Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Georgia Institute of Technology/ENGL 1101 (Spring 2024)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is often touted as “The Great American Novel.” While this may be true, Moby-Dick’s merits include more than what the whitewashed history of canonization and literary fame might afford it. This whale of a book includes myriad modes of writing, exudes America’s cultural fixation on conquest, power, and empire, and stands as a beacon of beauty, philosophy, and history. The industry of whaling, although far removed from our collective consciousness now, was once the wind in the sails of American commerce and a major conduit espousing the idea of financial stability and upward mobility, concepts that would eventually undergird what would be referred to as “The American Dream.” In this course, students take up many different modes of communication. As we read through Moby-Dick, we will loosely participate in the different genres practiced by Melville. Students might engage in personal narratives, travel and adventure writing, philosophy, soliloquy, visual analysis, science, and even religious writing. We will encounter each of Melville’s variations of writing style and pause the reading of the novel to read critical articles discussing those sections, while also composing our own multimodal writing within some of these genres. This writing course offers students the chance to read and communicate with both creative and academic texts while also engaging in Georgia Tech’s WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Non-Verbal) model of communication, an approach that emphasizes rhetoric, process, and multimodality. This course, ENGL 1102: Multimodal Moby-Dick; or, the Whale of WOVEN Communication, also has a significant research component.

The course includes an assignment where students create wiki pages that serve as repositories for specific academic and professional disciplines. This is a group project.