This semester we will discuss Death as an academic topic of research. To be clear, this is not a class to cope with a specific death, but rather a class that seeks to explore the many different ways a category can be considered within academic research and to familiarize ourselves with the ways rhetoric allows us to talk about sensitive and difficult topics.

Our textbook, from the Fountainhead V Series, contains many great readings concerning various aspects of death, but we will also be doing visual analyses of representations of death, looking at other outside sources (such as Charles Darwin, George MacDonald, Walker Percy, and the Grimm Brothers) to see how different disciplines talk about death and how “death” can work rhetorically.

While we will be working for most of the semester on a traditional research paper, I expect this research to be re-imagined towards the end of the semester as a digital project to see how your research might have application beyond traditional academic writing.

This website exists to house the various readings and useful links that will be necessary to complete the research process successfully, but it is used together with Brightspace (D2L), which is where the dropboxes will be housed.

Syllabi:
Syllabus-1102-170
Syllabus-1102-190

Live Tweet the class with #WhyDeathMatters

#WhyDeathMatters Tweets

Sample Lit Reviews:
Lit Review Example 190
Example In-Class Lit Review

*Due to the age of this edition, there is no copyright information – I am in contact with the publisher to obtain the information necessary to cite this source.