courses | Adam Haley, PhD

LEAP/ENGL 15: Composing Across Media

This course will argue that writing does not existâ€”and never has existedâ€”in a vacuum, that it is constantly influenced by (and influencing!) other modes of communication, expression, and thought in other genres, contexts, and media forms.

ENGL 262: Culture Under Surveillance

On some level, surveillance and narrative seem to have an awful lot in common: both are technologies reaching across time and space to allow some parties to see into the inner lives of others, to witness and record private moments, to look from the outside in and make the private public.

LEAP/ENGL 15: Photography and Writing

As Andre Agassi and Canon told us in 1990, image is everything.

ENGL 15: Image and Rhetoric

How does persuasive writing conjure images in its audienceâ€™s heads, and how do those images embody or enable the act of persuasion? And: why are images so powerful in human culture, to the point that we go to war for flags, threaten violence over cartoons, and regulate or outright censor various kinds of visual depictions? What makes the image so potent, and how might it help us understand rhetoric more broadly?

ENGL 136: Comics

I aim for you to leave this class with a handle on why comics are far from the trivial, adolescent timesuck others often assume them to beâ€”indeed, why they have been one of the most vital and interesting forms of cultural production over the last century.

ENGL 30: Writing the Future

This course will focus on the persuasive and philosophical uses of the future, and on the importance of implicit and explicit claims about the future to so many rhetorical acts. Taking as its thematic content various fictional and nonfictional imaginings of the futureâ€”some explicitly argumentative, some less soâ€”we will investigate how visions of the future function rhetorically and how they constitute arguments about and calls to action in the present.

ENGL 436: Fiction, Game, World

A world is an odd thing. But like so many fundamental components of how we think about and experience our lives, its oddness as a concept is not immediately apparent.

ENGL 262: The Possibilities of Postmodern Historical Fiction

Faulkner tells us that not only is the past not dead, itâ€™s not even past; this course will ask how, why, and to what effects the past is present (and I mean this both chronologicallyâ€”present as nowâ€”and spatiallyâ€”present as here).

ENGL 436: “Contemporary” “American” “Fiction”

Our nominal topic is a particularly slippery one: contemporary American fiction. Not only is there no recognized â€œcanonâ€ of contemporary American fiction, itâ€™s difficult even to pin down any of the three words in that key phrase.

ENGL 191: Science Fiction

Science fiction has long occupied a strange, somewhat precarious position in Western culture. Popular but nerdy, lucrative but marginalized, the stuff of dreams but the butt of jokes, it is both a driving force behind literary history and a counter-tradition at the margins of that history.