Graduate Studies Bulletin

Fall 2015 Course Offerings

English 501: Teaching of Writing: Methodology of Composition

Patricia Ericsson, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

Description not available. Please contact the instructor for more information.

English 509: Classical Rhetoric and its influences

Victor Villanueva, Wednesdays, 3:10-6 pm

Rhetoric is the oldest of the language disciplines. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, rhetoric formed the essential base of education: the trivium, consisting of what we would now call rhetoric, linguistics, and literature. For this course, we will become acquainted with the most known classical, Hellenistic, and Roman rhetors (and one medieval rhetor): the Elder Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and St. Augustine (and a few others). We will read primary works in translation, discuss the ancients within their historical contexts and discuss the ways these ancients remain with us in philosophy, composition studies, literary studies, and political and social oratory.

English 525: English Literature of the 17th Century: Memories of the Reformation in Early Modern Europe

Todd Butler, Wednesdays, 3:10-6 pm

This seminar, conceived as a team-taught class that joins graduate students in literature and history, explores this use of historical memory across seventeenth-century Europe, examining how writers and thinkers in England and the Continent returned to the events of the early Reformation in order to shape not only their personal understandings of religion but also the national institutions that constituted their collective expression.

Beginning with Hayden White’s conception of history as a “poetic act,” students will first review the first generations of the Protestant Reformation, concentrating in literary terms on texts that helped constitute for future writers the storehouse of Protestant experience (ex. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, selections from Spenser’s Fairie Queene). Memory in these terms could be constituted in iconoclasm and obliteration, as newly established Protestant regimes sought to replace long-standing traditions of religious expression (literary, material) with new narratives and imagery. The turn to the seventeenth century, however, dramatically altered this dynamic, as in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the moderation of the Anglican via media became a tool of active coercion. In this section of the course, students will focus on literary representations and recollections of two key moments—the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot—as well as the growing interrogation of processes of religious conversion and oath taking (ex. Donne, poetry selections and Pseduo-Martyr). In weeks 9-12 students will then concentrate on the literature of religious revolution, in particular on Milton’s prose tracts and Paradise Lost, as well as selections from Thomas Browne and George Herbert, to examine how these key writers marry memory and autobiography.

Assignments will likely include: secondary source reviews, joint (history-literature) discussion leaders, and an essay-length seminar paper.

English 543: Phonology

Lynn Gordon, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:00-1:15 pm

Description not available. Please 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: Critical Theory, Literacy, and Pedagogy

Ashley Boyd, Thursdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

“Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse”—Stuart Hall

The foundation of this course resides in Janks’s model of critical literacy: the interdependence of domination, access, diversity and design as an approach to reading, deconstructing, and re-constructing texts. We will read seminal theoretical texts that uphold each of those four pillars, including works by Marx, Foucault, Freire, and Gee as well as more contemporary works in critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical whiteness studies. Our study of these works will culminate in varied notions on how social reproduction occurs and how power is constructed and upheld. We will apply these theories to enact critical literacy, reading both the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ using analytic strategies to critique popular as well as traditional texts. Finally, we will explore how these intellectual practices inform pedagogies and promote ways to become agents of social change with regard to both teachers and students.

Major assignments in the course include: weekly text engagements wherein you will react and question the texts read for class; discussion leading and précis writing whereby you will lead us in examining a reading for the week; a multimedia presentation of an ideological analysis of a film, social practice, or current event; a problem-posing project for which you identify a myth of the dominant discourse and a population with which to work to deconstruct that myth (related to your own area of interest/academic work); and a final course paper/project that creates a set of texts around a particular theme to encourage a critical reading.

English 567: Prose Fiction: Transatlantic Naturalisms

Donna Campbell, Thursdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

This course explores late nineteenth-­ and twentieth-century literary naturalism, a movement based in evolutionary science and praised for its commitment to truth and objectivity by its practitioners but condemned as sordid and shocking by its detractors. This version of the course pays particular attention to naturalistic works by women writers and writers of color from the United States, England, France, Spain, and Brazil. Among the ideas we will examine are the following:

  • Fictions of the body; subjectivity and consciousness; evolution; biological and hereditary traits, including problematic theories of race and ethnicity; atavism, disease, and degeneration; sexuality and its various expressions; primitivism and emotional excess.
  • Constructions of the city and its crowds: the city as organism; bodies en masse, including mobs, crowds, and crowd psychology; the urban jungle; Social Darwinism
  • Concepts of space and the environment, including built and natural environments; prisons and entrapment; the function of material objects and processes; the antiromantic indifference of nature; human beings as both destroying and being destroyed by nature.
  • Commodity and consumer culture: the desiring self; commodity fetishism; department stores, advertising, and the role of text in constructing subjectivity.
  • Technology and machine culture: the body as machine (Seltzer); machines and corporations as bodies (Michaels); the powers of technology, including industrial capitalism.
  • Theories of scientific and philosophical determinism; the real, the “true,” and the “accurate”; philosophical coherence and emotional logic; naturalistic representation and its critics.
  • Narration and genre: “objective” representation; the spectator; features of style and form (e.g., the naturalistic catalogue of decay).
  • Gambling, speculation, risk and risky behavior; the vagaries of fate and accident and their relation to determinism; impulse and restraint.

Primary texts for this class will include work from among the following authors: Frank Norris, McTeague; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome; Kate Chopin, At Fault and The Awakening; Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jack London, Martin Eden; Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Monster; Emile Zola, L’assommoir; Aluísio Azevedo, O Cortiço [The Slum]; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Ann Petry, The Street; Emilia Pardo Bazan, Los pazos de Ulloa [The House of Ulloa] or Torn Lace. Critical and theoretical readings include work by Eric Carl Link, Mary Papke, Gillian Beer, Donald Pizer, Jennifer Fleissner, Janet Beer, Katherine Joslin, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Mark Seltzer, Walter Benn Michaels, and Gene Andrew Jarrett.

Assignments are all geared toward eventual presentation or publication. They include a 30-minute oral presentation; short 5-minute presentations of critical material; and two papers, one of conference length and one longer paper that may be based on the same topic.

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 with Technology

Kristin Arola, Mondays, 3:10-6 pm

This class questions the idea that as writing technologies change, so too must our writing pedagogies. As a way of exploring this notion, we will look specifically at the multimodal turn in composition and literacy studies, a turn largely brought forth by increased access to digital tools. By exploring the theoretical foundations of multimodal approaches, we will question how and why (and sometimes why not) to integrate multimodality into writing-intensive classrooms and examine to what degree a multimodal pedagogy is consonant with a digital pedagogy.

Books:

  • Alexander, Jonathan and Jacqueline Rhodes. On Multimodality: New Media and Composition Studies. CCCC/NCTE, 2014.
  • Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis (Eds.). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Routledge, 2000.
  • Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge, 2010.
  • Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Oxford UP, 2001.
  • Lutkewitte, Claire (Ed.). Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014.
  • Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois UP, 2012.
  • Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
  • Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. UPitt Press, 2011.

Assignments:

Book summaries. You are responsible for writing a summary for each book we read in class. The summary is due by class time and must include: 1) the book’s main argument summarized in your own words, 2) three direct quotes from the book that you feel are important to the overall argument, 3) a description of two issues the author raises that you find compelling (you may be compelled because you agree or disagree), and 4) one image, video, or song/soundclip, that you feel is somehow related to what you took away from reading the book.

Article conversations. For the weeks we read articles, you must choose one of the articles and put it in conversation with the book we read prior to this particular set of articles. Questions to consider if you’re feeling stumped (you do NOT need to answer all of these, this is just to help you think):

  • Does the article illuminate the book author’s point? How so?
  • Does the article challenge any of the arguments made in the book?
  • Does the book help you see/read/understand the article in a particular way?
  • Which text was published first and how might the author of the earlier text have benefitted from the arguments made by the later text?
  • Compare/contrast the main points

Theory Into Pedagogy. In a group of 2-3, you will be responsible creating a multimodal unit for a real or imagined course of your choosing. The unit must be designed for 3 weeks of the (imagined or real) course. You will design learning outcomes for the unit, assign readings/viewings, create day-to-day lesson plans, and compose at least one multimodal assignment prompt. The unit will be presented to the class along with a one-page pedagogical justification statement.

Final Multimodal Project. You will compose a multimodal project that engages with the themes of the class and develops a theoretically engaging argument. As part of this process, you will write an informal proposal at midterms and will receive feedback from your peers and from me. You will share your project in a presentation during the final weeks of class.

English 595.1: Topics in English: Literature, the Global South, and Environmental and Social Justice

Pavithra Narayanan, Mondays, 3:10-6 pm

Writers, who have the nation’s ear,

Your pen a sword opponents fear,

Speak of our evils loud and clear

That all may know.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, “An Appeal” (1992)

Paying attention to the intersections between the world of letters and environmental and social justice, this course examines the works of writers and scholars who challenge what Edward Said described as “the normalized quiet of unseen power,” to call attention to the violence that is engulfing communities globally, particularly in the Global South. Authors we will read include Kevin Gilbert, Alexis Wright, Indra Sinha, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Peter Alexander, Arundhati Roy, Neil Lazarus, Graham Huggan, Chris Tiffin, Rob Nixon, and Rik Scarce (WSU alumnus).