As its name implies, Introduction to English Studies is a foundational course that will help provide you with many of the tools you'll need as you pursue a major (or minor) in English here at the University of Cincinnati — and thankfully, many of you are taking this class as sophomores (or juniors) rather than waiting until your last year.
While this is an important class, it's one with a bit of an identity crisis: it's not a theory course, or a composition course, or a lit course, though it touches upon all of those areas. As a result, each professor who teaches it puts their own personal spin upon it depending on what they see as the necessary skills they'd like their students to carry with them.
Since 2010, I've been co-editor of Jacket2, an online journal of poetry and poetics journal that carries on and builds upon the groundbreaking work of Jacket Magazine (1997–2010), one of the world's first online venues for serious poetic discourse. In that role I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking with my colleagues about the evolving role of criticism in the 21st century as we move from a print-centric culture into a bustling 24/7 world of online discourse. That brave new world that you, as budding scholars, find yourself in is very different than the one I knew when I was in your shoes a generation ago, and it's vital to understand how to make your way through it, regardless of whether you plan to be an English professor, a high school English teacher, or to enter into any number of other fields.
Towards that end, you won't be writing traditional academic scholarship this semester. In the first half of the course we'll take a foundational look at the English language and the history of English scholarship, then explore other sorts of media literacies before applying our lessons to a pair of books by writers producing compelling and critically-acclaimed hybrid works of poetry, nonfiction, and criticism: Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson. The second half of the semester will be run as an academic writing workshop, where you'll be creating content — in a number of different modes and responding to a variety of audio, visual, and textual texts — for a thematically-constructed online writing project influenced by the work of Rankine and, in particular, Nelson (i.e. in the mode of her book Bluets).
Of course, we'll talk a lot more about how that will work as the semester progresses, but for now, welcome to the class! I hope you're as excited as I am for what we have in store.
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