George Packer, in his review in the The New Yorker, “Home Fries: How soldiers write their wars,” (April 7, 2014) gives a good overview of contemporary war literature except for the fact that he almost completely disregards one of the most interesting and complex bodies of work by American veterans… Continue reading
Congratulations to Bob Wood, whose recent poetry collection The Awkward Poses of Others launched him into nomination for the 50th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards! In addition to actively publishing poetry and scholarship, Bob is a supportive and wise mentor for some Britts. Well done, Bob! Continue reading
When this school year began, everyone was talking about the GT convocation video that went viral. “You can do that!” was the theme of the speech, where “that” meant things like changing the world, crushing the shoulders of giants, and building the Iron Man Suit. Big ideas! Big risks! Epic… Continue reading
My “English 1102: African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Digital Present” students’ final assignment this term was a version of one that Anne Sexton gave in her “Anne on Anne” course at Colgate University in the spring of 1972. Sexton taught a class on her own poetry and her teaching… Continue reading
The World Englishes Committee invites you to a poetic celebration of diversity at Georgia Tech. Sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program, the event will feature international Georgia Tech students reading poetry from their home countries, both in the original language and in English, and conclude with a question and answer… Continue reading
You are invited to hear poet, scholar, and teacher Grace Bauer read from and discuss her newest collection, Nowhere All At Once. Grace Bauer, recipient of Academy of American Poets Prize and the Idaho Poetry Prize, was a 2009 nominee for the National Poets’ Prize. Ms. Bauer’s newest collections of poems include Nowhere… Continue reading
Like so many writing instructors, I frequently find myself frustrated with what appears to be a lack of attention to editing in the papers I receive from my students. In the Fall 2013 semester, I tried something new in an effort to address this issue by inviting students to record… Continue reading
I run my first-year composition seminar as an acting class several times per semester. What does that mean? If you were to visit us, here are some of the things you might witness: physical and vocal warm-ups movement and dance experiments improvisation games observation exercises imagination training scene study discussion… Continue reading
Read Christina Van Houten’s contribution to Materialist Feminisms Against Neoliberalism, a special edition of Politics and Culture. “bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Ecological Returns” addresses the ways in which bell hooks’ thinking turns to a politics of critical regionalism, by tracing a line that discursively connects materialist feminism, antiracist… Continue reading
Read Aaron Kashtan’s recent blogpost about student-led discussions here. …I announced that I was going to sit in the back of the room and let the students lead the discussion. And this had an immediate positive effect. The students started talking and making fascinating points… Click the link for more. Continue reading
The title for this post (the first of two) comes from a response I received to a brief writing exercise I assigned to a group of University of Rochester students in a previous semester’s writing class. I was considering the possibility of teaching Moby-Dick in a freshman writing class, and… Continue reading
Each year, more than 6,000 Georgia Tech undergraduates enroll in courses offered by the Writing and Communication Program (WCP), whose home is in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. These multimodal courses are designed and taught by Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows. To showcase students’ artistic work created in… Continue reading
Brittain fellow Aaron Kashtan is featured in a recent Atlantic article by Noah Berlatsky entitled “The Incoherent Backlashes to Black Actors Playing ‘White’ Superheroes.” The article details recent social media outcry on the part of many white fans in response to the announcement that African-American actor Michael B. Jordan has… Continue reading
On Tuesday, February 18, from 11-12 PM in Hall 102, the Communication Colloquium presents “The Language of Tech Comm: Teaching Technical Communication From a Humanities Perspective.” LMC 3403: Technical Communication is a course that places an emphasis on workplace communication and that helps third- and fourth-year undergraduates learn strategies necessary for creating… Continue reading
We at TECHStyle are proud to present our third episode of the podcast, starring Dr. Rebecca Burnett, the director of the Writing and Communication Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the Director of the Brittain post-doctoral program, both here at Georgia Tech. This episode is the… Continue reading
Christine Hoffmann’s essay “Middling Through Somehow: Queer Temporality and the Disaster Meme,” has been published in Issue 26 of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. The essay discusses copia and the anxieties that surround abundance of expression in 21st-century online discourse. In (rhetorical) theory, copia promotes stability, correspondence and perfect… Continue reading
Clint Stivers and Phoebe Bronstein In the last post, we discussed mise en scene–everything that is put/placed in the scene–and so for this post, we are moving on to cinematography. Cinematography refers to what the camera does from framing, to focus, and movement. In early filmmaking cameras were heavier, and… Continue reading
Writing in itself is an aesthetic art not merely acquired, but more so felt. To say the least, writing is not baseball, and you cannot purely practice to become better. There comes a point when your grammar, style, diction, and syntax may create the ideal writing, but can still be… Continue reading
Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship Composition, Technical Communication, and Digital Pedagogy The Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech seeks recent PhDs in English, literature, rhetoric, composition, technical communication, film, linguistics, visual rhetoric/design, and related humanities fields for the Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship, renewable up to three years, includes… Continue reading
My spring English 1102 course, “African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Digital Present,” will address the range and variety of African American literature beginning with the poetry and fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. The writers we will read include Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude MacKay, Jean Toomer,… Continue reading
Phoebe Bronstein and Clint Stivers As teachers of multimodal/WOVEN artifacts, we naturally understand how to teach students how to arrange images for effective designs in posters, presentations, infographics, and other visual mediums. Despite having experience in visual rhetoric, some teachers express difficulty in how to approach teaching film. In this… Continue reading
In this post, I’d like to write about student posters and start/continue a conversation about the importance of the V in WOVEN. The Rhetoric of Waste and Sustainability: Teaching writing at Georgia Tech, an institution that prides itself with training problem-solvers, I invite my students to use multimodal communication as… Continue reading
Britts, help spread the word about the Marty Fink’s Spring ENGL 1102 course, Queer New Media. The course will be the first of its kind at Georgia Tech, and will engage questions of digital media through an investigation of queer fiction and cultural production. There will also be a heavy… Continue reading
In my English 1102 “Digital Woolf” class at Georgia Tech this fall, we began with Howards End (1910), by Virginia Woolf’s contemporary, E. M. Forster, which we followed with Woolf’s novels, Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927).[1] We will be concluding the course with her… Continue reading
