Self and Other Course Pairing
The Art of Reading: east Asian Literature in Translation (EN 101)
Cultivates reading, writing, thinking, and oral communication skills by investigating the kinds of attention that literary texts, in multiple genres, ask of readers. The course is writing intensive. Topics reflect the range of faculty expertise and interests and are selected to invite student curiosity.
Faculty biography
Dr. Yu Zhang Stearns specializes in late imperial Chinese literature such as poetry, vernacular fiction, and tanci fiction. Her current research focuses on the intersection of gender, text, and religion at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of Interfamily Tanci Writing in Nineteenth Century China: Bonds and Boundaries (Lexington Press, 2018), which examines a group of tanci writers connected within one extensive family network and the significance of their works. Her recent and forthcoming publications appear in peer-reviewed journals including Ming Qing Studies, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, etc. She is also active in publishing book reviews. At Loyola, she teaches Mandarin Chinese and content courses about Chinese literature, film, and gender issues in East Asia. Besides work, she likes to cook, read detective stories, and explore walking trails.
Effective Writing (WR 100)
This course will introduce you to the discipline of writing in the university through analytical and productive work with the contemporary essay and its various genres. You will learn how to conceive and pursue a line of inquiry about a subject, how to develop an original argument, and how to support an argument with various sources of evidence, including scholarly research. You will develop and practice a full writing process, including planning, drafting, considering critical feedback, revising, reflecting, and editing. And you will hone your critical reading skills to evaluate and engage with other people's arguments. To help you achieve these goals, we will critically examine and respond to texts, in a range of genres, written by authors in the real world for real audiences. We will also do a lot of writings consciously and reflectively employing the concepts and strategies we learn about inside and outside of class. All of the work we do in this class is grounded in rhetoric: the effective use of language and symbols, always sensitive to context, especially one's audience and productive of change. The various skills you learn and practice in this course will enable you to become a more thoughtful, reflective, critical thinker who can participate in intellectual and world-shaping conversations inside and outside the academy.
Faculty biography
Professor Dominic Micer has been reading and writing for more than half a century and has been teaching writing for nearly a third of a century. His favorite book is Primo Levi's The Periodic Table; his favorite painting is Winslow Homer's Right and Left, and his favorite musical composition is Steve Reich's The Desert Music. He has been known to tell a joke or two in class; students in the class have been known to laugh at those jokes sometimes.
Mentor biography
More information coming soon!
Virtual Advisor
EN 101 satisfies the Literature core requirement for all students. WR 100 satisfies the Composition core requirement for all students.
