Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2018 Course Offerings

English 502: Seminar in Teaching and Writing

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. Emphases will include working with nontraditional student populations and teaching-for-transfer pedagogical approaches. 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, Victor Villanueva, 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 514: 20th-Century American Literature —Toxic Bodies: Disease, Denial, and Resistance in Contemporary American Ecological Literature and Popular Culture

Desiree Hellegers, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 pm

This course, which advances health and environmental priorities identified in WSU’s “Grand Challenges,” will provide students with an opportunity to explore the intersections of two rapidly expanding fields, the environmental and medical humanities, as we examine texts that explore the links between toxic landscapes and the diseased body. Particular attention will be devoted to the emergence and rapid transformation of ecocriticism over the past two decades, and the emergence of environmental cultural studies, as we trace formative influences from ecofeminist, queer and postcolonial theory, environmental justice/ethnic studies, and Animal Studies.

Required Books:

  • Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
  • Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection (2014)
  • Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (1995)
  • Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
  • Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Environment (2015)
  • Kathy Jetnil Kijiner, Iap Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter
  • Audre Lorde, Cancer Journals (1980)
  • Cherrie Moraga, Heroes and Saints (1994)
  • Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991)
  • Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1992)

Additional articles and excerpts will be drawn from the following texts:

  • Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, “The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism” (MELUS, 2009 Special Edition)
  • Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy (2002)
  • Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures, Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2011)
  • Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture (2012)
  • Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2009)
  • Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Replacing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism”
  • Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996)
  • Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, the Reinvention of Nature (1990)
  • Graham Huggan, Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2nd edition, 2015)
  • Maren Klawiter, The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer, Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism (2008)
  • Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair” (1995)
  • Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (2006)
  • Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
  • Noel Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural (2008)

English 515: Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric

Victor Villanueva, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 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 snippets (or snippets+) from Louis Althusser, Michele Foucault, and readings from rhet/comp folks like Sharon Crowley, Krista Ratcliffe, or Jonathan Alexander. Very short response papers, one article- length seminar paper.

English 521: British Romantic Literature — Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction

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

What if the ‘idea’ of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else?”

—Friedric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?”

Science-fiction scholar Darko Suvin claims that the genre is fundamentally concerned with “cognitive estrangement,” or the presence of some element in the story that transforms how its readers understand their world. In fact, much of the developments in science, economics, and politics in the nineteenth century are also concerned with the new worlds revealed by an increasingly industrialized society. Charles Darwin shocked the world by postulating that natural selection determined the habits of human beings, not any divine plan. Charles Babbage transformed work and foreshadowed our own networked society by inventing the difference engine and arguing that clock mechanisms could help discipline lazy workers. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels looked to an impossible future where workers would determine how society would function. And the hopes and fears inspired by these ideas reappeared as dreams and nightmares in science fiction: Darwin’s theories become the strange human-like animal hybrids of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Babbage’s factories emerge as the living machines of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and the hopes of a proletarian rebellion are translated into the socialist aliens from Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star and the medievalist craftspeople in William Morris’s The News from Nowhere.

This course will show how science fiction articulated the hopes and fears Victorians associated with the future. Such anxieties are, as Jameson argues in “Progress versus Utopia,” a symptom of their (and our) inability to imagine the future. Against liberal promises of “progress” in which the notion of eventual inclusion tells the oppressed to stave off revolution and reassure the ruling class, science fiction enacts dramas surrounding the true danger and possibility of a future that is entirely unpredictable. In addition to the authors mentioned above, this course will show how women and authors of color used science fiction to challenge the oppressions of their day and imagine futures that asserted their freedom and power.

Potential texts include:

  • Bruno Latour, We Were Never Modern
  • Friedric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
  • Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or the Moor
  • Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  • Charles Darwin, Selections from The Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
  • H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
  • William Morris, The News from Nowhere
  • Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture
  • Karl Marx, Selections from Capital and The Grundrisse
  • Friedrich Engels, Selections from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
  • Samuel Butler, Erewhon
  • Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
  • Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood
  • Octavia Butler, Kindred

English 544: Syntax

Lynn Gordon, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 2:10-3 pm

Description not available. 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 546: Topics in Teaching English as a Second Language — Teaching and Learning L2 Academic Literacies

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/Digital Technology and Culture 560: Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in Digital Humanities

Kimberly Christen, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:35-11:50 am

Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary examination of the history, theory, and practice of digital humanities, paying special attention to the ways in which digital humanities is transforming and constructing research, digital tools, teaching, and access to knowledge across disciplines. Topics include: origin stories of digital humanities; tools and techniques used by digital humanists; the ethics of open access; diversity in digital environments, design and infrastructure and tool building, the crossover between critical theory and digital humanities methods. The course begins with a survey of the emergent field of digital humanities and its intersection with traditional disciplines. We will examine how critical cultural theories have influenced the use, practices, and construction of digital environments, discourses, and methods used under the umbrella of DH. While students are not expected to be proficient in any one technology, digital tool, or platform 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. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the course students across the humanities and social sciences are encouraged to bring their interests and topics to the discussions. Major projects and assignments can be adaptable to field-specific issues and goals and students will be encouraged to tailor their projects to the needs of their disciplines. Openness to tinkering, playing, failing, and making are required.

Required materials:

  • A Twitter account
  • A blog—platform is your choice

English 580: Seminar in Medieval Literature

Michael Hanly, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12-1:15 pm

Description not available. 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.