"Writing on Contemporary Issues: Culture Shock! Writing, Editing, and Publishing in Cyberspace, Fall 2008"

(Complete Item Description)

Abstract:: " This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience—specifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write. The end result of our collaborative work will be a new edition, the seventh, of Culture Shock!, an online magazine of writings on American popular culture, which we will post on the Web for the worldwide reading public to enjoy."

Subject:: Humanities
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: MIT OpenCourseWare

Writing on Contemporary Issues: Imagining the Future, Fall 2007

(Complete Item Description)

Abstract:: Turn-of-the-century eras have historically been times when people are more than usually inclined to scrutinize the present and speculate about the future. Now, the turn not just of a century but of a millennium having recently passed, such scrutiny and speculations inevitably intensify. What will the future that awaits us in this twenty-first century and beyond be like? And how do visions of that future reflect and respond to the world we live in now? In this course we will read and write about how some writers and filmmakers have responded to the present as a way of imagining--and warning about--possible worlds to come. Guided by our reading and discussion, we will scrutinize our own present and construct our own visions of the future through close readings of the texts as well as of some aspects of contemporary culture--urban and environmental crises, economic imperialism, sexual and reproductive politics, the ethics of biotechnologies, issues of race and gender, the romance of technology, robotics and cyborg cultures, media saturation, language and representation--and the persistent questions they pose about what it means to be human at this start of a new millennium.

Subject:: Humanities, Social Sciences
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: MIT OpenCourseWare

"Writing on Contemporary Issues: Social and Ethical Issues, Spring 2010"

(Complete Item Description)

Abstract:: " Our best writing happens when we care passionately about our topics. That sense of passion often emerges in relation to social problems, such as poverty, homelessness, injustice, or environmental crisis, that deeply concern us. Writing offers a critical avenue of civic engagement so that we can understand issues more profoundly, communicate that understanding to the public, and advocate for change. This course seeks to provide a supportive context for students to grow significantly as writers by discovering and engaging with issues that matter to them. Writing on social issues, we can see ourselves within a tradition of authors such as Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Orwell, Rachel Carson, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who have used the power of the pen to inspire social change. Throughout the semester, we will read selections from these authors, as well as contemporary writers such as Marion Wright Edelman, Alan Dershowitz, Susanna Kaysen, Jonathan Kozol, and Robert Putnam. 21W.730 also focuses on the visual power of photography and film, which combined with print media, help raise awareness of social problems and advocate for solutions. We will analyze classic documentary photographs by Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, and will screen some more recent documentary and feature films (e.g., One Woman, One Vote, Dead Man Walking, and Girl, Interrupted). In discussing these texts, we will explore the ways in which an artist's era, biography, political perspective, and rhetorical purpose may influence the choice of topic and style in addressing audiences. During the course, we will often raise the question of how individuals from different gender, racial, generational, religious, political and economic groups may understand the same social and ethical issues."

Subject:: Humanities
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: MIT OpenCourseWare

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Browse: Keyword: Media Saturation

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"Writing on Contemporary Issues: Culture Shock! Writing, Editing, and Publishing in Cyberspace, Fall 2008"

Writing on Contemporary Issues: Imagining the Future, Fall 2007

"Writing on Contemporary Issues: Social and Ethical Issues, Spring 2010"

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