Undergraduate Prerequisites: or MET-approved equivalent or exemption. - Topic-based seminar emphasizing advanced critical reading strategies, methods for scholarly research, and models for writing relative to discipline, audience, and rhetorical context. Attention to argumentation, prose style, and revision. Exercises in reflection and self-assessment, peer-review, and one-on-one work with instructor. Fall 2024 topic: AI's Veiled Reflection: Science, Technology, and Otherness in the Era of Intelligent Machines. As ever-new and powerful AI technologies promise to do many things better than humans and much faster, it becomes more urgent than ever to understand what AI is to us and what we are to AI. In this EN201 section, we will explore how the philosophical insights of Heraclitus, the wisdom of indigenous nations, the creative insights of 19th and 20th-century writers like E.T.A Hoffmann and contemporary poets like Joy Harjo and Natasha Marin, and the perspectives of science writers like Ed Yong and Annie Murphy Paul can help us to see that we and AI exist in a universe that is paradoxically both radically constrained and ordered and radically uncertain and free. Is it, then, a world where both AI and human imagination can thrive? Through class readings and handpicked topics for personal essays, we will explore how we might begin to embrace our interrelationships with nature, technology, and each other more as they are and less as our egos would like their unspeakably vast and complex otherness to be. All the while, we will consider the status of the human experience, human imagination, and human endeavors in the age of AI. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing, Research, and Inquiry and Research and Information Literacy.

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