Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2024 Course Offerings

English 502: Teaching of Writing: Contemporary Theories: Points of Access, Points of Exclusion

Patty Wilde, Thursdays, 3:55-6:25 pm

Reviewing foundational approaches to writing instruction, this course examines the theoretical underpinnings of composition pedagogies, focusing on the ways social, cultural, and political forces shape what we teach, why, and how. Beginning with CUNY’s Open Admissions experiment in the 1960s, we will trace the development and evolution of composition pedagogies, paying particular attention to how they attend to diversity and accessibility (or not). Working from the premise that difference is not “a ‘problem’ but rather an opportunity to rethink our practices in teaching writing” (Wood et al. 148), we ultimately aspire to develop inclusive and equitable practices that we can incorporate into our own classrooms. In addition to regularly reflecting on readings and teaching experiences, students will design pedagogical materials, draft a teaching philosophy and a book review, and write a conference proposal based on their 15–20-page research project.

English 527: English Literature of the Restoration and 18th Century: Gothic Fiction: The Politics of Horror in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British (& American) Literature

Kirk L. McAuley, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30-2:45 pm

This is a third variation / the third installment of my graduate-level Gothic Fiction seminar – and so, I say again . . . Any attempt to account for the Gothic novel’s unprecedented popularity in the 1790s must grapple with the Marquis de Sade’s critical suggestion, that, “the Gothic novels of [Ann] Radcliffe and [Matthew] Lewis” – two of the foremost contributors to this sudden craze for ‘terror fiction’ – “were ‘the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe.” Or, as Robert Miles explains, “according to Sade’s view, the bloody horrors of the revolution pushed novelists to new extremes of imaginary violence, as they strove to compete with the shocking reality.” Riddled with anxiety in this most divisive decade of political upheaval (the 1790s) – a period informed by two violent, and hugely impactful revolutions in France (1789 – 1799) and Haiti (1791 – 1804) – readers in Britain (narrowly separated from France by the English Channel) and a fearfully divided, newborn United States discovered in Gothic novels wildly imaginative re-presentations of these (and other) unsettling political realities.

If we accept this explanation for the Gothic novel’s dominance of the literary market in the 1790s as true – i.e., that readers embraced this ‘terrorist system of novel writing’ because it afforded them an opportunity to process anxieties / dangerous emotions steeped in the political realities of the day (rape culture, slavery & abolition, yellow fever, and the French and Haitian Revolutions) – then perhaps right now would be a most appropriate time for us to engage in a sort of Gothic revival . . . that is, as we struggle to come to grips with similarly shocking realities, including the persistent widespread horrors of racism, misogyny, and global capitalism, and, of course, the looming existential threat of climate breakdown. In short, the point of this seminar will be precisely that. We will read Gothic literature from the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in light of these (and other) disturbing present-day realities. Accordingly, texts will be subject to a variety of critical approaches, including the Female, Queer, Imperial, and Eco-Gothic, and feature various cultural landscapes: Europe, the British Isles, Africa, the Caribbean, and India.

English 544: Syntax

Michael Thomas, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 1:10-2 pm

Course description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.

English 545: Graduate Student Writing Workshop

Elizabeth (Liz) Siler, by arrangement

The Graduate Student Writing Workshop is open to all graduate students at Washington State University, including those for whom English is not a first language (ESL). Enrollment is limited. No over-enrollments are allowed in any section at any time, so encourage students, friends, and colleagues to sign up early.    

This is a completely web-arranged class, but it is taught through the English Department, not through Global Campus. To be in the class, a student needs two things: a substantial piece of graduate writing to work on and a computer that handles web video conferencing via Zoom. A substantial piece of writing could be an article, a proposal, a report, a presentation, a dissertation, a thesis, or any of many other types of writing. A minimum of seven individual conferences are held via Zoom. At each meeting, the student and I meet online at a mutually arranged time to work on their writing.   

Each student is different; each student has different writing needs. This class offers a highly individualized type of instruction — each student’s needs form that student’s course of studies. The class is suitable for students at all levels, from incoming graduate students to those in the last stage of dissertation production.   

There is some collateral instruction in oral production skills available through this class, often in the context of work with students who are preparing presentations for conferences, defenses, etc.  However, the primary focus of the class is writing development.

English 548: Critical and Cultural Theory: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pandemic: Theorizing the Health Humanities

Nishant Shahani, Tuesdays, 2:55-5:25 pm

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be processed across the globe through rhetorics that reprise longstanding racist and colonialist depictions of Asia and the global south. Western discussions around the immunity of bodies appear frequently to carry the imputation of immunity not just from coronavirus, but from immigrant labor, from incarcerated and/or otherwise policed Black bodies, from the global south, from the “third” world and the planet’s zones of “uneven development.” It is after all from these geographies that the virus is understood to have emerged, whether from “dirty” wet markets or menacing Chinese research labs. The racial other is imagined and cast not just as morally, cognitively, or physically deficient, but indeed as a walking pathogen to the putative sovereignty and flourishing of the white, male, western body. Under these logics, it is not just cells that must be defended from intruding viruses and bacteria, then, but whiteness, masculinity, and western states themselves that must be protected from the queer threats of lethal foreign cultures.

This class will use the shadow of COVID-19 and AIDS and their accompanying crises as entry points to understanding the interdisciplinary field of the health humanities. Through the epistemological frameworks that subtend these pandemics, we will more broadly seek to understand one of the central axioms of the health humanities: that health disparities do not only register epidemiologically, but are also narratively, culturally, and rhetorically produced. The health humanities focus of the class will thus engage with the insights of contemporary critical and cultural theory with a focus on queer, feminist, disability, postcolonial, and critical race theory.

Even while the class is informed by our collective (but not uniform) experience of pandemic crisis, it will also deliberately contravene the logic of crisis narratives, which can sometimes do reductive work. Crisis narratives can frame the uneven distribution of health as a singular state of exception rather than the long durée of debility—what Lauren Berlant theorizes as slow death or “crisis ordinariness.” The class thus proposes to think beyond medicalized notions of pandemics (that fetishize first occurrences and finite conclusions) so that we can diagnose the imperial and globalized systems of power which both presuppose and reproduce able-bodiedness, medical apartheid and carceral necropolitics. We will thus inquire into what precedes the putative “patient zero” of pandemics as well as what lingers after we return to “normal”—i.e., when pandemics are supposedly in the rear-view mirror.

If we can understand pandemics through the lens of enduring structures such as environmental racism, ableism, settler colonialism, incarceration, militarism, and gentrification, rather than focusing on when they begin or when they will end, we can ask how illness scatters and proliferates. And then more importantly, we can imagine strategies of collective survival and care that model more feminist, queerly entangled, and cripped understandings of bodies and environments that reach beyond racist and ableist myths of sovereignty.

Note:

This course will aim to offer students the conceptual and theoretical tools to approach the study of cultural texts through the lens of contemporary scholarly developments in the health humanities. Given the focus on the uneven distribution of life chances, the insights of feminist, queer, disability, and critical race theory will play a central role in this class. Given their mutual embeddedness, we will not approach these frameworks through discrete and linear chronologies in which “race” “gender” and “sexuality” supplant one another. “Theory” in this class will be a descriptive analytic: i.e., it will offer a critical vocabulary to analyze or describe social phenomenon, cultural objects, literary texts, and material realities. But perhaps of greater importance will be the performative nature of critical and cultural theory—that is, an attention to how theory can create a language to push toward new horizons or to articulate critical possibilities that have yet to be materialized.

English 550: Poetry or Non-fiction Prose: Life Writing

DJ Lee, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 pm

Life writing is an interdisciplinary field that draws on many literary and artistic forms and cultural movements. At first glance, these diverse forms may not seem to have much in common. Yet Life writing’s emphasis on individual lives allows scholars to look at the intersection of gender, race, psychology, anthropology, digital culture, neuroscience, and philosophy, as seen in Lifewriting, a scholarly journal published by Routledge, and programs like Oxford University’s Centre for Life-Writing.

Autobiographies, biographies, essays, diaries, and letters—the traditional forms of life writing—will make up some of the course content, but the lives of nations, places, animals, and objects will also be relevant. Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge is just one of many who write about the lives of places. Steven Connor’s Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things raises questions about how objects define human lives and invite discussion of “thing theory.” We’ll discuss gender, sexuality, disability, immigration, and other social justice concerns that create challenges to writing a life. We’ll consider l’autofiction, a French literary trend practiced by contemporary writer/artists like Sophie Calle but going back, at least, to Proust. We’ll look at how theories of haunting redefine memory, as in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. We’ll look at queer theory with Maggie Nelson; African American feminist theory with bell hooks, Indigenous storytelling with Terese Maria Mailhot. We’ll also examine how extra-textual media such as film biographies, oral histories, postcards, sound recordings, (self)portraits and selfies, digital stories, and graphic forms create, or fragment, a life.

English 590: Research in English Studies

By arrangement

English 590 is a graded independent study designed to provide directed research in English studies for individuals (or small groups) in conjunction with one or more faculty members. English 590 may be taken for 1 credit per semester up to a total of 3 credits altogether. One credit of English 590 is required for the Ph.D. program.

In Option One, the student would prepare least a one-page (typed and double-spaced) bibliography on key primary and secondary works in a specific research field along with a project description or rationale for choosing the works. In Option Two, the student’s work might include not only readings but also a practical exploration of other methods of research, including but not limited to learning statistical methods, working with digital technologies, or gaining experience with editorial work.

For both options, students typically meet with their research mentors once a week and at the outset draw up a memorandum of understanding that delimits the relative proportions of readings, discussion, and, if appropriate, practice, along with a clearly delineated set of standards for assessing quality and progress. The student’s research goals should be the focus of all work undertaken for the project. Under no circumstances may the instructor allow the needs of a larger project (for data collection, coding, and so forth) to supersede the benefit to the student.

All doctoral students must take at least 1 credit of English 590, but no more than 3 credits total are allowed. English 590 is not intended to be a substitute for a viable graduate seminar. M.A. students may take English 590 but might not find the time to do so in their program of study.

Students are encouraged to seek out faculty members to learn their research areas and availability for an English 590.

English 591: Topics in Pedagogy: Comparative Anti-Racist Pedagogies

Bibhushana Poudyal, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:05-1:20 pm

Anti-racism is a radical act of love, care, respect, kindness, and solidarity. It is a collective liberatory project. It is a consistent questioning of the system & structure. It is an intellectual and intersectional awareness and articulation that not everyone experiences the spaces we seem to share, the world, and the systems in the same way. Anti-racism is a revolutionary action guided by knowledge, to quote Audre Lorde, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” So, anti-racism is, at the same time, anti-heteronormativity, anti- colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. Anti-racism is social and global justice, linguistic justice, geo-political justice, disability justice, and environmental justice, just to name a few. With this commitment, this graduate course is designed to help us address and interrogate the following questions: Why should the existence of the anti-racist pedagogies course matter to the world, this planet, and the people we are aware or unaware of but co-exist with? What kinds of transformation are we daring to envision in society and ourselves through this course or anti-racist pedagogies? Despite our situatedness in the institutional bureaucracy, which is far from equitable, how can anti-racist pedagogies help students and teachers alike?

The modifier ‘comparative’ in the course title plays a theoretical and methodological role in the way we approach the questions of racism and anti- racism. We will learn from one another and from scholarly works in the field and beyond, social media pages, musicians, artists, activists, political speeches, biographical narratives, community-led archives, digital-multimodal storytelling projects, solidarity-building anti-racist movements happening on grassroots levels around the world. And together, we will try to find possible answers to the following fundamental and most-recurring questions of this course:

• How can we design courses, assessment systems, teaching materials, conversations, and assignments that value and reflect upon the humanity and dignity in each of us while recognizing, respecting, and making room for the humanity and dignity of others?
• How can our pedagogical and administrative practices assist in transforming slogans like “Black lives matter,” “Brown lives matter,” “Indigenous lives matter,” “Muslim lives matter,” “Asian lives matter,” “Global Souths lives matter” into the lived experiences of these communities on local, regional, global, international, and transnational levels?