This course helps you become a more effective communicator as you refine your thinking, writing, speaking, designing, collaborating, and reflecting. Grounded in Georgia Tech’s WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal) communication framework, you will develop strategic tools and reiterative processes for analyzing media and composing multimodal projects that blend research, creativity, and critical reflection. In this section of the course, you will explore rejection—as emotion, structure, and critique—through novels, short stories, parables, poems, songs, and films. We often experience rejection as failure, but this course asks what happens when you treat it as a way of thinking: a means of understanding how individuals and societies define themselves through refusal. 

Our readings will traverse centuries and continents, tracing how writers frame rejection in myriad ways: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther confront the self-destructive passions and emotional economies of rejection; Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” turn withdrawal and social invisibility into critiques of modern rationality and alienation; Murata’s Convenience Store Woman reimagine nonconformity and estrangement as strategies of endurance; and, Tulathimutte’s Rejection satirizes the self-consciousness, anxiety, and social performance of millennial life. 

Our assignments—ranging from literary remix, digital exhibit to collaborative podcast/vidcast—will emphasize multimodal communication and scholarly research, allowing you to approach the theme of rejection from diverse perspectives and media. Through workshops and peer review, you will learn to translate ideas across media, reimagine argument as design, and experiment with new forms of persuasion. Ultimately, this course asks us to see rejection not as a failure of communication but as its most revealing form—an invitation to rethink what it means to resist, withdraw, and begin again.