ENGL 3860: Syllabus Mini Newspaper

Public WriTing wriTe the world
ENGL 3850 FALL 2023
Welcome to the Fall Semester!
What other possible futures are available?
Our worlds are built of things
that matter: values, relations
(friends and family), institutions
(cultural, political, religious),
infrastructures (roads, schools,
utilities) and cultural productions
(literature, music, movies). We
build worlds by sharing these
things that matter to us through
all means of communication: we
write reviews of books online, we
share pictures of the food we eat
and the places we visit and
inhabit, and we speak out on
behalf of others in the name of
justice. And in this course, that is
exactly what you will do: write
about the things that matter to
you.
matter in ways that contribute
their continued mattering. 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.
Indeed, a term precious to
environmental and social justice.
But there is a catch. You must
write publicly about things that

Indeed, a term precious to
democratic life, republic, means
simply “a public thing”: a thing
held together in common but also
over and about which we argue.
This means that our writing too
must be public. No mere diary
entries or talk among aficionados,
we must produce public texts for
unfamiliar audiences who might
not yet share our commitment to
public parks, accessibility, pop
music, food security, bricks, the
environmental and social justice.
To engage such audiences, you’ll
need to write persuasively and in
media that activate and cultivate
that audience’s attention. This
time around, the course is
digging into Zine culture. Zines
a r e s h o r t , s e l f - p u b l i s h e d
magazines dedicated to a
particular, underrepresented
subject matter, which are then
i n f o r m a l l y c i r c u l a t e d ( v i a
p h o t o c o p y i n g ) . Z i n e s a r e
evocative mixtures of prose,
images, and design elements. In
addition to fashioning a series of
zines on a topic of their
choosing, students will have
opportunities to create stickers,
buttons, posters and a range of
other tangible texts in the
service of bringing their project to
life. The goal of this course is for
you to write in public so that the
things that matter to you might
persist and flourish—so that your
world can be shared with others.
Students have complete creative
control over their productions in
terms of medium, style, and
content. The only requirement is
that these texts be public and for
a discernible audience who might
yet be persuaded.
More information about the
course and its work can be found
at slupublicrhetoric.tumblr.com.