Graduate Studies Bulletin

Fall 2022 Course Offerings

English 501: Teaching of Writing: Methodology and Composition

Melissa Nicolas

Description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.  

English 509: Classical Rhetoric

Patty Wilde

Classical Rhetoric asks students to “[s]tudy…Greek and Roman rhetorical theories and their influences,” as stated in the Washington State University course catalog. Signifying its importance, this class is required for English graduate students specializing in rhetoric and composition, as many of the concepts articulated in the ancient Greco-Roman tradition are considered foundational to the field. While we will study canonical texts to gain a deeper understanding of this rhetorical legacy, we will also interrogate the logics and structures that contribute to its continued propagation. Recognizing that knowledge is a social construct informed by systems of power, we will take up Jacqueline Jones Royster’s challenge to “articulate the limitations of historical and current practices and the scholarship produced by such practices; to sustain perspectives that assume, rather than minimize, a fuller terrain where other views participate kaleidoscopically in the knowledge-making process; and to establish a more generous accreditation system capable of accounting for a more richly endowed rhetorical landscape and for more dynamic possibilities for understanding that landscape” (“Contemporary Challenges…” 149). To this end, we will also learn about feminist, comparative, and cultural approaches to rhetoric and their relationship with (and sometimes in opposition to) the Greco-Roman tradition.

English 512: Introduction to Graduate Study

Jon Hegglund

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 521: Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

Roger Whitson

Darko Suvin claims that science fiction 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 were 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. Voyages to other parts of the planet were revealing new frontiers and new spaces for capitalism and colonialism to exploit. Machines and unskilled labor were replacing artisans with mechanized and standardized commodities. And the hopes and fears inspired by these new worlds reappeared as dreams and nightmares in speculative fiction: Darwin’s theories became the strange human-like animal hybrids of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, while imperialism inspired the “lost race” novels of H. Rider Haggard and made possible the utopian dreams of William Morris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This course will show how science fiction articulated the hopes and fears Victorians associated with the future. Such anxieties are a symptom of our inability to imagine the future (or the past) in its alterity. Against liberal promises of perpetual 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.

English 534: Theories and Methods of the Teaching of Technical and Professional Writing

Julie Staggers

This course provides a historical and theoretical introduction to professional and technical writing as a discipline with an emphasis on pedagogy. We inspect the rise of professional writing against the backdrop of rhetoric and composition as a scholarly field with a focus on key issues such as usability-design-users, genre analysis and rhetorical situation, networks-organizations-documentation, rhetorical ethics, and workplace ethnography.

English 543: Phonology

Michael Thomas

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 573: Postwork Imaginaries and Contemporary American Culture

Pamela Thoma

Despite national mythologies and ideologies explicitly rooted in a Calvinist (Protestant) work ethic, post-work imaginaries have been increasingly manifest in American narrative culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a period in which neoliberal logics that valorize individual work and entrepreneurial spirit have become common sense or reached an ontological phase of near axiomatic proportions. In the very recent context of the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have called the record-breaking pattern of US workers who have quit their jobs the “Great Resignation,” and now employers fear that workers who have been working remotely will refuse to return to the physical workplace. A shift in the balance of power towards labor is emergent and anti-work politics are discernible on various levels. This seminar will examine works that grapple with, depict, and chart post- work imaginaries, including critical or theoretical texts, such as Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work, Beth Blum’s The Self-Help Compulsion, and Heather Berg’s Porn Work, and literary and cultural narratives, such as Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart, and Hustlers (Scafaria, 2019). While assigned readings will be contemporary, seminar members will have the opportunity to glance back toward earlier periods and other cultural influences of their choosing to consider such works as Samual Smiles’ Self-Help, with illustrations of character and conduct (1859), for a short “lit review” paper that will be part of an effort to identify an archive and create a collective genealogy that recognizes cultural struggle over the meaning and value of work. A final research paper (12-15 pages) will allow students to explore a topic related to the seminar focus.

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.