[ENGL 652] Creative Non-fiction: Voices from the Margins

Course Title: Creative Non-fiction: Voices from the Margins

Course Description

This course engages students with nonfiction writings that reflect wide-ranging issues of human experiences. It explores narratives of home, culture, diaspora, racism, disability, and environment.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Build up insights into a range of voices from margins across the world.
• Scrutinize the process of argumentation embedded in creative non-fiction.
• Inculcate skills to conduct rhetorical analysis.

Course Contents

Unit I: Rhetoric and Rhetorical Analysis (12 Hours)

1. Introduction to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Analysis (from Rhetorical Analysis)
2. Kairos and the Rhetorical Situation
3. Argumentation, Structure, and Style
4. The Framework and Techniques of Argumentation from A Treatise on Argumentation

Unit II: People, Places, and the Environment (9 Hours)

1. Chang-Rae Lee: "Coming Home Again"
2. David Foster Wallace: "Consider the Lobster"
3. Judith Ortiz Cofer: "More Room"
4. Chief Seattle: "Letter to President Pierce, 1855"
5. Terry Tempest Williams: "The Clan of One-Breasted Women"

Unit III: Art, Literature, and Philosophy (9 Hours)

1. Eudora Welty: "One Writer's Beginnings"
2. Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o: "Decolonizing the Mind"
3. Virginia Woolf: "In Search of a Room of One's Own"
4. Audre Lorde: "Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response"
5. Susan Sontag: "Notes on a Camp"

Unit IV: Language, Communication, and Education (9 Hours)

1. Maxine Hong Kingston: "Tongue-Tied"
2. Richard Rodriguez: "Aria"
3. Patricia Williams: "The Death of the Profane: The Rhetoric of Race and Rights"
4. Frederick Douglass: "Learning to Read"

Unit V: Human Nature and Culture (9 Hours)

1. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: "On the Fear of Death"
2. Esra Ari: "How I Became an Alevi Muslim Woman"
3. Arundhati Roy: "The Graveyard Talks Back: Fiction in the Time of Fake News"
4. James Baldwin: "Stranger in the Village"
5. Nancy Mairs: "On Being a Cripple"

Evaluation Scheme

Internal Evaluation

External Examination

Prescribed Text

Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Hachette, 2006.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.