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In the UVaCollab course site:   Writing about TV (3:30)

Syllabus

Syllabus for ENWR 1510

Writing and Critical Inquiry

Or, Writing about Television

Prof. Sarah O’Brien, Fall 2019

Class meets: 

Section 052: T/Th, 12:30-1:45 pm, Shannon House 111 

Section 066: T/Th, 3:30-4:45 pm, New Cabell Hall 411

Office hours:
T/Th: 2:15-3:15 pm, Bryan Hall, 102-B (and by appointment) 

Email: sjo9b@virginia.edu

What is this course about?

High or low, mass or niche, absorbing or distracting, informative or trash, social glue or atomizer, art or opiate—since its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, the social, cultural, and aesthetic values of television have been contested by experts, critics, fans, and viewers in debates that tend to these extremes. This course charts out the values and possibilities in between, using the writing process, different research methods, and critical inquiry to explore the ambivalent uses, meanings, and effects of a medium characterized by mutability and ubiquity.

In the first unit of this course, we’ll dive into the historical and theoretical dimensions of television, and think and write about how television as a form of technology and part of everyday life shapes our viewing experiences and affects the medium’s socio-cultural dimensions. Our initial readings, viewings, and discussions will prepare you to compose an argumentative essay in which you come to terms with a foundational essay on television in the twentieth century, and consider how the meanings and values that essay ascribes to the medium have mutated in the twenty-first-century “post-network” era. The second unit of the course shifts our focus to the poetics of television, and we will attend to television as both a socio-cultural forum and an aesthetic form. Building on the theories explored in the first unit, we’ll consider how television reflects and participates in public conversations about sexuality, race, class, and gender. For the major essay for this unit, you will develop a vocabulary to describe televisual style and an understanding of how style surfaces in discourses around television’s relationship to identity, difference, and representation. The final unit of the course adds narrative form to the study of poetics; for your final essay, you will examine a contemporary dramatic TV series in terms of seriality, quality, and/or complexity. 

This sampling of key concepts, issues, and developments related to television’s past, present, and future is designed to raise questions that will prove particularly provocative to write about and (ideally) will transform your understanding and appreciation of a medium with which you are deeply familiar. We will watch a number of episodes of TV series together, and in order to facilitate your engagement with TV that matters to you, your final essay will invite you to watch and write about series of your (limited) choice. 

What can I expect to get out of this course? (AKA, Course Objectives)

  • Develop an understanding of writing as fundamentally intertextual (as “rewriting”)
  • Write about different modes, styles, and genres of television in language that is specific and engaging 
  • Learn about important concepts and developments in television history and theory, and connect them to your own changing experiences as a spectator
  • Appreciate how small changes in your writing practice can create significant differences in the expression of your ideas. 
  • Respond to your peers’ writing in ways that contribute to their rewriting 

 What are we going to do? (AKA, Learning Activities)

Think of our class meetings as a mix of discussion section and lab. We will spend about half of our time together talking in focused ways about what we are writing/reading/viewing, and the other half working on components of your compositions. Consistently thoughtful and collaborative participation is vital to creating a positive learning experience for you and for the class as a whole. This kind of participation means a lot more than showing up, and even more than showing up having read or watched the assigned material. It means showing up ready to offer considerate comments and ask specific questions about the texts, ideas, and projects at hand. Additionally, I may ask you to do short writing activities (e.g. handouts, super short Forum posts) in class, and these will count towards your participation grade on a pass/fail basis. 

Your primary writing for the course will take the shape of three essays (between 1,250-2000 words each) in which you practice the moves outlined in what amounts to our textbook for the course, Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: coming to terms with or conveying an understanding of the ideas and language of other writers; forwarding and countering the claims of other writers; and taking on another writer’s approach—which is to say, adapting not just their methods but also their sensibility. As you will see in the Course Schedule, the three units of the course are designed around these three moves and their corresponding essays. You can read more about the aims and requirements of the essays in the Assignments tab on Collab, and we’ll discuss them in vivid detail in class. Know at the outset that you will build up to your “final” draft for each essay through weekly forum posts, peer review sessions, and discussion with me. 

The first essay will have a revision opportunity (and thus a chance to raise your grade). You can revise and re-submit this essay by Tuesday, November 26 at 5p.m. I will re-grade your essay, and your final grade for the assignment will be the average of your original grade and the grade for your revision. I encourage you to meet with me in office hours and to make the most of resources such as the Writing Center as you revise. Revisions to your essay must be substantial and include marked improvements in argumentation, structure, and/or dialogue with scholarly sources. Essays that include only minor changes to grammar, punctuation, citational mechanics, and/or word choice will not be re-graded. 

Submitting revision: Please drop off a print copy of your revised essay + your initial submission w/my feedback and the rubric in my mailbox in the main office of Bryan 219 by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 26. Note that we do not have class on this day. You can also give me your revision (and the initial essay) anytime before this in class or office hours. 

Weekly posts on the Forum on Collab will connect your writing with our class discussion. Every week (with a few exceptions), you will post a response (~300 words) to that week’s prompt. Posts are due at 5 p.m. on Sundays.You are encouraged to use a conversational tone (if that suits you), but please spend some time thinking through your ideas and crafting your prose. Please provide citations to any texts referenced in end or foot notes—no formal bibliography is needed for these posts. The prompts for the posts are designed to generate material for your larger essays, and you are encouraged to mine them when it comes to writing those larger texts. 

We will start class each week by workshopping two posts—that is, discussing the writing with a generous critical eye. Every student will have one post workshopped. Please sign up for a slot using the link below. You don’t need to do anything to prepare for the workshop—just be sure to submit your post to the Forum on Collab on the given Friday and show up for class on the following Tuesday ready to share your process (Did you try something new and want to hear if it worked? Do you want to keep working on this for larger project?) and listen to what your peers think about it. 

If you are in Section 052 (meets at 12:30 p.m. in Shannon House), please sign up for a workshopping slot here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19RHVSm84lAVfKGU5n4yLyCE1PeKa3jcvhummJW4hueg/edit?usp=sharing

If you are in Section 066 (meets at 3:30 p.m. in NCH), please sign up for a workshopping slot here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b8gJ1iYXGq-FmYxSXTpOAVdXf4LlvTndt-NmdNQfaPo/edit?usp=sharing

How will I be graded?

This course adheres to UVa’s standard course grade thresholds: 

A+       100

A         95

A-        90

B+       87

B          83

B-        80

C+       77

C         73

C-        70

D+      67

D         63

D-        60

F          0

IN       -1

Your overall course grade will be calculated according to this breakdown:

  • Participation: 15%
  • Weekly Forum Posts: 20% (10% completion and 10% graded top two posts)
  • Essay #1: Coming to Terms with TV (Or, What is Television?): 20%
  • Essay #2: Forwarding and Countering TV Poetics 20%
  • Essay #3: Taking an Approach to Complex Television: 25%

Participation will be evaluated according to the following guidelines:

  • A: Consistent, thoughtful and thought-provoking engagement in discussions; applies and/or challenges assigned texts; brings specific ideas and questions about assigned texts to class; engages with and/or motivates peers
  • B: Actively listens in class and occasionally comments; good collaboration with classmates; prepared and participates actively in individual and group work; occasionally late
  • C: Tends to look disengaged; uses cellphone or laptop for purposes not related to class activities; often late; problematic collaboration with classmates
  • D: Sleeps in class; rarely pays attention and/or is disruptive; frequently late or absent; unprepared for peer review or group meetings
  • F: Doesn’t attend class often; sleeps through class when present or is disengaged; disruptive and/or disrespectful to class/group.

For each of your three essays, you’ll receive a grading rubric and written feedback from me.  

Your forum posts will be graded two ways. First, all posts will be graded “all or nothing” (100 or 0) based on completion, and that grade will count for half of the 20% allocated to forum posts. There is a 10% penalty per day (including weekends) for late forum posts—no exceptions! Second, at the end of the semester you’ll identify the two posts that you’re most satisfied with, and I’ll grade those two using parameters that will be familiar from the essay rubrics. The grade on these two posts will count for the other half of the 20%. In short, 10% of your overall grade is based on just completing the posts, and 10% is based on the quality of two posts that you pick. 

What texts and materials are required—and how will we use them? 

You can expect to spend about $70 on materials for this course. If this presents a financial challenge to you, please feel free to email me or speak with me in office hours, and we can easily find an alternative. 

  • Course pack: Our key readings are collected in a course pack, available for purchase at N.K. Print and Design on the Corner (7 Elliewood Avenue, ph: 434-296-9669). The course pack costs $43.25. The use of a printed course pack is intentional: I want you to read the texts carefully and to make marginal notes, and I want us to look closely at passages together when we discuss them in class. For that reason, be sure to bring your course pack to every class. A few additional required readings are linked on the schedule. You can read them online and/or print them out. 
  • Book:You will need to buy one book for this course: Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, second edition (2017). Itis available at the university bookstore for $22.95. You are free to buy it elsewhere—just be sure to get the second edition and, for the reasons stated above, please buy the print version.
  • TV shows: Most of the shows we’ll be watching and discussing together in class will be available to stream on Collab (or they’ll be screened in class). For your final essay, you’ll choose one of the series below and will need to figure out a way to watch it on your own. If you have not yet done so, you can sign up for a free month-long trial subscription to most streaming sites and then cancel it once you’ve finished the essay. Almost all of the show below are also available on DVD at the library, and you can check out a DVD player to hook up to your laptop. Please speak with me if you have any issues accessing these shows—I have easy access to a lot of them!

    This course focuses more on writing (and reading and talking) about television than it does on watching it. That said, I encourage you to watch as much television as you can, and particularly to check out series that come up in our readings and conversations; to do so, you may want to subscribe to a streaming service for the entire semester.  

For the final essay, you will be choosing one of the series below. You are also welcome to choose a series of your liking, but you must discuss this choice with me (and make a compelling case for it) in your first individual conference with me in Week Five—which means you need to start thinking about this project now! 

Long-running series (just need to watch and write about one season) 

  • The Wire (HBO)
  • Breaking Bad (Netflix)
  • Better Call Saul (Netflix)
  • Twin Peaks (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon)
  • Six Feet Under (HBO)
  • Orange is the New Black (Netflix) 
  • Atlanta (season 2, Hulu))
  • Enlightened (HBO) 
  • Transparent (Amazon)

Mini/anthology series 

  • Broadchurch (Netflix)
  • Top of the Lake (Netflix)
  • Big Little Lies (HBO) 
  • The Night Of (HBO)
  • Fargo (Hulu) 
  • Fleabag (Amazon)
  • When They See Us (Netflix)

I highly recommend that you start exploring which series you want to focus on sooner rather than later. You will need to figure out a way to watch your series—thus you may need to subscribe to a streaming service for a month or two. These tips may help:

Answers to some of the many other questions you may have

How will we use technology in class?

I ask that you consider the default mode of the class to be “unplugged”; that is, unless otherwise instructed, please keep your books and pen and paper ready at hand, and keep your laptops, tablets, and phones tucked away. Studies show that we retain a great deal more from taking notes by hand, and experience proves that classroom discussions are much richer without the distraction of screens. If you have only ever taken notes using a laptop and are uncomfortably writing by hand, please use this course as an opportunity to try it out (I post all my slides so you can easily retrieve important information later, and there aren’t any high-stakes cumulative exams in here).   

Of course, this course is about screen media, and we will rely on a range of digital technologies and texts to aid the writing process. To that end, please bring your laptop or tablet to class, as we will frequently work on components of major assignments and complete short writing and research tasks during class. It’s also a good idea to keep a pair of headphones with you, as some of our in-class work will require watching—and listening—to shows individually.

If you find yourself succumbing—in this class or others—to the siren songs of social media and internet browsing, please install a productivity app (I recommend Cold Turkey) to remove the temptation. These apps are also excellent tools for writing and studying.  

When and what are office hours? 

Office hours are set times in which you can drop in and discuss any questions, ideas, or concerns you have with me. My office hours are 2:15 to 3:15 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Bryan Hall, 102-B. You don’t need to make an appointment to come to office hours, but if you know you have limited time, please shoot me an email so we can make sure to fit you in. If you can’t make it during my office hours, feel free to email me and we can set up an alternative time.

In Weeks Six and Eleven, you are required to sign up for and attend a 15-minute individual conference with me to workshop/discuss the draft of your current essay project (and any other concerns or questions). When the time rolls around, you can use the “Sign-up” tool in Collab (lefthand toolbar) to sign up for your meeting. Please bring notes and drafts of your essay with you. Failure to sign up for and attend your conference will be reflected in your participation grade. This is an opportunity to have a casual yet focused conversation with me—don’t sweat it! Also, don’t let this be the first or only time to come to office hours!

What’s the deal with attendance? 

This course follows the Academic and Professional Writing Program’s policy on attendance. This means that you can miss up to two class meetings without penalty. For each additional absence, your grade in the course will be lowered by two-thirds of a letter grade (thus, for example, if you had a C+, it would be lowered to a C-). There is no distinction between excused and unexcused classes. Absences due to varsity sports travel, religious holidays, or serious medical crises (experienced by you or a member of your immediate family) are the only types of absences that do not count towards the allotted two absences mentioned above.

How do I submit my work—and what if it’s late? 

  • First, back up your work so you can submit it: Stop reading this right now and get yourself a UVA Box account: http://its.virginia.edu/box/! Then figure out how to automatically back up all your files with it. This is an incredible amount of cloud storage for free—take advantage of it! No extensions will be granted in cases of work lost to mysterious computer crashes and meltdowns!
  • Submitting Essays: Please submit a stapled, printed copy of your first two major essays at the beginning of class on the given due date. All other assignments should be submitted in the appropriate folder on Collab. Please do not email me assignments and do not submit any assignments as links to Google docs. Accessing Google docs creates headaches on my end. Furthermore, the platform does not offer sufficiently robust word-processing tools for your writing (e.g. it limits the functionality of footnotes and endnotes); if you must use Google docs to compose your writing, please export it, save it as a Word document, and print or upload it.
  • Preparing for peer-review sessions: For each of your three major essays, you’ll work with a partner in class to shape and hone your prose in the week leading up to submission. This process, called peer review, can be an incredibly productive part of the writing process, but to make it worthwhile, you need to come to the table with a substantial amount of writing on the page. On the course schedule, you’ll see that the first day of peer review for each essay amounts to the preliminary deadline for that essay; failure to bring a draft that meets the minimum word length will result in your essay grade being lowered one-third of a letter grade (so, a B+ essay would become a B essay).   
  • Submitting essays late: There is a 5% penalty per day (including weekends) for late essays and a 10% penalty per day (including weekends) for forum posts. If you anticipate or find yourself in a difficult situation that interferes with timely completion of an assignment, please discuss it with me as soon as possible so that we can work out an alternative that is fair to you and other students in the class.

How do I cite my sources? 

We will discuss the conventions and larger significance of scholarly citation in great detail in this course. Unless otherwise instructed, please use Chicago Notes and Bibliography (NB). For Collab posts, you do not need to create a bibliography—placing the bibliographic information in footnotes or endnotes will suffice. For major essays, please create a bibliography in addition to your footnotes. We will discuss how to translate your fine-tuned understanding of Chicago to other disciplinary bibliographic styles.

What is plagiarism? 

You have been introduced to the University’s distinctive approach to honor and its honor committee. In this course, honor or academic integrity manifests most commonly in relations to issues of academic fraud, namely plagiarism. The University defines plagiarism as 

representing someone else’s ideas or work as your own original ideas or work. Plagiarism encompasses many things and is by far the most common manifestation of academic fraud. For example, copying a passage straight from a book, a website, or any other source into a paper without using quotation marks and explicitly citing the source is plagiarism. Additionally, paraphrasing without citing your original source is considered plagiarism. It is very important that students properly acknowledge all ideas, work, and even distinctive words or phrases that are not their own.

Throughout the semester, we will practice how to work with others’ ideas and language in ways that are both effective and ethical. Before things get going, though, please review this page to get a sense of the university-wide expectations for academic integrity and the consequences for violating it. If you are at all confused about issues related to plagiarism, please feel free to speak with me in office hours. 

Useful Resources

Academic Resources

  • The Writing Center(http://professionalwriting.as.virginia.edu/welcome-writing-center):I encourage you to make an appointment at the Writing Center to work on drafts of any (or all!) of your assignments for this course. Appointments are 50-minute long sessions in which you work one-on-one with a tutor to begin, revise, and/or refine a piece of writing. You may be surprised to learn that the Writing Center is not remedial; working with a writing tutor can benefit writers at all stages and levels, and can be especially helpful if you’re trying to develop and shape already high-level writing. 

Library Resources 

Campus Resources for Well-being, Safety, and Success

There are a lot of these. Please feel free to speak with me if you don’t know where to start. 

  • Student Disability Access Center (SDAC): The University of Virginia strives to provide accessibility to all students. If you require an accommodation to fully access this course, please contact the Student Disability Access Center at 434-243-5180 or sdac@virginia.edu. If you are unsure if you require an accommodation, or to learn more about their services, you may contact the SDAC at the number above or by visiting their website. 
  • Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) : CAPS is available to you anytime, 24/7, and their services are covered in your student fees. Please call 434-243-5150 or visit their website. 
  • Dean of Students :The Dean of Students provides assistance in times of crisis. In particular, their Just Report It program should be one of your first lines of contact if you are concerned about an incident of sexual violence, hazing, or bias.
  • The Women’s Center: from their website, “The Women’s Center is a vital hub of resources and opportunities on Grounds. We work every day at the intersection of social justice issues that affect our students, faculty and staff on Grounds, our neighbors and friends in Charlottesville, and women and men globally.”
  • The Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights: Please contact the Office of EOCR if you are concerned about an issue of harassment or discrimination