Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2015 Course Offerings

English 502: Teaching of Writing: Contemporary Theories of Composition

Wendy Olson, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:30 pm

This course introduces students to key theories that inform and impact both what we teach and how we teach when we teach writing in higher education. We’ll start from the premise that a theoretically informed pedagogy is both important and necessary, so one goal of the course will be to better develop our own pedagogical approaches and how we employ strategies for teaching writing in the classroom. At the same time, we’ll look to the ways in which writing and composing theories develop both historically and concentrically— that is, in dialectic with other theories and against the backdrop of social and material changes—in order to better understand the scholarly debates, contentions, and contradictions that have shaped composition studies as a field.

We’ll begin with a discussion of the “social turn” in composition (not only what it is, but also how we got there), then move to investigate its lingering effects on the field and its research. In doing so, we’ll read a few earlier texts that have influenced composition theory (texts on composition, on rhetoric, on cultural theory) alongside more contemporary scholarship within the field, all along the way inquiring into what the conversation/debate/theorizing means for our classrooms and curriculum. Course requirements to include weekly critical responses, a number of brief writing exercises/assignments, a book review, a presentation, and a final project. Readings will include selections from Mina Shaughnessy, Mike Rose, Nancy Sommers, David Barthomae, Sharon Crowely, Patricia Bizzell, Min-Zhan Lu, Scott Lyons, Deborah Brandt, A. Suresh Canagarah, Rebecca Moore Howard, Elizabeth Wardle, Ellen Cushman, Jeff Grabill, and others.

English 514: 20th Century American Literature

Thabiti Lewis, Mondays, 3:10-6 pm

This course will examine what might be termed “the lost years,” a generation of black literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance to 1960. This rich and often omitted renaissance moment in African American literature will be examined. Anchoring the course will be Lawrence P. Jackson’s important book: The Indignant Generation. Many of the writers from the “lost years” were connected and in conversation with one another. It is a group responsible for pushing a new way of thinking about being African American, gender, race, art and class. The course will look at the social history of this period via African American life, culture, and literature. Among the writers and issues examined are Dorthy West, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher, Margaret Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, John Oliver Killens, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Chester Himes, Ann Petry, J. Saunders Redding, The WPA, World War II, and The Harlem Riots(1935 and 1943). We will learn about the community and writers that created and sustained the ideas of this era.

English 522: Victorian Literature: Steampunk and the Nineteenth Century

Roger Whitson, Wednesdays, 3:10-6 pm

“[Steampunk] is not interested in coming up with universalizing models for technological progress, but in experimenting with alternatives, in quirky ideas, in excavating novel paths that fall outside of the mainstream.”

—Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (2012)

This course will juxtapose nineteenth-century literature and history with the remaking of the Victorian period in the alternate-history genre known as “steampunk.” In a 1987 letter to the science-fiction magazine Locus, K.W. Jeter defined steampunk as “writing in the ‘gonzo-historical manner’” that was “based in the appropriate technology” of the Victorian period. Since then, steampunk has embraced a quirky approach to technology and history in everything from novels to fashion, film, television, electronics, and programming. Fans and performers alike take the opportunity to remix the past with the present. Miriam Roček dresses up as a time-travelling Emma Goldman to participate in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The Whitechapel-inspired The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing infuses 70s punk ballads with the “cockney sing-songs” of the 1880s. Jake von Slatt constructs steam-powered machines for MakerFaires, while filmmakers Lisa Yaszek and Balogun Ojetade reimagine Harriet Tubman as a psychic spy and freedom fighter.

But what remains of nineteenth-century history in steampunk? To answer this question, we will proceed in a comparative manner examining works from nineteenth-century authors like H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton while also reading contemporary steampunk fiction such as Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air (1971), Jeter’s Moorlock Night (1979), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), China Mieville’s Iron Council (2004), Karina Cooper’s Tarnished (2012), and Cherie Priest’s Clementine (2011). Along the way, we will survey episodes from Victorian history that inspire steampunk authors like the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace on the analytical engine, upper-class practices of “slumming,” airship scares, and the struggles of trade unionists and luddites in factories. Our goal will be to explore how steampunk offers an alternate vision of history that foregrounds what Siegfried Zielinski calls a variantology: a methodology that rejects the notion of history as linear or progressive and instead traces the “fractures or turning points” where history could have followed a different path. Requirements include a weekly 600-word response to readings, a conference-length presentation on a topic of your choosing, and a final 15-20 page seminar paper.

English 531: Administering a Writing Program

Victor Villanueva (ARRGT)

Reality: the teaching force for writing is overwhelmingly contingent faculty—graduate students, non-tenure track faculty. So it is that those with PhDs in Writing Studies will very likely find themselves playing an administrative role at some point. Reality: the hierarchy of the university in which writing program administrators find themselves are bureaucratic, meant to run, in Max Weber’s view, despite the leadership, calling into question the power any administrator (particularly in middle management—like Writing Center Director or Director of Comp or even Department Chair) has.

Reality: most of us pursue degrees in rhetoric and writing in order to affect change, which seems to contradict the very purposes of bureaucracy (at least in terms of speed). So how do we navigate the pragmatics of administration as a not very powerful bureaucrat and the idealism and even utopianism that give us purpose as teachers and as scholars of literacy- writ-large (“literacy,” following Robert Pattison, being defined as “reading, writing, and rhetoric”)?

Our readings for this course will explore this seemingly contradictory dynamic, looking at the university-at-large, reading accounts of those who argue for critical discourse within writing program administration, and reading the account of one person’s struggles with the bureaucracy to create a community learning center (and succeeding). And then there will simply be conversation with one whose scholarship concerns the politics of rhetoric and writing (not administration) but whose roles have often been administrative.

English 544: Syntax

Lynn Gordon, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 12:10-1 pm

The purpose of this class is to learn about modern syntactic theory and analysis based on examining a range of structures (of different periods, developmental stages and dialects) of English (mostly). The best way to learn a system of analysis is to do it and so we’ll be doing a lot of it. We will be employing a minimalist approach, which is the most recent theoretical descendant of generative syntax. This course has no prerequisites and does not assume that students have any prior syntactic or, more generally, linguistic training.

Learning Objectives: By the end of the semester, English 544 students will be able to:

  • explain the goals and overall structure of one standard theoretical model for syntax, Chomsky’s Minimalist framework;
  • discuss topics like universal grammar, parameters, learnability, and innateness within that model;
  • apply analyses developed in class! for a substantial range of English data to unfamiliar examples, producing and explaining formal representations, covering topics like null constituents, Binding Theory, Head Movement, and Wh-Movement;
  • apply the Minimalist model to analyze unfamiliar, but fairly straightforward syntactic structures; and
  • to make and assess arguments supporting old and new analyses within the Minimalist model. to analyze moderately large data sets showing complex and unfamiliar syntactic structures, producing a clear and well-supported analysis giving; and
  • to produce and support derivations of a wide range of complex structures within the Minimalist model.

Textbook: An Introduction to English Sentence Structure, Andrew Radford (Cambridge University Press, 2009) (IESS)

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: Postclassical Narrative Theory

Jon Hegglund, Thursdays, 2:50-5:30 pm

This seminar will look at many new developments in narrative theory that have occurred since the “narratological turn” of the 1970s and 80s. Where narratology borrowed heavily from structuralist philosophy (and still remains an important foundation for understanding narrative), postclassical narrative theory has cast its disciplinary net far and wide, drawing on a number of fields including cognitive sciences, linguistics, new media studies, ecocriticism and environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, and materialist philosophy. We will explore these conjunctions, all the while developing skills at the close reading of narrative (focusing on prose fiction, but also looking at other mediums).

The first half of the course will build different frameworks for understanding narrative. Our starting point will be the structuralist narratology of Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, and Mieke Bal, before we look into cognitive linguistic approaches by Monika Fludernik, David Herman, Lisa Zunshine, and Alan Palmer, rhetorical theories of narrative by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, and fictionality studies by Richard Walsh and Marie-Laure Ryan. The latter part of the course will explore the interface between new narrative theory and two or three subfields to be determined. The specific material will depend upon the interests of the class, but some possibilities include: gender/sexuality studies, ecocriticism, postcolonial/race studies, comparative media (film, videogames, comics, digital narratives), and pedagogy. I will ask you to read a short list of novels before the semester begins, but other primary texts will be selected based upon the specific interests of class members.

While there will be a considerable amount of conceptual, theoretical, and terminological work, I want this course above all to be usable. That is, I would hope that you leave the course with some additional tools to help you answer the questions you are asking in your own research program more concretely, precisely, and thoroughly. Because of the wide range of approaches to narrative, this seminar should be of interested to anyone interested in literature, rhetoric, writing, linguistics, and/or new media studies. In other words: just about all of you.

Work for the course will include weekly readings, meetings, and online discussion board participation. Formal writing will proceed on one of two tracks, based upon the student’s goals, interests, and position in the graduate program.

  • Track 1: Students will research conferences in this or related fields, prepare a conference proposal, and write a conference-length paper (10-12 pp.). Additionally, students will complete another project related to the course, such as keeping a regular blog, writing a book review, or drafting a course syllabus (TBD on an individual basis).
  • Track 2: Students will research journals in the field and prepare a brief annotated bibliography of scholarly journals that match their own interests, and then write an article-length paper (20-25 pp.) intended for submission to one of the researched journals.

English 554: History of English Language

Lynn Gordon, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 1:10-2 pm

The topic of this course is the development of English from the time Germanic tribes invade the British Isles to the present. We will consider how the changes in English exemplify language change in general, how language and society interact, how the language is used in literature and how English developed as a literate language.

By the end of the semester, English 554 students will be able:

  • to describe the broad outlines of changes in the English language from Old English (600-1100, Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) to Middle English (1100-1500, Chaucer and the Paston letters) to Early Modern English (1500-1700, Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to Modern English (after 1700);
  • to produce a transcription of the actual sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet for a text in Old English, Middle English, or Early Modern English orthography;
  • to describe and categorize major phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical changes in English;
  • to describe changes in systems of versification in English;
  • to identify the historical period of an unfamiliar text and give evidence for their identification; and
  • to describe aspects of the interaction of language and social/political events.
  • to identify, analyze and describe sets of changes found in English; and
  • to produce a coherent paper analyzing original data exemplifying linguistic change in English.

Textbook: Dennis Freeborn. 2006. From Old English to Standard English.

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: Teaching Literature

Donna Potts, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:35-11:50 am

This course addresses the practical, theoretical, and methodological aspects of teaching literature. It outlines the major theories and methods in the field; considers controversies over canon formation, literary periodization, and the economics of the profession; and discusses practical aspects of teaching literature such as strategies for teaching various genres (poetry, fiction, drama, and theory), conducting literature workshops, and navigating controversial topics in literature. Required texts include Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student; Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature; Sheridan D. Blau, The Literature Workshop; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation; Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered; and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Students will be expected to teach a class on a work of literature, submit a ten to twelve page paper on their teaching philosophy; observe three other people teaching literature; and design a syllabus for an introductory literature class.

English 595.1: Topics in English: The Composed Life

Debbie (DJ) Lee, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:30 pm

This is an intensive writing course designed to give you skills that will contribute to your success in the scholarly and writing world beyond graduate school. Using a hands-on methodology, the course will engage every stage of the writing process, from concept to draft, revision, polish and submission for grant/fellowship proposals, scholarly articles, and book reviews.

We will cover the grant/fellowship writing process in its entirety, including how to design a fundable project and how to match your interests to funding agencies. Your assignment will be to conceptualize a project, draft a proposal and bibliography, solicit letters of recommendation, draw up a budget and write a budget narrative. We will also navigate the minefield of professional journal publication, addressing questions such as: what does “publishable” mean? What are the differences between seminar papers, conference papers, dissertation chapters, and articles? Your assignment will be to turn a seminar paper you have written for a previous course into a publishable piece. You will learn how to choose the right journal for your work, signpost your article in ways that signal you are entering a specific scholarly conversation, evaluate the “originality” of your contribution, and ensure your article answers the questions all good writing answers: what’s at stake and why should readers care? You will also learn the importance of communicating with program directors (in the case of grants and fellowships) and editors (in the case of journals), how to read and respond to readers’ reports, and what to do next, after your proposal or article is either accepted or rejected. Finally, we will spend a little time on writing book reviews for popular venues and how this activity can lead you into the role of the “public intellectual.”

English 595.2: Topics in English: Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in Digital Humanities

Kimberly Christen, Mondays, 3:10-6 pm

This course examines the history, theory, and practice of digital humanities, paying special attention to the ways in which digital humanities are transforming research, disciplines, and access to knowledge across disciplines. Topics include contrasts and continuities between traditional and digital humanities scholarship; tools and techniques used by digital humanists; the ethics of digital circulation; the politics of open access and diverse scholarship; and the crossover between critical theory and digital humanities methods. This course begins with a survey of the emergent field of Digital Humanities and its intersection with traditional disciplines. From here we will examine how critical cultural theories have influenced the field paying special attention to how the field interrogate the construction, use and practice of digitality. While students will not be expected to be proficient in any one technology, digital tool or product, we will explore how these tools are used, how humanities scholarship has changed with and in response to them and the challenges and changes that they bring to critical inquiry.

The course aims to familiarize students with the literature pertaining to the emergent and interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities with special attention to the theories, methods and practices that have developed from the field and that influenced its growth. Students will gain a critical literacy in the dominant discourses that frame the discipline and be able to critically analyze their limits and possibilities. Specifically, students will:

  • Become conversant in the practices and theories of the Digital Humanities.
  • Engage critically and hands-on with the tools and methods of the Digital Humanities and its relevant interdisciplines.
  • Produce texts in varied formats using digital tools to construct theoretically engaging arguments.
  • Define the possibilities and limits of the field and its relation to: pedagogy, methodology and theory.

English 597: Topics in Composition and Rhetoric: Rhetorics of the Western Hemisphere

Victor Villanueva, Wednesdays, 3:10-6 pm

A part of Kenneth Burke’s definition of rhetoric says that “Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew.” In so saying, he is arguing here (and in other places) that language is basic to the creature, at the very least epistemological and maybe even ontological. If that’s the case, then every culture, every cooperating group of people, would have its rhetorical history, would not have to have been introduced to rhetoric by the people of Athens and Rome.

It is with this line of reasoning that we will look in this course, not at “alternative rhetorics,” but at the rhetorics that obtained and obtains on this part of the world, from the pre-Columbian, to the nineteenth century Latin American and African American, to the Indigenous of North America, from the Arab empire, to the women of those cultures. These are the rhetorics that have not yet been canonized within the history of rhetoric. Along the way, we will speculate in how an understanding of these rhetorics might effect and affect the writings of women, those we consider students of color, and others who are Othered.