WRI 101 | Model Course B

To adjust for remote teaching during the pandemic, this course was designed for a thirteen-week semester, the typical four-project model pared down to three projects, each taking four weeks to complete. In addition, rather than holding primarily whole-class seminars, small groups of students cycled through weekly meetings, some devoted to discussing readings and planning approach to arguments, others devoted to commenting upon drafts and revising.  Entitled “Pandemics in the Public Mind,” the course invited students to describe, explain, and evaluate how pandemics have been publicly represented.

Drawing upon George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s classic work on public metaphor, Metaphors We Live By, students examined the systematicity of commonly-used metaphors that infuse our normative conceptions and gain, over time, a measure of epistemic authority (“argument as war,” or love understood as a force field,” for example).  With this theory under their belts, students turned to metaphors typically used to describe medical interventions, especially bellicose metaphors circulated in terms of war, or more recently, Covid-19. This was also a way to open the conversation to focus on the effects of representations of illness, more generally and to envision alternative representations. The second project asked students to examine an approach to the 1914 influenza pandemic in the United States–namely the barricading of a small town in Washington state fictionally represented in Thomas Mullen’s The Last Town on Earth, an historical novel that traces the decline of a small logging community during the pandemic. Finally, students focused on the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, chronicled in Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, an account of the work of John Snow, generally considered a pioneer in epidemiological research. Johnson frames Snow’s work by drawing on the conventions of detective fiction, which tends to frame those who are ill as “victims,” and Snow as salvific. Students argued about the ethics of that framing.