WINTER 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
All sections of Writing 1 explore the power of language to make meaning, to create identities for the writer, to shape communities, and to influence readers. All sections will give you the chance to explore writing as a means of discovery and learning as well as a means of communication. Every section will help you to analyze rhetorical situations: that is, to understand the conventions at work in various situations and the kinds of arguments and evidence that are persuasive in different contexts. And in any section of Writing 1, you will have the chance to develop your particular strengths as a writer of academic prose and work on your particular weaknesses.
All sections of Writing 1 teach writing as a process that involves strategies for generating ideas, revising, and editing. They all will encourage you to work together as readers of each other's papers. And all will require a significant amount of reading and weekly writing which may include informal writing for yourself as well as more formal essays for others.
All course descriptions are subject to change.
In the winter quarter, half of each Writing 1 section will open for enrollment to frosh only during their scheduled appointment period. This priority will remain in effect until the other half of the seats open to all students on a fist-come, first-served basis at 12:00 noon on Friday, December 3.
Jeff Arnett
TTh 2:00P-3:45P
SocSci I 149
A course designed to explore the role of written expression in personal and public well-being; defining the term well-being, in fact, will be an ongoing challenge. Using a variety of subjects, we will utilize forms as diverse as poetry, autobiography, interviews, argumentation, and research to better understand how we can be well (or better) in this complex world of ours. Journals will play a crucial role in our research, as will a willingness to challenge our assumptions about writing. We will also focus on physical well-being and its relationship to mental or emotional well-being. For field research, each of us will engage in some form of physical activity during the quarter and participate in a triathlon relay with other members of the class. We have much to teach each other!
Jeff Arnett
TTh 4:00P-5:45P
Soc Sci I 149
Roger Bunch
TTh 2:00P-3:45P
Oakes 103
In this writing course, students analyze texts from a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, testimonies, and essays, on a wide range of topics and issues related to Latin America, including culture, politics, economics, religion, ecology, and human rights. These texts focus on Central America and Chiapas in Southern Mexico, though students interested in other regions of Latin America will be encouraged to read and write about those regions. Students will keep journals, conduct independent research, and engage response groups with the objective of learning to write clear, compelling, engaging essays.
Virginia Draper
TTh 10:00A-11:45A
Stevenson 152
How do we come to know and understand? And how can we--as writers--help others understand our experiences, reasonings, and insights? In this class, we will practice various ways of understanding and of expressing and communicating our understandings in expository writing. And we will explore what works and what doesn't depending upon the audience and situation.
Writing assignments will be on topics of students' own choice and will include narratives, definitions, reports on research, arguments, and reflective essays. The readings for the course will include our own writing and published expository writings (including writing for academic readers). Like other successful writers, we'll work together in writing groups helping each other to see what works and what doesn't and sharing insights and strategies, so everyone becomes a purposeful, versatile, confident writer of academic and other kinds of prose.
Carol Freeman
MWF 9:30A-10:40A
Kresge 319
In this section, we will explore the multitudinous manifestations and dimensions of the essay itself. We will read and write autobiographical narratives, reflective essays, reports on research, arguments, and analyses, always paying particular attention to the interplay between writers' intentions and readers' responses. We will work on developing a writing process and polishing a prose style suitable for academic discourse as well as experiment with more informal styles. Above all, we will explore the notion of effectiveness: that is, what makes a particular piece of writing work in a particular situation? The texts for the course include a collection of magnificent essays. Writing assignments (almost one per week) involve writing and rewriting different kinds of essays on topics of each student's choice.
Michelle Morton
TTh 10:00A-11:45A
Crown 203
In this course we will explore different approaches to representing self, place and community in writing. Focusing on representations generated from California's social and geographic landscape, we will look at works from a number of different genres--including testimonial, autobiography, essay, and the novel--analyzing their narrative qualities and conventions and comparing the representations created by these distinct modes. We will identify and examine the diverse rhetorical strategies used to convey images of the individual in a variety of historical, social, cultural, and geographic contexts. Reading for this course includes 19th century testimonials, coming-of-age stories, and essays and novels by Mike Davis, Thomas Pynchon, and Walter Mosely. Students' written work will include both formal and informal responses to the readings, research, regular revisions and peer editing, with an emphasis on the multiple steps involved in producing a polished piece of writing.
Sondra Archimedes
TTh 2:00P-3:45P
Soc Sci 1 153
In this course we will explore nineteenth-century ideas about madness in women. The readings encompass selections from fiction, conduct manuals, medical guidebooks and a psychoanalytical study, all of which illustrate the complex ways in which gender, body, and mind were interconnected in popular and scientific thought. Literary offerings include short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James, along with excerpts from novels by Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens. The diverse and sometimes contradictory material should encourage students to think critically and to see their own writing as the outcome of a spirited engagement with ideas. Students will write both formal and informal essays, revise papers, keep journals, and participate in peer response groups, all of which will lead to a final research project.
Peggy Miles
MWF 2:00P-3:10P
Cowell 223
In the words of Morrison, "if you study the culture and art of African-Americans, you are not studying a regional or minor culture. What you are studying is America." Through the works of the Nobel Prize-winning author, we will explore a too often overlooked aspect of the American experience. In addition, we will use her novels as models for discovering insights into the craft of writing. Texts will include The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Jazz.
The focus of this course will be on class participation and writing as a process. Students will generate ideas through class discussion, keep weekly learning logs, and develop writing skills through a succession of three drafts each on three different topics, including a research paper. Students will read and respond in writing to peer work-in-progress. We will look at means of developing a personal style and voice.
Ellen Newberry
MWF 9:30A-10:40A
Oakes 103
People have often used writing as a tool for exploring their own identity or for presenting their sense of self to the rest of the world. In this section of Writing 1 we will read fictional and autobiographical works which focus on the search for self. In particular, we will examine the ways that race, class, gender and sexual identity affect this process of exploration, and we will discuss why people might use writing as a way to assist in their processes of discovery. We will read books by such authors as Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, Daphne Scholinski and others, and mix films and music into our examination of this complex process of self-discovery. We will use the writing process as both a challenge to think critically about the world around us and an opportunity to examine our own lives more thoroughly. There will be four essays, each of which moves from discussion and planning through drafts, peer response and revision. One essay will be based on research and will allow you to investigate a topic of your choice that centers on an issue connected with the search for identity.
Amy Weaver
MWF 3:30P-4:40P
Porter 249
Through writing and discussion, the participants in this course will work together on those issues that most concern us surrounding the role of the university in our lives and our societies. Among others, we might consider questions such as: What is the university; who "gets" to go there; and who decides? Does a public university have a public responsibility, and what might that entail? Admittedly, these questions are enormous ones that will not be resolved during the course of a quarter. The more limited goal of this seminar is to allow students and the instructor to begin a critical inquiry into personal, social and political aspects of university education. Students will be asked to work with the instructor to outline the path the course will follow based on the current interests of the students. As this course is foremost a writing course, students will participate in weekly writing groups and will be constantly engaged in both informal and formal writing, culminating in a final research project.
Sherri Paris
MWF 11:00A-12:10P
Eight 242
This course will focus on social and political movements of the Nineteen-Sixties. Students will be introduced to major events, personalities, and ideas that made the decade unique. We will examine the Old Left roots of movement politics, how organizations like S.N.C.C. and S.D.S. redefined the Left's agenda, and how militant groups like the Weathermen and media-oriented groups like the Hippies changed and perhaps undermined that agenda. We will ask the questions: "What went wrong? What endured? What should the Left do differently in the Nineties"? Cultural influences will be examined through primary source material, including excerpts of tracts, novels, films, and guerrilla theater. This course continues themes which began in the Merrill Core Course regarding the Civil Rights movement and the Viet Nam War. Students will be required to write and completely revise a paper of substantial range.
*Section 12 is designated for Merrill honors students. Enrollment by permission only.
Sherri Paris
MWF 12:30P-1:40P
Eight 242
Sarah-Hope Parmeter
MWF 2:00P-3:10P
Merrill 130
This course is affiliated with a multi-grade early-outreach program focusing on Watsonville schools, so in addition to the regular coursework, students will regularly work on writing directed toward audiences ranging from fifth grade to high school. For this aspect of the course, Spanish-English bilingual skills will be very valuable, but they are not required. This course will explore a range of forms and topics used by women writers, and consider their evolution over time. Writing assignments will include letters and journals, as well as essays. We will begin with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and end with Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera and poetry by Sandra Cisneros. In between, we'll read Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Gillman's The Yellow Wallpaper.
Roxanne Hamilton
MWF 3:30P-4:40P
Merrill 130
Beginning with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we will write about the literary, historical, and thematic elements of long poems and shorter lyrics from the Medieval period to the present. We will write explications, historical analyses, and argumentative essays in a sequence of revised essays that culminate in a longer research project. Our goal is to perform close readings of poems that incorporate formal poetic conventions without sounding mechanical. That is, we will try to carve out a "voice" that enhances the beauty or complexity of the poem rather than nailing it down to a single meaning. Poets include Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Williams, Stein, Hughes, Brooks, Plath, Rich, Olson, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Lorde, and Hacker.
Don Rothman
MWF 8:00A-9:10A
Oakes 103
This course will focus on writing about censorship, both the internal and external varieties. We'll explore how censorship emerges in fiction as a generative theme, and how it shapes the lives of writers who have put themselves and their families at risk by continuing to publish in the face of government suppression. Students will explore how the analytical essay can serve to further both personal as well as political empowerment.
Readings will include two novels by the South African J.M. Coetzee, a novel by Nigerian Chinua Achebe, and a collection of articles published in the Index on Censorship.
As the course evolves, students will engage in a research project to link our class discussions and readings to a contemporary issue in which censorship plays a significant role.
Jude Todd
TTh 4:00P-5:45P
Porter 249
How might humans live in physical, mental, and spiritual harmony with the rest of nature? Buddhist, Jain, and Native American conceptions of the human place in nature, Western scientific ecology, and contemporary nature writers of sundry stripes will inform our developing understanding of what it means to dwell on the Earth. What fundamental assumptions about the nature of nature hamper our capacity to live harmoniously within it? What's the relationship between our own bodies and that of the Earth, and what do our attitudes toward one imply about our conceptions of the other? Do language limitations impede articulation of crucial insights that could help heal ecological distress? What light can we, as a group and individually, bring to the question: How can humans appropriately take our place (and give our share) within nature?
Students will enhance writing skills through composing and revising essays that explore such questions. The final research project allows students to delve deeply into a course-related topic of their choice. Required texts, all non-fictional, include a reader, Rules for Writers , by Diana Hacker, and Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. by Theodore Roszak et al.
Additionally, students will select one other volume of their choice from a list of supplementary texts. For this list or other information, email todd@cats.
Note: Due to my multiple-chemical sensitivity, I need to have a scent-free classroom. I ask that people not wear perfume, scented hair or body products, or clothing smelling of tobacco smoke, fabric softeners, etc., to class. Thank you.
James Wilson
TTh 10:00A-11:45A
Stevenon 151
This course will explore (in reverse chronological order) fiction and film relevant to several intellectual and historical moments of the past 75+ years: post-modernism, political activism, neo-realism, and women authors during Mussolini's regime. Students can expect to write short reading logs and five papers (including a 6-9 page research effort), to revise substantively, and to participate in small and large group discussions and draft workshops. Authors and directors include Calvino, Fo, Negri, Tartufari, Ginzburg, Wertmuller, Fellini, and de Sica.
James Wilson
TTh 12:00P-1:45P
Stevenson 151
This course will explore fiction and film relevant to several cultural and intellectual moments of the past 50+ years including existentialism, feminism, and post-modernism. Students can expect to write short reading logs and five papers (including a 6-9 page research effort), to revise substantively, and to participate in small and large group discussions and draft workshops. Authors and directors include Camus, Duras, Redonnet, Darrieussecq, Renoir, Rohmer, and Klapish.
Robin King
MWF 9:30A-10:40A
Soc Sci 2 141
Some researchers claim that emotional intelligence contributes to a person's success in life more than performance on standardized tests. In this section of Writing 1 we will consider this claim and explore concepts of emotion intelligence by writing about the influence of emotions on perception, awareness, behavior and critical thinking.
Students will complete informal and formal writing assignments in which they analyze how humans dramatize emotions in socially effective and dysfunctional ways. In peer-led discussion and small writing response groups, there will be a strong link between analytical reading of essays about the dynamics of human emotions and writing convincing arguments about the connections between emotional intelligence and rational thinking. Students will research and write four 4-6 page essays and a final research paper about the influence of culture and social institutions on emotions, perceptions and behavior. Course work will emphasize the essentials of academic writing, including grammar, effective language, drafting, rewriting, and editing papers.
Candace Calsoyas
MWF 9:30A-10:40A
Porter 249
How do we develop a sense of place? We will read natural history essays and visit campus sites to determine how we locate and situate ourselves in the environment. A sequence of essays from Words From the Land and Natural State will provide the framework to analyze how authors Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, and John McPhee interpret the geographical, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of place. Your own writing will include informal writing responses, reading journals, and a series of essays--autobiographical, expository and argumentative--exploring how environment has shaped and affected an intellectual and spiritual sense of self. Reading will be relatively light but intense with "close readings" and critical analysis of stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies used by authors to give meaning to place. Analysis will include the role of "unobtrusive observer," language of fact and reverie, and the process of "dialoguing" with place. Coursework will emphasize strategies for drafting, revising and editing papers and everyone will participate in a writing group.
Gayle McCallum
MWF 11:00A-12:10P
Soc Sci 2 141
"We are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives." --Doris Lessing
How do we establish our values and beliefs? How do we maintain a critical perspective in a sea of information? How do we interpret the information we have received from our upbringing, peer groups, the media, and the political arena, in order to find out where we stand on issues in our community? How do we gather, filter, and synthesize information to express our growing ideas?
In this Writing 1 course, we will examine the perils of blind obedience and conformity; we will look at how language (and images) "bamboozles" us; we will determine where we fit into the political spectrum.
Finally, we will apply our critical thinking skills and newfound understanding of ourselves to investigate a community issue. The culmination of the course will be a documented research paper, for which the student will select a pertinent issue of his/her choice in the community (including the UC campus) to explore.
Mark Baker
TTh 10:00A-11:45A
Soc Sci 2 141
This course will focus on how U.S. culture, at the turn of the century, is ever rapidly fluctuating. With this in mind, we will consider how place, along with its characteristics, can shape who we are. While examining what the term "community" has implied throughout the past and up to the present day, we'll explore how groups of people, as well as individuals, react to change within contemporary culture. We will then look at specific instances and issues confronting those within the United States (and oftentimes elsewhere). Areas of exploration will include: ecology, multi-culturalism, politics, resistance, social movements, economics, and others. Readings will potentially include pieces by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Gloria Anzaldúa, Dave Foreman, Judi Bari, Ed Abbey, Joan Didion, Jon Krakauer, Eric Bogosian, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherríe Moraga, and others. Students will write several short essays throughout the quarter, as well as one longer research paper.
Tom Marshall
MWF 12:30P-1:40P
Soc Sci 2 141
Literacy, "hah,...what is it good for?" --War
In this course, we will re-define literacy by taking a critical look at several of the ways in which it has been literally and functionally defined by others. Issues of both reading and writing will be examined and used as material for three responsive analytical essays to be composed through the workshop process of the class. We will scrutinize such concepts as "standards," "standard English," "dialect," "voice," "identity," "written-ness," "the literary canon," and others which are used to set up definitions of literacy. We will have some critical fun probing with questions like "Whose literacy is this, anyway?" and "How can we turn 'absolutely nothin' into relatively something?" This is your chance to take the political task of defining literacy into your own hands and minds and mouths.
The course will require doing assigned readings, supplying additional readings, participating in discussion, participating in the workshop processing and completion of those three responsive essays, and their integration into a final project. A substantial final research paper involving past and possible future definitions of literacy will be required of each student, though its research and development may be done collaboratively. We will work toward publishing our final products.
Adrielle Mitchell
MW 5:00P-6:45P
Porter 249
Attention Education, Psychology, Sociology, Community Studies, Pre-Law and Literature majors, as well as others interested in youth and/or the justice system: Here is a rare opportunity to be part of a publishing venture in collaboration with youth in the juvenile justice system. You will engage in a two-fold process which will give you ample opportunities to hone your own writing, editing, and research skills at the same time as it will allow you to work directly with adolescents, age 14-17, who are at work on a book project headed for publication. These teens have gone through the juvenile justice system, and are now enrolled in a school/treatment program (P.A.R.K.) jointly run by the Santa Cruz Probation Department, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, and Santa Cruz Children's Mental Health Services. In a safe, supervised situation, you will have the chance to help bring the voices of "juvenile offenders" to the mainstream public; our goal is to produce a volume of essays which directly addresses and redresses the stereotypes that haunt these individuals. Your assignments will reflect the different aspects of your collaborative effort, and will include an observational case study, an interview, a multiple source research project, and writing as process techniques, including pre-writing, drafting and revising assignments. At the conclusion of the quarter, interested students may submit a relevant essay for inclusion in the book project. In addition, students who are so inclined may petition to continue their work as an independent study during the Spring quarter.
Farnaz Fatemi
MW 5:00P-6:45P
Soc Sci I 149
How do we learn about other cultures? How do we move beyond what we find in the movies, mass media and the news to learn about places we know relatively little about?
In this course we'll consider these kinds of questions in relation to the Middle East. Using texts from a variety of genres (including news, criticism, fiction and film), I want to encourage a conversation about what it is we see and don't see of the Middle East and the various cultures that exist within it. We will pay attention to the ways our perceptions of the region are both shaped by and reflected in our readings. How does our reading of the Middle East inform our notions of ourselves as Americans? What is it like to "know" a culture as an insider, writing from within, and as an outsider, reading and writing about it?
Students will develop their writing skills through formal and informal essays exploring these questions. We will also incorporate peer response groups and a reading journal. Some of the reading for this course will focus on contemporary Iran (1970s - present) and the 1991 Gulf War, but students will be encouraged to write more deeply about regions of their choice for a final research-based essay.
Kate Kordich
TTh 8:00A-9:45A
Soc Sci 2 141
This class will look at a variety of California narratives in an effort to locate effective writing strategies. Students will be asked to identify what conventions and strategies are and are not effective in selected texts as a means to clarify and strengthen their own writing. Readings will include newspapers from early statehood to the present, essays, poetry, and short fiction by authors such as John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, John Fante, Gary Soto, and Hisaye Yamamoto. The class will also view and discuss Chinatown and Vertigo, two films that have strong, nearly mythic California associations. Topics to analyze and discuss include the ways in which the changing social landscape of California is registered by immigrant authors of early statehood through today; how authors narrate California's natural environment, in both its quietly lovely (coastline, the Sierra Nevada, the desert) and infamously threatening (earthquake, fire, flood, drought) manifestations. Students will write several formal essays and shorter essays, keep a reading journal, and participate in peer editing groups. All writing assignments will focus on methods for planning, drafting, revising and researching.
Kate Evans
TTh 12:00P-1:45P
Soc Sci 2 141
In this course we will read novels, plays, and short stories and view the film versions. In the process, we will consider, and write about, the varying effects written and visual media attempt to exert on readers/viewers. We will consider how form and content interact, which will lead to discussion and writing about the various lenses through which ideas can be communicated. Students will also engage in an independent research project which extends their interest in one of course's key ideas. All writing assignments will focus on methods for generating content, focusing and organizing ideas, and revising with the help of classmates. Texts for the course will include Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (film: Smoke Signals), Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Romeo and Juliet (with two films adapated from this play).
Mark Baker
TTh 2:00P-3:45P
Porter 249
Jessica Breheny
TTh 6:00P-7:45P
Porter 249
How do we affect our world through writing? How can writing change society? In this course we will hone our skills as persuasive writers by employing argumentative strategies geared towards various audiences. We will explore how we write convincingly in academic, public, and personal contexts.
Readings will include works by contemporary authors attempting to change the worlds in which they live; such authors will include Michael Moore, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, bell hooks, and others. We will examine how these writers advance their projects. In-class and exploratory writing will be an integral part of the course, and students will read and comment on each other's work in groups. Assignments will leave room for creativity and experimentation in form, style, and voice. Required texts will include a handbook, a collection of essays, and students' own essays.
Farnaz Fatemi
MW 7:00P-8:45P
Soc Sci I 149
Amy Weaver
MWF 12:30P-1:40P
Oakes 102
Barbara Logan
TTh 2:00P-3:45P
Kresge 325
Advertising is the art of persuasive argument. Rhetoric is also the art of persuasive argument. The difference between the two is that traditional rhetoric is also interested in valid truth claims, while traditional advertising is interested in getting more of your money out of you. In this class we will examine what others say and do to persuade us--both to discover what we and others find convincing and to discover new ways of making our own writing more persuasive because our claims are valid. (We may also become immune to advertising.)
Readings will include short excerpts from classical rhetoric (Aristole, Plato), works by authors who want people to see new truths (possibly Jonathan Swift and Dick Gregory), and advertisements--political, comestible, and charitable. Students will write arguments on important issues, using close reading logs, group brainstorming, and multiple drafts to develop persuasive arguments.
Phil Rodriguez
TTh 10:00A-11:45A
Crown 202
In this class we will consider the stakes in "truth telling" in both visual and written media. What are the goals and challenges of representing accurately and authentically events, people, and predicaments? We will read essays on a variety of topics and see two documentary films,Viva 16! and Skin Deep in order to explore the purposes of fiction and nonfiction and to compare notions of objective and subjective styles of writing. And we will see what happens when we write in those styles ourselves. Papers will involve autobiography, investigation, and interviews on topics of students' own choosing.
The class requires weekly writing and a reading log, and emphasizes different ways of investigating, organizing, composing and revision. Writing groups, peer feedback and research are essential components. Texts will include a writing handbook and an anthology of readings. Students will also need access to a video camera or audio tape recorder for one assignment (rentals are available through Media Services).