Graduate Studies Bulletin

Spring 2013 Course Offerings

English 502: Teaching of Writing

William Condon, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:25-2:40 pm

Description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.

English 514: 20th Century American Literature

Christopher Arigo, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:10-10:25 am

This course is designed to give a comprehensive overview of a century of American poetry and poetics. We will look at major movements, starting more or less with the Modernists and moving chronologically through various other movements, such as The Objectivists, The Beats, Black Mountain School, The New York School, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and into the contemporary poetry scene. We will ask such questions as: How did these various movements aesthetically evolve from/respond to one another? What does it mean to be contemporary? What defines a “movement”? What kind of racial, gender, sociopolitical politics shape/underlie these various movements? The overarching theme of the course is to trace the various lineages of poetries and poetic practices in such a rapidly changing century filled with an incredible and unprecedented breadth of diversity.

English 515: Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric

D. Menchaca, Wednesdays, 2:50-4:05 pm

This course will examine issues and trends in current rhetorical theory framed by the following premise: if we are to understand current rhetorical theory, we must view it as a differential return that presupposes the death of rhetoric and its replacement with rhetoricality. Rhetoricality supplants rhetoric through various postmodern positions.

• Language is inherently subjective.
• The author is replaced by the author function.
• Persuasiveness becomes intimately tied to capitalism as an overriding hegemonic force.
• Written text is overrun by new forms of mass communication.

These postmodern positions result in rhetoricality: the constitutive rules of discourse and the linguistic turn. Rhetoricality, positioning language a priori to truth, is imbricated in all power relations. As such, we will analyze rhetoricality as it is deployed across disparate domains of communication and as it deploys various significances and structures social practices, which sustain hegemonic forces. Students will complete a number of rhetorical précis and offer discussion questions for class meetings as they contemplate possibilities for the democratization of science and technology that rhetoric offers. Two term papers will be written addressing issues arising from class discussion.

English 522: Victorian Literature: The Creation and Re-Creation of Victorian Literature

Carol Siegel, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:50-4:05 pm

Students will read a selection of primary texts in Victorian literature including poems and at least one novel. The initial focus will be on how the Victorian writers demonstrated a sense of themselves as participants in literary movements such as the Pre-Raphaelites and the Realists. Then we will look at the ways Modernists, such as Woolf and Strachey, created an image of Victorian literature that informed criticism for decades, as attention to seminal 20th century critical studies will reveal. Next we will examine classic theoretical and critical texts about Victorian literature’s relation to imperialism. Finally we will look at late 20th and early 21st century re-creations of Victorianism from Antonia Byatt’s Possession and recent horror mash-ups, like Grave Expectations. The Steampunk phenomenon will receive attention. Students can choose between focusing their work on a specific text and its reception or looking at a trend in transmitting visions of Victorianism. They will be asked to make 2 short presentations and to deliver one conference-style seminar paper, which will be taken through a revision to create an article length final paper. The class will have two purposes. One: to help students produce two pieces of work (the conference paper and the essay) that can help advance their careers. Two: to help students understand that the ways literary periods and movements are shaped is a dynamic process involving not only the writers who participate in them and critical responses, but also by subsequent generations of writers. “Victorian literature” is a concept always in flux.

English 525: English Literature of the 17th Century: Milton and the Religions of Political Liberty

Todd Butler, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:35-11:50 pm

In 1644 John Milton, his tracts on divorce under public attack, published Areopagitica, a text whose arguments against pre-publication licensure insisted upon the preservation of “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.” For all its rhetorical force, however, Milton’s defense of liberty offers a complex and mixed understanding of political and intellectual obligation, one in which social expression and communal debate, if not individual thought itself, are conditioned by the obligations of “conscience,” a term that radically elevates individual judgment while simultaneously binding it to a presumptive universal. Especially amidst this election season, Milton seems to be addressing questions that continue to animate political disputes today—what are the obligations of citizens to their society? What sort of human agency can be ascribed to matters of “choice,” and from whence can one draw the grounds of belief?

These were of course not new questions—they bedeviled ancient philosophers and rhetoricians, and they continue to animate both political discourse, literary criticism, and cultural theory, the latter in the so-called “turn to religion” that recognizes, as Julia Lupton has argued, religion’s role as a both “a form of thinking” and “a testing ground for struggles between the universal and the particular.” Our guide into these questions will be our encounters with the poetry and prose of Milton himself, familiarity with which is neither required nor assumed. We’ll pay particular attention to both his political and religious prose (Areopagitica, The Reason of Church Government) and his great later poetry, including not only Paradise Lost but also its shorter companions Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, criticism of which most recently has engaged questions of terrorism and Samson as a suicide bomber. Both the range of Milton’s work and the diffuse (scattered?) interests of your prospective professor means that students will be given wide latitude to pursue their own individual research interests. Previous students, for example, have worked on early modern horticulture, concepts of kairos, animal studies, and early American (Jefferson, Hawthorne) appropriations of Milton. Along with a seminar-length paper expect to complete a series of short response papers and to have the opportunity to structure our class discussion through your own contribution of to-be- assigned readings.

English 531: Administering a Writing Program

Lisa Johnson-Shull (ARRGT)

The supervised internship in the Writing Program is designed to introduce students to both theoretical and practical approaches to Writing Program Administration. The course attends to Writing Across the Curriculum, English as a Second Language, linguistic theories, theories of collaborative learning, mission statements and models of administration, assessment, and models of tutor training. Students are able to focus their internship in one of three areas or a combination thereof: Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Assessment, or Writing Center administration.

English 544: Syntax

Lynn Gordon, 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 546: Topics in Teaching English as a Second Language – Teaching and Learning L2 Academic Literacies

Nancy Bell, Tuesdays, 2:50-5:30 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 573: American Literature: Regionalism, Race, and Nationalism in Late 19th and 20th Century American Fiction

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

This seminar explores American regional literature from the local color movement of the late nineteenth century to the neoregionalism of the late twentieth century. 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.

In reading regionalism, we’ll consider its temporal, spatial, and affective dimensions: its construction of the past to codify particular kinds of race-based social control; its function as what Richard Brodhead has described as a “transitional object” to ease the anxieties of an “insecure modern age”; its use of nostalgia and occasionally sentimentality to enshrine an imagined past and idealize the primitive; and its contributions to a national narrative that enshrined and naturalized certain kinds of race- and class-based power. We’ll also explore the ways in which regionalism employs emerging technologies of viewing and representation, from photographs and anthropological representations of folkways, including medical and food cultures, to the souvenirs, curios, and other objects of material culture that Bill Brown contends are a close analogue of the genre. In addition, we will consider the ways in which regional literature contests its status as a “minor literature” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term.

Primary texts for this class will include work from among the following authors: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Bret Harte, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Leslie Marmon Silko, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Harrison, and Sherman Alexie. Critical and theoretical readings include essays by such critics as June Howard, Krista Comer, Lucy Lippard, Douglas Powell, Benedict Anderson, José Límon, Hsuan Hsu, and Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse.

Assignments are all geared toward eventual presentation or publication: a 30-minute oral presentation; minor 5-minute presentations of critical material; and two papers, one of conference length and one longer paper that may be based on the same topic.

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.