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Advanced Projects in Popular Culture

ENGL 170.301
instructor(s):
Friday 2–5:00

This advanced course in writing about the arts and popular culture (interpreted broadly) is limited in enrollment (by permission of the instructor) and focuses on a semester-long project that each student defines in consultation with the instructor. The course will be run something like a group independent study, in which students pursue their specific, personal projects and share their work on an ongoing basis with the class as a whole. Ideally, students will informally serve as each other’s editors, sharing suggestions, sources, approaches and encouragement. Occasional meetings of the full group will concentrate on issues relevant to all aspects of arts-and-culture writing, while meetings with individual students will focus and help realize the individual projects that will constitute the course’s main work. Most typically, the semester-long project will be a lengthy feature (6,000+ words) of the sort that regularly appears in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine or Rolling Stone, among other publications. Other approaches to the project, however, will certainly be considered. Readings for the course will be geared specifically to the interests of the students who have been selected, and will be drawn from work that is appearing at that time in journalistic publications. Ideally, applicants will have already taken 117.301 with the instructor, but that is not a firm prerequisite and other students should absolutely feel free to apply.

 

fulfills requirements