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 techniques of college writing; all courses in Expository Writing help fulfill the university writing requirement.

060.215 (H) (W) ADVANCED EXPOSITORY WRITING

(3) Limit 12 per section.

Designed for juniors and seniors with experience in using analysis to make clear and persuasive arguments, but open to any students who have taken Expository Writing (060.113/114), this course focuses on the advanced skills of argument.  Students learn how to draw inferences from the evidence, use sources in a variety of ways to develop their thinking, and structure complex arguments.

060.114 (H) (W) EXPOSITORY WRITING

(3) Limit 15 per section.

This course teaches students the concepts and strategies of academic argument.  Students learn to analyze and evaluate sources, to develop their thinking with evidence, and to use analysis to write clear and persuasive arguments.  Expos seminars are organized around four major essay assignments, each of which guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes in-class discussion and workshops.  Students also learn how to document sources and how to navigate the university library.

In addition to its central focus on the strategies of argument, each seminar offers its own intellectually stimulating topic or theme.  Please see the following list of individual course descriptions to decide which sections may be of most interest to you.

Individual course descriptions follow.

060.114.01  Public Perception of Science (MWF 10:00)
Adam Ruben

When the human genome sequence was announced, callers to an NPR program reporting the news—instead of reacting to the milestone with pleasure—kept asking, “Does this mean you can make Frankensteins now?”  How had the media failed so thoroughly to communicate the accurate ramifications of such an important project, and why did the public misunderstand?  In this writing seminar, we explore the methods used (and misused) by the popular media to explain scientific concepts to a lay audience.  We begin by critiquing a philosophical argument against the teaching of science in public schools.  Next we examine mainstream sources that may give a false impression of science, comparing their portrayal of its capabilities to those in reality.  In the third part of the course, each student chooses a current hot topic in science (for example, stem cells, global warming, human cloning, etc.) and scrutinizes the accuracy of its mainstream representation.  Finally, students select a faculty member at Johns Hopkins and write an article about his or her research appropriate for a non-scientific publication; students accompany their article with a short parody of how the same research may be misrepresented in the popular media.

060.114.02  Returning Home  (MWF 10:00)
Michael Klotz

Robert Frost wrote that “home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in”—his cynicism testifying to a broader discomfort with the promise of what home can do.  A more familiar idealization of home, of the kind reflected in phrases like “home sweet home” and “there’s no place like home,” joins the idea of the family bower as an authentic place of being—not simply the house itself, but the country, neighborhood, and culture represented there—with the imagining of the house as a sanctuary from the alienation of capitalism, the trials of adulthood, and the loss of cultural heritage.  The journey home is thus a trip imbued with fantasy, a quest interwoven with questions of identity and selfhood, race, national origin, and social class.  It is at once a search for comfort, certainty, and safety, and a seeking out of origins.  In this writing course, we will analyze how the journey home is represented in, and how it structures, a variety of narratives.  We will begin with short fiction by William Trevor, Nadine Gordimer, John Cheever, and Junot Diaz.  In the first section of the course, students will perform a close analysis of one of the stories and write a short analytical essay.  In the second unit, we will read Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Palace of Art” along with two critical essays on the theory of nineteenth-century “domesticity.”  Students will write an essay analyzing the relationship between the Tennyson poem and one of the critical pieces.  In the third portion of the course, we will focus on Virginia Woolf’s modernist rendering of the return home, To the Lighthouse.  Students will enter a critical controversy surrounding the novel and, in a multi-source essay, take a specific position in an ongoing debate.  Finally, in the fourth section of the class, we will analyze David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, a film that traces a continuum between the security of family life in a small town in the Midwest and the violence of mob life in Philadelphia.

060.114.03  Educating America (MWF 10:00)
Anne-Elizabeth Murdy

James Baldwin urged teachers to teach every child that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it . . . and that it belongs to him [or her].”  In just a few words, Baldwin both emphasizes the importance of education and foreshadows the responsibility that comes with it.  This course looks at public education in the US and probes the connections of education, achievement, and civic responsibility.  We begin with Horace Mann, credited with fathering American public education.  With this foundation, our first essay, an analysis, will respond to Brazilian revolutionary Paulo Freire and US social critic Jonathan Kozol, both of whom protest the exclusion of low-income students from public education’s promise of class mobility and intellectual liberation.  We turn in our second essay unit to focus on a particular moment in the 1890s and early 1900s in the US, a moment when flags had begun flying outside schoolhouses, poor African Americans and poor whites were insisting on their right to an education, and major thinkers Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, and Booker T. Washington were speaking to the issues of gender, class, and race at school.  Our third and largest essay unit builds on this history by asking the question: What does an educated person owe, if anything, to her or his community?  Or, put another way, if education is power, then how should you use that power?  Drawing on the Johns Hopkins University mission statement alongside the writings of Richard Rodriguez, bell hooks, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others, students formulate their own answers to these questions.  We close the course by returning to Horace Mann and, in the final essay, rewriting him for our own era.

060.114.04  Representing the Gothic South (MWF 10:00)
Rob Higney

For almost two hundred years, American writers have set stories laced with decadence, insanity, high tragedy, and black humor among the moss-covered live oaks and shadowy swamps of the Deep South.  In the twentieth century, this genre became known as Southern Gothic.  Perhaps no region has ever so identified with a mode of representation, and today various aspects of Southern culture are regularly termed “gothic” in journalism, literature, and film.  In this course, we will focus on developing writing skills for critical analysis through an examination of texts from across the history of the Southern Gothic.  In the first assignment, we will read short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, identifying and interpreting some of the problems these stories pose.  We will then consider the short stories of Flannery O’Connor alongside essays by Southern literary critics in the 1930 collection I’ll Take My Stand.  How does O’Connor’s use of the grotesque trouble or support the notions of traditional, agrarian Southernness put forth by these conservative writers?  For the third and largest assignment, we will examine issues of race, class, and region in works by William Faulkner, engaging with scholarly work on the author and a variety of secondary sources.  Finally in an essay of their own design, students will analyze the contemporary legacy of the Southern Gothic in the films Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

060.114.05  Public Perception of Science (MWF 11:00)
Adam Ruben

Please see the course description listed above for Section 01 at MWF 10:00.

060.114.06  Imagining Immortality (MWF 11:00)
Devin Powell

Between the carnage of two Word Wars, Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno posed a timely question to humanity: “If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist?  Wherefore?”  He hungered for immortality, “To be, to be for ever, to be without ending . . . eternalizing and eternal . . . to be God!”  Those of us who find de Unamuno’s thirst for life intriguing are in good company: a growing community of 21^st-century scientists believes that fledgling technologies like stem cells and nanotech will soon offer all of us the chance to cheat death and be, in the words of Bob Dylan, “forever young.”  In this writing class, we will explore the promise and the dangers of immortality and, in doing so, will take part in a millennial conversation that is just beginning to come of age.  The first assignment will thrust you into the midst of controversy by asking you to consider the question “is the pursuit of eternal life a proper goal for humanity?”  Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey and George W. Bush’s former science advisor Leon Kass will present their opinions; you will craft your own critical challenge to the view you find most compelling or controversial.  For the second essay, you will explore a particularly dark vision of immortality provided by Anne Rice’s classic film Interview with the Vampire.  Its phantasmagorical cast of blood-suckers will ask you to reflect on the pitfalls of deathless life as you interpret the film in the context of a secondary source about vampire literature.  The third essay will focus on modern technology as we explore what science and science fiction can tell us about our conceptions of self.  You will study two theories of consciousness: William Dennett’s “virtual machine” and John Searle’s “Chinese Room.”  After selecting one, you will argue how it relates to a pair of short works of immortality-related science fiction chosen from a list that includes an episode of Star Trek, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Greg Egan’s short story “Dust,” and Masamune Shirow’s The Ghost in the Shell.  Our final essay will consider how new technologies are unveiled in popular news reporting; you will select a news event related to life extension.

060.114.07  Educating America (MWF 11:00)
Anne-Elizabeth Murdy

Please the course description listed above for Section 03 at MWF 10:00.

060.114.08  Returning Home (MWF 11:00)
Michael Klotz

Please see the course description listed above for Section 02 at MWF 10:00.

060.114.09  Apocalyptic Economics (MWF 12:00)
Maia Linask

There may be good reason to label economics the “dismal science.”  Predictions of disaster and the destruction of our current way of life abound: the social security program will soon be bankrupt, outsourcing and immigration will irreversibly harm American workers, oil supplies are running out, and globalization will lock us into a spiraling economic race to the bottom that destroys the ecosystem in the process.  In this writing class, we will focus on selections from some of the more extreme economic forecasts and, through additional contextual reading, will delve into the claims put forth.  Readings will include selections from Malthus, Schumpeter, Stiglitz, Rodrik, Friedman, Perot, and Singer.  Readings and writing assignments for the course will address four hotly debated economic topics: free trade and outsourcing, social security, globalization, and immigration.  In particular, the following questions will be central: Are the arguments put forth sensible and logically sound?  What makes these predictions compelling?  Is style or substance more important to the argument?  For the first essay in the course, we will analyze Ross Perot’s arguments about outsourcing and NAFTA.  Next, we shift our attention to domestic economics and the future of social security.  For the third and longest writing assignment, we examine the definition of globalization presented by one economist and analyze how this definition drives the writer’s arguments about the consequences of globalization.  Returning to the fundamental subject of the first essay in a different guise, we will focus in the fourth and final essay on immigration and its consequences for the American economy.

060.114.10  Law and Revenge (MW 12:00)
George Oppel

Honor killings, the warrior code, divine retribution—these are just some of the concepts associated with revenge as a principle of justice.  In modern societies, however, the personal and passionate act of revenge is thought to have been replaced by law, with its impersonal and public application of penalties.  Why, then, does revenge persist as a dominant theme in Western culture, and why does it continue to haunt our legal system?  Is the need for vengeance an inescapable feature of the human condition?  Is there a sense in which law should—and does—accommodate this need?  Or should law attempt to eliminate revenge altogether?  We will explore these questions by thinking and writing about some diverse texts.  In the first essay unit, Blood and Vengeance, we analyze the concept of revenge as it appears in the Old Testament, and in a journalistic account of blood feuds in Albania.  In unit two, Crime and Punishment, we examine how the rule of law has attempted to replace revenge, and you write an essay that engages with an important philosopher, anthropologist, or historian.  In the third segment of the course, Hard Cases, we turn attention to the death penalty and to the role of “victim impact statements” in capital trials.  You write an essay that evaluates the competing views of judges and other thinkers on this issue.  The fourth unit, Beyond Law and Revenge, considers how notions of mercy, forgiveness, and forgetting provide moral alternatives to law and revenge.  The final essay invites you to reflect on course themes and to develop an argument based on an example of your choice: it may be a personal experience, a book, a movie, or an event reported in the media.

060.114.11  On the Path to Socratic Wisdom (MW 12:00) Canceled
Lisa Ievers

How do we know what we know?  And why is it so hard to admit, to others and even to ourselves, what we don't know?  The easy (and perhaps understandable) answer is a fear of appearing ignorant in front of others, whether they be teachers, classmates, or friends.  For Socrates, often considered the first moral philosopher, genuine wisdom consists in not thinking, or acting as though, we know what we do not know.  As the leading voice in Plato's dialogue Meno, Socrates challenges us to discover for ourselves what we do not know and thus to set ourselves on the path to wisdom.  In this writing course, we will examine whether figuring out (and actually admitting) what we don't know is a worthwhile activity, or whether the price of pursuing Socratic wisdom--that is, admitting our ignorance--is too high.  With this question as our guide, we will begin by analyzing an argument in the first section of the Meno.  For the second essay, students will present and then assess Socrates's argument in Plato's Apology for the claim that wisdom consists in not thinking (or acting as though) one knows what one does not know.  In the third and largest essay, we return to the Meno, and this time, students will themselves conduct the inquiry of the Meno into what virtue is (and how we know).  With the help of a variety of sources, including Aristotle and contemporary philosophers, students will present and assess each of the three alternative answers considered in the dialogue.  The fourth and final essay is of students' own design within the context of the course.

060.114.12  Power, Development, and the City (MW 12:00)
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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

060.114.13  Law and Society (MW 1:30)
Patricia Kain

“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”          —Alexis de Tocqueville

Does money equate with free speech?  Can the Fourth Amendment provide a “warrant” for torture?  Do we have a constitutional “right to die”?  These are just some of the questions put to the law in recent years, as we struggle to define our values and beliefs in a fast-forward society.  And as the law struggles to keep up with advances in information technology, new family configurations, and a changing workplace, it is clear that the relationship between the law and our society is both mutual and self-reinforcing: the law shapes us and our thinking even as we shape the law.  In this writing course, we will read a variety of historical and contemporary texts—essays and articles on law, philosophy, and politics, as well as legal documents and Supreme Court opinions.  Writers include, among others, Plato, James Rachels, Alan Dershowitz, Mari Matsuda, and Justices of the Supreme Court.  The first two essays focus on analysis and offer a choice of possible topics; the third, a multi-source argument, centers on a U.S. Supreme Court case (Brown v. The Board of Education); the fourth is of students’ own design. 

060.114.14  Hitchcock (MW 1:30)
Andrew Sisson

This course aims at developing students’ critical and expository abilities by taking up the challenges of writing about several of Alfred Hitchcock’s major pictures.  “Suspense” may be the word Hitchcock most liked to have associated with his name, and we will find that the process of understanding his work often leaves us suspended: between seriousness and play, fascinated absorption and critical distance, avant-garde art and mass-produced culture, the elegance of technical and formal control and the excess and contagiousness of desire.  Perhaps no figure in the history of the cinema has led such a successful double life as entertainer and intellectual, engaging both theorists and the general public with equal intensity, and our course will examine selected aspects of the critical history alongside the films.  We begin with a brief scenic analysis of Rear Window—a film that lucidly sets out the stakes of reading Hitchcock’s aesthetic medium as an element of his basic narrative concerns.  In the second essay, we look at The Birds in terms of Robin Wood’s suggestion that the central device of a film—this film in particular—can mean nothing.  For the third assignment, students choose among a variety of sources, from the influential views of the French New Wave, to Freudian and feminist revisions, to interviews with Hitchcock, in developing an argument about gender, audience-identification, and violence in either Psycho or Notorious.  The final essay asks students to choose one of Hitchcock’s earlier, sometimes overlooked pictures (we will screen The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Sabotage for this purpose) and produce an analysis incorporating themes from the course.

060.114.15  License to Fool (TTH 10:30)
David Hershinow

From African folk tales 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.

060.114.16  Debating the Body (TTH 10:30)
Pierce Salguero

This course focuses on the question of how society and culture shape the experience of the human body and its health, illness, and cure.  Readings will introduce perspective on the body from the classical medical traditions of Europe, China, and India, contrasting these with each other and with contemporary biomedical views.  The essays in this class ask students to engage with the writing of important historians and cultural critics, as well as to question their own conceptions and assumptions in light of this cross-cultural framework.  The first essay will focus on the cultural construction of the body: how do our beliefs, language, history, and other daily practices influence notions of embodiment?  Students will analyze “The End of the Body?” by anthropologist Emily Martin.  For the second essay, we will read a comparison of traditional Chinese and Greek anatomy and, based on Shigehisa Kuriyama’s views, analyze the differences in how the body was depicted in these two cultures.  For the third essay, students will develop an interpretive argument about the use of metaphor in everyday English in order to uncover our unspoken assumptions about the body and its processes.  Finally, we will analyze the issues faced by traditional Asian practitioners when facing the process of modernization and globalization and the hegemony of scientific medicine.

060.114.17  The Intersection of Myth and History at Troy (TTH 12:00)
Nancy Barry

The ancient city of Troy has figured in the Western imagination for millenia, ever since Homer first told his classic tale of war -- of love and honor, Greek armies and Trojan defenders.  Inspired by the legend as told in the Iliad, archaelogists went in search of the historical city in the nineteenth century, and since then, myth and history have intersected in our exploration of ancient Troy.  This section of Expository Writing will explore how various types of evidence can shape our understanding of history, and what in fact can reliably be said about a period so ancient.  For their first essay, students will read selections of Homer's Iliad, the classic story of the Trojan war, and also Barry Strauss's The Trojan War: A New History to begin to evaluate the Iliad as a historical text.  Next, we will read excerpts of Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War and analyze the scholarly controversy surrounding the ancient site.  For their third assignment, students will evaluate how one archaeologists's work can influence our views on history as they consider David A. Traill's Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit, a biography of the principal excavator of Troy.  For their final paper, students will develop an argument about the historical mystery of Troy, relying on the archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence considered thus far in the course.

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