Preparing a Course Overview
Look at nearly any professor’s syllabus at Brandeis, and you’ll find a list of sources and/or relevant topics next to a series of dates. Writing seminar syllabi, which focus on writing and analytical skills and on student drafts, and which involve comparatively little reading, are quite different. Every unit in a writing seminar has three phases: the first phase is usually devoted to discussing the readings, with the writing assignment in view; the second phase, to discussing writing skills (e.g. the formulation of a thesis) that students will need in order to do the assignment; and the third phase, to discussing students’ own drafts, an activity called “draft workshop.” The point of this design is to limit the readings and to place as much emphasis on writing—both skills and student drafts—as possible.
Writing seminar syllabus design is so different, in fact, that we usually don’t even think about the syllabus until the course’s armature is in place. We call this armature the “course overview.” It’s essentially the blueprint of your course. To create a course overview, we recommend that you begin by defining your topic and drafting the three major assignments. From there, you’ll be in a good position to produce a course description/blurb, a 200 word statement which indicates why the topic is a compelling one and what the main subtopics, texts, and/or authors are. We explain these elements of course design in more detail below. Please don’t be daunted by the length of this document; most of the space is taken up by examples.
The Topic
To provide students with a worthwhile occasion for writing, each seminar is based on an intellectually stimulating topic, chosen specifically to interest freshmen and to animate their writing with compelling questions, debates, and problems. Because students enroll in writing seminars through a bidding process, it’s crucial that each topic appeal to a broad cross-section of Brandeis freshmen, high-achieving students who want an intellectually rigorous experience but who may not see the attractions of topics that a professional scholar would likely find engaging. In 2009-2010, topics included:
• Murder Most Foul
• Grotesque Bodies
• Incidents of Travel
• Shakespeare and the Samurai
• Staging Madness
• The Soul of Science
• Music in the Age of New Meida
• The Monster and Me
• Minimalist Music
• Education Reform in the US
• American Frontiers
As can perhaps be inferred from these examples, topics must be approachable enough for readings to be kept to a minimum, they must provide students with opportunities to make their own arguments, and they must allow students to approach the material from several angles while giving them the chance to build up a base of knowledge.
The Three Major Assignments
At the heart of your course overview will be your three major assignments, which are generally of increasing complexity, reflecting essay types commonly assigned at Brandeis. The three assignments position students to engage the texts and subtopics of the course in interesting and original ways, and also challenge students to develop strategies and techniques of college-level inquiry and argument. The common essay types these assignments cover may be defined by the number and kinds of texts involved, the analytical tasks performed, and (where relevant) the relationships between and among texts. A typical sequence of essay assignments over the term, plus an end-of-term reflection on the semester’s work, is as follows:
(1) a close-reading of a single text, usually using one or more texts to make the argument (e.g. an interpretation of a “defining” text that stands out from others seemingly like it, an interpretation of a problematic, self-contradictory, or incongruous text)—5-6 pages/2-3 weeks,
(2) a lens analysis (e.g. a comparison in which one “focal text” or “case study” is seen through the lens of a more theoretical text), sometimes also drawing on a few secondary sources (which students may locate themselves in anticipation of the next unit’s research component)—7-8 pages/3-4 weeks,
(3) a research essay (e.g. a classic research project in which the writer brings multiple academic sources to bear on a problem, question, or issue; or a text-in-context essay, in which the writer supplies crucial context for understanding a focal text or set of texts)—~10 pages/4-5 weeks, and
(4) a portfolio, including overview letter reflecting on the entirety of the students work for the term (~3 pages)
Students prepare for each of the essays by writing two or three pre-draft assignments as well as a draft. The pre-draft assignments represent some of the key skills and steps involved in producing an essay for any course. For example, if the essay assignment asks students to make an argument about a short text (a typical first assignment), they might be asked in a pre-draft to write two letters to the text’s author, one in which they agree with her, the other in which they disagree (this type of intellectual play is known as “believing” and “doubting”). Alternatively, they might be asked to choose a passage from the text and annotate it in detail, defining ambiguous or potentially interesting words and phrases, noting patterns, pointing out moments pertaining to the course theme, and then freewriting on the passage for a few minutes. In each assignment sequence, students will likely produce several pages of incidental writing, including responses to their classmates’ drafts, in-class writing exercises, and reflections on their own writing.
The form taken by your three major assignments (which yield about 30 finished pages of student writing) will depend on the topic of your course and the writing goals you have for your students. In designing your assignments, you’ll want to ask two sets of related questions: First, what types of assignments do you want to give, and what are the best texts for students to use in doing these assignments? And, second, will the overall sequence of reading and writing assignments make for a good narrative arc for the course and give students the chance to develop expertise on the topic? These are tough questions to answer, but with a draft of the course overview before us, we’ll be able to puzzle our way to answers together.
The Course Description/Blurb
A student’s choice of writing seminar will depend almost entirely on how interesting the brief title and course description show the topic to be. Our course descriptions, or blurbs, as we like to call them, are no more than 200 words and usually have two parts. The first part conveys why students would want to explore the topic: what makes it important and interesting and what the central questions, debates, or issues are. The second part details the sub-topics and texts of the seminar’s three major units and often describes the seminar’s writing assignments and overall intellectual and writing goals. Blurbs frequently open with a provocative hook, pose complicating questions, describe the seminar’s critical approach to its materials, and mention important authors and texts to be covered.
The primary purpose of the blurb is to advertise our seminars and make students want to sign up for each one of them. But blurbs do far more than this. For one thing, they give us our first chance to model clear writing and thinking for students who will soon be walking into our classrooms. As important, the blurbs convey our shared values, as writers and writing teachers, to our colleagues across the University and to the hundreds of professors and Writing Program administrators around the country who read our materials via our web site. We want all of these readers to know, just by glancing through our blurbs, how much we value clarity, conciseness, and accessibility.
Your blurb is such an important document that you and the Director and/or Assistant Director will likely pass it back and forth a few times before it’s ready for publication. The role we play is that of editor; the catalog of seminar offerings is the publication that we edit. Like any editor, we ask our contributors for revisions, and at times we offer revisions of our own. For most instructors, we play another role as well—that of course consultant. The blurb provides us with a useful focus for important (and usually interesting!) conversations about seminar design.
Sample Blurbs
Taking to the Streets
Lydia Fash
From Bourbon Street to Wall Street, streets index celebration, dissatisfaction, location, and wealth. We mob them to protest bad banking; we use them to drive West and find ourselves. As the most public of all locations, they define our ideas of space, community, and travel. And we often feel personal possession over “our” street corner, intersection, or address. Yet, despite their cultural importance in locating us, in advancing social causes, and in moving us from place to place, many dismiss streets as empty conduits.
Among other texts, this course will use a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, a theoretical essay by Georg Simmel, and the road movie Little Miss Sunshine to interrogate our own assumptions about the public-private space of streets and about American street-related culture. Why is it that we use roads to map development, we use streets to make political statements, and we locate ourselves with pavement byways? And what do streets mean to American movements, subcultures, and literature? To assist students in developing their writing process, this discussion-based seminar will emphasize drafting, revising, peer editing, and conferencing. Ultimately, the goal of Taking to the Street is to further develop the critical thinking and writing skills necessary to university and post-university writing.
UWS 15a: Friendship, Justice, and Politics
Tim McCarty
According to Aristotle, "If people are friends, they have no need of justice." Yet, we are all familiar with stories of loyalty, love, and friendship getting in the way of the pursuit of justice, whether it is the code of honor among thieves, helping a friend evade the law, or refusing to testify against a loved one. What is a little injustice among friends? Are friends beyond justice? Does friendship impede the pursuit of justice? Is friendship itself a higher form of justice? In other words: can it be unjust to be a good friend?
This course explores the tensions between friendship and justice in the great works of moral or political philosophy and literature. The course begins with a study of how philosophers such as Aristotle, Montaigne, and Nietzsche treated the problems of friendship and justice. Next, we will investigate how these philosophic concepts play out in literature, specifically the work of Graham Greene. Finally, we will confront the ways that the potential tensions between justice and friendship play out in politics. Students will explore these themes while developing essential writing skills through careful engagement with texts, exercises in style and form, analytical essays, and a self-directed research project.
Inventing the Self: American Identity from Emerson to Today
Amy Easton-Flake
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail…Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist… All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson. These words first uttered in the mid-nineteenth century contain ideas of self-reliance and individualism that continue to infuse American society today. The American self-image has often harnessed a creative tension between pluralism and assimilation. While Americans prize their individual identities, distinctive qualities define the American character. What are these qualities and where did they originate? Over the course of three units, this course will explore identity formation. We will examine factors in American society that influence who we are and who we will become, and we will question our ability to invent others and ourselves. In the close reading essay, you will analyze popular nineteenth-century fiction to assess the viability of Emersonian ideas of individualism and self-reliance. In the lens essay, you will investigate how classic Hollywood cinema reflects, constructs, and questions the dominant image and understanding of American identity. Finally, the research paper will allow you to explore how a self-chosen facet of culture today normalizes individuals into race, class, or gender identities. The essay assignments for this course are designed to teach you the skills necessary for your success at Brandeis. You will learn to engage critically with texts, organize and develop your thoughts, and integrate outside sources to enhance your arguments. Peer reviews, individual conferences, class discussion, and revisions will help you refine the style, grammatical form, organization, and overall quality of your analytical writing.
Voice Lessons: The Discourse of Voice in America
Nick Van Kley
Voice is a powerful and multivalent metaphor. On the one hand, it often points to the profound truth of individual and cultural identity. We use it to describe the uniqueness of authors and artists. We use it to validate the authenticity of political advocates. On the other hand, it can also point to the irrational or inexplicable. The voice of God and the voices in our heads are counterparts to the logic of everyday decision-making. Including text by Charles Brockton Brown, Herman Melville and Kathy Acker, this course will examine disparate representations of voice in the American tradition and compile a glossary of the metaphor’s meanings.
This course is a University Writing Seminar. As such, its primary goal is to prepare students for college-level academic writing. While examining the implications of voice, students will learn and practice the standards of academic writing. They will develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the process of composition and revision, and cultivate crucial research skills that will help them make the most of the information resources available at Brandeis.
Sample Course Overviews
Below are four course overviews, the armatures that we put in place before creating the full syllabus students will eventually see. Course overviews should include a fleshed out version of the blurb or seminar description, a brief description of the three major essay assignment sequences including pre-draft assignments, and a list of the writing lessons each unit is designed to teach. (These writing lessons may draw on but need not be limited to Gordon Harvey’s “Elements of the Academic Essay,” a document we commonly use to discuss writing technique with our students.) Once your course overview is in place, you can expand it into the full syllabus, which will additionally include your contact information, a list of required texts, a percentage breakdown of graded evaluation, a contract of classroom expectations and policies, and a week-by-week class schedule. The course overviews below do not include these pieces of the full syllabus, but lay the groundwork for expansion into the final document.
All What Jazz?
A Writing Seminar by Sarah Caissie Provost
From Dixieland in the 1910s to fusion in the 1970s, jazz has been simultaneously adored and despised. This course will examine jazz and some of the controversies that have surrounded it from its beginnings. Is one jazz style more legitimate than another? Can one race claim jazz performance? How does one define jazz? Class materials, including reviews by Philip Larkin, recordings by Count Basie and Charlie Parker, and Ken Burns’s documentary, Jazz, will help us formulate persuasive arguments based on our opinions. This course is designed to give you critical thinking and analytic writing skills that will serve you throughout your college career. Papers will consist of close readings of music and reviews, an analysis of issues pertaining to race, and a research paper on a jazz style of your own choosing.
Essay 1: Close Reading
Essay assignment: For the first assignment, you will familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of musical analysis, in order to inform our class discussions throughout the semester. You will also be introduced to the idea of close reading: developing meaning from details of a text. For this first paper, we will be using a controversial essay on Billie Holiday's love songs, “When a Woman Loves a Man,” by Angela Davis.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (1.1) Focused Description of A Billie Holiday Song; (1.2) Reading Response to Mini-Lens
Writing Lessons: thesis, motive, evidence, analysis, introductions, conclusions, argumentative structure, audience, source documentation, revision, style.
Essay 2: Lens Analysis
Essay assignment: The second essay will focus on Philip Larkin, a British jazz critic and poet. You will read Larkin’s essay, “All What Jazz?” which is found in the course pack. You will also listen to a number of jazz pieces. In a 7-8 page essay, you will be asked to evaluate the pieces according to Larkin's criteria of what constitutes jazz.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (2.1) Reverse Outline of the Lens; (2.2) Preliminary Application of Lens to Three Songs; (2.3) Compose Three Theses/Motives
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus lens application, lens in music, thesis and motive in lens analysis, quotation and citation, paragraph structure, passive voice.
Essay 3: Research Paper
Essay assignment: For your final essay, you will research a non-jazz artist who has cited jazz as an influence. This assignment requires you to use both your close reading and lens analysis skills in order to form connections between two disparate styles. You will use a variety of sources, both primary and secondary, to research the artists of your choice.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (3.1) Research Proposal; (3.2) Annotated Bibliography; (3.3) Paper Outline
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus conclusions, asking a research question, doing independent research, using research to make an argument (not a report!), writing with sources, and style.
Authority and Authenticity
A Writing Seminar by Laura John
Anthropologists routinely struggle to represent their subjects objectively. Many acknowledge this as an unattainable goal, yet ethnography (defined as both the methodology of anthropological research and its product) remains a key way anthropologists describe and analyze their subjects and the documentary (which could be considered a kind of pop ethnography) maintains an aura of authenticity.
In order to delve deeper into the ever-present but often overlooked themes of authority, objectivity, and authorship in ethnography and documentary, this course will foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks and consider an array of ethnographic texts - some traditional, some not – and documentary styles.
Our goal in this course will not be simply to improve as thinkers and writers, but to open up our concept of writing to new possibilities. While the analytical and expressive skills you develop in this class will be critical to your success at Brandeis and beyond, ultimately, this course will provide you with an opportunity to discuss not only the topics of the course – authorship and its ethics - but the craft of writing as well.
Essay 1: Close Reading
Assignment: In a 5-6 page essay, you will conduct a close reading of Michel-Rolph Trouillot‘s piece “The Power in the Story,” in which the author discusses the presentation and interpretation of history through narrative.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (1.1) Response to A Key Term, Single Image, or Sentence; (1.2) Developing a Thesis Statement
Writing Lessons: thesis, evidence, analysis, claim, introduction, conclusion, orientation, active verbs, revision.
Essay 2: Lens Analysis
Assignment: For Essay 2, you will read and unpack Eric Hobsbawm’s discussion of the creation of practices and norms in “The Invention of Tradition”. In 6-7 pages, you will use Hobsbawm as a lens to comment on some other ‘invented’ tradition.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (2.1) Close Read a Sentence from the Lens; (2.2) Mini-Lens Reading; (2.3) Draft Introductory Paragraph
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus introduction, opener, motive, critical engagement with and rhetorical use of sources, source documentation.
Essay 3: Research Paper
Assignment: For your final essay, you will research and contextualize either Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, using a few key framing texts chosen by me as well as sources chosen by you, in order to explore some seminar themes in 10-12 pages.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (3.1) Research Proposal; (3.2) Annotated Bibliography
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus introductions, conclusions, motive, asking a research question, doing independent research, using research to make an argument (not a report!), writing with sources, and style.
Getting Medieval in the 21st Century
A Writing Seminar by Andrew Albin
When we think of “the medieval,” we think of the dark ages, feudalism, theocracy, the black plague; we envision knights in armor, damsels in distress, peasants with pitchforks, bards strumming harps, monks chanting in Latin, white-bearded conjurers—everything we are not. Yet these images come to mind with surprising ease; they’re more than familiar to us, one might argue so familiar as to be part of our American cultural mythology. From this perspective, the Middle Ages might not be as foreign or as far from us as we like to think.
In this course, we will foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing as a way to probe the place of the medieval in our own historical moment, as well as in other epochs leading up to ours. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks and consider a wide array of texts. We will reflect on the ways we encounter cultures and the ways cultures encounter us, as we work out techniques to make these encounters visible and meaningful.
Our goal in this course will not be simply to improve as thinkers and writers, but to open up our concept of writing to new possibilities, and, centrally, to reconsider what it means to be a responsible thinker and a good writer. Not only will the analytical and expressive skills you develop in class be critical to your success at Brandeis and beyond, they also will offer new perspectives and strategies for experiencing and reading the world at large.
Essay 1: Close Reading of the Quest for the Holy Grail
Essay assignment: You will conduct a close reading of a short passage from Malory’s Morte D’Arthur in a 5-6 page essay. By locating and residing in a “strangeness” within the text, you will discover how that text works to produce meaning at the local level. Your analysis will focus on how and why the Quest for the Holy Grail makes problematic the conventional norms of chivalric romance.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (1.1) Reading notes on a 200 word passage; (1.2) Post two thesis statements and comment on other students’ theses on LATTE
Writing Lessons: Question/problem-posing theses, engaged reading habits, evidence, analysis, structure, orientation, source documentation, revision.
Sources: five chapters of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur
Sidney Painter, French Chivalry (excerpt)
Robert Burlin, “Middle English Romance”
Brian Stone, “Models of Kingship”
Essay 2: Lens Analysis of Orientalism in Narnia
Essay assignment: With a strong grasp of argumentation and the location and synthesis of meaningful textual details, you will next consider how C. S. Lewis’ classic children’s story The Horse and His Boy engages in Orientalist discourse. In a 7-8 page essay, you will explore how Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, a historical process by which the Arabian Orient is cast as the inferior and subject opposite of the West, does (or doesn’t) illuminate Lewis’ seemingly innocent tale.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (2.1) Reverse outline and reflection on lens; (2.2) Locating an obvious match, a non-obvious match, and a contradiction between lens and focal text; (2.3) Working with lens quotation
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus introduction, motive, critical engagement with and rhetorical use of sources, source documentation.
Sources: Edward Said, Orientalism (excerpt)
C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
Essay 3: Medievalism in Post 9-11 Hollywood Film
Essay assignment: You will select a medieval film released since 2001 and conduct research to establish a cultural context and interpretive framework around it, with the goal of revealing how contemporary film uses “the medieval” to reflect on our historical moment. Our classroom conversations will equip you with important terms and concepts for thinking about medievalism and film; you will also conduct independent research on primary, secondary, and contextual sources to help inform your critical thinking. Your 10-12 page paper will examine how and why the film you choose acts as a reflection and a shaping influence on post-9/11 America.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (3.1) Mini-lens: medievalism in your everyday experience; (3.2) Film viewing notes using filmic vocabulary; (3.3) Proposal and annotated bibliography
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus asking a research question, conducting research, integrating multiple primary, secondary, and contextual sources, filmic analysis, conclusion, transition, paragraph structure, style.
Sources: Jonathan Markovitz, “Reel Terror Post 9/11”
Leon Calvert, “Ideology and the Modern Historical Epic”
Bruce Holsinger, Neomedeivalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror
Umberto Eco, “Return of the Middle Ages”
Arthur Lindley, “The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film”
Susan Aronstein and Nancy Coiner, “Twice Knightly”
Kevin Harty, “Introduction” to The Reel Middle Ages
Martha Driver, “Writing about Medieval Movies”
David Williams, “Looking at the Middle Ages in Cinema”
Susan Aronstein, “Chapter 6: Old Myths Are New Again”
Paul Halsall, “Thinking about Historical Film”
Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about Film (excerpt)
Grotesque Bodies
A Writing Seminar by Tina Van Kley
The title of this course, “Grotesque Bodies,” may sound appealing, strange, or off-putting to you – perhaps even all three. The ambivalence of our responses are important markers of the grotesque, which is often located in an object that provokes desire but is also prohibited, or that is situated between conceptual categories (e.g., human and animal), and is consequently both fascinating and disturbing. But what does “grotesque” mean and, furthermore, what is (or who has) a grotesque body? Who defines that body as grotesque, and what are its broader implications? The questions generated by the theme of the class will be a springboard for class discussions, and especially for your writing.
This course will foster the development of incisive analysis and sophisticated academic writing as a way to probe the place of the grotesque in our own historical moment, as well as in the past. Structured assignments, class discussions, peer group workshops, and conferences will direct us as we explore different writing tasks and consider a wide array of texts. We will reflect on the ways we construct, encounter, and respond to “the grotesque body” as we develop techniques to make these encounters visible and meaningful. Our goal for this course is to develop critical thinking and writing skills that will be critical to your success at Brandeis, and will also offer new perspectives and strategies for experiencing and reading the world at large.
Essay 1: Close Reading of a poem by Jonathan Swift
Essay assignment: The first essay unit sets up the entire course in two fundamental ways. First, you will familiarize yourself with a set of critical terms for thinking about the grotesque that will inform our class discussions throughout the semester. Second, this unit introduces the foundational skill of academic writing: the ability to cogently and eloquently derive larger meanings and ideas from the smaller details of a text. Your assignment will be to describe how one of Swift’s poems represents the female grotesque and what larger point the poem is making using the critical vocabulary we will develop in our class readings.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (1.1) Notes on a Source Text (with Reflection); (1.2) Introductory Paragraph
Writing Lessons: thesis, evidence, analysis, argumentative structure, audience, source documentation, revision.
Sources: Swift, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”; Bakhtin, Pollak articles for mini-lens on the grotesque
Essay 2: A Lens Analysis of “Objects in Space” from the series Firefly
Essay assignment: In this assignment, you will consider a primary text (an episode of the television series Firefly) through the lens of a secondary text – a critical essay by Cassuto – and make a claim about how concepts from the essay can impact our understanding of the episode. The goal of this assignment is to use one theoretical source to show your reader something he or she would not otherwise have been able to see by examining the focal text in isolation. By analyzing the strategies and functions of representations of the racial grotesque in the t.v. episode, you will be participating in the creation of knowledge by producing your own small-scale account of the racial grotesque.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (2.1) Understanding Cassuto (Reverse Outline); (2.2) Lens and Focal Text Match
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus introduction, opener, motive, critical engagement with and rhetorical use of sources.
Sources: Firefly “Objects in Space,” Cassuto lens on the racial grotesque, Baldwin, “Goin’ to Meet the Man” to introduce the racial grotesque
Essay 3: A thesis-driven research essay on contemporary “freaks”
Essay assignment: This assignment synthesizes your reading and lens analysis skills in order to produce an essay that adds to our understanding of the cultural significance of the construction of the body as grotesque. You will use a variety of sources – both primary and secondary – to analyze the legacies of the freak shows of the last three centuries in England and American influence our contemporary understandings of the “normal” and the “grotesque” body. Your primary objective will be to assess the extent to which your chosen contemporary “freak(s)” is/are continuous with the accounts of the grotesque discussed earlier in the course and/or the extent to which it departs from them.
Pre-Draft Assignments: (3.1) Research proposal; (3.2) Annotated Bibliography; (3.3) Essay outline, including citations, topic sentences, and thesis
Writing Lessons: Same as above, plus conclusions, asking a research question, doing independent research, using research to make an argument (not a report!), writing with sources, and style.
Sources: Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self , Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A. to develop a shared theoretical base