The College Writing Program offers five special sections of WRI 101 that explore the rhetorics and aesthetics of cultural criticism. Taught by professors from English, German, and Rhetoric, courses within the Writing Cultural Criticism Project invite you to examine texts (novels, films, and public-intellectual writings) whose main purpose is to critique some aspect of culture.

These texts question status quo understandings of political, social, economic, and aesthetic arrangements, and experiment with stylistic and structural resources in order to make their special arguments. Students will engage in public discussions about shared interests, and will be given opportunities to interact as writers and reviewers with colleagues in other courses within the Writing Cultural Criticism cluster.

Each course is composed of four major writing projects. Two of those projects are shared across all five sections, and two of them are unique to each course. One of the shared projects offers students a special opportunity to screen FLOW: For Love of Water, an award-winning documentary that Robert Redford describes as a film that "opens our eyes about the greatest threat to our time-the global water crisis." Students in the Writing Cultural Criticism Project will meet and interview one of its co-producers, who will visit Davidson in March.

The Writing Cultural Criticism Project gives students the opportunity to have their work read and critiqued by colleagues in allied courses, allowing them to experience the social ethics and rhetorical rewards of public writing-saying something that matters to persons unknown to one another as acquaintances, but interested in others' positions.

The "Writing Cultural Criticism" courses include:

• WRI 101 [B] Writing Cultural Criticism on Film (McCarthy)
• WRI 101 [D] Writing Criticism (Ingram, R.)
• WRI 101 [F] Nothing If Not Critical (Hillard)
• WRI 101 [G] Crossing Cultures: Writing East and West (Holland)
• WRI 101 [H] Nothing If Not Critical (Hillard)