Graduate Studies Bulletin

Fall 2016 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 507: Shakespeare: Knowing and Believing in Shakespeare’s England

William Hamlin, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:35-11:50 am

Unknown to Europeans until its rediscovery in 1417 by the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) became one of the most widely read poems in the Renaissance. Montaigne quoted huge portions of it in his Essays, and in England several translators prepared vernacular renditions. Yet the poem, with its vehement materialism and anti-religious ethos, seems an unlikely candidate to have moved beyond cult-classic status in the early modern world. Meanwhile, in northern Italy at the close of the sixteenth century, an obscure miller and autodidact called Menocchio argued that God and the angels had first emerged, maggot-like, from an enormous mass of putrefying matter that had existed for all eternity. Despite earnestly explaining his ideas to Roman Catholic inquisitors, he was deemed an irrecoverable heretic and burned at the stake.

I mention the rediscovery of Lucretius and the story of Menocchio because they serve as marquee examples for any discussion of knowledge and belief in the Renaissance. But this seminar will be somewhat more restricted in focus, dealing mainly with the intersections of religious and gender ideology, epistemological presupposition, and theatrical representation in Elizabethan/Jacobean England. How do early modern accounts of perception, knowledge, certainty, and belief manifest themselves in plays traversed by varied forms of doubt? What criteria are understood to be relevant in ascertaining the status of truth-claims within fictional discourse? How are the plays that early modern writers called “histories” or “tragedies” shaped from historical narratives and evidence? What cultural presuppositions — about gender, class, literary form, aesthetic value, reception — enable this to happen? How do tragic representations of “history” exploit and/or explode transcendental assumptions ascribed to characters within plays or held by audience members viewing those plays? Is tragedy incompatible with Christian providentialism, as scholars have often argued? In the end, how do we gauge and evaluate the moral, political, and metaphysical assumptions of fictional characters — or, to use Althusserian jargon, how do we assess their ideological “interpellation”? And can we extrapolate from such assessments to claims about the opinions, say, of Marlowe or Shakespeare?

We’ll study a range of plays by Shakespeare and his near-contemporaries, and we’ll juxtapose these plays against important selections of non-fictional prose by Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon, particularly from the Essays (Montaigne) and The Advancement of Learning and the Essays (Bacon). We’ll also spend time with other relevant historical, philosophical, and/or devotional materials (events, practices, homilies, chronicles, theological polemics, ethical and epistemological treatises, etc.). Plays will be drawn from the following list: Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville); The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd); Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta (Marlowe); Titus Andronicus, Richard II, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus (Shakespeare); The Tragedy of Mariam (Cary); Sejanus, Bartholomew Fair, Epicoene (Jonson); The Duchess of Malfi (Webster); The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Changeling, Women Beware Women (Middleton); and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford). Basic familiarity with Erasmus, Machiavelli, Descartes, and Pascal will be helpful, as will an acquaintance with the central debates of the Reformation and the theoretical opinions of Sidney in his Defense of Poesy. Other readings will include Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms; Étienne de la Boétie, A Discourse of Voluntary Servitude; short passages from Lucretius, Plutarch, Josephus, Saxo Grammaticus, and Holinshed; selections from Wiesner-Hanks’ Gender in History (2nd ed.); discussions of ideology by Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Williams, Eagleton, David Hawkes, and Michael Freeden; and the Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy. Contemporary criticism will include articles and book chapters representing a spectrum of methodologies and theoretical orientations. Issues of censorship, anti-theatricalism, resistance theory (Huguenot, Catholic, etc.), social discipline, and early modern masculinity and femininity will figure centrally in class discussion.

Students should expect to pose questions for class discussion, to give two brief oral presentations, and to write two short essays (roughly 6-8 pages apiece), a book review (4-5 pages), and one longer essay (15-20 pages).

English 508: Assessment of Writing

William Condon, Wednesdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

Increasingly, our professional lives are infused with assessment, from testing, to grading, to course and program evaluation. Thus, knowledge of this field benefits the teacher who wants to improve her performance, the program administrator who needs to advance new initiatives or defend existing ones, or any professional who needs to be able to join in local, statewide, or national conversations about assessment in a field.

While we will focus on writing assessment, our deliberations are contextualized within the field of evaluation generally. We will look at the history of writing assessment, as well as its methods and research practices. Most important, we will devote considerable time to classroom forms of assessment. The course pursues several important objectives:

• To explore the history of writing assessment.
• To establish a context for writing assessment within the larger context of assessment in general.
• To relate concepts and practices of writing assessment to classroom grading and evaluation practices.
• To examine recent developments in course and program evaluation.
• To develop a series of assessment-friendly assignments and implement them in the classroom.
• To develop an independent project in writing assessment, program assessment, or self-assessment that an individual student may present as a conference paper and, eventually, publish as a journal essay.

We focus on praxis—on the application of theory to practice—in order to develop an understanding of assessment as a form of research that focuses on improvement. Much of class discussion will concentrate on how assessment plays into teaching and grading practices.

English 514: 20th Century American Literature: African American Writing after the Renaissance, 1938-1960

Thabiti Lewis, Mondays, 3:10-5:40 pm

African American Literature and the Rhetorics of Hip Hop introduces students to the architecture of language that serves as the foundation for the African American literary tradition. The literature within the field makes use of several impulses and cultural influences ranging from spirituals, sermons, and blues to folklore and jazz. The first goal is to forge an understanding of these antecedents as they function in the literature as rhetorical strategies that part and parcel of African American literary tradition and then influence what is produced in hip hop culture. We learn that hip hop’s rhetorical devices do not exist in a vacuum but are modern iterations of the folklore figures like the bad man, trickster, and John Henry or Shine. This course examines not only the core components of hip hop and the particular aesthetic representations driving it, but also iterations of the aforementioned antecedents at work in the language of rap music and other core elements. An additional point will be to draw connections between the literary expressions of Black Aesthetic as giving rise to late 1970s hip hop.

We will examine critical essays (by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Bakari Kitwana, Imani Perry), novels (such as A Cold Winter, The Rage is Back, and WhiteBoy Shuffle), poems, music, and visual material to help us understand the archeology of knowledge required to better understand the rhetorics of hip hop literature and culture.

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 554: History of the English Language

Lynn Gordon, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:25-2:40 pm

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

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 595: Topics in English: Nonhumanisms

Jon Hegglund, Thursdays, 2:50-5:20 pm

In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel posed the question “What is it like to be a bat?” in an essay of the same name. Can we answer this question in such a way that inhabits the perceptual and cognitive otherness of this creature, or are any attempts to do so inevitably pressed into human frames of reference? This seemingly innocent philosophical question opens onto a rich and varied tradition in literature, philosophy, and art that explores how, and indeed, if, it is possible for humans to conceive of and represent nonhuman otherness. Though literary and cultural artifacts will anchor our inquiry into these broad questions of the nonhuman, this course will engage a number of disciplinary fields, including biology, philosophy, media studies, ecocriticism, and science/technology studies.

While the course title features “nonhumans” as objects, forces, and entities of interest, this in no way implies that humans are simply diminished, devalued, or disappeared from the scene. Rather, we will explore the uncanny and ubiquitous interfaces between the human and the nonhuman, and the ways in which these encounters change the shape of the human subject past the point of recognizability. Nonhumans are quite literally everywhere, so it will not be difficult to find them in the literature and culture of the past two hundred years. What will be different, however, are the ways in which nonhuman forces are placed on equal or comparable footing with human agency—with nonhumans endowed with life and agency, and humans reconceived as things, material, and matter.

This approach aims to accomplish the following: 1) to trace the rise of ideas that decenter the human subject as part of a larger recognition of (to use Levi Bryant’s felicitous phrase) the “democracy of objects,” 2) to identify and explore alliances and affinities between the nonhuman and particularized, politicized human groups, including racial, sexual, and class minorities, and 3) to take part in larger conversations about the special (specie-al) exceptionalism of the human in the face of decisive material transformations brought about by modernity and its anthropogenic transformation of “nature” and the world.

We’ll begin with precursors such as Darwin, Freud, and Heidegger along with early 20th-century literature, art, and film, before we get to the bulk of the course, which will center on more recent philosophy, ecocriticism, animal studies, narrative theory, science and technology studies, and theories of the body. While there will be a good deal of theory in the course, we will be pairing our theoretical readings with examples from popular culture as well as literature and art–much of which will be determined by the interests of the individual members of the class.

Over the course, we’ll discuss the work of these thinkers and artists: Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, H.P. Lovecraft, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, André Breton, Djuna Barnes, Martin Heidegger, Maya Deren, Bruno Latour, Ursula Leguin, Thomas Nagel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, William Connolly, Jason Moore, Jeffrey Cohen, Stacey Alaimo, Jeff VanderMeer, and others. Work will include weekly readings, assigned discussion openers and responses several times during the semester, two brief “position” papers of 2-3 pages each, and a conference-length paper of roughly 10-12 pages.

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

Victor Villanueva, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 pm

A part of Kenneth Burke’s definition of “rhetoric” is that it “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 rhetoric is basic to the creature, at the very least epistemological and maybe ontological. If that’s the case, then every culture, every cooperating group of people, would have its own rhetorical history, would not have to have been introduced to rhetoric by the people of Athens or Rome. It is with this line of thought that we will look in this course, not at “alternative rhetorics,” but at the rhetorics that obtained and continue to obtain on this part of the world, from the pre-Columbian to contemporary people of color, groups with their own ways of navigating different linguistic heritages and the kind of colonialism that is a part of racism, reflected in unique rhetorical ways. Short reading responses and two short papers.