Graduate Studies Bulletin

Fall 2020 Course Offerings

English 501: Teaching of Writing: Methodology and Composition

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

Description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.

English 509: Classical Rhetoric

Mike Edwards, Tuesdays, 2:55-5:25 pm

Classical rhetoric, when engaged carefully, is amazing. It’s got power, lust, avarice, slander, philosophy, adultery, treason, ethics, invective murder, scandal, and redemption. It’s also easy to represent poorly, often as a loose collection of obsolete ideas from a couple thousand years ago. My goal is to investigate, with you, classical rhetoric in its material practice: as something that very smart ancient peoples performed, lived, theorized, researched, and contested.

 This seminar uses the concept of empire as a way to investigate the problematic notion of a Western-oriented classical rhetorical tradition and canon. While rhetorics ostensibly rely on persuasion, they are often sustained or advanced by unequal relations of imperial power and domination, and this seminar proposes that those unequal relations of power merit investigation: the rhetorical tradition does not exist outside of politics or materiality. For those reasons, this seminar investigates texts from the classical rhetorical tradition in their historical and material contexts, offering participants a thorough familiarity with those texts while at the same time asking participants to complicate the long-held notion of traditional rhetorical canonicity.

English 512: Introduction to Graduate Study

Donna Campbell, Thursdays, 1:25-2:15 pm

English 512 is an introduction to the materials and methods of graduate study in English. It is recommended but not required for students entering the M.A. or Ph.D. program. It includes the following topics:

• Introduction to research methods, ethics, and issues (such as seeking IRB approval)
• Campus centers (CDSC, etc.) and their resources
• Reference management tools (Mendeley, Zotero, Endnote) and their uses
• Reading scholarly articles (arguments, contexts, theories)
• Writing seminar papers: finding your voice, making a persuasive argument, literature reviews, and so on
• Writing for the profession: calls for papers, conference proposals, brief biographies, and other materials
• Job market preparation: how to assess your goals, read a job ad, create a curriculum vitae (cv), and write a cover letter for academic and broader forms of employment
• Conversations with and presentations by faculty through the colloquium series and through faculty visits to the class

Students are expected to complete the following:

• Turn in a CV and cover letter;
• attend at least one colloquium beyond this class;
• attend and participate in the class.

English 534: Theories and Methods in the Teaching Technical & Professional Writing

Julie Staggers, Mondays, 12:10-2:40 pm

This seminar offers WSU’s graduate students a foundation for teaching undergraduate technical and professional writing courses. As such, it is a survey of current scholarship concerning objectives and methods of instruction in technical and professional communication that takes a rhetorical view of theory within the field. The seminar ms to not only investigate the historical and theoretical bases for production of writing in scientific and technical industries, but also to familiarize students with models of inquiry in the field, emphasizing the connections between theory and pedagogy in technical and professional communication. This course also serves as a credentialing mechanism for graduate students who wish to teach English 402 by providing the necessary pedagogical training in and scholarly context for professional communication.

English 543: Phonology

Michael Thomas, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:25-2:40 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 549: 20th Century British Literature: Irish Literature & the Rhetoric of Environmental Protest

Donna Potts, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:05-1:20 pm

Often considered the first colony of Great Britain, Ireland has long relied on coded forms of protest, particularly through music and poetry, to address the Irish dispossession from the land. The Irish environmental movement, which began gaining momentum in the nineteen seventies, has influenced and been addressed by contemporary Irish writers, artists, and musicians, who often invoke Ireland’s history of dispossession. This seminar examines Irish environmental writing and its cultural contexts, considers how postcolonial ecocriticism might usefully be applied to Ireland, and analyzes the rhetoric of Irish environmental protests. By placing the Irish environmental movement within the broader contexts of Irish national and postcolonial discourses, I hope to invite discussion and make analogies with a range of global environmental protests. Notable Irish environmental protests that invoke the history of colonial dispossession have focused on road construction (Roads protests can be traced to Boudicca’s insurrection against Roman occupation in Britain and have been shaped in Ireland by famine roads—roads that the starving Irish were forced to build in exchange for food). In the twentieth century, roads protests have continued, from John Montague’s 1968 literary protest, “Hymn to the New Omagh Road” to the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skyrne valley. Other environmental protests involve the ostensibly barren Burren region;  Bogland, often depicted as uncultivatable wasteland, and considered metonymic for Irish character; natural resources, including hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear power; as well as natural gas: the “Shell to Sea” campaign, launched in 2005 in protest of Shell Oil’s effort to build a natural gas pipeline on Rossport’s land, near the mouth of Broadhaven Bay.

Both the rhetoric of Irish environmental campaigns as well as their literary expressions have inevitably tapped into an audience’s awareness of the historic and symbolic significance of Irish animals. It is essential to balance the historic and symbolic understanding of Irish animals with their ecological significance, and also, to balance the literary celebrations of threatened as well as extinct species with the rhetoric that argues for the protection of threatened species. Invasions of Ireland are now also biological; many animals native to Ireland will face extinction if foreign species invading the country are not controlled. Texts for the course include the poetry of John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Moya Cannon, and Francis Harvey; the fiction of John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, and Patrick McCabe; as well as the plays of Francis Harvey, W.B. Yeats, and Brian Friel; and music included in the three-CD set, Songs of Solidarity and Resistance (2015), as well as the CD, The Sound of Stone: Artists for Mullaghmore (1993). We will also read excerpts from Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism, Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, Liam Leonard’s Politics Inflamed (2005), Green Nation (2006), and The Environmental Movement in Ireland.

English 573: Creating Online Editions: Theory and Practice

Donna Campbell, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 pm

This seminar combines the theoretical, analytical, and practical skills needed to create online and print editions. We will read Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth, Summer, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence), Virginia Woolf, and Charles W. Chesnutt in the publication context of their works both during their own day and in their new incarnations as digital editions. We’ll work with unpublished writings and various editions of Edith Wharton’s writings as well as the Virginia Woolf Collection in the MASC. Readings include theoretical work by Jerome McGann, Lisa Gitelman, Matthew K. Gold, Matthew Kirschenbaum, William Procter Williams and Craig S. Abbott, Roopika Risam, Shawna Ross, and Amy Earhart.

Students will learn hands-on digital and traditional editorial markup and will perform some actual editing work to explore the underpinnings of digital editions. We’ll discuss theories of editing (Tanselle, Bowers, etc.) as well as traditional topics in editing (manuscripts, typescripts, establishing provenance, transcription, methods of collation, distinguishing editions and printings, and theories of editorial practice) through Williams and Abbott. We’ll also explore digital methods of collation such as Juxta, PocketHinman, and Traherne Digital Collator. Among the markup tools we’ll practice using in creating editions are basic HTML and CSS, the TEI (Text-Encoding Initiative), and Scalar. This course is an approved elective for the Digital Humanities Certificate.

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: Critical and Cultural Theory: Futurity: Feminist & Queer Theoretical Interventions & Genres of Forecasting

Pamela Thoma, Thursdays, 2:55-5:25 pm

This seminar takes up the topic of futurity, building on a crucial area of theoretical concern that has been the intense focus of scholarship over the past decade and numerous recent conference themes across a variety of fields or subfields related to English studies, including literary, American, and feminist and queer studies, As one session on “Forecasting” for the 2019 American Comparative Literature Association annual conference observes, in a broad understanding of weather: “It is not just climatologists and scientists that engage in forecasting these future weather scenarios. Scholars, artists, writers, activists, planners, and policy makers are all trying their hand at forecasting, at casting projections forwards through careful prognosis and/or radical acts of imagination. They do so as a way of grappling with the complex and uncertain scenarios that lie just ahead of us, as well trying to imagine entirely different futures than the ones to which we collectively seem fated” (Jagoe). 

The seminar will consider questions posed by contemporary feminist and queer theorists who have developed and engaged a wide range of concepts related to futurity: the Chthulucene, cruel optimism, fugitivity, planetarity, the post-work imaginary, reprofuturity, utopia/dystopia, and world making, to name a few. We begin with the influential provocations of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, and move through a varied and eclectic selection of recent thinking on futurity. At five points in the semester, there will be interregna when we read genres of literary prediction and forecasting—fiction, poetry, and memoir—with texts collectively decided upon by seminar members. The final paper will be an analysis of a primary text or texts using theoretical concepts and a framework encountered during the semester and through independent research in the topic. 

English 597: Topics in Composition and Rhetoric: Rhetorics of the Archive

Patty Wilde, Wednesdays, 3:10-5:40 pm

Terry Cook’s notion that “We are what we keep; we keep what we are” is suggestive of the problematic nature of archives and, subsequently, the products of archival research. This course takes up the rhetorical nature of these concerns, examining the constructed nature of both archives and histories. While interrogating these issues, students will acquire pragmatic archival skills, learning about archival research methods and methodologies. In addition to exploring archival collections at the WSU library, they will investigate digital and personal archives, which will culminate in their own original research project. While the course primarily focuses on archival research as it is enacted in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, it is also relevant to students interested in pursuing archival projects in other disciplines and in pedagogical settings.