Writing 5 Section Descriptions for Fall Term 2025

Writing 5 introduces Dartmouth students to the writing process that characterizes intellectual work in the academy and in educated public discourse. Each section of Writing 5 organizes its writing assignments around challenging readings chosen by the instructor. The course focuses primarily on the writing process, emphasizing careful reading and analysis, thoughtful questions, and strategies of effective argument. Below you will find a list of the courses being offered next term.

Writing 5 -- Expository Writing

Section 01

Hour: 10; Instructor: Francine A'Ness

Course Title: Experience and Education: Students, Teachers, Institutions, and the Power of Learning
Description: “Writing” is a process; one that includes a series of discrete yet always related tasks. These range from critical reading, close textual analysis, and/or research to composition and presentation. The goal of this course is to explore the writing process and practice these related tasks through a series of in-class and out-of-class activities. Our topic will be education in a broad sense. In addition to reflecting on your own educational journeys from kindergarten to college, we will analyze, from a cross-cultural perspective, a series of “texts”—plays, films, essays, even lived experiences that deal directly with education, learning, social change, and mobility. The foundational text for the course will be John Dewey’s classic 1938 work on educational reform "Experience and Education." We will supplement Dewey’s text with other essays from educational philosophy and sociology. Some of the questions we will address will be: What is the relationship between education and schooling? What makes an experience educational? How can education be both oppressive and liberatory? In addition to these questions, you will have an opportunity to pursue your own education-related interests.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 02

Hour: 12; Instructor: John Barger

Course Title: Identity in Poetry and Cinema
Description: Personal identity—how it’s shaped, expressed, fractured, and reclaimed—is a central concern of both poetry and film. In all three of our primary objects (Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems; Barbara Loden’s film Wanda; and Nathalie Léger’s nonfiction book Suite for Barbara Loden), the artist projects aspects of lived experience onto the “screen” of the work, whether literal or metaphorical. Howe’s poems draw from her deeply personal reflections on childhood and family; Loden’s film, though fictional, draws on her own background and social position, blurring the boundaries between character and creator; Léger, to research her nonfiction book, travels to America to investigate Loden’s life and film, using her own fraught relationship with her mother as a lens. In this course, we will explore how these works construct identity in relation to gender, community, grief, and mental health. We will also consider media: how the tools of poetry (voice, metaphor, line) and cinema (sound, editing, image) overlap and differ in their representations of the self. Alongside our primary objects, we’ll also engage with scholarly essays from different disciplines and voices within and beyond the English-speaking world. You will complete three major assignments: Essay 1 (analysis of a single object), Essay 2 (analysis of two objects), and Essay 3 (analysis of multiple objects). By practicing academic writing as a mode of critical analysis that navigates between languages and cultures, you will develop strategies of expression, argument, and critique that will prepare you to think and write effectively at Dartmouth and beyond.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Marie Howe: New and Selected Poems (ISBN: 978-1-324-07503-5); Suite for Barbara Loden, by Nathalie Léger (ISBN: 978-0-9973666-0-0)

Section 03

Hour: 2; Instructor: John Barger

Textbook(s)Required:

Marie Howe: New and Selected Poems (ISBN: 978-1-324-07503-5); Suite for Barbara Loden, by Nathalie Léger (ISBN: 978-0-9973666-0-0)

Section 04

Hour: 10; Instructor: James Binkoski

Course Title: What is Knowledge?
Description: Epistemology is the study of knowledge, evidence, and justification. Its questions are of basic, primary importance—and they’re everywhere. Can you know that climate change constitutes an existential threat even if you’re not completely certain? Can two people disagree over the existence of God and yet both be rational? Why do groups that share evidence, like the American public, nonetheless polarize? We'll pursue these questions and more as we study the ins and outs of academic writing.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 05

Hour: 10A; Instructor: Rebecca Clark

Course Title: Image and Text
Description: This class will look at a variety of works—ekphrastic poetry, graphic novels, advertisements, political cartoons—that combine images with text to tell stories. How, we will ask, do words and images play with, against, or off of one another when we read these hybrid works? How does their combination help authors create fantastical new worlds, document painful or playful quotidian realities, or navigate and narrate traumatic personal and national histories? What special demands do these works make on their readers? What narrative and thematic possibilities do they open up? How can we analyze, research, and write about them? In this course, you will produce approximately 32 pages of written work through a gradual process of drafting, editing, reviewing, and revising. We will work on reading critically, posing analytical questions, crafting and supporting well-reasoned arguments, and developing research skills.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006) - 9780618871711; Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth (2015) - 9781566894098; Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of (2018) - 9781632430526; Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014) - 9781555976903; Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings (2007) - 9781897299753

Section 06

Hour: 2A; Instructor: Rebecca Clark

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 07

Hour: 2A; Instructor: William Craig

Course Title: Wild Hopes: Anarchism in Popular Culture
Description: Most of us know very little about anarchism as a political philosophy, but we're quick to declare, "It can't work." Yet anarchism persists as both a movement and an ideal. For more than two centuries, artists and writers have offered real and imagined anarchies as histories, inspirations and warnings. Is an anarchist the shaggy-bearded mad bomber of 19th- and 20th-century fictions? Oscar Wilde's "true, beautiful, healthy" aesthete? The antifa street fighter or the Occupy Wall Street pacifist? We'll survey representations of anarchism in both "high" and "low" literature, from journalism to poetry. Our writing will include informal reactions, close-reading, literary analysis, comparative, and research-driven essays. We won't get bogged down in arguing about anarchism as a practicable idea. We'll sharpen our writing, critical thinking and research skills as we appreciate artworks that have kept anarchism alive in our fears and in our dreams.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Vintage. ISBN: 9780593082096; Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780060512750; Moore, Alan. V for Vendetta. DC Comics. ISBN: 9781779511195; Ward, Colin. Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN: ‎ 978-0192804778; Williams, Joseph and Joseph Bizup. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, 5th edition, Pearson 2014 ISBN: 0321953304

Section 08

Hour: 9L; Instructor: Phyllis Deutsch

Course Title: Gender and the Holocaust
Description: Writing is a process that includes the ability to undertake research in primary sources, analyze diverse texts, and develop coherent evidence-based arguments. The goal of this course is to explore all aspects of the writing process through the lens of Gender and the Holocaust. Examining three memoirs written in the context of immediate or remembered extremity, you will learn how to organize an argument, incorporate evidence, develop a strong voice, and respond to provocative texts in original ways. Two films and secondary sources will enrich our close reading of these extraordinary memoirs.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 978-0-684-82680-6; Edith Bruck, Who Loves You Like This, 978-0-966-491371; Ruth Kluger, Still Alive, 978-155861436-9

Section 09

Hour: 10A; Instructor: Christiane Donahue

Course Title: Creativity, Originality, and Ownership of Ideas
Description: Who owns images, sounds, and words? Who “owns” creativity? How do we determine “originality”? In this writing course we will study the many ways that we use and reproduce all kinds of creative work in the U.S. As we explore, we will study the media in which we are immersed, read policies and laws about ownership and reuse of print, image, and sound, and consider who makes these laws and how they affect us. We will then turn a critical eye on these policies and practices, reading essays by authors including John Berger, Larry Lessig, and M.M. Bakhtin and analyzing ways that words, images, sound are (re)used on the Internet, in music and art, in written works, in product design, by ChatGPT, or in other contexts. Coursework will include many short informal writing pieces and discussion presentations, two more formal essay projects with several revisions, and a final project that will focus on an issue of your choice from the various subjects we cover.
Divisional Affiliation: Social Sciences

Textbook(s)Required:

Williams, Joseph & Bizup, Joseph. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. 11th edition. Pearson, 2014. ISBN 10: 0-321-89868-0, ISBN 13: 978-0-321-89868-5

Section 10

Hour: 10; Instructor: Christopher Drain

Course Title: Ethics of the Internet
Description: This course examines ethical and political issues emerging from the rise of ubiquitous computing in the 21st century, with readings drawn from philosophy, political science, and sociology, as well as recent tech-journalism. Topics include “platform capitalism” (e.g., Google, Facebook, Airbnb); algorithmic harms and digital surveillance (whether governmental or private); disinformation and echo chambers in social media; and first amendment issues in the wake of trolling and social media bans. We will also explore—though reading, discussing, and writing—more philosophical aspects of technological mediation, including questions concerning agency, design, and the political status of technical artifacts, with the goal of coming to terms with whether technology can ever be a morally neutral enterprise.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1509504877

Section 11

Hour: 11; Instructor: Christopher Drain

Textbook(s)Required:

Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1509504877

Section 12

Hour: 11; Instructor: Min Young Godley

Course Title: Metamorphosis and Otherness
Description: In this course, we will examine the ways that bodies and forms of life transform themselves or are transformed by others. Such an idea lies close to the heart of writing as a practice, not only because writing is a process of continual construction and reconstruction, but because effective writing is what aims to produce change in oneself and others. What, then, does it mean for language to become a means of metamorphosis? Can someone really change their identity and become someone (or something) entirely “other”? How does language affect our experience of our own bodies and what we take them to stand for or represent? By reading and discussing classic and contemporary texts on various types of “becoming Other,” we will equip ourselves to better explore issues of body image, sexual violence, deception, estrangement, and pain. But it is ultimately by writing about these issues that we will learn to have an effect upon what we study, by understanding, challenging, and overturning pre-given ideas and creating openings through which something new might emerge. In order to do this, students in this class will acquire knowledge of the standards, norms, and unwritten rules of academic writing and practice engaging in critical dialogue with literary and critical texts. This doesn’t mean copying rigid formulas, but rather exploring scholarly writing as a rigorous, yet plastic medium
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say I Say. W.W. Norton & Co. 132407003X. Han, Kang. The Vegetarian. Hogarth, 2016. 9781101906118.

Section 13

Hour: 2A; Instructor: James Godley

Course Title: Truth in Fiction
Description: In this course, we will explore how to write effectively by examining questions of truth and fiction, where the latter is broadly defined as a category that includes not only literature, but also everyday fictions like dreams, fantasies, and cultural myths. The class will compose nonfiction essays that examine what it means that such works of the imagination can touch on human truths, or distort them. In short stories and theoretical studies, we will explore questions such as what "truth" exactly means when we're talking about made-up things, the distinctions of truth and lie, how stories contribute to our individual and collective accounts of ourselves, and what fiction means in our so-called "post-truth" era. As a Writing 5 course, much of our attention will be placed on the art of rhetoric, reader expectation, and persuasion, which are core features of fictional, as well as nonfictional, forms. But fictions, dreams, myths, and fantasies also make available tools of writing that are not strictly at the level of deliberative processes or even conscious awareness. We will also explore those aspects and see what scholarly writing can do with them. Thus, while all of the writing for this course will be analytical and inquiry-based, we will also see how this kind of writing is also creative.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters ISBN: 0679731377; David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically, 8th edition (Cengage, 2018). ISBN: 1337559466

Section 14

Hour: 3B; Instructor: James Godley

Textbook(s)Required:

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters ISBN: 0679731377; David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically, 8th edition (Cengage, 2018). ISBN: 1337559466

Section 15

Hour: 10; Instructor: Mark Koch

Course Title: Determinism and Agency
Description: Questions of fate and free will, determinism and agency, have been standards of the college experience for centuries, but these questions are never fully resolved. Are our lives--our every decision--predetermined by providence, destiny, history, environment, or genetics? Can we choose to live free, without constraints and against fate, or is that choice itself an illusion, perhaps a necessary illusion? Do some live with greater agency and with true free will, and, if so, why? Does this digital age present us with greater freedom or increased constraints? While this course will not be concerned with answering this ancient dilemma, we will examine how literary texts from a range of periods have treated it and will consider why different historical cultures have generated their own answers. Among the primary texts to be read will be Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, and Dave Eggers’ The Circle. In addition, we will analyze some short stories and essays. While these readings will serve as a basis for much class discussion and paper assignments, we will also spend time reading and discussing student essays and good writing.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Shakespeare, Macbeth (any print edition will do, but here is one: Folger, ISBN: 978- 0743477109); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Dover, ISBN ‎978-0486831817); Dave Eggers, The Circle (Vintage, ISBN 978-0345807298)

Section 16

Hour: 9L; Instructor: Clara Lewis

Course Title: Authenticity: Self & Society
Description: Have you ever wondered how selfies and social media impact your sense of self or connection with others? How do you judge an image, product, or person’s authenticity? Social scientists argue that authenticity is now more highly valued than ever. Realness is idealized. Yet the same social forces that make the performance of authenticity a valued marketing ploy also make us crave connection and self-knowledge. These tensions serve as the starting point for our writing-intensive seminar. We will begin the term with two essays that capitalize on the value of writing as a tool for observation, analysis, and idea development. For these essays, we will read and write a mix of social theory and personal narrative. Next, you will have an opportunity to explore an original question by conducting in-depth research using the library’s online and physical collections and write a literature review. In previous terms, students have studied subjects including the role of authenticity in education, psychological wellness, medicine, the arts, and tourism. Topics vary from luxury brand marketing to wine authentication, from online dating to religious identity, and from niche subculture performances to linguistic norms. Across the term, we will work on becoming better writers and researchers for college and beyond. To that end, we will focus on the advanced literacy skills required to comprehend and contribute to scholarship; the foundations of analysis; and the full writing process.
Divisional Affiliation: Social Sciences

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 17

Hour: 10; Instructor: Clara Lewis

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 18

Hour: 12; Instructor: Erkki Mackey

Course Title: Philosophy in Fiction and Physics
Description: Is it possible that philosophers, novelists, and physicists are trying to reach the same ends by different means? To answer that question we will pursue four primary objectives: 1) become familiar with surprising and unresolved problems in physics; 2) consider how different philosophical perspectives attempt to resolve those problems; 3) analyze works of fiction from those philosophical perspectives; 4) complete several formal essays and informal writing exercises exploring different points of view.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Translated by William Weaver. ISBN-13: 978-0-15-6439619; Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. ISBN-13: 978-0-06-091307-6

Section 19

Hour: 12; Instructor: Douglas Moody

Course Title: Foundations of Dartmouth: Samson Occom, Edward Mitchell, and the History and Cultures of Native American, African American, and “Minority” Students at Dartmouth College
Description: In this section of Writing 5 we will explore some of the foundational stories of Dartmouth College, which was founded by Eleazar Wheelock with the crucial support of his one-time student and protégé, Samson Occom. Occom was a member of the Mohegan tribe, and although he was never a student at Dartmouth College, he had attended Moor’s Charity School, which was a precursor to Dartmouth, and Occom’s involvement with the college was crucial from the beginning. Another person who was a trailblazing student at Dartmouth was Edward Mitchell, Class of 1828, who was the first Black student at Dartmouth and first in the institutions of higher education that would become the Ivy League. Like Occom, Mitchell’s story is also emblematic of the many changes that have taken place at Dartmouth and in American society over time, and so we will begin our intellectual journey in this Writing 5 class by considering the Native American and African American foundational stories of Dartmouth College as they relate to the evolution of civil rights and the significance of educational access for all members of society.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

All readings will be available in the Canvas course website and through Dartmouth Library reserves.

Section 20

Hour: 10A; Instructor: Rachel Obbard

Course Title: Deus et Machina: Sports, Science and Ethics
Description: This writing course examines the intersection of sport, technology, and ethics. In it, we will examine normative theories of sport and the ways they affect our decisions, particularly those around implementing new scientific understanding and technical innovation in sport. We will begin by looking at the dilemma of doping, through a close reading of pro cyclist David Millar’s autobiographical narrative “Racing Through the Dark” (2015). In the second part of the course, we will examine peer-reviewed scholarly papers on the inclusion of hyperandrogenic athletes in women’s sports. Throughout the term, students will read many types of sources, including scholarly writing from the fields of philosophy, bioethics, gender studies, and science and engineering. In their third major paper, students will write a research paper that examines the scholarly conversation about another technology that has brought controversy to sport. In this course, you will read and write a lot, and will find that writing is transformative, a means by which ideas are formed, examined, refined, and promoted. There will be several short writing assignments or discussion prompts a week, which will help you work toward the major papers.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Millar, David. Racing Through the Dark. Touchstone, 2011 (ISBN: 978-1501133657)

Section 21

Hour: 2A; Instructor: Rachel Obbard

Textbook(s)Required:

Millar, David. Racing Through the Dark. Touchstone, 2011 (ISBN: 978-1501133657)

Section 22

Hour: 10A; Instructor: Katherine Riley

Course Title: Word Meaning in Context
Description: Each of us knows many thousands of words. Normally, we use them without stumbling on their meaning; we must to some degree, or we wouldn’t speak at all. But sometimes we’re struck by meanings heretofore unremarked. What is a word meaning? What are the contexts of its use? Are these different or one and the same? What are their forms, functions, effects? We’ll explore these questions, considering scientific, philosophic, cultural, artistic, linguistic, artificial intelligence and other perspectives, examining how their answers vary, and what new questions arise from their juxtapositions. This is fundamentally a writing course, which means we’ll read closely and practice writing as thinking. We’ll develop our raw ideas and arguments into formal structures of depth and complexity through a careful process of observation, analysis, discussion, and revision in response to feedback received.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 23

Hour: 9L; Instructor: Ellen Rockmore

Course Title: Happiness for Beginners
Description: In this Writing 5, we will examine happiness. How do we define it? How do we achieve it? Our course will approach these questions from many disciplines: popular culture, psychology, economics, cultural criticism. We will begin by looking at songs and movies, with the purpose of analyzing their messages about how happiness is achieved. We will then consider research regarding happiness from the fields of psychology and behavioral economics. Our readings also address unhappiness and its causes.
Divisional Affiliation: Social Sciences

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 24

Hour: 11; Instructor: Sarah Smith

Course Title: Food for Thought
Description: French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” Indeed, our food choices can be reflective of our families, religious beliefs, ethics, and emotions. Our decisions may be influenced by the media, our peers, or simply by convenience. What we eat also influences how food is grown, and therefore has wider reaching effects, such as on the environment, the economy, and public health. This idea that our world and our selves are shaped by food will serve as inspiration for the primary goal of this course – sharpening our writing and critical thinking abilities. We will explore the personal side of food writing as well as contemporary issues related to food. Our readings will come from authors such as MFK Fisher, Wendell Berry, and Michael Pollan, and will include magazine articles, scholarly papers, and the scientific literature. We will write about food in the form of critical analyses of course readings and academic arguments. Ample classroom time will be spent reviewing the principles that underlie writing in all disciplines, workshopping student writing, and discussing the processes of reading, writing, research, and revision.
Divisional Affiliation: Social Sciences

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 25

Hour: 12; Instructor: Sarah Smith

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 26

Hour: 2A; Instructor: Nirvana Tanoukhi

Course Title: Reflecting About Matters of Taste
Description: Millennials, sometime around the 1990s, began using the term “relatable” to express aesthetic pleasure in things and people. At first, most academic and mainstream commentators were skeptical, arguing that the term was intellectually lazy, absurd, solipsistic, even racist. Now, the term relatable is uncontroversial. Not all aesthetic categories have eventful histories like relatable. Most are not remarkable enough to be noticed. Some appear and are socially transformative. New ones continue to be coined. In this course, we will ask questions like: Why are new taste terms invented or rediscovered? Why do different taste terms appear and disappear when they do? Do we need aesthetic categories to make assessments? Why do we even share our taste? What is the point of telling others that something is relatable, or of disagreeing that something is trippy, when we know that, ultimately, each person will have their own taste?
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 27

Hour: 11; Instructor: Amanda Wetsel

Course Title: Experiencing Built Environments
Description: We will write as a way to understand the built environment: How do buildings shape our lives? How do values, hierarchies, and inequalities materialize in the built environment? How do architectural spaces affect how people understand themselves and relate to each other? We will analyze spaces at Dartmouth and interviews with Dartmouth students as well as texts written by architects, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Divisional Affiliation: Social Sciences

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 28

Hour: 12; Instructor: Amanda Wetsel

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 29

Hour: 10A; Instructor: Leigh York

Course Title: Reimagining Fairy Tales
Description: This course will explore how twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors have adapted and transformed the Grimm fairy tales to address questions of race, gender, and power. By reading the Grimms alongside contemporary sci-fi and fantasy stories from writers like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Helen Oyeyemi, we will learn about the ways that fairy tales can reimagine the present and transform the future. In this course, you will practice academic writing as a mode of critical analysis: you will learn to develop your own original arguments through skillful engagement with texts in multiple media and genres. By analyzing fairy tales and their contemporary adaptations, you will develop strategies of expression, argument, and critique that will prepare you to think and write effectively at Dartmouth and beyond.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 30

Hour: 2A; Instructor: Leigh York

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 31

Hour: 11; Instructor: Rosetta Young

Course Title: Interaction Ritual: the Novel and Sociology
Description: How do we define social interaction? How do we know the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful encounter? In this course, students will strengthen their argumentative and written skills through tackling these questions. Using both novels and works of sociology to structure our engagement, we will approach writing as a process by which we encounter and think through pressing critical problems. In the first units of this course, students will use social theory to read two literary classics—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929)—and we will study how both novelists understood the interaction rituals of their time periods. We will conclude the class with a unit that focuses on these issues in modern education, reading two novels—Danzy Senna’s New People (2017) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2017)—that take the contemporary university as their setting. As we work through these novels, we will also simultaneously engage with the work of social theorists such as Erving Goffman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pierre Bourdieu, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Shamus Khan.
Divisional Affiliation: Arts & Humanities

Textbook(s)Required:

Section 32

Hour: 2; Instructor: Rosetta Young

Textbook(s)Required: