2010-2011 Graduate Courses
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Download the 2010-2011 Graduate Course Booklet
Fall 2010 Courses
Eng 503/703 - History of the English Language
Instructor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
Languages change over time and vary over space. This fundamental linguistic concept, as true of English as of all languages, explains both the emergence of Old and Middle and Modern English from Indo-European and the existence of varieties of English from Bangladesh to Meigs County. This course will explore the temporal development and the spatial varieties of English, with a particular emphasis on reading in primary texts, as well as examining earlier stages of the language in situ, that is, in a manuscript and an early printed text. We will consider not only the social and historical events and conditions that have shaped and continue to shape the language but the invention of the printing press, the creation of dictionaries, and the development of the science of linguistics.
Texts:
Richard W. Bailey. Images of English. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1991. Graddol, David, et al. Changing English. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Assignments
A class presentation, 2 short papers, and a final long paper involving linguistic research.
Eng 517/717 - Milton
Instructor: Beth Quitslund
Description:
This is a course about the writings of John Milton—or at any rate, as much of them as we can fit into ten weeks. Our central focus will be on his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, but we will also be tracing the outlines of Milton’s career and the development of the ideas that were most important to him by reading some lyrics, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, Samson Agonistes, and substantial pieces of his polemical prose tracts. On the one hand, studying Milton is an opportunity to look closely at one of the greatest poets of the English language (and one of the masters of early modern political prose). On the other, because of Milton’s consistent and passionate involvement with the pressing public issues of his day, it is an incomparable window into the political, ideological, and theological crises of seventeenth-century England—a period that saw a revolution in church and state and, however briefly, the world turned upside down.
Eng 537 - Critical Theory
Instructor: George Hartley
Description:
In this course we will be reading theories of decolonization relating to Indigenous and Third World struggles. Authors are likely to include Marx, Fanon, Foucault, Césaire, Cabral, Malcolm X, Anzaldúa, Taiaiake, Waziyatawin, Spivak, and Said. We will look at the dynamics of internal colonialism, imperialism, anti-colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism as specific related moments of the past 500 years. You will write daily Reading Notes, two analytical essays, a short bibliographical essay, and do a class presentation.
Eng 551/551L - Teaching Language and Composition in Secondary Schools
Instructor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
Students will learn student-centered, developmental strategies for teaching language and composition in the middle school and high school English/Language Arts classrooms.
Readings:
Glasgow’s Strategies for Engaging Young Adult Readers: A Social Themes Aproach. Christopher Gordon Publishers, 2005.
Assignments:
Portfolio of ideas for teaching writing in secondary schools.
Note:
Students who enroll for English 551 must also enroll in English 551L
Eng 552/552L - Teaching Literature
Instructor: Eric Eye
Description:
This course is designed to acquaint students with various materials, teaching methods, and theories appropriate for teaching literature in middle schools and high schools based on the NCTE/IRA Standards and the Ohio State Department of Education’s English Language Arts Standards. In addition to class meetings, students must be enrolled in English 552L and will spend 20 hours in a middle school or high school English/Language Arts classroom to gain Field Experience.
Required Texts:
Glasgow, Jackie and Linda Rice. Exploring African Life and Literature: Novel Guides to Promote Socially Responsive Learning.Newark, DE: IRA, 2007
Eng 556- Teaching Young Adult Literature
Instructor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the genres of adolescent literature. We will examine the characteristics of these various types of literature and give some attention to current issues of and trends in the field of young adult literature. A particular focus of the course will be social justice issues in young adult literature.
Text:
Literature for Today’s Young Adults, 8th ed., by Nilsen and Donelson. Students will choose other award-winning books to read to meet course requirements.
Exam/papers:
Students will keep a reader response log and do a course project.
Eng 570N/734 - 20th Century Literature (Modernism)
Instructor: Marilyn Atlas
Description:
Modern American writers after the Genteel Tradition were confronting questions concerning form as well as gender, identity, ethics, race, class and place. In this seminar we will investigate the relationship between these issues, politics and poetics during a period of notable cultural conflict.
Readings (not quite set in stone yet):
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900); Gertrude Stein, Three Lives and Tender Buttons (1908 and 1914); Jean Toomer, Cane (1923); Dawn Powell, Dance Night (1930); William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946-1958, 1963); H.D., Helen in Egypt (1961); and Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936).
Assignments:
Four short analytical essays due before readings, one bibliographical essay to be distributed to your classmates and due the day that we begin the text you are assigned to research (8 pages), and one major critical essay (10 pages). Oral reports.
Eng 591 - Teaching College English
Instructor: Jennie Nelson
Description:
This course is required of all entering graduate students who will be teaching. It is designed to accomplish several goals: 1) to introduce graduate students to the theories and practices related to the first-year writing program at Ohio University; 2) to support writing teachers as they learn to teach composition by examining some of the “best practices” for teaching writing published by composition scholars; 3) to allow teachers to develop their own theoretically-based goals and approaches for teaching writing; 4) to provide a community of teachers who share their experiences working with student writers at OU.
Texts:
Teaching Composition: Background Readings, edited by T.R. Johnson, latest edition, Bedford/St. Martins Press; Engaging Ideas by John Bean, Jossey-Bass Publishers; Readings available on Blackboard; Other textbooks TBA
Eng 593 - Bibliography and Methods
Instructor: Janis Holm
Description:
A practical introduction to research and scholarship
Goal:
To develop research skills and a professional vocabulary
Readings:
MLA Style Manual, by Gibaldi; Literary Research Guide, by Harner; course pack; other readings to be announced
Assignments:
Enumerative bibliography, book review, take-home final, and other assignments to be announced.
Eng 690 - Creative Writing Seminar: Nonfiction
Early Modern and Postmodern Essays
Instructor: Eric LeMay
Description:
Why write an essay? What ends should it serve? How does it differ from other genres, and what is it anyway? Many of the questions haunting today's essayists have a striking resemblance to those asked by the Renaissance writers who were inventing the essay in English. In this course, we will explore the origins of the English essay—the debates about it, the ways in which it was composed, and the work of its early practitioners—as a means of better understanding our craft and energizing our work. We will read selections from the likes of Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, and Montaigne (in the first English translation) alongside such contemporaries as David Shields, Anne Carson, and Jenny Boully. We will also try a few Renaissance writing practices, including keeping and using a commonplace book.
Eng 765 - Form and Theory of Poetry
Instructor: Mark Halliday
Description:
This course will be centered on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, as a candidate for most important American poet of the twentieth century. We will proceed by comparing his poetic methods (especially his use of image, metaphor, symbol) and his ideas to a series of other poets -- notably: Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, Claire Bateman. We will consider Stevens' advocacy of imagination as a value to replace religious faith, and as alternative to materialist realism.
Requirements:
Each student will do at least one in-class presentation, comparing selected poems; and will write two "observation/meditation" papers (4 pages each), and one 10-page essay.
Eng 777 - Colloquium on Profession
Instructor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
This colloquium prepares doctoral students in English for the profession of college teaching and research. It discusses both practical and theoretical professional matters not usually addressed in other courses. Specific topics may be suggested by contemporary conditions within the profession.
Eng 780 - Special Topics: Queer Rhetorics, Heteronormativity, and Composition Studies
Instructor: Sherrie Gradin
Description:
The field of Rhetoric/Composition has been actively engaged with issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and critical pedagogies for quite some time. It is, in fact, very difficult to read or write in the field without considering race, class, and gender—our own and that of our students. For too long, sexuality and sexual orientation has, as one of the articles we will read suggests, been the “invisible diversity.” Together we will explore queer theory, heteronormativity, and what sexuality might have to do with how and what we teach, research, and write. While we will read and talk about theory, we will also always be concerned with teaching, writing/rhetoric/composition, and academic culture.
Course Requirements:
Active participation, a presentation accompanied by a critical book review, a final paper.
Eng 780 - Special Studies Seminar: African Literature
Instructor: Ghirmai Negash
Description:
This seminar aims to do two things. The first is to review historical developments in post-colonial African literature, with a particular emphasis on the African novel as a specific literary project of African cultural modernity. The African novel is often referred to both as a cultural product and agent, first in its vigorous interventions in the project of manufacturing an African national identity and, later, in its equally radical disenchantment with the post-colonial African state, within the framework of a global, post-nationalist and post-apartheid era. The second aim is to offer a conceptual framework and associated vocabulary as a means to theorizing and examining the novels selected for this seminar. The selected articles bear in mind the continuities and discontinuities in the engagements of creative and critical discourses on Africa with old and contemporary concerns.
In this seminar we will follow a case-study approach. After laying the foundations in the first two weeks, we will concentrate on a particular novel framed in a defining moment of African history—the first phase of decolonization, or the end-of-century “time of unhappiness,” for example—and explore in what ways the dynamics of these political, economic, and cultural moments and processes maybe refracted in that work.
All along during the seminar, we will aim to provoke discussions by identifying and stimulating entry points as a means to think through the often complex issues and conversations about the nature, scope, and real and imagined spaces in which African literature is produced and consumed. A good starting point is to look at the “classical” debates on the question of language and reader-audiences of African literature. What are the abling and disabling consequences of using European languages for African literature? If an exclusive usage of European languages reinforces Western hegemony on Africa, what kinds of countering artistic and literary movements in Africa have emerged to justify the optimism of linguistic and literary pluralism within the African landscape? And if at this age of globalization, “Africa is considered a secondary or marginal market for African art” by some of its own artists (Diawara 1998: 113; in Jameson and Miyoshi), what kinds of stories does this bifurcation of loyalties mask about the status and ordeal of contemporary African art and artists within and outside Africa? Another good point of entry for conversation is to revisit the mass of critical corpus that primarily considers African literatures as a typical case of post-coloniality. Some of the pertinent questions to raise are: What is post-colonialism as a historical condition? In what ways does post-colonial theory as a critical discourse account for this historical phenomenon? When does it fall short to do so? In other words, what are the pitfalls of post-colonial theory as canonically applied to African literature? And, finally, in what ways does post-colonial theory differ from or overlap with postmodernism? Another yet useful strategy of thinking about African literature is to entertain alternative approaches of analysis that go beyond the limitations of homogenizing post-colonial models and provide context-specific interpretations.
Eng 791 - Professional Issues in Teaching College English
Instructor: Jennie Nelson
Description:
Colloquium for all graduate teaching associates designed as a forum to discuss professional issues in the discipline and to provide information and resources for pedagogical development.
Winter 2011 Courses
Eng 533/733 - American Literature 1865-1918
"American Realism(s): U.S. Fiction in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century"
Instructor: Paul Jones
Description:
In the late decades of the nineteenth century, many American writers repeatedly articulated an aesthetic commitment to “realism” in their fiction and developed various technical and stylistic means to pursue this realistic ideal in their novels and short stories. This course will explore these efforts, the often uncomfortable relationship between imaginative literature and the commitment to realism, the varying definitions of realism expressed by these writers, the types of innovations that allowed them to write realistic fiction, and the aesthetic, political, and ethical consequences of this enterprise. Though the reading list is still very tentative, our exploration will likely begin with critical statements by writers like William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Frank Norris, justifying their individual commitments to realism in fiction. Then we’ll sample American fiction in various modes of realism, including examples of Howellsian realism (Howells, James, and Edith Wharton), naturalism (Stephen Crane, Jack London, Norris, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman), and regionalism (Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Sui Sin Far). We’ll conclude our survey by looking at the early work of modernist Gertrude Stein to explore how modernist fiction itself might also be seen as an extension of this pursuit of realism in fiction. Our readings of primary texts will be supplemented by critical writing about American realism by scholars such as Donald Pizer, Amy Kaplan, Walter Benn Michaels, Elizabeth Ammons, and Michael Davitt Bell.
Readings Might Include:
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; Stephen Crane, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets; Frank Norris, McTeague; Charles Chesnutt, Tales of Conjure and the Color Line; Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; James Nagel and Tom Quirk’s Portable American Realism Reader; Critical work posted on the class Blackboard site.
Assignments:
12-15 page critical essay, a scholarly book review, an annotated bibliography, and class presentations
Eng 535/734 - African American Literature
Instructor: TBA
Eng 551/551L - Teaching Language and Composition
Instructor: Linda Rice
Description:
This course is designed to acquaint students with various materials, teaching methods, and theories appropriate for teaching composition in middle schools and high schools based on the NCTE/IRA Standards and those adopted by the Ohio Department of Education. In addition to class meetings, students must enroll in 551L and spend 20 hours in a middle school or high school English/Language Arts classroom to gain Field Experience.
Point of Emphasis:
This class is made up predominantly of undergraduates (English 451/451L) so the class has the routine accountability (reading quizzes every class; weekly assignments; presentations that engage students in Multiple Intelligences and with technology). This class is unlike most graduate classes as it aims to create the routine accountability and rigor that help new middle and high school teachers to be effective. The primary audience served by the class is pre-service teachers looking for licensure in Adolescent-to-Young Adulthood Integrated Language Arts. In accordance with all of the College of Education and Ohio Department of Education mandates, the rigor of this class ensures that our AYA/ILA program is accredited by NCATE.
Required Texts (tentative):
Glasgow, J. N. and Rice, L. J. (2007). Exploring African Life and Literature: Novel Guides to Promote Socially Responsive Learning. Newark, DE: International Reading Association; Noden, Harry R. (1999). Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Boynton/Cook Heinemann.
Major Requirements (tentative):
1. Routine Reading Quizzes (or comparable accountability assignments); 2. Literacy Autobiography or Archaeological Literacy Dig; 3. Teach a Writing Lesson Using Image Grammar; 4. Portfolio of Teaching Ideas; 5. Multigenre Research Paper or YA Book Project
Note:
Students who enroll for English 551 must also enroll in English 551L.
Eng 552/552L - Teaching Language Arts in Secondary Schools
Instructor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
Students will learn student-centered, active reading strategies for teaching literature in the middle school and high school English/Language Arts classrooms.
Readings:
Glasgow's Exploring African Life and Literature: Novel Guides to Promote Socially Responsive Learning, International Reading Association, 2007
Assignments:
Portfolio of Ideas for Teaching Literature, including lesson plans, book projects, and other related activities.
Note:
Students who enroll for English 552 must also enroll in English 552L
Eng 556 - Teaching Young Adult Literature
Instructor: Linda Rice
Description:
This course is designed to acquaint students with young adult literature, literature focusing on issues that are of particular importance to teens. The course will include extensive reading about YA novels (with several read and discussed in Socratic Seminar form) as it offers a brief history of the genre, unveils characteristics of the best young adult literature, establishes connection among YA literature, pop culture and mass media, and examines ongoing efforts to censor YA books. While open to all English majors, this course should be of particular interest and usefulness to future middle school and high school teachers whose job it will be to engage and challenge adolescents in the English/Language Arts classroom—the themes of YA literature are ideally suited to facilitate that endeavor.
Required Texts:
: Nilsen, Aleen Pace & Kenneth L. Donelson (2009). Literature for Today’s Young Adults (8th Edition). Allyn and Bacon; Rice, Linda J. (2006). What Was It Like? Teaching History and Culture Through Young Adult Literature. Teachers College Press; Five Young Adult Novels (TBA)—three read as a whole class; one read in small group literature circles; one read independently
Assessments:
1. Macro Paper/Project (presented in front of the class) [20%]; 2. Reader Response and Literary Analysis Assignment [10%]; 3. Book Quizzes and/or In-class Activities (based on YA novels) [15%]; 4. Chapter Quizzes (from Nilsen & Donelson textbook) [35%]; 5. Group Paper/Project/Presentation [20%]
Eng 532/732 - Exchanges of Power: Circulations of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction
Instructor: Linda Zionkowski
Description:
Despite its reputation as a period of emergent capitalism with The Wealth of Nations as its guidebook, eighteenth-century Britain was far more deeply structured by the dynamics of gift exchange: its political, economic, and social institutions were upheld by relations between donors and recipients, and the tensions and antagonisms within these relationships appear throughout literature of the time. Defined as variously as patronage, charity, expressions of regard, and even the bestowal of life from parents to children, the gift was a complex transaction with the power to affirm or deny one's participation in social compact: for people at this time, "to give was to live," and exclusion from this process--or being without "friends"--threatened one's very existence. Our seminar will focus on how eighteenth-century fiction represents gift exchanges as they both establish and attempt to contest hierarchies of power, particularly those resting on class and gender.
Readings
Our primary texts will include Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (abridged version), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, Frances Burney's Cecilia, and Jane Austen's Emma. Secondary texts will include works of social and cultural anthropology by Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Lewis Hyde, and Pierre Bourdieu.
Eng 593 - Bibliography and Methods
Instructor: Andrew Escobedo
Description:
This course provides training in research methodology and bibliographic format, as well as helping students acquire a professional vocabulary.
Readings:
MLA Style Manuel; essays on academic professionalization and theory.
Assignments:
Two papers, presentations, and an annotated bibliography
Eng 691 - Creative Writing Seminar: Poetry
Professor: Jill Rosser
Description:
We will read three contemporary books of poetry that have appeared within the past three years. Initially we will divide class time equally between student work and assigned texts, though as the quarter progresses we’ll tip the balance in favor of poems generated by the class. I’ll inflict occasional exercises to which I’ll insist on strict adherence. I will also require a minimum of eight new, never-before-typed poems from each student, and a major revision of one of them, also to be shared with the class.
Texts:
TBA
Course Assignments:
Three exercises, eight poems, one revision, and a review of one of our texts
Eng 691 - Creative Writing Seminar: Fiction
Professor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
The fiction writing workshop will be traditional in the sense that, as a group of writers, we will critique the fiction you write during the quarter. However, I will ask you to read and discuss critical and theoretical articles and published fiction so that we might find some fresh and helpful ways of talking about fiction. The emphasis of the course will be on technique, on the how of fiction, not on its interpretation.
Readings:
Your fiction and published stories and critical articles.
Assignments:
Lead workshop discussions; minimum of fifty pages of fiction.
Eng 777 - Colloquium on Profession
Instructor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
This colloquium prepares doctoral students in English for the profession of college teaching and research. It discusses both practical and theoretical professional matters not usually addressed in other courses. Specific topics may be suggested by contemporary conditions within the profession.
Eng 791 - Professional Issues in Teaching College English
Instructor: Jennie Nelson
Description:
Colloquium for all graduate teaching associates designed as a forum to discuss professional issues in the discipline and to provide information and resources for pedagogical development.
Eng 792E - Computers and English Studies
Instructor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
We’ll focus our inquiries on the impact computer media has had and is having on verbal and visual communication, the nature and boundaries of texts, reading, literacy and college English pedagogy. We will explore the use of newer forms of composition and communication (rhetorical, artistic, and in between) in “new media”: hypertext, blogs, wikis, games, “social media,” YouTube, and rhetorically interesting web sites. We will read a variety of scholarship in the field of computers and English studies. Among a few of the possible questions are: How has/is the use of computers changing and expanding literacy? Research? What is multi-modal literacy and why is it important? How does it alter rhetorical situations? What material conditions contribute to who gets to become literate in computer media? How has new media re-purposed or re-mediated existing genres? What are some effective ways of teaching writing with computers? Of teaching multi-modal literacy? What critical theories of technology might help us going forward? Why and how have the humanities resisted digital texts? How does the so-called “digital humanities” differ from the vision of English Studies being developed by “techno-rhetoricians”? How have interactive communication spaces altered the writing subject/self and the sense of community?
Assigned Works:
1. Post weekly writing and multimodal expression on the readings to the your blog, plus weekly comments on others’ posts. 2. A reflective essay on your blog writing (due at end). 3. A substantially researched multi-modal project, produced individually or in pairs, including a project proposal, a “storyboard” and individual reflective statement. 4. Write and submit a proposal to a conference based on your work in the course. 5. Write a critical review essay of a book chosen from a list provided. 6. Give a presentation on the book you reviewed.
Possible Course Texts, whole or in part:
Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition; Rice, Jeff, The Rhetoric of Cool; Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media; Reid, Alexander. The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition. Plus book excerpts, journal articles, and online articles and works.
Spring 2011 Courses
Eng 503/703 - English as a World Language
Instructor: Ghirmai Negash
Description:
Languages and their function change over time and space. This course will critically look at the fascinating history of English in its development from a local vernacular to a national language, to a prominent post-colonial and international language. We will also examine closely how it has shaped, and been shaped by, those historical developments.
Texts:
Books and selected articles on British and American English and Post-colonial Englishes (Asia, Caribbean, Africa)
Eng 500/709 - Medieval Language and Literature
Instructor: TBA
Eng 514/714 - Spenser
Instructor: Andrew Escobedo
Description:
Edmund Spenser's massive epic-romance, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), in many ways summed up the artistic and intellectual aspirations of the two millennia that preceded it, while intimating the changes that modernity would impose. The poem raises crucial questions about poetry and thinking: how is it possible that the frangible, fragile materials of verse (rhyme, meter, stanzaic form, metaphor) combine to produce a special kind of thinking that allows us to pose fundamental questions to ourselves? How is it that art allows us to travel vast conceptual distances that otherwise would require immense time and effort? What is distinctive about poetic thinking? Come join us to find out what Spenser's answers are.
Readings:
The Faerie Queene
Assignments:
Papers and presentations
Eng 537/733 - Critical Theory
Transnational Narratives: Literature, Cinema, Theory
Instructor: Katarzyna Marciniak
Description:
This course focuses on transnational literature and film in contemporary global contexts and offers the study of various themes related to immigration, migration, dislocation, racial and ethnic politics, foreignness, translation, and border-crossings. We will place our inquiries within transnational studies, generally defined as an interdisciplinary field that focuses on aesthetic productions foregrounding transcultural experiences of those who belong to more than one nation. Key terms: nationalism and citizenship, difference and incommensurability, hybridity, liminality, strangerhood, alienhood, and exilic consciousness.
Sample Readings:
Digging to America (Anne Tyler), Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri), Dreaming in Cuban (Cristina Garcia), Arabian Jazz (Diana Abu-Jaber), Yo! (Julia Alvarez), Native Speaker (Chang-Rae Lee).
Sample Screenings:
Frozen River (Courtney Hunt), Maid in America (Anayansi Prado), Amreeka (Cherien Dabis), Unveiled (Angelina Maccarone).
Theory:
Giorgio Agamben, Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Chandra Mohanty, Hamid Naficy, Edward Said, Azade Seyhan, Ella Shohat, Imogen Tyler.
Eng 556- Teaching Young Adult Literature
Instructor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the genres of adolescent literature. We will examine the characteristics of these various types of literature and give some attention to current issues of and trends in the field of young adult literature. A particular focus of the course will be social justice issues in young adult literature.
Text:
Literature for Today’s Young Adults, 8th ed., by Nilsen and Donelson. Students will choose other award-winning books to read to meet course requirements.
Exam/papers:
Students will keep a reader response log and do a course project.
Eng 570N/727 - Marketing Modernisms
Instructor: Carey Snyder
Description:
Anglo-American Modernism has conventionally been regarded as an elite cultural movement—the antithesis of mass culture. The studied inaccessibility of works like Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waste Land hints that, in their pursuit of aesthetic innovation, the high modernists scorned the mass market. Yet recent scholarship has not only broadened and pluralized our understanding of literary production during this period, it has also shown that the diverse modernisms were more deeply engaged with mass culture and the literary marketplace than previously assumed. As critic Sean Latham puts it, modernist works “aspired to the status of art and commodity at the same time.” This seminar will examine the myriad ways that writers of the period (1890-1935) negotiated the marketplace: circulating “limited editions” priced as luxury items, producing prefaces and reviews to boost sales, creatively evading censorship while courting the associated scandal, veiling commercial exchange in antiquated modes of patronage, and participating in a culture of celebrity that turned “Stein,” “Woolf,” and “Joyce” into household names. This seminar will serve as a general introduction to the period, while familiarizing students with current scholarship and historical debates about the relationship between various modernisms and the literary marketplace.
Likely Readings:
George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession; James Joyce, “Nausicaa” Chapter of Ulysses; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Jean Rhys, The Left Bank and Other Stories; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Jean Toomer, Cane; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Assignments:
Reading Journal, in installments (2 pages weekly); Annotated Bibliography and Presentation on Secondary Sources; Final Paper (12-15 pages), to be presented conference-style and substantially revised
Eng 692 - Creative Writing Seminar: Fiction
Instructor: Zakes Mda
Description:
The objective of this course is to encourage the participants to write the best way they can the way /they /can. This will be achieved through a combination of a workshop where the participants discuss each other’s work and presentations on some interesting aspects of narrative theory.
Course Requirements:
1. Participants shall comment on each participant’s work – both in the workshop and in writing. (Most of what we learn in writing comes from talking about other people’s work.) The written comments shall not be more than TWO pages. 2. The workshops will be process-oriented and student-centered. We shall avoid the traditional “silent author” approach and the authors shall play an active role in the discussion of their stories. In fact, the authors lead the discussion of their work and engage their peers in a dialogue. Of course, this experiment will only succeed if the authors are able to move the discussion beyond niceties and time-consuming defensiveness to identifying areas of interest and concern in their work, so that with the feedback from their peers they become effectively self-critical. Remember that when you lead the workshop we need to know more about your work. For instance: Where does the story come from? What inspired it? What brought about the basic idea? How did you go about creating your characters? What is your approach to writing? How did you decide on a particular style? 3. The workshop is not interested in old work (especially work that has been workshopped elsewhere before), but in work that the participants are doing at the moment. 4. The workshop shall not deal with literary/critical theory. We shall not be interrogating the assertions of Derrida, Eagleton, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault and the like. Not that theory is a bad thing. For one thing it may empower us with a vocabulary with which we can think about our fiction – although I tend to agree with writer-teacher R. H. W. Dillard that theory works against you as a writer--because imagination/artistic work is essentially conjunctive (a drawing together of unlikely things) whereas theory and analytic work are disjunctive (a matter of taking something apart.) We only have ten weeks in this course, and the focus can only be the writing itself. We do appreciate the fact that the work of the participants will be informed by varied traditions. For instance, some may write in such post-modern modes as magic realism. It will therefore be necessary to discuss those elements of the mode that make texts in that mode successful. So you see, we cannot altogether run away from critical theory! Narrative theory (for instance, looking at the elements of successful fiction), however, is an essential tool for the writer. It has possibilities of being conjunctive – hence our discussions on some aspects of it. In this regard each participant shall be required to make a presentation on some interesting aspect pertaining to writing. For instance in the past some participants have presented on the effective use of the surprise and suspense principle, on tips on humorous writing, on why flat characters are essential etc.
Prescribed/Recommended Texts
None.
Eng 692 - Creative Writing Seminar: Nonfiction
Instructor: Dinty W. Moore
Description:
This workshop will focus on nonfiction writing as literary art and the seemingly endless range of ways in which writers choose relevant details, combine and recombine information, and reshape experience to, as Rebecca McClanahan puts it, “… illuminate the artful possibilities hidden within actual events.” Student writing will be front and center, but to inform our choices, we will be reading work by various contemporary nonfiction writers, most likely including Patricia Foster, Ander Monson, Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, Debra Marquart, Heather Sellers, and Tobias Wolff.
Eng 777 - Colloquium on Profession
Instructor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
This colloquium prepares doctoral students in English for the profession of college teaching and research. It discusses both practical and theoretical professional matters not usually addressed in other courses. Specific topics may be suggested by contemporary conditions within the profession.
Eng 780 - Special Studies Seminar: Grading and Assessing Writing-Problems and Possibilities
Instructor: Jennie Nelson
Course Description:
This course is designed to explore the practices and theories involved in grading and assessing student writing. These practices and theories can be affected by race, gender, and other social or institutional forces.
Readings:
Texts include The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing (paper back) by Frances Zak (available through Amazon.com); A course pack available at Copy Katz off Court street ( I will email you when the pack is available). Other texts may be used as well. To Be Announced
Written Work:
1. You will give frequent reports, which, along with class participation, will count 30% of your grade. Compile these reports into a folder. See below for a fuller explanation of the reports. 2. You will complete a midterm take home exam, which will count 30% of your grade. 3. You will write a research report describing an empirical study you have completed; this will count 40% of your grade.
Eng 791 - Professional Issues in Teaching College English
Instructor: Jennie Nelson
Description:
Colloquium for all graduate teaching associates designed as a forum to discuss professional issues in the discipline and to provide information and resources for pedagogical development.
Eng 792F - Histories of Composition Studies
Instructor: Mara Holt
Description:
This course will examine Composition Studies in the context of U.S. education and English Studies, specifically the cultural and material conditions of U.S. education, of post-secondary English Studies, and of the professional apparatus of the area of rhetoric and composition. The goals of our investigation are to explore answers to these questions--What is the relationship of U.S. public education to the discipline of post-secondary English Studies? What is the relationship of English Studies to Composition Studies? How has Composition Studies developed and in what relationship to U.S. culture from its emergence in the 1970’s to its current, global scope in the early 21st century? Our goal is to position our field in historical materiality and cultural circumstances, and thus to gain an understanding of some of the forces that have influenced and have been influenced by Composition Studies. Toward that end we will read and report on written histories and journal articles toward an examination of issues in the field such as the roles of the teacher, the student, and the purpose of writing instruction.
Possible Texts:
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: SIUP, 1987. Spring, Joel. The American School: From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind, 7th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Kitzhaber, Albert R. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1990. Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997. Octalogs, all. Selections from historical work by Brereton, Carr and Schultz, Donahue and Moon, Hobbs, Miller, Russell, Smith, and Wozniak.