WRC 1010.101 Introduction to Mathematics For WRC
Gen Ed. Attribute: Quantitative Literacy
Instructor: Dr. Sarah Greenwald
Whether it is counting the number of stars, understanding why the Benjamin Franklin fund never earned its intended money, or managing the uncertainty inherent in polling and medical testing, many real-life situations require the critical and creative analysis of a variety of mathematical interpretations in order to fully consider the implications. This course focuses on local to global connections related to the application of geometry, algebra, probability, and statistics as you develop creative inquiry skills, research techniques, and communication skills. You’ll also explore what mathematics is, what it has to offer, and the diverse ways that people can be successful in mathematics and impact the world (including you!), as we study:
Personal Finance: How we apply algebra to interest formulas and decisions we make about our own lives.
Geometry of our Earth and Universe: How we measure and view the world around us and decide what is the nature of reality.
Consumer Statistics and Probability: How probability and statistical techniques allow us to recognize the misrepresentations of studies and make public and private policy decisions.
What is Mathematics? To reflect more broadly about the course themes as we tie the segments together. You can choose a topic you are interested in and research how mathematics relates to it or you can design a creative review of what we covered in class. You will communicate your expertise in a video project session.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1010.410
WRC 1103.101 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: Stories Can Save Us
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Professor Joseph Bathanti
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
"Words are all we have," the great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, reminds us. All of us bear stories and they all matter, and I would hazard that sharing stories comes as naturally to humans of every stripe as breathing. Stories make us jointly human. They kindle intimacy. Stories can save us even when we don't know we need saving – by returning us to who we are essentially, by underscoring what matters most to us, by taking us back home, wherever that home might reside – an abstract in all likelihood. Tim O'Brien writes, in his short story, "Spin," from The Things They Carried: "Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." This course will tackle story from a generous vantage. While the bulk of the reading will be short stories – some classic, some brand new, some obscure – we'll also engage with other kinds of stories: poems, memoirs, essays, interviews, film – and we'll host a number of noteworthy guests who will share their spellbinding stories with us. This is a course where your lived life is of the utmost importance, as is the place(s) where that lived life plays out. This is very much a course that relies on autobiography. And, of course, you will write stories too.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.410
WRC 1103.102 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: Why Are We Here (In College)?
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Professor Clark Maddux
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm
In this section of WRC 1103, we’ll look at what it means to be in college through a historical, literary, and cultural survey of lives that take shape in colleges much like ours. We’ll study poems, novels, and the history of collegiate life, and pose hard, maybe unanswerable, questions about why we should pursue learning for its own sake and how desire molds who we are. The primary texts we’ll read, discuss, and write about in class will be Ann Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, May Sarton's The Small Room ( a probing exploration of driven studenst and passionate teachers), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (an homage to a novel written one hundred years before), and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (about what it was like to be young, gay, going to university, and finding one’s place in the world during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in a reactionarily conservative society). Each of these is a distinct work, but each asks related questions about what we wish for, whether it is ever attainable, and how we compose our lives, sometimes bring them to ruin, and if we can
find beauty and even fulfillment in what will never be.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.411
WRC 1103.103 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: Democracy: An Owner's Manual
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Professor Joe Gonzalez
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm
Democracy is under attack. Both in the United States and Western Europe, substantial numbers of citizens express disillusion with or contempt for democratic governance. Tens of millions believe that the presidential election of 2020 was "stolen" from their candidate, absent compelling evidence. And young people (by some measures) express the greatest degree of indifference, refusing to participate in important democratic and civic rituals, such as voting.
This semester we will consider how we came to this point--and what we can do about it. In the best traditions of the Watauga Residential College, we will explore the foundations upon which our republic was created, some of the crises it has endured, and its current state. Just as important, we will investigate democratic institutions locally, nationally, and globally, all the while critically interrogating the U.S. Constitution and local organizations, such as schools, newspapers, and service clubs, that contribute to our civic life. We will also meet with local leaders, the people who make democracy "work" on a daily basis. Students will conclude the semester by redesigning the U.S. Constitution for the 21st Century.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.412
WRC 1103.104 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: Metamorphoses In Life: Love and Death
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Professor Michael Dale
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm
Love and death are oftentimes experienced as seismic upheavals in our lives; we are changed in puzzling, perhaps even mysterious ways by these two forces, sometimes delightfully and sometimes terrifyingly or painfully. In love, suddenly someone or something that perhaps we did not even know existed comes into our life and now is seen and felt as a presence we cannot imagine living without. In death, as the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins puts it, "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." How should we see and understand the experiences and transformations wrought by love and death? The question is especially important in a society that frequently trivializes love, and at times and in some circumstances, makes death something to either be avoided, not spoken of, or a spectacle of entertainment.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.413
WRC 1103.105 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: (Be)Longing: Identity Formations In 19TH-Century American Arts
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar and ENG/RC 1000
Instructor: Professor Audrey Fessler
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Historian David Shi identifies the “process of forging an American identity” as one of the “overarching themes of the early American republic [that] continues to resonate today.” Late-18th-century political writings such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution grounded this unitary (and therefore exclusionary) effort. In the early 1800s, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and others began to establish a canon of “American” literature; in 1828, Webster published the first American Dictionary of the English Language, which sought to identify and consolidate a specifically “American” language. How did subsequent writers and artists in other media appropriate, challenge, expand, redefine, and otherwise respond to foundational conceptions of “an American identity”? In answering this question, we will explore a wide range of 19th-century short stories, novels, poems, slave narratives, dream narratives, speeches, paintings, cartoons, songs, and folk art productions, and will visit local museums and attend local artistic performances together.
Students will also research little-known paintings by important American artists and write label texts that may be permanently displayed with those paintings in an area museum. We will travel to the museum three times to work with the curators there. Through this project, each classmate’s research and writing can reach and benefit thousands of museum-goers over time!
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.414
WRC 2001.101 and 102 28607: DAYS IN THE LIFE (Second Year Writing)
Gen Ed Attribute: Sophomore Writing, Fills ENG/RC 2001 requirements
Instructor: Professor Cary Curlee
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm and TR 2:00 pm-3:15pm
Days in The Life: Mountain Messages, will introduce students to writing across the curriculum using poems, essays, short stories and scientific texts. Readings in the course will touch spiritual, cultural, and environmental aspects of living in Appalachia and beyond. Our exercises will hone research and analytical skills learned in WRC 1000 while introducing you to writing and reading across academic disciplines. We will take a rhetorical approach to reading and writing across the curriculum and students will engage in more independent work and more involved research. We will read texts from a variety of academic disciplines, including analyses of disciplinary writing in order to identify other writers’ rhetorical choices and discipline-specific writing strategies and conventions. Our writing projects, some of which will entail independent research, will provide you opportunities to make effective choices in your own writing for specific purposes and academic communities, and using various digital methods. Learning to assess different writing situations and make effective context-specific rhetorical choices should prepare you to meet writing challenges in the future, whether it be for another college course, on the job, or for civic or personal reasons.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2001.410 or 411
WRC 2201.101 HEARING VOICES: Science and Nature in Literature
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrative Learning Experience Theme; Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Michael Dale
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Living in relationships with the natural world (land, oceans, and the larger universe of galaxies and star systems) and reaching for an understanding of nature provides fertile ground for novelists, short-story writers, and writers of narrative non-fiction. In this seminar we will explore and examine the intellectual and emotional landscape of fictional and non-fiction beings as they are immersed in and navigate the world of science and nature. What happens when the sciences and humanities meet? What do we learn about science and the all-too-human human beings who pursue scientific knowledge and understanding when both are brought together on the landscapes of novels, short stories, poems, and essays? What do we hear from the voices of science and scientists in narrative literature and poetry?
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2201.410
WRC 2201.102 HEARING VOICES: BS, Between the Lines
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrative Learning Experience Theme; Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Clark Maddux
Time: TR 9:30 am-10:45 am
In this course, we’ll examine two significant works of literature, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, that together explore the limits of narration and sense-making. Individually and formally, with their frequently confusing array of narrative voices, textual apparatuses, and often obscure aims, these texts ask us, indeed, clamor for us, to pay a maybe impossible toll of attention to our own reading and to questions of veracity and reliability. In addition to these main texts, we will analyze the cultural prevalence of bullshit in America and its moral implications by reading and discussing Harry Frankfurt’s seminal 1986 essay, “On Bullshit.” The class (as a whole) will establish a contract with the instructor to determine half the semester grade. The remainder of the final grade will reflect student work in writing an annotated bibliography, composing a review of scholarly literature, and sitting an oral examination.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2201.411
WRC 2202.101 WHAT IF? ASKING HIST QUESTIONS: Transatlantic Ireland: Crosscurrents
- Gen Ed Designation: His Studies and ILE-Experiencing Inquiry
- Instructor: Professor Jessica Martell
- Time: MWF 10:00 am-10:50 am
How do we know what we think we know? What informs our understanding of the past? In this course, students will study the history, literature, and culture of Ireland and its influence on the US. Irish history is ancient, but interpreting it in the present is highly controversial: as famous Irish novelist James Joyce wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” As students explore this legendary culture, they examine different storytelling techniques used in historical accounts, question the accuracy of historical backdrops, and observe how different approaches to narrative can result in profoundly–sometimes violently—different accounts of the past.
WRC 2403.101 The Practice of Poetry
Gen Ed Attribute: Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Joseph Bathanti
Time: TR 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
"A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters," claims the great Northwest poet, Richard Hugo. This course introduces the basics of poetry writing. It tackles poetry through a “writerly eye” (reading like a writer) and pays careful attention to the kinds of craft (a protean word we’ll use regularly and seek to define contextually) choices that influence the emotional impact and meaning of a given poem.
The class will also provide students with an overall context for poetry: its scope; trends; its development, especially during the last decades of 20th Century to the present, with a decided lean toward American poetry (of a narrative vein), but with a keen eye on diversity and burgeoning voices, multiculturalism and various “kinds” of poetry, including formalism and free verse.
An extremely important component of the course will be careful readings and analyses of poems from a number of realms and “schools.” Approximately 1/3 of the class time will be spent workshopping student-generated poems, and each student will have the opportunity to workshop two poems – and the subject matter is totally up to you. We’ll also engage occasionally in in-class writing assignments and hopefully do a bit of writing out of the classroom. Our ultimate aim, by the end of the semester, is to acquire an understanding of, and instinct for, various elements and strategies – all revolving around craft choices – employed by writers in building/composing poems, elements and strategies you can then employ in your own poetry.
Regardless of whether you consider yourself primarily a poet, fiction writer, or creative nonfiction writer – and even if you’ve never attempted to write a poem before – this course is the right place for you.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2403.410
WRC 3000.101 Interrogating Popular Culture: Technostalgia
Gen Ed Attribute: Hist & Soc Theme-Culture in Social Practice and Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Mark Nunes
Time: TR 9:30 pm-10:45 pm
This course will explore the terrain where technology, popular culture, and nostalgia intersect. In particular, I will be interested in hearing about your experiences of “technostalgia.” What media did you grow up with that is no longer current? How do you reflect upon your own technologically-saturated youth? How do you participate in current technostalgic trends? In addition to this autoethnographic approach to the course, we will also explore as case studies certain popular cultural forms that traffic heavily in technostalgia, including: vaporwave; 8-bit music, art, and video games; retro-tech fashion trends; and IG vintage filters. While we will also discuss important background concepts like the origins of “popular culture” as a category, as well as how the concept of “nostalgia” has changed over time, this course will be more seminar than lecture and will serve as an invitation for us to think together on the topic of technostalgia.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3000.410
WRC 3203.101 WHY ART? WAYS OF RESPONDING TO THE WORLD AROUND US
- Gen Ed Designation: Fine Arts and Aesthetic-Creat Exp of Culture and ILE-Experiencing Inquiry
- Instructor: Professor Chris Yon
- Time: W 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm
As a group, we will explore the production, function, and consumption of art. Methodologies and processes from artists across disciplines will be examined while we cultivate our own interdisciplinary creative practices. We will reflect on the ways art reflects, impacts and captures its moment in time in the world. No artistic talent is required, but students should arrive with an open curiosity about how, when, where, and why art happens.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3203.410
WRC 3401.101 MYTH AND MEANING
Gen Ed Attribute: Hist & Soc Theme-Culture in Social Practice and Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Laura Ammon
Time: TR 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
Myths are the stories we tell about the world, exploring and explaining humanity's place in the past, the present and the future offering insights on what it means to be human. This course will explore various expressions of myth, from the Aztecs to Black Panther, and how these myths construct meaningful imaginative worlds within specific historical, cultural, and literary contexts. We will cover an assortment of myths, rituals, symbols that construct the worldviews of various communities, investigating conflict, syncretism, and hybridity in differing global encounters, and how that conflict impacts the stories humans tell about their place in the world. This investigation is necessarily an interpretive journey involving theoretical approaches to the role of mythology in human cultures and religions.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3401.410
WRC 4001.101 Capstone
Gen Ed Attribute: Hist & Soc Theme-Culture in Social Practice and Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Laura Ammon
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm