Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2014 Course Offerings

English 502: Teaching of Writing: Contemporary Theories of Composition

Vanessa Cozza, Thursdays, 2:50-5:30

As writers, teachers, and scholars, we are theory-builders; we draw from our own personal experiences as writers and as teachers in the classroom to create a little “t” theory, where we question and reflect on the effectiveness of our own practices. Additionally, we draw from research-based explanations of how certain theories work in practice, the big “T” theories. Because theory is fluid, contextual, and open to new ideas, research, and practice, we will combine our exploration of big “T” theories with our little “t” theories to engage in an ongoing, scholarly conversation. In doing so, we’ll read theories and research that examine what we should value about composition, how we should think about composing processes, what counts as “good” instruction, and what view of knowledge we should adopt. We will also consider the connectedness of these areas of composition theories and research. To engage in an ongoing, scholarly conversation, course readings will include:

A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 4th edition. Erika Lindemann. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2001.
Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 3rd edition. Eds. Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2011.
The Function of Theory in Composition Studies. Raúl Sanchez. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005.
The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Assignments will include reading responses, discussion leading, and one article-length seminar paper.

English 508: Assessing Writing

William Condon, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12-1:15 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 the teacher who needs to be able to join in local, statewide, or national conversations about assessment in his 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 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: Landscape, Memory, and Society in 20th-Century American Literature

M. Balaev, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:30 pm

This course explores how American literature represents society, memory, and individual desire through a reliance on landscape imagery. What are the representational contingencies of nature and the assumed natural order? How do ecological and cultural landscapes shape the American experience? Does an American environmental ethos take shape in certain works? The course takes a particular interest in the depictions of wilderness found in contemporary novels in order to study the ways that the American wilderness, as trope and physical entity, influences the formulation of a national culture. Primary texts will likely include Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Robert Barclay’s Melal, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and poetry selections from W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich. Secondary readings will be included in a course packet.

English 515: Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

Victor Villanueva, Wednesdays, 2:50-5:30 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. Readings will include Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, Rosemary Hennessy’s Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Stuart Hall’s Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, V.N. Volosinov’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Language and excerpts from Louis Althusser, Michele Foucault, Raymond Williams, and others. Very short response papers, one article-length seminar paper.

English 521: Nineteenth-Century Media Studies

Roger Whitson, Wednesdays, 2:50-5:30 pm

The nineteenth century saw the invention of technologies that would forever change how people communicated and experienced the world around them. From the rise of cheap printed political pamphlets, railroads, telegraph lines, telephones, quick transportation of mail, and the serialization of narrative in magazines and newspapers — media revolutions marked the nineteenth century that radically transformed how people understood place, time, perception, work, leisure, religion, philosophy, and existence itself. John Guillory argues in “The Genesis of the Media Concept” that the idea of the medium in its modern sense, as a technological process associated with the specific affordances of different apparatuses, emerged in the nineteenth century. In fact, most of the authors writing in the nineteenth century reacted in some way to the phenomenon of mediation, the desire for immediacy, and the social upheavals brought on by technology. We will look at how these reactions helped to form ideas about media and technology that impact us even today, and investigate what it means to understand literature as part of a larger nineteenth-century media ecology. In addition to weekly 450-word responses to the class listserv, you will be responsible for a class presentation and a 15-18 page seminar paper.

Primary Sources:

Charles Babbage. “Argument in Favor of Design from the Changing of Laws in Natural Events.” The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment. London: John Murray, 1837.
William Blake. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Ed. Michael Phillips. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2011.
Charles Dickens. “A Flight.” Household Worlds. 3:75 (August 30, 1851).
—. “Ch. XXI: Mr Dombey Goes on a Journey.” Dombey and Son. Oxfordshire: Oxford UP, 2001.
—. “The Signal Man.” Mugby Junction. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1866.
George Eliot. The Lifted Veil. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009
Elizabeth Gaskell. Mary Barton. Ed Jennifer Foster. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000.
Thomas Hardy. A Laodicean. London: Penguin, 1998.
Rudyard Kipling. “Wireless.” Scribner’s Magazine. (August 1902).
Ada Lovelace. Selections from “Translation of and Notes on Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” Scientific Memoirs. 3 (1843)
Richard Marsh. The Beetle. Ed Julian Wolfreys. Ontario: Broadview, 2004.
Nikola Tesla. “On Electricity.” Electrical Review. (January 1897).

Selected Secondary and Tertiary Sources:

Jonathan Crary. “Techniques of the Observer.” Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Boston: MIT Press, 1992. 97-136.
Lisa Gitelman. “Media as Historical Subjects.” Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 1-24.
N. Katherine Hayles. “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality.” Yale Journal of Criticism. 16.2 (2003): 263-290.
Lev Manovich. “Soft Evolution.” Software Takes Command. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 199-239.
Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane. “The Medium of Romantic Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 239-62.
Saree Makdisi. “Weary of Time: Image and Commodity in Blake.” William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003. 155-203.
Jussi Parikka. “Media Archaeology of the Senses: Audiovisual, Affective, Alogorithmic.” What is Media Archaeology? London: Polity, 2013.
Thomas Standage. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers. New York: Walker and Company, 2007.

English 544: Syntax

Lynn Gordon, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 12:10-1 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 554: History English Language

Lynn Gordon, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 1:10-2 pm

Description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.

English 573: Prose Fiction: American Moderns: Technology, Cosmopolitanism, and Race in American Fiction, 1900-1930s

Donna Campbell, Mondays, 2:50-5:30 pm

This course focuses on the intersection of technology, modernity, race, and cosmopolitanism in American fiction of the early twentieth century. Instead of the traditional figures of modernism (Stein, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Barnes, and so on), we’ll explore alternative visions of modernism, those that engage ideas of progress, race, and technology but not necessarily aesthetic experimentation. The topics we’ll consider include the following: cityscapes and visions of cosmopolitanism; the middlebrow and “high art” modernism; expatriate life, displacement, and diaspora; aesthetic and political bohemianism; racial passing and gay identities; and technologies of time and efficiency, of work, of beauty, of reproduction, and of movement. We will also consider questions of genre: the short story, the novella, and the short story cycle in addition to the novel as a form.

To consider the beginnings of modernism, we’ll discuss concepts of modernity in a Progressive Era novel of reform, Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon, a work that engages issues of industrialism, class, ecology, and technology. We’ll discuss modernist form in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Stein’s Three Lives before moving on to Harlem Renaissance works such as Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, which provide racial, transnational, and queer critiques of modern life through retreats into primitivism or resistance through gender and racial passing.

These works are placed in dialogue with three novels by “classic” modernists–Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises–in which white masculinity attempts to recuperate a nostalgically conceived past in a transnational context: the lost South for Faulkner, and the expatriate Paris of the 1920s for Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In contrast to this reverence for an imagined past, Du Bois’s The Dark Princess looks to the future to project a Pan-African global cosmopolitanism. The course also considers satiric views of modernity including Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, works that, with selected magazine fiction, will allow us to discuss the role of the middlebrow as modernism’s much-despised but ever-popular Other.

Assignments are all geared toward eventual presentation or publication, and they will probably include the following: an oral presentation; minor presentations of critical material; a conference- length paper; an article-length paper (that may be on the same subject); a conference abstract based on the longer paper; and, for our “in-class conference” at the end, an oral response to another person’s paper.

Secondary readings for this course include current critical articles on the novels and theoretical essays by Bourdieu, Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, North, de Certeau, Huyssen, Scholes, Doane, and Bhabha, among others.

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.