Julie Schulte

Julie Schulte is a Los Angeles-based writer. She writes about art and culture and is a regular contributor to Artillery Magazine. This summer she finished writing her first novel; a book that examines mother-daughter bonds following a first-generation daughter as she is confronted with her immigrant mother’s past. Her fiction and non-fiction writing inspires, and is inspired by, her class themes which deal with issues surrounding women, class, the rhetoric surrounding motherhood, and the language of exile. Julie earned her B.A. in English Literature and Slavic Languages at UC Berkeley and holds an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine where she was the Fiction Editor for the Pushcart-Prize winning literary journal Faultline. Before her graduate studies, she taught English in Eastern Europe and Western China. She has been a lecturer at UCI since 2018.

As a life-long language learner herself she is sensitive to the insecurities and worries many students have towards writing and self-expression. She loves to see formerly writing-averse students become enlivened through discussion and witness their thinking and arguments become crystalized through the revision process. Her passion is to cultivate a class community where each student comes to feel their voices and stories possess the power to touch others and impact their communities.

Courses Typically Taught:

• Writing 45
• Writing 50
• Writing 60
• Writing 31

Themes Typically Taught:

• Writing 50: The Language of Exile
• Writing 60: Mothers and the Rhetoric

Course Descriptions:

• Writing 60: Mothers and the Rhetoric of Safety
  • This course will investigate the rhetoric of safety around children and parenting, particularly mothers. Safety is “rhetorical” where it is used (by the media, politicians, policymakers, and the rest of us) to shape public perception and action. Ordinary ideas about parents’ obligation to protect their children from harm, for example, can include protection from strangers who might harm a child’s body, but it can also include protection from poverty, from exposure to realities (like homelessness) that might cause a child mental disturbance, from disappointment (like not getting into the child’s college of choice). And then there are other, more problematic ideas about the safety of children that include protecting children from the very things society teaches them to trust: protection from the parents themselves, protection from other children, protection from the law. What does it mean when safety, such a seemingly basic concept, creates vulnerability, and even harm? We will use these questions to interrogate current problems surrounding the question of safety: child separation at the U.S border detainment centers is one such problem. Not only does the separation render children psychologically unsafe (studies show that many of these children are exhibiting signs of potentially long-term PTSD), but the lack of effective care in the centers has caused illness and even death. And what of the mothers separated from their children? Fleeing from countries where rampant crime has made them unsafe, these women find that those who are supposed to protect them from criminals not only fail to do so, but become their worst nightmare by making it impossible for them to provide safety for their children. School shootings, too, are bound to problematic ideas about who is and isn’t safe. Not only do the victims learn that their peers are potentially dangerous, the school itself becomes a site of vulnerability. Moreover, most of the shooters are themselves children, which means we inevitably ask about the parents: who raised such children and how? What failures of parenting? Of mothering? And finally, abortion. How does society present women who seek abortion? Are these women who know they cannot be “good mothers” because they lack the will and the resources? Is the basic definition of a “good mother” someone who wants her child? What happens to a child when its mother is deprived of the legal right to abortion? Does she raise the child anyway? Does she give the child away? When we deprive a woman of the legal right to an abortion, from who or what is the law protecting the child and how? What of those who seek abortion for reasons of poverty, lack of resources? In what ways does the rhetoric of safety serve as a vehicle to isolate and oppress certain groups while elevating the value of others? We will look deeply into the roles of mothers as protectors and the social repercussions of cultural expectations and stereotypes of what good mothering means. We will turn to close analysis of media representation of children as innocents who need protecting. We will see how the rhetoric of safety plays out in race relations, poverty, the policing of crime and the ways it perpetuates xenophobia. We will consider "motherhood" as a concept of repression and scapegoating in Western discourse, and we will look at moments when present crises are explained away as mothering failures, interrogating the impact that has on policy reform, discourse, and social punishment.
  • Throughout the next ten weeks, we will be reading texts across genres and disciplines in order to contextualize present-day social issues. The articles you read will serve as guides for thinking, questioning, and situating your own research projects. The articles will serve as models for research methodology, multimodality, and clear and effective expository writing.
• Writing 50: The Language of Exile
  • In this class we will look at conventions of the language of exile; through reading short stories, personal essays, poetry, and theoretical writing we look at exile not only as a physical condition from forced migration due to genocide, war, political upheaval, climate disasters but as an experience of the human condition. We will examine common conventions of exile writing and how they serve as rhetorical devices: the feelings of banishment, estrangement, wandering, idealizing the homeland, the dream of returning to a promised land where one can finally be united with family, people, in landscape and in language. We will also analyze how authors play with the conventions of exile writing to portray the modern experience: isolation, a sensation of feeling existentially homeless, a sensation acutely felt in a post-tech world and during the recent quarantine where we had to remain in forced isolation from our loved ones. The readings for the course will showcase varying positions on what it means to be in exile from migration literature where it is something that happens to us, something beyond our control; to more modern perspectives as a way of thinking, an outsider position that is sought out; we will look at claims from poets and thinkers whose ideas vary from seeing exile as a prison sentence, exclusion from paradise and the known, to a state of mind to be cherished, one that affords a richer and more honest perspective of where we come from, access to deeper memory, and new perspectives on language, longing, and life.
  • Beyond the political and religious framework what does dreaming of a promised land or returning to our roots do for those disenfranchised? How does seeing oneself in exile lead us to a narrative of future hope? By accepting exile as a destiny, what do we learn from a lifetime wandering in the wilderness? No matter our personal experiences we will see these conventions will allow us to describe more richly the times we have felt outside, estranged, or not included and how it affected our desire for a new vista of belonging.

Textbooks Needed:

• All course specific readings provided by instructor as a PDF

Email: jaschul1@uci.edu