Fall Seminar (FP 0003)

FP 0003 is a 4-credit course offered in the fall term. The course focuses on writing and provides the same enrichment activities that FP 0001 offers, including: 

  • Diverse activities that complement the theme of the seminar, including those that introduce you to the city and its cultural resources; 
  • Enrichment experiences such as film screenings and lectures by faculty; and 
  • Opportunities for group study. 

Class themes for are listed below:

Borders, Barriers, and Bridges

Who decides the location of a national border?  How are borders amended as political contexts shift?  What are the implications for porous or firm borders for the communities that surround them?  How do borders and barriers influence our thinking and our connections to one another?

 

In this seminar you will read, write and engage with visuals that help you to consider the role of borders, barriers and bridges in your own experience of the places that matter to you.  We will consider their influence on you, your thinking and how you understand aspects of local and national concepts of community in relation to what separates and connects us as individuals and as groups.   You will write essays from your own experience, your own research and undertake collaborative work with your peers, as we explore written, visual and theatrical explorations of how borders, barriers and bridges affect our past, present and future.


In Pittsburgh, we will visit the Hill District.  We will explore university neighborhoods impacted by legacies of “urban renewal” and the slow expansion of the university corridor.  We will view murals and consider how artists offer windows in the walls that we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out.  You will read and view States by Edward Said, a Palestinian exile whose work pairs photographs by Jean Mohr with his own exploratory writing, as he considers what it means to be a citizen of a nation without a state.  We will consider installations like Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall, along the border between the United States and Mexico.   We will read their meditations on these designs and what it means to build a practice that insists on connections, rather than differences, between neighboring nations.  We will view films like Mairéad McClean’s Making Her Mark and consider the absurdity of borders, alongside their dire implications when such borders are not respected.   We will also view Laurence McKeown’s The Green and Blue, a portrayal of policing along the Irish and Northern Irish border, to consider what it means for an individual to represent a state in patrols, wearing particular uniforms and maintaining a firm barrier between nations and regions.

Working for Social Change

“Working for Social Change” provides a framework for exploring your campus and city and reflecting upon your role as a community member. While completing meaningful service and formative academic work, you’ll consider the many means of engaging with social systems and advocating for social justice. You’ll read a variety of essays and write your own; student writing will inform class discussions through a workshop format. Class periods will include guest speakers and some off-campus sessions with partnering agencies. Students will complete the course with a game plan for employing their skills, education, and experience to help bring about positive social change.

What's Food Got to Do with It?

Food is everywhere. And not just on our plates. It is intertwined with identity, gender, power, memory, entertainment, and pain. This course examines Toni Morrison’s Paradise along with various essays to spur discussions around representations of food in literature and popular culture. Alongside our readings, we’ll experiment with different writing styles and strategies to create impactful, purposeful work with personal and cultural significance. We’ll learn how to leverage our connections to food to craft meaningful prose around topics of students’ choosing. Abundance, scarcity, representations of the body, othering, nostalgia, cultural celebrations, and more are all fair game. In the words of the ultimate American gourmand, M.F.K. Fisher, “with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perceptions of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves.” Bon appétit, and cheers to discovering a hearty appetite for writing!

Funny Story: Humor & Critique

Comedy dominates American culture. Storytelling is ubiquitous in the modern world. And funny stories can be so much, well, fun! While enjoying the pleasures of humor and narrative, this course will also take seriously and critique these genres as powerful cultural forces in our public and personal lives. In this course we will read, watch, and analyze personal essay writing and recorded performances by contemporary humorists, comedians, and critics from a diverse range of backgrounds, including David Sedaris, Lindy West, Damon Young, Pheobe Robinson and Cathy Park Hong. As we laugh, we will consider: how do humor and storytelling function in our personal lives? What are the potential benefits, and limitations, of humor and first-person narrative to comment on serious social and political issues? The course readings will provide models and inspiration for writers, who will draw on previous experiences in search of unusual, playful, and humorous ways to reconsider everyday life. Assignments include personal essays, creative nonfiction, and academic writing that offers writers the opportunity to experiment with style, try out playful techniques, and write from a more authentic writing voice.

Writing the Body

The story of the body—in art, literature, religion, philosophy—has been notoriously fraught. Whereas the ancients regarded the human form as something to be celebrated, Biblical accounts of creation depict embodiment as the primary source of sin and shame, ever threatening to disrupt the mind and corrupt the soul. In Writing the Body, we'll study the work of writers who use the body to look squarely at the culture and the self—to raise questions, to process trauma, illness, and joy, to explore identity and grief, to celebrate. In the company of personal essayists and poets, students will write both analytically and autobiographically, exploring Ross Gay’s notion that “The body is an instrument of thought.” 

On a Quest 

Why are quests important? What can we learn from them?  What sorts of questions do they raise and lead us to?  What sorts of answers might they give us?   Looking at representations of quests in early medieval and contemporary stories, films, art, and TV can lead us to speculate about these questions; perhaps finding the ways quests, searches, and missions help humans discover, learn, and find out about themselves, their past, and the world around them.   In this seminar you’ll write essays which draw on what the class reads and watches and discusses, and consider how this material is  relevant to you and your life.  This seminar will be a kind of quest itself, setting goals and asking important questions, and arriving at some important answers through reading, watching, discussing, and writing.

Rereading Popular Culture

This seminar uses contemporary popular culture as its subject matter.  We are all immersed in popular culture, both experiencing it and authoring it.  Through an examination of the history and contexts of popular culture in the United States, we’ll discover how it has been formed into this all-pervasive construct.   We will explore film, television, video games, fashion, food, and other cultural phenomena that tell us a great deal about who we are individually and as a society.  We will also examine the extraordinary impact the digital age is having on our world, even as the Internet and the myriad devices we access it with continue to evolve at a rapid pace.  Through a series of reading and writing assignments, as well as out-of-class explorations, we will develop new lenses and ways of seeing the dynamic world we live in with the aim of becoming more curious, critical, and active participants in culture. 

Capitalism: Do You Buy It?

We make choices about what to do with our money every day. Businesses invest millions of dollars every year to gain our money and trust, via advertising and marketing campaigns.  The profits we help generate are then used to make decisions that affect our lives, communities, and planet. How can we be more aware of our role in this process? In this class we will investigate the rhetoric of corporate capitalism through readings, documentaries, and exploration of the ads we see and hear daily. We will also study how activists work to expose and critique the rhetoric of corporate capitalism. Together we will investigate the marketing messages we receive and our responses to them, in order to discover: Why do we buy what we buy?

Ballot Box Writing, 2024 

In November, 2024, in the middle of Pitt's fall semester, voters in the US will elect a president. In this class, we will use this election to focus and motivate our writing, reading, and discussions. Rather than debating the merits of this or that candidate, we will zoom out to examine larger questions: What do we gain, if anything, by voting? How do we form our opinions? How do we balance self-interest and the common good? In signing up, bear in mind that this is not a poli-sci class. We will not aim to become experts in anything other than writing. Toward that end, we will write essays that argue and explore. In an oral history project, we will interview family members, friends, and strangers about what the election, or democracy more broadly, means to them.

Doctoring the Story 

In “Doctoring the Story” we use the figure of the medical doctor in graphic memoir, fiction, and archival documents to explore themes of transition, medical ethics, individuality, and community. How has the archetype of the troubled doctor been used to explore ethical dilemmas and ambiguity in literature and popular culture? How have physicians themselves told and “doctored” their own stories using creative and journalistic modes of composition? How does the abundance of doctor narratives in popular culture inform how we talk about community and public health at the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and (dis)ability? We will practice interdisciplinary and creative essay writing in response to these questions.