ENGL 3108, Writing for Digital Media, will focus on professionalization in the digital age. Particularly targeted toward upper-level CIT and IT majors, Writing for Digital Media will concentrate on bringing together your digital assets into an online portfolio that highlights the skills you have developed before and will develop in this class. We will cover web site design and implementation, HTML, CSS, blogging, wiki collaboration, Podcasting, video production, and rudimentary server administration skills. By the end of the course, you will have a working digital portfolio on your very own domain name that will feature your skills as a digital writer.
Announcing Special Sections of 1101 for Spring 2008!
Are you good with computers? Do you want to take a class that engages new Internet technologies? Do you like to socialize? Are you already a pretty strong writer and want to get more out of ENGL 1101? Are you up for a challenge? Are you already a member of Second Life? Then these sections of English Composition I might be for you.
In sections 06 and 16 of ENGL 1101, we will be focusing on composition in the virtual world Second Life. We will create avatars, make objects, meet online, build structures, meet new people, and have fun. We’ll do all of this while learning the essentials of composition. Contact Dr. Lucas for more details or if you have any questions.
Download a flyer, or two, in PDF form.
Spring 2008
ENGL 1101 Sections 06 and 16
Dr. Gerald Lucas
Through the study of art, literature, film, and popular culture, this course will explore how the idea of “motherhood” has been historically constructed in the United States. Foregrounding study in the matrifocal nineteenth century, we will examine the origins of the “American Madonna” and explore how she has haunted the American imagination since the antebellum period. This course will also consider writers and thinkers who willfully resist the idealization of motherhood and who present an alternative maternal discourse that more fully expresses the complex experience of women who are mothers.
For more information go to the American Madonna Web page or contact Dr. Wearn at mary.wearn@maconstate.edu
A HUMN 3999 Special Topics Course
SPRING 2008
Dr. Mary Wearn
T-TH 2:00-3:15
HUMN 4472: Studies in Culture
The course will focus on the American West as represented in film and literature, looking particularly at the West as a regional culture, at times raised to a mythical level. While the West has typically been viewed as the land of cowboys and outlaws, the course will examine the diverse populations that lived and interacted within this region, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans. The course will look at a number of associated topics through the eyes of literature and film, including the mythology of the Wild West, westward expansion and the introduction of the railroad, the American cowboy, women in the West, Native American displacement, contributions of African Americans and Hispanics to Western history and culture, the Gold Rush, and the emergence of West Coast cultural centers such as San Francisco in the 1890s. The course will end by taking a look at trends today toward demystifying the West, particularly in the film Unforgiven by Clint Eastwood and in the story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx.
SUMMER 2007
Dr. Amy Berke
MW 12:30 – 2:50; H/SS122
“Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology.” —Isaac Asimov
This section of Special Topics (ENGL 3999) will explore the genre of science fiction in the last half of the twentieth century in short stories, novels, films, and futurism. Much of humanity’s hopes and fears about its relationship with the universe is explored by the various writers and directors known for their work in science fiction. Science, or speculative, fiction also considers humanity’s responses to changes in the level of science and technology. This class will consider science fiction as located historically and attempt to relate culturally texts that explore, discover, learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of humanity, of “reality.” Cyberpunk, world building, gender, cyborgs, robots, space travel, aliens, war, time travel, mad computers, and other similar subjects will fall under the purview of the course. Talk to your advisor to see if this course will work for you.
Possible Authors, Directors, Works
- Philip K. Dick
- Blade Runner
- Bruce Sterling
- William Gibson
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Alice Sheldon
- Ridley Scott
- Steven Soderbergh
- Stanislaw Lem
- Solaris
- Isaac Asimov
- Harlan Ellison
- Stanley Kubrick
- David Cronenberg
- And others . . .
What: ENGL 3999 Special Topics
When: Fall 2006
Who: Dr. Gerald Lucas
In this course, we will examine forms of medieval media—medieval manuscripts, archeology, songs, and poetry–as forms of cultural expression in these areas:
- Meditation and Pilgrimage
- Women’s songs
- Battle Poetry
- Medieval Medicine
We will study methods of preserving manuscripts with digital technology. This course requires a research component as well as a final project in media production. Students will produce a media presentation involving any combination of manuscript images, music, (live or recorded) and images of archeology and art.
This three-credit course counts as an elective for either CIT Cross Cultural or CIT New Media tracks. Pre-requisite: ENG1102 with a “C” or above.
FALL 2006
Dr. Karmen Lenz
Thursdays: 5:30pm – 8:00pm
Crossing Waters is a course that examines various aspects of Caribbean life through the experience of exile, as it is manifested in literary works produced inside as well as outside of the region. Caribbean history begins with the physical crossing of the Atlantic from the coast of West Africa to island plantations. This historical crossing has become a metaphor for talking about Caribbean life experiences. The advent of Independence and mass migration from the islands to Britain, Canada and America in the 1960s have introduced new concepts of nation and nationhood. Since then, especially since the 1980s, a new wave of immigration has given birth to a new group of Caribbean artists whose works have contributed to reshaping Caribbean concepts of culture and identity.
Crossing Waters problematizes the question of exile, examining the collective as well as the individual experience. How does one define the state of exile? How do the varying experiences of exile affect traditional social structures? What cultural ex-changes are made in the process of the crossing? What effect does the crossing have on the individual’s sense of identity? The course approaches these questions with an open mind.
HUMN 3999: Special Topics Course
Dr. Derrilyn E. Morrison
No, this class will not be about the band! Instead, we’ll explore some of the most entertaining and challenging fiction written by Southern women writers since the late 1960s. These women came of age during or since the end of segregation and the beginning of the women’s rights movement and offer unique insights into an “age of transition,” as one critic states.
Together, we’ll consider questions such as:
- Where, exactly, is the South? Does it include Texas? How about Florida? Appalachia?
- What does it mean to be a Southerner—particularly a Southern author—today?
- How do issues of race and gender shape our experience of the contemporary South?
- What issues and themes fascinate, worry, and intrigue contemporary Southern women writers?
- How are these writers similar to the Southern writers that go before them? How are they different?
- Where is Southern literature headed in the next century?
We’ll examine the work of a variety of today’s finest authors, such as: Jill McCorkle, Alice Walker, Lee Smith, Connie May Fowler, Tayari Jones, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, and many more!
NOTE: If you’re looking for a course in Faulkner or Scarlett O’Hara, this is not for you! Beyond Gone with the Wind — this is Dixie Chicks!
Humanities 2999.2
Tuesday/Thursday 6:30-7:45 pm
Dr. Sharon Colley
Questions? scolley@mail.maconstate.edu
