This course explores theories and practices of writing and criticality in academic, civic, and artistic contexts. We consider some of the scripts that organise literate social practices and how to perceive and extrapolate their principles. We explore how we are affected by, how we navigate, and how we transform our immersive world of signs. We explore how writing functions in paper and digital environments and how we construe and read literary and non-literary texts for different purposes. We’ll engage critically with your writing and reading practices and we will also practice creative alternatives for recoding what we encounter. This is a critical skills class as well as an opportunity to study new writings and modes.
Readings are from multiple nations and regions such as Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, China, Japan, Oceania, Russia, Sweden, the UK, the US and transnational identities and border sites. Our critical thinking blends Euro and Anglo-American-Australasian modes with Oceania epistemology and digital knowing. We are studying the transgenre, translingual, and transplace of writing among identities, genres, codes, & places.
This course will help you understand how writing and critical thinking creates and records individuals and societies; articulate underlying assumptions about writing, mind, and identity in textual practices; perceive how texts reproduce and/or swerve dominant discourses; perceive how becoming literate and making texts means more than acquiring a set of linguistic, technical, and genre skills; situate literary texts in other and wider fields of discourse; reflect on what being an active, critically aware writer and reader means for you as an individual, a collaborative maker, and a member of social groups.