ENGLISH 2269

Digital Media Composing “Do You Even Meme, Bro?”

Ben McCorkle

MW 1:30 - 2:50 / 3 Credit Hours

The Cloud. Social Networking. Twitter. Podcasting. ChatGPT. Ten years ago, we would have been scratching our heads trying to figure out the meanings of these cr yptic terms, but today, they are becoming increasingly commonplace for us. More and more, we have a hand in actively shaping the landscape that creates such terms: the Internet.

For this course, we will focus on the issues associated with creating digital media content (in other words, using computers to make meaning by combining words, images, and sound). In addition to examining the formal proper ties and social implications of digital media texts (the various genres of online discourse and how they circulate through the web), we will also investigate the practical, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of composing in a digital world. No experience with digital media is required for this course, but during the semester, you will develop a digital por tfolio that includes a variety of smallish and larger projects using different combinations of images, audio, and animation. Texts will consist primarily of an online course packet of readings/viewings/listenings. For more information, contact Ben McCorkle (mccorkle.12@osu.edu).

Fulfills new GE for Literary, Visual, and Performing Ar ts.

English 3031

Rhetorics of Health, Illness, and Wellness

Katie Braun

TR 11:00 - 12:20 / 3 Credit Hours

Whether browsing online, watching TV, or reading about the latest wellness trends, every day, we are bombarded with messages about what it means to be healthy and well. This class equips you with analytical tools needed to navigate the stream of all these messages. To do this, we’ ll examine the knowledges and values of health and wellness that circulate with a variety of texts including iconic images such as the food pyramid, mundane texts such as medical forms, informative distributables such as patient education materials, and social and enter tainment media such as YouTube videos. You will learn how to interrogate such texts critically and ethically and ar ticulate how these texts shape perceptions of what it means to be healthy and well. We’ ll use these analyses to consider how arguments and persuasion about health and wellness happen explicitly and implicitly and through a variety of genres and media.

Fulfills new GE for Health and Wellbeing.

English 3110

Citizenship, Justice & Diversity in Literatures, Cultures, and Media

Sara Crosby

TR 1:30 - 2:50 / 3 Credit Hours

Resource extraction—who shares in it and who suffers from it—has determined who does and does not count as a citizen. Resource extraction has ruled our history and promises to dominate our future, and yet its story remains mainly a dir ty secret known only to insiders. In this class, we will unear th that secret and follow the story across continents and centuries. We’ ll track it from memoirs about gold-hungry Conquistadors to novels on the nineteenth-century ivory frenzy to films on the surreal battles over West Virginia coal to soap operas about the Dakota oil boom. In the process, you will gain insight into extraction mythologies, how they developed and why, and how they’re subtly and powerfully influencing the way we think of ourselves and our world.

Fulfills new GE for Citizenship.

English 3264

Monsters Without and Within

Sara Crosby

TR 11:00 - 12:20 / 3 Credit Hours

Nature is a Monster. Flying killer sharks, flesh-eating fungi, epic storms, hungry haunted houses, Godzilla, and our own weird and mor tal bodies! Why do humans seem so afraid of nature? Where did the horror come from? Could this fear be a reason we find ourselves in ecological crisis? Could understanding it be a way out? This class will explore these questions, among others, as we investigate “ecohorror.” Be prepared to follow this investigation down main roads and into strange corners of world literature, film, etc.—from Egyptian myths to gothic horrors like Frankenstein to “nature strikes back” flicks like Frogs to bestsellers by Jeff VanderMeer to Youtube series like Llamas with Hats. And, of course, Godzilla.

Fulfills new GE for Health and Wellbeing OR Citizenship.

English 3360

Ecopoetics

“Animal Minds"

Sara Crosby

TR 9:30 - 10:50 / 3 Credit Hours

Animals. We love them, fear them, eat them. They are cute, and they are horrifying. They are aliens, and they are us. Why can’t we make up our minds about them? And what about their minds? What are they really thinking? Animals mediate our connection to our environment and our own identities. How we understand and treat them shapes how we understand and treat ourselves. This class will investigate that contradictory relationship and track how we have conceptualized our fellow ear thlings, as we explore texts from Aesop’s Fables and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” to the so-bad-it’s-good Birdemic and Youtube’s “Henri the Existential Cat.” In so doing, we will shed some light on animal minds—our own included.

Requirements: In addition to readings/viewings, etc., you'll do your own investigation of an animal of your choice and craft creative work around that animal.

Fulfills new GE for Lived Environments.