Graduate Studies Bulletin

Fall 2024 Course Offerings

English 501: Teaching of Writing: Methodology of Composition

Kate Watts, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:35-11:50 am

English 501 is required for all graduate student teaching assistants, and the course necessarily differs from many of the other seminar courses you have or will take in graduate school. We must accomplish two main goals in this course: 1) familiarize you with composition theory and 2) prepare you for the practical side of teaching at WSU. As such, we will read and examine a wide range of scholarship connected to composition pedagogy, and we will explore and practice assignments, activities, and lessons you might facilitate in English 101.

English 501 is a fast semester introduction. PDC/English 600 and your fall and spring experiences in English 598 will also complement this preparation. Teaching is a mixture of preparation and practice, and while we will work diligently to prepare, we will also need to practice teaching. Good teaching is honed over time; we’re beginning a journey which will continue.

In most class sessions, I will ask you to participate in a learning experience; this is my way of modeling teaching strategies and providing an opportunity for you to engage with course content simultaneously. This work will often take the form of large group discussion but may also include structured small group discussions, group activities or assignments, creating visuals, writing assignments, and so on. Your contributions to these opportunities will prove beneficial to yourself as well as others.

English 509: History of Global Rhetorics: Rhetoric and Empire

Mike Edwards, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30-2:45 pm

The history of rhetoric, when engaged carefully, is remarkable. It’s got power, lust, avarice, slander, philosophy, adultery, humor, treason, ethics, invective, murder, scandal, and redemption. It’s also easy to represent poorly, often as a loose collection of obsolete ideas. This seminar seeks to investigate the history of global rhetoric in its material practice: as something that humans performed, practiced, theorized, researched, lived, and contested. We will use the concept of “empire” to investigate the problematic notion of a classical rhetorical tradition and canon and propose a more diverse array of rhetorical practices. While rhetorics ostensibly rely on persuasion, they are often sustained or advanced by unequal relations of imperial power and domination. This seminar proposes that those unequal relations of power merit investigation: no rhetorical tradition exists outside of politics or materiality, and persuasion often blurs into coercion. For those reasons, we will investigate readings from global rhetorical traditions in their historical and material contexts, often from the liminal spaces between coercion and persuasion, offering participants an introductory familiarity with those texts and asking participants to complicate traditional notions of rhetorical canonicity.

English 512: Introduction to Graduate Study

Jon Hegglund, Mondays, 12:10-1 pm

This course offers a practical introduction to the materials and methods of graduate study in English. It includes the following topics:

Introduction to research methods, ethics, and issues.
Reading scholarly articles (arguments, contexts, theories).
Negotiating multiple roles and responsibilities as a graduate student.
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, and create a Curriculum Vitae (CV).
Conversations with and presentations by faculty and fellow graduate students.

Students are expected to complete the following:

Attend and participate in the class,
compose a CV and a conference paper proposal,
and attend at least one colloquium, presentation, or scholarly/creative lecture beyond this class.

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 547: Introduction to Critical Theory: Thinking the Subject

Jon Hegglund, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:05-1:20 pm

This course will offer an introduction to concepts, frameworks, and debates within critical theory, centering our readings and discussions on the question of the subject—understood as the figure of human consciousness, agency, and embodiment (“subject of”) as well as the position afforded by linguistic, social, and political structures (“subject to”). We will begin by reading philosophical backgrounds of the subject through the lens of European colonial practices and indigenous contact zones, before working through several theoretical domains in which ideas of the subject are posited and developed: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, feminism, queer/trans studies, and post-/anti-/decolonial theories. This course is aimed at foundational concepts and questions of relevance to both literary and rhetorical scholars, as well as anyone pursuing cultural studies, media studies, and any methodology interested in philosophical and theoretical approaches to language.

Even though much of the reading will be challenging, we will elucidate and exemplify theoretical ideas by using examples from contemporary culture, politics, and everyday life.

English 548: Critical and Cultural Theory: Archives, Rhetoricity of Technologies, and Anti-Oppressive Interventions

Bibhushana Poudyal, Tuesdays, 2:55-4:45 pm

Despite the weight of institutional, historical, and infra/structural violence and inequities, people write back and re-script the oppressive narrative demanding accountability and rematriation. Communities have always been practicing resistance writing, storytelling, narrative-weaving, recordkeeping, and archiving in the most creative and radical ways with the available resources. This graduate course is designed in a way to humbly listen and learn from those practices and philosophies to archive back by understanding the rhetoricity of technologies through anti-oppressive interventions. Drawing upon Walter Mignolo’s concept of epistemic delinking and disobedience, we will ask: Are hospitality and justice still possible through archival performances? If there is a possibility, then what does that possibility and hospitality look/feel like? If it’s impossible, why does finding possibility in that impossibility or demanding the impossible feel like a decolonial, feminist, queer option?

Drawing upon the rhetoricity of technologies, discourses of multimodality-digitality, archival narratology, narratological gaps, and feminist counter-data and algorithmic justice, this graduate seminar is designed to help us interrogate the colonial past and post/colonial present and explore decolonial options and feminist/queer possibilities. To find these possibilities, we will turn to grassroots organizations and individual activists and their decolonial, anti-oppressive, and feminist zine-making, recordkeeping and narrativizing works from the Global South and the Global North. We will also consider how emerging technologies such as social media and online publishing raise rhetorical problems and opportunities in archival practices. Through the frameworks of global-planetary-social justice and ethics, we will approach the fields of multimodal-digital archiving and storytelling.

English 573: American Literature: Critical Regionalism, Race, and Nationalism in U. S. Literature

Donna Campbell, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30-2:45 pm

This seminar explores American regional literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the late nineteenth century, local color or regionalism served as a national forum for concerns over Gilded Age capitalism, urbanization, and the emergence of literary professionalism, and it became a means of engaging in national debates over immigration, imperialism, race, and nationalism. By the end of the twentieth century, regionalism in its newer forms, including critical regionalism, had become a means of exploring multicultural perspectives that underlie urban ethnic realism and the contact zones of contested ethnic spaces, such as the Southwestern U.S.-Mexico border. This course addresses these contact zones and the effects of colonization, focusing on critical regionalism and marginalized authors of color, particularly Native American writers in the West.

Readings at present include work from Beth Piatote, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, María Cristina Mena, Sara Orne Jewett, James Welch, Mourning Dove, Louise Erdrich, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton; archival materials and additional sources will be added.

Critical and theoretical readings will include essays from among the following: June Howard, Krista Comer, Gloria Anzaldùa, Samaine Lockwood, Bill Brown, Lucy Lippard, Douglas Powell, Benedict Anderson, José Límon, Hsuan Hsu, Cari Carpenter, Philip Deloria, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gerald Vizenor, Paul Giles.

Themes and subjects include the following:

Colonialism and diaspora; cultures of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad (Amy Kaplan).
Cultures of theft and appropriation in regional literature: collections and fantasies of a vanishing past; souvenirs (Susan Stewart).
Anthropology and the “science” of acquisition and (Cather, The Professor’s House); fetishization of artifacts and struggles over repatriation; Immigration, migration, and transnationalism; policing of territories, boundaries, borders, bodies; constructions and practices of labor (Gloria Anzaldúa).
Race, heredity, ethnicity: anthropological, biological, or cultural definitions; hidden signifiers; passing; “foreign” and familiar characters; white supremacist colonial past.
Disability, illness, and age as the province of regional literature: Jewett’s “Poor Joanna,” Wharton’s Ethan Frome, etc.
Queer regionalism, gothic regionalism, and the supernatural (ghost stories, cryptids, and signifiers of the other) (Samaine Lockwood, Fetterley & Pryse, etc.).
Technologies: of seeing, of representation, of travel, of circulating goods and services; of folkways, including medical and food cultures.
Ecocritical concerns, region as a national reserve (Timothy Clark, Benjamin Morgan, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Hsuan Hsu).
Cultures of waste, loss, extraction and transportation industries; “development” and “preservation” as contested terms.
Place: definitions of place, boundaries, bridges; place as temporal rather than spatial; urbanization and vanishing spaces.
Geographies of region and nation: when does “a people” become “a nation” and who decides? Also, settlement, borderlands, empire, appropriation of territories; cosmopolitanism: can the region exist without the structures and sentiment of the city?
Competing narratives of possession and dispossession; collections, artifacts, material objects, nostalgia; archives—whose archives? how constructed? how collected? how defined?; and appropriation and repatriation.
Temporal and affective dimensions of regionalism: the past; emotion and sentimentality; nostalgia.
Communities and individuals: individualism within cultures and communities; outsiders; spectators; foodways and folkways; reciprocity and gift-giving; sites and rituals of inclusion; customs and transgressions.

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: Time Machines: Temporal Politics and Infrastructures in Science Fiction and Time-Critical Media

Roger Whitson, Thursdays, 2:55-4:45 pm

Lewis Mumford argues in Technics and Civilization that “[t]he clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.” From deep time to time synchronization, computer timing to urban acceleration — the history of modernity is characterized by a multiplication of temporal infrastructures. These assemblages of practices, technologies, and institutions unevenly repeat the rhythms of cultural hierarchy: black bodies can be coded as slow or “out of sync” with modernity, while differently-abled bodies can be subjected to futurist fantasies of technological acceleration.

Time travel narratives dramatize how mediated experience recontextualizes the interplay between personal experiences of time, social realities shared through policed simultaneity, and the longue durées opened up by geological and cosmic speculation.

The course explores how media infrastructure and time-travel fiction work dialectically to produce different speeds, rhythms, frequencies, and scales of temporality. In addition to exploring the social and technological implications of time travel, this course will also draw from critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and eco-criticism to show how infrastructures use temporality to automate various privileges and oppressions. In addition to presentations on research and course content, this course requires a substantial final project that can take the form of a seminar paper, digital/multimodal project, lesson plan, or some other equivalent modality.

In addition to those mentioned above, possible fiction includes:

Octavia Butler, Kindred
Samuel R Delany, Empire Star
William Gibson, The Peripheral
Amal El-Hohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility
Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline
Robert Heinlein, “By His Bootstraps”

Critical texts include:

David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative
Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher and “The Media of Relativity”
Jussi Parikka, A Slow, Contemporary Violence
Axel Volmar and Kyle Stine, ed. Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Wolfgang Ernst, “From Media History to Zeitkritik”
Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures