Brandeis First Year Experience

Objectives

The Brandeis First Year Experience aims to introduce new students to faculty and their different disciplinary perspectives, to model civil discourse, and to encourage participation in the rich intellectual, co-curricular life of the university. The First Year Experience includes completion of the University Writing Seminar (UWS), during which students will attend a Critical Conversation.

First Year Writing

The First Year Writing Program at Brandeis University is the foundation of the University Writing Program. The University Writing Seminar introduces students to the power of writing as a means of communication and a process of thinking and understanding.

The program offers a selection of topic-driven seminars that challenge students to formulate meaningful arguments, support them with observations and evidence, and convey them clearly and persuasively. In so doing, students will engage with writing as an integral part of academic and professional life, recognizing its value and utility as well as its capacity to foster an engaged citizenry through critical thinking and discussion. By instilling and strengthening flexible writing and research skills, the program invites students to participate in the intellectual discourses of the University. Each seminar addresses the distinct discursive requirements of various disciplines, including the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Students thus learn to write effectively and confidently in any field or profession.

UWS Learning Goals

Students will be able to:

  1. Understand writing as a recursive process of thinking and communication.
  2. Articulate elements of effective writing and integrate them into their own work.
  3. Participate in critical conversations by responding to openings, problems or contradictions in existing scholarship.
  4. Assess their own and others’ writing with respect to audience and purpose.
  5. Generate original questions and pursue independent research.
  6. Identify and evaluate sources and use them responsibly.
  7. Develop awareness of disciplinary differences in writing and adapt their writing to different genres and contexts.

How to Fulfill the Requirement

The requirement will be satisfied by completing one University Writing Seminar (UWS) in the student's first year, during which the student attends a Critical Conversation.

Courses of Instruction

COMP 1a Composition
Prerequisite: Placement by the University Writing Program. Successful completion of this course does NOT satisfy the first-year writing requirement. Enrollment limited to non-native English speakers.
A course in the fundamentals of writing, required as a prerequisite to the first-year writing requirement for selected students identified by the University Writing Program. Offered in the fall and spring semesters.
Staff

COMP 1b Composition
Prerequisite: Placement by the University Writing Program. Successful completion of this course does NOT satisfy the first-year writing requirement. Enrollment open to native English speakers.
A course in the fundamentals of writing, required as a prerequisite to the first-year writing requirement for selected students identified by the University Writing Program. Offered in the fall and spring semesters.
Staff

UWS 1a - 49b University Writing Seminar
University writing seminars (UWS) focus on strategies and techniques of college-level argument taught through the exploration of a subject. UWS teaches transferrable writing skills (defining a thesis, assessing and analyzing evidence, introducing and developing an argument) that students will employ and continue to develop throughout their academic and professional lives. In three papers of increasing complexity (25 pages total), students learn to frame analytical questions, make original claims, structure complex ideas, integrate sources of various kinds and revise for greater cogency and clarity. One of the UWS assignments is linked to required attendance at one of two Critical Conversations offered each semester. Students will learn how to assess the quality of an argument and its counter-arguments, model civil discourse and critical analysis.

Each course assigns a close reading in which the student brings out non-obvious nuances of a prose passage, a lens essay in which one particular text and another at a higher level of abstraction reflect upon each other and each deepen one's sense of the meaning of the other, and a research paper in which the student must engage the ongoing scholarly conversation about a text, problem, or theme examined in the course. Students prepare for each of the three major essays through short predraft assignments as well as through drafts that faculty comment on in writing and discuss with the student in individual conferences. Students examine their own writing in draft workshops and in small groups. The course also teaches basic skills of research, from using the library to appropriate citation of sources.
Staff

HUM/UWS 1a Tragedy: Love and Death in the Creative Imagination
Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
How do you turn catastrophe into art - and why? This first-year seminar in the humanities addresses such elemental questions, especially those centering on love and death. How does literature catch hold of catastrophic experiences and make them intelligible or even beautiful? Should misery even be beautiful? By exploring the tragic tradition in literature across many eras, cultures, genres, and languages, this course looks for basic patterns. Usually offered every year.
John Burt and Steve Dowden

HUM/UWS 2a Crime and Punishment: Justice and Criminality from Plato to Serial
Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows. Formerly offered as COML/HOI 103a.
Examines concepts of criminality, justice, and punishment in Western humanist traditions. We will trace conversations about jurisprudence in literature, philosophy, political theory, and legal studies. Topics include democracy and the origins of justice, narrating criminality, and the aesthetic force mobilized by criminal trials. This course also involves observing local courtroom proceedings and doing research in historical archives about significant criminal prosecutions. Usually offered every year.
Eugene Sheppard and David Sherman

HUM/UWS 3a Drawing upon Literature
Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows. Studio fee: $75 per semester. Formerly offered as FA/RECS 118b.
An interdisciplinary team-taught course bringing together the practice of studio art and the study of literature. Students use Russian fiction and poetry (and some critical theory) as source material for the creation of visual images: drawings in various media, watercolors, prints, and photographs. The nature of narrative, as it crosses disciplines, will be a focus of our curriculum. We will read works of fiction by such writers as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel and Nabokov to consider the role of artists as major literary characters, and how works of art function as iconography. Usually offered every year.
Susan Lichtman and Robin Feuer Miller

HUM/UWS 4a Epic Literature
Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
Zeroes in on the most foundational of “foundational” texts. This course will study the evolution of the epic, beginning with its solemn ancient origins, in Gilgamesh, following through with the panoramic martial epics of Greece and Rome, and then investigating how Dante, a Christian Medieval poet, adapts his “pagan” predecessors to tell the story of his voyage through Hell, in The Inferno. At the end we will turn to Milton’s engagement with the entire tradition - in his epic treatment of the story of the Fall - and then to the 18th-century “mock-heroics” that parodied them all. The course will necessarily touch on wide-ranging interdisciplinary aspects of history, anthropology, comparative religion, philosophy and myth. But it will focus on intertextuality: it will scrutinize the ways in which later authors reframed, reshaped, honored and challenged the work of their predecessors. Usually offered every year.
Laura Quinney