Winter Intersession 2015 Course Descriptions

219.041: Technical and Professional Writing

Online – Dec. 11-Jan. 17
Stephen Benz, sbenz@unm.edu 

In English 219, students learn how to write and design documents commonly found in the professional workplace. The course covers principles related to structure, style, research methodology, audience analysis, and document design. Assignments include creating professional letters, memos, procedures, manuals, proposals, and analytical reports.

219.042: Technical and Professional Writing

Online – Dec. 11-Jan. 17 
Erin Lebacqz, lebacqze@unm.edu 

English 219 provides practice in the analysis of writing situations and audiences, and in the writing and editing of workplace documents, including correspondence, reports and proposals. In this fast-paced online section, students will analyze questions of audience, culture, and communicative purpose, and will complete three professional documents (written and multimodal) and a portfolio. 

220.020: Expository Writing

MTWRF 10:00 AM-6:00 PM Jan. 4-Jan. 8 
Julie Shigekuni, jshig@unm.edu 

Real World Life confronts us with a series of mysteries: The simplest daily goals such as, “what do I want and how do I go about getting what I want?” are fraught with complications, sometimes related to our objectives, sometimes not; yet what we are looking for affects the path we choose to take. The subject of this course is the world. What does it look like? What are the layers of your reality? In this weeklong intensive course, we will focus on inquiry and methods of investigation from the rhetorical to the creative. You will act as an investigator and a reporter, utilizing research and evidence to present your vision of your world.

224.011: Introduction to Creative Writing

MTWRF 12:35 PM-4:35 PM Dec. 14-18 (Hybrid: 50% online)
Diane Thiel, dthiel@unm.edu 

Are you interested in creative writing? This is the course for you! This intersession course offers a fun and innovative way to complete the introductory creative writing course before next semester. The course is structured around a set of creative exercises that will spark your imagination and hone your writing skills. We will practice fiction, poetry, nonfiction and some dramatic writing in this interactive workshop setting. Short readings by well-known writers will enrich discussions and provide context for the exercises. The online aspects of the course will be easily accessible audio and visual resources. For more information about Diane Thiel (UNM Professor and author of books in several genres) please see her webpage:www.dianethiel.net.

315.011: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature (Seven Psychopaths: Violence and Criminality in World Literature and Film)

TWR Online 12:00 PM-4:00 PM Jan. 5, 6, 12, 13, 14 Hybrid course
Sarah L. Townsend, sltownse@unm.edu 

Prostitute serial killer...Comic-book-obsessed juvenile butcher...Political prisoner turned brutal interrogator....IRA reject avenging the death of his cat....Murdering chauffer...Unrepentant death squad leader infatuated with Hollywood films....Businessman turned killing machine. This course focuses on seven psychopaths in contemporary world literature and film in order to investigate the pathology of late modernity. The dark, complex, often likable and funny characters we will encounter in our explorations challenge traditional understandings of villainy and evil. By placing these works into their historical and political contexts, we will begin to ask about the conditions that generate and sustain psychopathology, especially in the outskirts of modernity. Many of the protagonists we will encounter are also victims of sorts, oppressed by political tyrants and economic inequality, and treated in ways that provoke our sympathy even as we recoil in horror. In our readings and viewings, we will travel from the U.S. and Ireland to Indonesia, South Korea, India, and Chile. We will read one novel (Adiga's The White Tiger), two plays (McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Dorfman's Death and the Maiden), and watch four films (McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Park's Oldboy, Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, and Broomfield's documentary film about Aileen Wuornos). Throughout the course we will consider how late capitalism and globalization produce their very own monsters.

315.012: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature

MTWRF Dec. 14-18 0900-1700
Andrea L Mays, amays@unm.edu 

388.002: Dickens and Film

Online – Dec. 11-Jan. 17
Gail Houston, ghouston@unm.edu 

This course focuses on two of Dickens’ novels and one novella and film adaptations of those works. You will learn the basics of analyzing film while also performing literary analysis. Students will develop their skills in A.) literary analysis and film analysis vis-Ã - vis Charles Dickens’ writing and film versions of some of his novels, B.) approaching literary texts from a cultural studies perspective, C.) thinking about how to connect literary texts to nonliterary writing, and D.) analyzing how literary texts were influenced by and helped to shape the culture and history of which they are part. Learning to talk about literature, as well as write about it, is one of the “aims and pleasures” of taking an English class. This class is an online course, which, like many online classes, is more difficult than face-to-face courses because it is important not to get behind. Keeping up with assignments is even more important.

417.002: Editing

MTWRF 12:00 PM-4:00 PM Jan. 4-Jan. 15 
Andrew Bourelle, abourelle@unm.edu

English 417 will focus on technical and professional editing. In addition to proofreading for punctuation, mechanics, and spelling, students will practice editing documents for consistency, accuracy, usability, and audience consideration. The class is intended for students interested in careers in technical and professional writing; however, the emphasis on the precision of language will be applicable to any students interested in improving their writing or editing skills.

468.001: The Space-Age Epic

MTWRF 10:00 AM-2:00 PM Dec. 14-Dec. 22, Jan. 4- Jan 8 
Matthew Hofer, mrh@unm.edu

Thedates for this interdisciplinary analysis of the fantasy and reality of space travel from 1955 to 1982 span the period from the planning of the satellite Sputnik I to the earliest successful Challenger space shuttle missions. Grounded in literature, film, music, history, and philosophy, the course is based on widespread notions of science fiction (which is, of course, not limited to prose) becoming thinkable possibility, even fact. Beginning after the so-called Golden Age of science fiction and stopping with Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982), it adopts the New Wave focus on the person holding the gizmo rather than the oddness of the gizmo itself. In terms of critical thinking, its overarching objective is to address in critical, historical, and conceptual contexts the extension of modernist aesthetic innovation into a multi-generic proto-postmodernism that asks meaningful questions about the forms of human discovery. Our key themes turn on concepts of normativity and difference, including languages, bodies, minds, home, exile, freedom, and authority. We will read prose and poetry, and also screen and discuss several films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Kubrick, 1968), Space Is the Place (dir. Ra, 1974), Star Wars (dir. Lucas, 1977), Alphaville (dir. Godard, 1965), and Blade Runner (dir. Scott, 1982).