Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2022 Course Offerings

English 502: Contemporary Theories or Rhetoric

Wendy Olson, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:55-4:10 pm

This course introduces students to key theories that inform and impact both what we teach and how we teach when we teach academic 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 composition classrooms. 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, contradictions, and valuing that have shaped composition studies as a field alongside its manifestation and institutionalization within higher education.

We’ll begin with a discussion of the “social turn” in composition (both what it is, and why/how we got there), then move to investigate its lingering impacts on the field, research, and teaching practices. A particular focus of our conversations will concern what is at stake for students in how academic writing is defined, valued, and institutionalized within higher education). 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, curriculum, and students. Course requirements include weekly critical responses, a number of brief writing exercises/assignments, a pedagogical presentation, a book review, a teaching philosophy statement, and a final project.

English 527: 18th-Century Literature: 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

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, ecological collapse, 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 or reboot . . . that is, as we struggle to come to grips with similarly shocking realities, including the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. 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 disturbing present-day political realities.

The course will be organized around two primary overlapping areas of investigation: Gothic Romance (Gender and Sexuality), and the Imperial Gothic (the Horrors of Slavery in the Caribbean, Colonialism, Racism, World-Ecology, and Disease).

English 544: Syntax

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

Description not available. Contact 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 549: 20th Century: Postcolonial Theory and Literature

Donna Potts, with Pavithra Narayanan, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

What is, what could, or what should postcolonial studies be? This theory-based course pays attention to the roots of postcolonial studies, key concepts and discourses, and the discipline’s relations and intersections with other fields of study. Required readings engage with a wide range of representative twentieth-century texts by Indigenous Pacific, Australian Aboriginal, Caribbean, Algerian, Zimbabwean, Somali, South African, Kenyan, Nigerian, Indian, New Zealand, and North American writers and theorists. One of the goals is for students to gain a better understanding of how to identify, develop, and apply methodological approaches and perspectives that are both interdisciplinary and intersectional, both contemporary and historical in scope to research and pedagogy.

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

Michael Hanly, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:05-1:20 pm

Nearly encyclopedic in its scope, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury 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 social roles for women, and ideal government–especially the genre of De Regimine Principum, the “advice to princes.”  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.  In particular, the contemporary Book of Margery Kempe offers perspectives on gender, commerce, and pilgrimage, and readings from the Showings of Julian of Norwich will suggest the richness of late-medieval women’s mysticism.  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.

English 591: Topics in Pedagogy: Teaching English with Digital Technologies

Mike Edwards, Mondays, 2:10-4:40 pm

The COVID-19 crisis made freshly visible the challenges of teaching English with digital technologies. This pedagogy-focused multidisciplinary (literature, composition, English education) seminar offers graduate students a critical examination of the problems and potentials offered by digital pedagogies in English studies combined with training in digital tools for use in teaching English. As such, this seminar is designed to complement the focus of the DTC seminars (560 and 561) on methodological and theoretical perspectives in Digital Humanities, but attending closely to English studies and to pedagogical questions, and to training English Department graduate students in the technologies and questions associated with digital teaching.

Required Texts include:

• Banks, Adam. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. (2006, Southern Illinois University Press.)
• Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. (2019, Polity Press.)
• Carillo, Ellen C. MLA Guide to Digital Literacy. (2019, Modern Language Association.)
• Demaree, David. Git for Humans. (2016, A Book Apart.)
• Jockers, Matthew. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. (2013, University of Illinois.)
• Krause, Steven D. Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Online Open Courses. (2014, Parlor Press.)
• Selfe, Cynthia. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. (1999, Southern Illinois University Press.)

English 595: Topics in English: Disability Studies

Melissa Nicolas, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 pm

Disability studies is a growing, inter (trans) disciplinary site of inquiry, intersecting in powerful ways with critical race, feminist, queer, Marxist (among others) theories. Disability rhetoric participates in disability studies as both theory and methodology. As theory, disability rhetoric concerns itself with language and languaging as well as the interpretation, decoding, and deconstructing of texts and cultural artifacts. As methodology, disability studies asks practitioners, in the words of Hans Kellner, to “get the story crooked,” to challenge dominant research paradigms based on linearity, norms, standardization, and ableist assumptions about what all bodyminds can/should do. In this seminar, we will explore disability studies as both a theory and a methodology, creating space for all of us, regardless of disciplinary specialization, to connect with our own work.