Graduate Studies in English
Fall 2013 Course Descriptions
400- and 500-Level Literature Courses
402 1U/1G DESCRIPTIVE ENGLISH GRAMMAR, Russell. MW 3:30-4:45 (CRN 34483)
same as BTW 402
Area Requirement: None
It’s possible to think of grammar as a “science”: it is the careful collection and analysis of observable facts about how we use the English language. This course will be an introduction to that science, surveying how linguists and language scholars presently describe the structures of English—its morphology, phonology, phrases, clauses, sentences, syntax, semantics, stylistics, and sociocultural variations. But grammar is just as much and importantly an “art”: it is a set of rules and recommendations for how we should use the English language. And so, this course will also be an introduction to how, why, and to what effects various people have prescribed English usage in various ways, from the 18th century into the present day. Ultimately, a better understanding of what grammar is, how it works, and what it does in the world not only allows us to be better users of the English language but also invites us to be more conscientious users of the English language, mindful of how our describable practices and prescribable rules have social consequences that accord purity, power, and participation to some and contamination, ignorance, and exclusion to others.
403 1U/1G HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. MWF 11 (CRN 42951)
Area Requirement: None
Language variation and change from the earliest forms of English to the present day, with emphasis on the rise of Standard English and the social, geographic, and cultural aspects of linguistic change in English.
404 D3/D4 ENGLISH GRAMMAR FOR ESL TEACHERS, Ionin. On-line (CRN 41138)
same as EIL 422
Area Requirement: None
This course is designed to help prospective teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) enhance their understanding of English grammar and develop pedagogical approaches to teaching English grammar. This course has two main components: (1) instruction in English grammar, with particular emphasis on those areas that present difficulties for ESL students; and (2) development of pedagogical approaches for teaching English grammar. In order to provide practical teaching experience, the course also offers a tutoring practicum where participants tutor ESL students on topics of English grammar that have been covered in the course, using pedagogical materials that are sound in light of current second language acquisition (SLA) theories, research findings, and teaching methodologies.
407 1U/1G INTRO TO OLD ENGLISH, C. Wright. TUTH 12:30-1:45 (CRN 49440)
same as MDVL 407
Area Requirement: British, Beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
In this course you will learn to read Old English prose and poetry in the original language, which was spoken by the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England from the sixth through eleventh centuries. This was the native language of Caedmon, who wrote the earliest surviving English poem (“Cædmon’s Hymn”); of King Alfred, who prevented the Vikings from conquering England, and who then undertook a revival of learning by translating into English “those books which it is most necessary for all to know”; of the anonymous author of Beowulf, who memorialized a Germanic hero’s battles with a man-eating monster, his vengeful mother (the monster’s, that is), and a dragon; and of abbot Ælfric and archbishop Wulfstan, who preached in English for those who could not understand Latin, the official language of the medieval church.
We will begin with some easy prose readings (the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis, and a school dialogue about Anglo-Saxon “career choices”), and as you gradually master the basics of Old English grammar we will work our way up to more challenging narrative prose such as Bede’s story of Cædmon’s miraculous transformation from cowherd to poet; King Alfred’s government “white paper” on education reform; and Ælfric’s story of the martyrdom of King Edmund, slain by Vikings invaders. Then in the second half of the semester we will read some of the finest shorter Old English poems, including The Wanderer and The Seafarer, two elegiac poems of exile; The Battle of Maldon, recounting the heroic defeat of an English army by the Vikings; The Dream of the Rood, a mystical vision of the Crucifixion, as told by the Cross; and The Wife’s Lament, about a woman abandoned by her former lover.
412 E MEDIEVAL BRIT LITERATURES, Barrett. MWF 1 (CRN 61187)
same as MDVL 311
TOPIC: Nature and the Non-Human in Medieval England
Area Requirement: British, Beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
The natural landscapes of medieval English literature are filled with human and non-human agents: knights errant, intersex deer, half-giants, city mice, snake ladies, talking crosses, and so on. In this course, we’ll explore the interactions between these diverse beings, paying particular attention to their violations of the so-called line between human and non-human. Nature itself, frequently personified as a woman, will be an object of study, as will the ecologies our characters traverse and modify in the course of their adventures. Among the texts we’ll read in Modern English translation are the Exeter Book riddles of Anglo-Saxon England (in which talking objects recount their histories and ask you to guess their true identities), the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which Sir Gawain finds himself the object of an all-too deadly hunt), the exotic Travels of Sir John Mandeville (in which diamonds have sex and give birth to baby diamonds), Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (in which the goddess Nature serves as relationship counselor for a quartet of eagles), and The Owl and the Nightingale (in which the two birds debate their relative superiority).
418 1U/1G SHAKESPEARE, L. Newcomb. TUTH 2-3:15 (CRN 40436)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This course explores seven Shakespearean plays from a cross-section of dramatic genres. We’ll look especially at the features that made these plays popular in their day: their open staging, their playful language, their laying bare of the period’s familial, national, gender, and racial tensions. But we’ll also find that the cultural significance of ‘Shakespeare’ accumulated through the plays’ later lives, thanks to their continuous, often resistant, reinventions by performers, literary critics, and adapters world-wide. That constant reinvention demands that we, too, employ multiple interpretive practices to continue opening up the plays: close reading; informal staging; film analysis; feminist, historicist, postcolonial, and queer studies critical approaches. Be ready for proactive discussion, performance experiments, and rigorous written work, including informal journals, a response to at least one on-campus Shakespeare production, two focused short papers, a longer paper using guided research (7-9 pp.), and a final exam.
TEXTS: (Required) Greenblatt et al, eds., The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays (2nd edition, ISBN 978-0-393-93313-0); McDonald, ed., Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2nd edition, ISBN 978-0312248802); one contextual edition of a play TBA.
418 2U/2G SHAKESPEARE. MWF 11 (CRN 40440)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
English 418 is a survey of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Reading assignments will reflect the generic diversity and historical breadth of Shakespeare’s work.
423 1U/1G MILTON, Gray. TUTH 2-3:15 (CRN 40365)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This course introduces you to one of the greatest British writers—John Milton. Milton was a blind seer, a regicidal prose-writer, and an inspired poet. He also wrote arguably the most ambitious English epic, one that aimed to explain the origins of life itself: Paradise Lost. This class will explore Milton’s prodigious and ostentatiously learned output in the context of his own life and the historical turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century that transformed it. We will focus on the complex issues of religion, gender, and politics he engages, looking at his often contradictory responses to the ideas, literature, and men and women of his time. We will also trace his carefully crafted public image, thinking about Milton’s view of the role of poetry and polemic within a revolutionary historical context.
450 1U/1G AMERICAN LIT 1865-1914. MW 2-3:15 (CRN 40395)
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
The five decades between the Civil War and World War I were alive with cultural turbulence, and with enormous changes in what it meant to be a writer. In a technological revolution, standard print-runs for a book or magazine jumped to tens of thousands of pages every day; national railroad networks made it possible to ship huge quantities cheaply to distant markets; telegraph networks, wire services, “chromos,” and printable photographs—all new—could now bring celebrity almost overnight. Suddenly an author could reach an entire continent, and also much of the world, and grow famous, and sometimes rich.
This was also an era of intellectual ferment: many of the “isms” that continue into our own time had their roots in the Gilded Age. We will tour some of these formulations without getting lost in the thicket, and pay special attention to what happens when doctrine collides with individual talent. We will use Realism as a touchstone and a departure-point for exploration of other movements, schools, and insurrections. Authors will include William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Henry James, Frank Norris, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. E. B. Dubois, Harold Frederic, and Mark Twain. There will be one mid-term examination, one final examination, two short papers, and one major essay constructed in stages in consultation with the instructor.
455 1U/1G MAJOR AUTHORS, Freeburg. TUTH 11-12:15 (CRN 40444)
TOPIC: Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
What is the relationship between what it means “to live” and the idea of American freedom? During much of the twentieth-century Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin struggled with the question, what does it mean to be black and live in a modern democracy. This course we will engage these writers as well as music, visual art, and comedic performances over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to explore how notions of living and freedom are shaped by both grand political events and everyday social life. In addition to reading Ellison and Baldwin’s prose we will focus on how to make better arguments and refine prose writing while paying special attention to interesting historical artifacts and new media aesthetics.
455 2U/2G MAJOR AUTHORS, D. Wright. MW 3:30-4:45 (CRN 40445)
TOPIC: Alice Walker and John Edgar Wideman
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
This course will focus on the major works of two of the more important writers of the post-Black Arts Movement era, Alice Walker and John Edgar Wideman. In the 70s and 80s, Walker and Wideman pushed the bounds of form and content, writing fiction and nonfiction (and in Walker’s case, poetry) that garnered broad acclaim and numerous awards. Of late, the work of these authors has begun to fade from view. We will read fiction and nonfiction from both, as well as a variety of texts on the socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts of the period that informed the work. Course requirements include regular response papers, an in-class presentation, and a long research paper.
455 AS3/AS4 MAJOR AUTHORS, Malekin. TUTH 12:30-1:50 (CRN 40443)
meets with SCAN 463, THEA 483, CWL 463
TOPIC: Ibsen in Translation
Area Requirement: MFA Literature only. Fulfills no requirement for Literature students.
This course is dedicated to the major prose plays of Henrik Ibsen, one of the most important playwrights in the history of modern drama. It promotes a thorough understanding of the structures, themes, and socio-historical contexts of his plays. Metaphors of economics, politics of gender, and the function of sets and architectural representation are some of the topics addressed. We study production-and audience-related aspects as well.
Ibsen’s influence extends across world literature, which this course investigates by including works by George Bernard Shaw, Georg Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, Elfriede Jelinek, Samuel Beckett, and August Strindberg, as well as film adaptations of Ibsen’s works from India, the US, and Europe.
The course features strong research components and emphasizes group work
465 1U/1G TOPICS IN DRAMA, Stevens. MWF 2 (CRN 59750)
same as CWL 465
TOPIC: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Area Requirement: British, 1660-1800 and MFA Literature
“He was not of an age, but for all time.” We all know the role Shakespeare continues to occupy within the Western canon; this class, however, takes a close look at Shakespeare-the-theater-professional as opposed to Shakespeare-the-Bard. Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the physical spaces of the Globe and the Blackfriars theaters, and any number of material factors necessarily shaped the plays he wrote. So too did Shakespeare influence, and was influenced by, the many talented writers who also supplied plays to the various theater companies of early modern London. Shakespeare clearly modeled Hamlet on Thomas Kyd’s early blockbuster The Spanish Tragedy, for example, and Thomas Middleton in turn drew upon both of these plays when he wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy. At other times, the relationships amongst the plays we read might appear to be more allusive than direct—did John Ford have Romeo and Juliet in mind when he wrote a very different tale of forbidden love, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore? Which play about jealous tyrants and the women they love came first—Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy or Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale?
We will cover the following groupings or pairs of plays: The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Hamlet (1601), and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606); Romeo and Juliet (1596) and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632); and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) and The Winter’s Tale (1611). We will conclude the course by reading William Heminge’s shocking, compulsively allusive, and perhaps unwittingly hilarious The Fatal Contract (1639), a play dismissed as “the most obvious and detailed example of plagiarism of Hamlet in the seventeenth century” but more usefully understood as illustrating the imitative mode of early modern dramatic authorship. With the sole exception of The Winter’s Tale, our primary focus on tragedy—in particular, on revenge tragedy—will allow us to consider a range of important questions about genre, authorship, gender, the performance of violence, and the transformation of key theatrical conventions from the early days of the popular theater to the last years before the theaters go dark during the English civil wars.
The class will be conducted as a seminar-discussion. Evaluation will be based on participation, including a willingness to read lines out loud and block scenes in class; one group performance project; one midterm; and two to three short papers. It is recommended—but not necessary—that you take this class already having some familiarity with Shakespeare, or drama, or Renaissance literature and culture. Graduate students can enroll for graduate credit with the permission of the instructor.
TEXTS: TBA, likely single editions of the plays, and one course text, Peter Womack’s English Renaissance Drama.
481 1U/1G COMP THEORY AND PRACTICE, Schaffner. MW 2-3:15 (CRN 40460)
Area Requirement: Critical Theory for Writing Studies students only. Fulfills no
requirement for Literature students.
In exploring some of the major theories that inform the teaching of academic writing, we will pay particular attention to the role of innovation in written communication. Can innovation be taught? Should it be? Topics we will explore include: personal writing, the use of writing as punishment, formulaic writing, code switching, writing with images, and YouTube composition. Students will be responsible for presenting on a popular film about composition and for writing regular reading response papers.
486 A3/A4 HISTORY OF TRANSLATION, Cooper. MW 12-1:20 (CRN 58439)
same as SLAV 430, CLCV 430, CWL 430, GER 405, SPAN 436, TRST 431
Area Requirement: None
This survey examines the historical development of translation ideas and practices in Europe and in particular cases across major global regions through the lens of contemporary theories of translation. It will focus on reading and analysis of key texts in the development of translation theory and case studies of translation practices and methods and the historical roles played by translation.
Course objectives: Students will read significant texts in the history of translation theory and be able to discuss major ideas and developments in translation theory. Students will learn about translation practices in a variety of historical periods and places, be able to discuss the many roles that translation and translators have played in cultural history, and learn approaches to the analysis of translations. Students will either conduct research into the history of translation ideas and practices in a particular literature at a particular historical moment and present their results in the form of a scholarly essay or will translate into English a short work on translation from their literature of concentration, from any historical period.
All students submit discussion questions based on readings for about 1/3 of the class sessions, and graduate students pick a session to lead discussion or give a presentation.
This course covers everything from the role of translation in the invention of Latin literature to poststructuralist thought on translation. Case studies touch on Japan, Latin American, the Arabic world, and Africa, with guest lecturers who are specialists on those topics.
500 R INTRO TO CRITICISM AND RESEARCH, Parker. TH 1-2:50 (CRN 30190)
Area Requirement: Critical Theory
This course is a survey-introduction to the concepts and methods of recent critical theory. In short, it is a ticket to engaged fluency in the dialogues and opportunities of contemporary criticism, designed for newer English graduate students (and more experienced graduate students) who do not already have a broad background in critical theory. We will proceed through a series of cumulative, overlapping units on new criticism, structuralism, deconstruction and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, cultural studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and reader response, including attention to ecocriticism and disability studies. We will also participate in the Modern Critical Theory Tuesday evening lecture series sponsored by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and including parallel graduate seminars from other departments. Depending on scheduling and student interests, we may devote sessions to such practical concerns for graduate study in English as research methods, graduate writing, preparing for publication, and organizing and planning one's graduate studies and academic progress intellectually and administratively. Attendance, inquisitiveness, and active participation in class discussion are crucial. Students who prefer to be seen but not heard should not enroll.
505 E WRITING STUDIES I, Prior. W 1-2:50 (CRN 35705)
same as CI 563
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
This seminar offers an introduction to writing studies, an interdisciplinary field that emerged in the 1980s and explores the theory, research and practice of writing in any context (school, workplace, home, community). Across these contexts, the course will examine issues of writing processes; the collaborative nature of writing and varied types of authorship; intersections with other modes (reading, talk, visual representation) and with varied technologies (paper, screen and other materials for production and distribution); how discourses are stabilized and meshed in writing; specialized genres and genre systems; rhetorical contexts and practices; and situated forms of learning and pedagogy (whether formal or informal). This seminar aims at helping students to engage in meaningful scholarship in this field. In addition to common readings, participation in activities, and regular informal writing, each student will select, explore and write on an issue of interest in greater depth.
511 E CHAUCER, M. Camargo. W 1-2:50 (CRN 61216)
same as MDVL 511
TOPIC: Twenty-First Century Chaucer
Area Requirement: British, Beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
The focus of this seminar will not be a particular theme, approach, or set of Chaucerian texts but rather the scholarship on Chaucer published since 2000 (with allowance for continuing trends that first emerged during the 1990s). We will first orient ourselves by reading and discussing several published overviews of the field. Due to the amount of publication on Chaucer, such overviews have come to constitute an important scholarly genre in their own right. Using criteria derived from this metascholarship, in combination with the individual’s own critical and theoretical predilections, each member of the seminar will identify a coherent body of Chaucer scholarship to survey in greater detail and present to the seminar. The presenter will assign a limited number of readings that must include at least one text by Chaucer. (The featured text by Chaucer for the initial, overview portion of the seminar will be The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.) The other major work for the seminar will be a research paper (20-25 pages) on a Chaucerian topic of the student’s choice. In form, this paper should resemble an original article suitable for publication in a scholarly journal. There is no requirement that the paper belong to the specific subfield of scholarship previously surveyed by its author.
527 D SEMINAR 18TH C LIT, Nazar. W 11-12:50 (CRN 46745)
TOPIC: Enlightenment Narratives of Education
Area Requirement: British, 1660-1800 and MFA Literature
In his famous essay of 1784, “What is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant described enlightenment as an emergence from “self-imposed tutelage” into critical and moral independence. Kant’s essay obscures, however, how freedom from tutelage was perceived by many eighteenth-century thinkers to be itself a matter of tutelage or education. This seminar considers the paradoxical rhetoric of education—tutelage to be free from tutelage—permeating eighteenth-century letters. The idea that reason is less an inborn faculty than a construction or a development—a thing of the world and hence capable of being shaped by human intervention—constitutes one of the most powerful and contested legacies of the Enlightenment. It was an idea that found particular appeal among women who used it to counter long-standing essentialist notions of women’s biological and mental inferiority. It was a crucial shaper, moreover, of the new genre of the novel, of which a principal subset was the Bildungsroman or “novel of formation.” This seminar explores the intersecting fields of eighteenth-century theories of education, histories of the novel, and feminist/gender theory. Philosophical and historical readings include selections from John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694-97), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile or On Education (1761), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), William Godwin’s The Enquirer (1797), and Immanuel Kant’s On Education (1803). Fictional readings focus on the eighteenth-century female Bildungrsoman, from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) to Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818).
553 G SEMINAR LATER AMERICAN LIT, Foote. M 3-4:50 (CRN 32356)
TOPIC: Ecocriticism and US Literary Study
Area Requirement: Critical Theory, American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
This course will examine the evolution of environmental criticism in the humanities, asking particularly how at different points it has been used to describe a mode of reading; a field of study; a set of political and ethical orientations to the natural and built world; a way of producing objects of study like “nature,” “human,” and “culture”; and a practical relationship to interdisciplinary writing and thinking. This class will thus function as a survey of environmental criticism in the humanities over the last 40 years or so, but it will pay special attention to the hybrid forms of writing—memoirs as well as histories, amateur blogs as well as government white papers, manifestos as well as cultural studies of objects—that have characterized the lively conversations the field stages not only between disciplines and genres , but between amateurs and professionals, academics and activists, artists and scholars. Reading TBA.
578 E SEMINAR LIT & OTHER DISCIPLINES, Gaedtke. M 1-2:50 (CRN 61218)
TOPIC: Affect, Cognition, The Human
Area Requirement: Critical Theory
This seminar will examine how affect has emerged as a key concept at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences of the mind. While the category offers a point of contact between long standing disciplinary divisions, it has also emerged as a way to rethink intractable conceptual dualisms such as mind and body, physiology and culture, the normal and the pathological, the individual and the social, and the human and the non-human. We will critically examine recent claims made in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, neo-phenomenology, and cultural theory while assessing their political, philosophical, historical, and aesthetic implications. In addition we will discuss several works of contemporary fiction that address this cognitive turn toward affect and its cultural implications. If the humanities have long been invested in psychoanalytic models of the mind, we will consider what it would mean for our disciplines to engage critically and productively with these emergent discourses of affect. Finally, we will ask what transdisciplinary space might be opened between the humanities and the cognitive sciences. This seminar is sponsored by the UIUC Network for Neurocultures and the Graduate College’s Intersect Program.
578 G SEMINAR LIT & OTHER DISCIPLINES, Carico. W 3-4:50 (CRN 58162)
TOPIC: Theories of Racial Capitalism
Area Requirement: None
In a moment when many disciplines across the humanities and social sciences are returning to questions of political economy, this interdisciplinary seminar will attend to the knot that binds together racial formations and the formations of capitalism. Much of our course will be focused on the American scene, considered both at a wide angle—from early settler colonialism to twentieth-century acts of Asian exclusion to more recent instances of minority asset-stripping—and in close-up—through a more sustained focus on slavery, its commodity logics, and their residues. We will close the semester by considering the political implications of two emergent and seemingly divergent fields of scholarship—the “history of capitalism” and the “new materialism” in literary studies—each of which can be understood as iterations of the contemporary turn to political economy. A number of overarching questions will guide our inquiries: Are the impulses that subtend racial capitalism isomorphic with the impulses that subtend the American project? How does the law enact and order the modes of racial subjection required by capitalism’s insuperable profit motives? How is the incessant reproduction of race implicated with capitalism’s unending moment of primitive accumulation? In what ways does racial commodification structure the category of the human, and how can that ontological crisis be redressed? And should a critique of racial capitalism necessarily entail a critique of history’s narratological underpinnings? That is, does that critique also demand that we reconsider the conditions of possibility for narrating the past’s difference in and from the present—or the conditions of possibility for “critique” itself? Possible readings may include works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric J. Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, David Kazanjian, Ian Baucom, Bill Brown, Stephen Best, Lisa Lowe, Silvia Federici, and Angela Mitropoulos.
578 M1 SEMINAR LIT & OTHER DISCIPLINES, Littlefield. TU 12-2:50 (CRN 60133)
meets with KINES 594
TOPIC: Bodies in Science and Culture
Area Requirement: None
Bodies are central to knowledge production: they are what we work with, on, in, and through. But how have bodies been defined and redefined by science and culture? In this course, we will examine this question through a range of historical and contemporary readings and case studies: from the history of anatomy illustration to Barbie’s anthropometry, from body modification to theories of “fitness.” This graduate course is intended to serve students in a wide range of disciplines, from the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Although our focus will be a socio-historical approach, we will engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue about bodies that welcomes many different perspectives.
581 A SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Byrd. TU 3:30-5:50 (CRN 30196)
meets with AIS 503
TOPIC: #Indigenous: Digital Natives, Technology and Indigenous Critical Theory
Area Requirement: Critical Theory
With #idlenomore and the rise of social media for indigenous activism, decolonization, and mobilization, questions emerge about the role digital technology plays in indigenous modes of resistance locally and globally. This course, in conjunction with the fall symposium on Indigenous New Media, will look at some of the recent scholarship in indigenous studies that considers the impact of media, technology, and digital cultures on knowledge production at the site of materiality, recognition, and language. In reading key texts across a range of disciplines from video game studies to queer theory, the course will ask students to consider how a concept like indignity mobilizes and disrupts the structures of settler colonialism and notions of spatiality, territoriality, temporality, and futurity. Some of the texts may include Ian Bogost, Unit Operations, Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words, Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga, and Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous.
582 R TOPICS RESEARCH AND WRITING, Prendergast. TU 1-2:50 (CRN 45651)
same as CI 565
TOPIC: Economies of Literacy
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
This course presents the opportunity to examine closely the conversation between two domains of knowledge: economics and literacy studies. Economic theory has long influenced research in literacy. Similarly, economics is filled with metaphors that speak of literacy: brain drain, infonomics, knowledge spillovers. We will read classic texts in literacy studies with and against texts in economics that inform them, are misused by them, and/or that they could inform. In addition to course readings, students will serve as collectors of economic theory (either by sitting in on the occasional economics lecture on campus or joining MOOC) and will bring that knowledge back to the class. Students will have choice in devising their final project for the class, whether a traditional seminar paper, multimedia project, or proposal for further study.
Course texts in literacy will include: Brandt, Literacy in American Lives; Graff, Literacy Myths, Legacies and Lessons; Rose, The Mind at Work; Watkins, Class Degrees; Prendergast, Buying into English and additional articles.
Readings in economics include those by Karl Marx, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Heller, Daniel Ariely, Cristina Bicchieri.
584 T TOPICS DISCOURSE AND WRITING, Russell. TH 3-4:50 (CRN 39504)
same as CI 569
TOPIC: The Arrow and the Loom: Rhetoric, Gender, and Disciplined Practices
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
According to Robert Connors, rhetoric is “the most purely male intellectual discipline that has existed in Western culture.” Shaped by “male rituals, male contests, male ideals, and masculine agendas,” rhetoric began (circa 500BC) and persisted (at least through 1800) as “the property of men, particularly men of property.” Connors is but one metronome to thusly mark the masculinity of the field: “At the risk of seeming repetitive and hyperbolic,” he writes, “I need to reiterate that the discipline of rhetoric, as it has evolved from the classical period through the eighteenth century, was almost absolutely male. It categorically refused entry to women” and women were “not merely discouraged from learning it, but were actively and persistently denied access to it.” This course will examine the gendered and gendering history of rhetoric as a discipline and as a set of disciplined practices. It will consider the totalizing masculinity of rhetorical training in the classical period as well as the persistence of masculine metaphors in current rhetorical theory and practice. Of course, feminist scholars writing at the turn of this century have produced a small battery of books and articles to recover women’s historical rhetorical work and highlight its stylistic importance, its teleological distinctiveness, and its political significance. Therefore, this seminar will also consider the positions and practices of women within traditions of Western rhetoric from the classical period and into the present day. Key questions for the seminar will be: How is rhetorical education and performance differently gendered in different historical periods? What effects on rhetoric (how it’s conceived, taught, practiced, and researched) does a gendering of it produce? How does the status of rhetoric as a discipline produce or rely on gender categories and norms? What is gained and lost in the feminist project of claiming participation in an androcentric tradition? How can we understand rhetoric as related to masculinity and femininity in the present scholarly moment?
593 D PROF SEMINAR COLLEGE TCHG. M 11-12:50 (CRN 32361)
TOPIC: The Teaching of Rhetoric
Area Requirement: None
This is a course for students new to the teaching of college composition. Over the course of the semester, we will explore connections between theories of written composition and teaching practices. In particular, students in the course will theorize practices relating to: syllabus and assignment design, conferencing with students, responding to student work, dealing with conflict, maintaining language diversities in the classroom, and developing teaching personae. Requirements for the course include reading, participating in class discussion, blogging, drafting a statement of teaching philosophy, and creating a reflective teaching portfolio.
593 P PROF SEMINAR COLLEGE TCHG, Erickson. TU 11-12:50 (CRN 32365)
TOPIC: The Teaching of Business and Technical Writing
Area Requirement: None
This professional seminar is designed to ground graduate students in some of the salient genres, discourse conventions, and styles privileged by discourse communities engaged in business, as well as help those students construct a sophisticated conceptual understanding of writing well suited to the instruction/learning of writing-as-a-verb for those discourse communities. More importantly, this seminar will help its students critically engage useful pedagogical theory and theory from the field of business/technical writing, so they might improve their effectiveness as classroom instructors. This seminar is required of all graduate students teaching business/technical writing for the first time.
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
500-Level Creative Writing
Course Descriptions
FALL 2013
500 T THE CRAFT OF FICTION, Howe. TU 5:30-8:30 (CRN 45291)
Area Requirement: None
Examination of the creative process of fiction from the perspectives of aesthetics and techniques, illustrated from the work of selected authors.
502 G PROBLEMS IN POETRY WRITING, Harrington. W 3-4:50 (CRN 45292)
Area Requirement: None
Examination of the creative process of poetry from the perspective of aesthetics and techniques, illustrated from the work of selected authors.
504 E WRITING WORKSHOP IN FICTION, Petty. W 1-2:50 (CRN 45293)
Area Requirement: None
Directed projects in fiction writing, either short stories or sections of a novel, with group discussion and critique. There will be a course packet for the class, featuring short stories and essays on the writing of fiction and related topics; there will be a discussion of these readings at the beginning of each class meeting.
506 T WRITING WORKSHOP IN POETRY, Kelly. TH 3-5:50 (CRN 45294)
Area Requirement: None
Directed individual projects, with group discussion in fiction.
560 NL LITERARY PUBLISHING & PROMOTION, Stanley. Arranged (CRN 45754)
Area Requirement: None
A working practicum designed to teach graduate students the basics of literary journal publishing and to introduce them to career and entrepreneurial opportunities in other types of literary arts organizations. Students will attend weekly editorial meetings, complete weekly reading assignments, and will work 2 hours per week in the ‘Ninth Letter’ office, reading manuscript submissions and completing various clerical tasks for the journal. Approved for both letter and S/U grading. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: MFA candidate standing.
