WRIT 039: ENGLISH
Spring 2022 Courses
WRIT 039 301
TR 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Taransky
The Politics of Poetry
Fulfills the Writing Requirement
While writing workshops are generally thought to be hosted by libraries, schools, or literary centers, there is a rich history of poetry workshops in prisons, union halls and workers' centers. In this course, working from Mark Nowak's Social Poetics, we will explore what Nowak calls, borrowing from Howard Zinn, a people's history of the poetry workshop. Our focus on this history of poetry workshops and the workshop's potential for solidarity and change will take us from the Watts Rebellion in LA of 1956 to the Attica Prison riots, to the anti-apartheid protests in South Africa to Nowak's own Worker Writers School, a monthly workshop for low-wage workers, founded at a Ford Factory in 2011. In this course we will write for a range of audiences, genres and goals towards developing a rhetorical flexibility that will aid you in professional and academic writing situations.
WRIT 039 302
TR 1:45 PM - 3:15 PM
Taransky
The Politics of Poetry
Fulfills the Writing Requirement
While writing workshops are generally thought to be hosted by libraries, schools, or literary centers, there is a rich history of poetry workshops in prisons, union halls and workers' centers. In this course, working from Mark Nowak's Social Poetics, we will explore what Nowak calls, borrowing from Howard Zinn, a people's history of the poetry workshop. Our focus on this history of poetry workshops and the workshop's potential for solidarity and change will take us from the Watts Rebellion in LA of 1956 to the Attica Prison riots, to the anti-apartheid protests in South Africa to Nowak's own Worker Writers School, a monthly workshop for low-wage workers, founded at a Ford Factory in 2011. In this course we will write for a range of audiences, genres and goals towards developing a rhetorical flexibility that will aid you in professional and academic writing situations.
WRIT 039 303
MW 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Libow
Health and the Humanities
Fulfills the Writing Requirement
Over the last few decades, "medical humanities" and "health humanities" programs have been popping up in health professional schools across the country, including at Penn. In these courses, students study works of art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are "the humanities"? How do they differ from "the arts" or "humanity" itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit healthcare providers and their patients? In this seminar, we will begin to address such questions by turning to Sari Altschuler's The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. With this text as our guide, we will examine eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century humanistic medical practice in Philadelphia and elsewhere as well as contemporary approaches to the health humanities. By experimenting with a range of genres and media, we will use writing to interrogate the complicated relationship between humanistic and scientific ways of understanding the body.