ENGL 3860: Introduction Slide Deck

The things that matter to us—our beliefs and values, the places and
institutions that shelter and sustain our modes of being, the cultural
productions that give meaning and direction to that being—must be
argued for. Like gardeners we must cultivate the lives that matter to us.
The world as we know it and the worlds we might want otherwise must
be persuasively articulated in order to be kept and made real. A term
precious to democratic life, republic (res publica), means simply “a public
thing”: a thing held together in common but also over and about which we
argue.