur Koestler’s fictional portrayal of life under a totalitarian regime in Darkness at Noon.  In their third essay, students will synthesize all three readings as they analyze how the ideas presented in the philosophical works on ethics and politics are developed in—and challenged by—Koestler’s novel.  We will end the semester by reading a second essay by John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in which Mill attempts to show that utilitarian ethics need not entail authoritarian politics.  For the final assignment, students will design their own essay on the relation between utility, tyranny, and justice.

060.113.19  Representing the City from Dickens to The Wire (TTH 12:00)
Jessica Valdez

Television writers and reviewers have compared the representation of Baltimore in David Simon’s series The Wire to the vision of nineteenth-century London described in the stories and novels of Charles Dickens.  Mark Bowden of The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, has written that neither Dickens’s London nor Simon’s Baltimore “reflect[s] the complete truth: like Dickens’s London, Simon’s Baltimore is a richly imagined caricature of its real-life counterpart.”  In this writing course, we will take London and Baltimore as case studies to examine urban representation and to ask how the image of the city is constructed in the popular imagination.  How do we see and understand the city?  How accurate are fictional representations of “real” urban spaces?  What is the role of realism in these portrayals?  In our first assignment, we will read Dickens’s early journalistic representations of London in Sketches by Boz.  Students will examine how Dickens represents the city and will analyze the language and structure of one of Dickens’s Sketches.  In the second assignment, we will read selected chapters of Dickens’s famous novel of London, Bleak House, together with excerpts from Robert Alter’s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel.  Students will evaluate Alter’s argument in terms of Bleak House.  In the third and largest assignment, students will develop a multi-source argument about an episode of The Wire, taking into consideration the views of secondary sources as well as the themes of urban representation.  Finally, for our fourth assignment, we will read about popular conceptions of Baltimore’s elite Guilford neighborhood in David Harvey’s book Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Students will write a short analytical essay about the role of popular imagination in the creation of city spaces.

060.113.20  American Utopias (TTH 1:30)
Katherine Moran

From the Puritan “City on a Hill” to modern-day organic farming communities, American history is filled with attempts to express shared values through utopian visions.  This writing course will examine that history, exploring the ways in which some famous American utopias—both fictional and lived, both inspirational and tragic—articulated new approaches to labor and politics, nature and the built environment, gender and sexuality, and most fundamentally, to the very idea of community itself.  We will begin with a close analysis of a short story written by Louisa May Alcott about her childhood experience on a Transcendentalist farming community founded by her father.  The community—which was founded in 1843 and famously failed within a year—featured vegan dietary rules, farming without animal labor, and attempts to avoid participation in the capitalist economy.  Next, students will write an essay about gender and economics in two popular fictional utopias published at the turn of the twentieth century: Edward Bellamy's escape from industrial strife and poverty in Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's all-female world of Herland.  Third, each student will write a guided research essay on the Catholic Worker movement.  Founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin during the Depression of the 1930s and still in operation, the Catholic Worker movement revolves around the creation of urban “houses of hospitality” in which members of the community work and live side by side with people in need.  The last assignment will be a film review: with an eye on communitarian themes, students will analyze Stanley Nelson’s new documentary on American history’s most famous utopian nightmare, the mass suicide and murder of the followers of Jim Jones in 1978 at their Guyana community.

060.113.21  Memoirs and Memorials (TTH 1:30)
Christiane Gannon

Who owns memories?  As individuals, we use our memories to define our personal and emotional lives, but memories are also shared experiences that define group identities—family, nation, and culture.  Memory lies somewhere between fact and fiction.  We remember things that actually happened, but these factual events are retold, and sometimes changed or embellished through the work of retrospection.  If memories are both fact and fiction, public and private, how can we interpret art forms such as the memoir and the memorial?  How is the memoir different from history or autobiography, and how is the memorial not simply a museum?  In this writing course we will examine questions about memory by beginning with the poetry of William Wordsworth, considering Wordsworth’s “spots of time” theory of memory.  The first essay will be a close analysis of Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey.”  Next, we will read and discuss the controversial Holocaust memoir Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski.  The second essay will ask you to evaluate secondary sources about Fragments in conjunction with your own reading of the memoir.  For the third essay, we will consider memorials.  You will read three theories of collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and John Frow, and we will visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.  In your essay, you will enter the theoretical debate about collective and individual memory by analyzing your experience of the museum using these theories of memory.  We will conclude our investigation of memory with a screening of René Clement’s film Forbidden Games, about a young girl orphaned during World War II, who copes with her loss by building graves.  For the fourth essay, you will write about Forbidden Games in the context of the course.