Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2016 Course Offerings

English 502: Teaching of Writing: Contemporary Theories of Composition

Wendy Olson, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:20 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.

Readings likely to include selections from Anis Bawarshi, Deborah Brandt, Sharon Crowely, Ellen Cushman, Jeff Grabill, Rebecca Moore Howard, Min-Zhan Lu, Scott Lyons, Paul Kei Matsuda, Mina Shaughnessy, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Elizabeth Wardle, and others. Course requirements include weekly critical responses, a number of brief writing exercises/assignments, a presentation, a book review, and a final project.

English 515: Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric

Victor Villanueva, Wednesdays, 3:10-6 pm

This course is not a survey of contemporary rhetoric (though I will provide a relatively comprehensive bibliography). For this course we will focus on marxian trends in rhetoric. We will contrast rhetorical notions of subjectivity with classical, structuralist, and post- structuralist marxist and marxian discourse theories—and some of their applications by scholars in Rhetoric & Composition. Readings will include Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, Colette Guillauman’s Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political, V.N. Volosinov’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Language and excerpts from Louis Althusser, Michele Foucault, and readings from rhet/comp folks like Sharon Crowley, Krista Ratcliffe, or William Spurlin. Very short response papers, one article-length seminar paper.

English 544: Syntax

Lynn Gordon, Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, 2:10-3 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.

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
• make and assess arguments supporting old and new analyses within the Minimalist model.
• analyze moderately large data sets showing complex and unfamiliar syntactic structures, producing a clear and well-supported analysis; and
• produce and support derivations of a wide range of complex structures within the Minimalist model.

The class grades will be based on completion of the homework and participation in class discussion and analysis (15%), performance on the quizzes (35%), extended syntax problem (10%), and final exam (40%).

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 546: Topics in Teaching English as a Second Language

Nancy Bell, Thursdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

This seminar is designed to prepare you to teach second language (L2) users in composition courses in higher education. The course will provide an introduction to literacies and second language acquisition (SLA) in general, but the main focus will be on learning about the experiences of non-native English speaking students in US university settings and ways of teaching academic literacy to these students. Much of the course will be devoted to researching an academic task/genre and designing activities to teach that task/genre to university level ESL students. Observation of at least two weeks of an ESL class will also be required. Students who take this class will be qualified to teach English 105, 303, and 403 (if they are already qualified to teach 402).

At the end of this course you should be able to:

• identify differences between first and second language acquisition of literacies,
• identify different types of L2 learners and their needs,
• identify specific ways of supporting L2 users in your classes,
• use feedback and assessment techniques that are appropriate for these learners,
• design and implement a curriculum to teach academic literacies to L2 users.

English 549: 20th Century British Literature

Donna Potts, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:30 pm

Within the last ten years (including, most recently, the 2009 release of the Ryan Report), reports of abuse in the church and in Ireland’s industrial school system have produced a great deal of public discourse, but Irish literature has long registered an awareness of these issues, beginning in the modern era with James Joyce’s Dubliners, in which child sexual abuse, incest, domestic violence, and rape are in many ways sanctioned by the official discourse of church and state. Irish colonial and postcolonial discourses have had an impact on a number of social issues, such as abortion and reproductive rights, gay rights, domestic violence, and divorce, which have also garnered a great deal of literary attention in works such as Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River, Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices, Emma Donoghue’s Stir Fry, Roddy Doyle’s The Woman who Walked into Doors, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed and poetry by W.B. Yeats, Eva Gore-Booth, Paula Meehan, Seamus Heaney, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and others. After an examination of the colonial rhetoric that shaped and continued to shape representations of Ireland, we will examine cultural moments such as the trials of Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement, the Kerry Babies case in the 1980s, the X Case in 1992, the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal, the Ryan Report, and the Magdalene Laundries Report, in relation to the literary texts that respond to these events, as well as the contemporary trauma theory that helps to make sense of them.

English 560: Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in Digital Humanities

Roger Whitson, Mondays, 3:10-5:40 pm

In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Steven Jones argues that DH after 2008 is different from humanities computing due to a cultural phenomenon that William Gibson calls “the eversion:” a term meaning “turning inside out.” For Jones and Gibson, the development of mobile media platforms, the rise of social media applications, and the spread of maker culture question the once stable separation between everyday life and what was once called “cyberspace.” This course will examine how the eversion impacts the study of materiality in the digital humanities.

We will interrogate versions of new materialism in philosophy before examining the materiality of seemingly immaterial digital archives, the geological materials that make up our most common electronic devices, the impact of material networks on our geopolitical world, the forensic “guts” of our computational systems, the impact of mobile media on our sense of material embodiment, and the rise of digitally- mediated forms of material extrusion and manipulation in physical computing. Requirements include two presentations and a final paper, but students will also be given the opportunity to replace the paper for a final digital project or artifact using the Makey-Makey or Arduino platforms.

*This class fulfills a core requirement of the Digital Humanities and Culture Certificate program. See the English Department website for more details about the DHC Certificate.

Readings Taken from the Following Possibilities:

• Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
• Benjamin Bratton. The Stack.
• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.
• Lori Emerson. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound.
• Jason Farman. Mobile Interface Theory.
• William Gibson. The Peripheral.
• N. Katherine Hayles. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.
• Steven Jones. The Emergence of the Digital Humanities.
• Jerome McGann. A New Republic of Letters.
• Jussi Parikka. A Geology of Media.
• Steven Shaviro. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism.

English 580: Middle English Literature: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Michael Hanly, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:25-2:40 pm

As Dryden said, “here is God’s plenty.” The Canterbury Tales is nearly encyclopedic in its scope. The Tales assemble an astonishing variety of voices from across the social and linguistic spectrum, and offer trenchant commentary on the era’s most pressing issues: emerging nationalisms, interfaith conflict, the rise of the vernacular, the just war, marriage and sexuality, church reform, changing roles for women, and ideal government, as manifested in the De Regimine Principum, the “advice to princes” genre. This seminar will place Chaucer’s narrative compilation in the context of fourteenth-century European politics, history, and artistic culture. Selections from works by a number of medieval authors both famed and obscure, will serve as touchstones. We will necessarily consider both medieval and contemporary critical responses to the texts and themes we encounter. A Term Paper (including an annotated bibliography and other written assignments) is to be expected, as will oral reports and regular participation in seminar discussions.

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.