Spring 2001 Graduate Courses
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- 503: History of the English Language
- 537: History of Criticism
- 570O/775C: American Literature to the Civil War
- 692: Creative Writing Seminar: The Personal Essay
- 692: Creative Writing Seminar: Fiction
- 765: Form and Theory of Poetry
- 777: Colloquium
- 780: The History of the Composition Discipline
- 791: Professional Issues
- 792E: Computers and Composition Pedagogy
503: History of the English Language
Instructor: Marsha L. Dutton
Description:
Languages change over time and vary over space. This fundamental linguistic concept, which is as true of English as of all other 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, largely through primary texts.
Readings:
- Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language by Richard W. Bailey, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991.
- A History of the English Language by Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1993.
- The History of the English Language: A Source Book by David Burnley, London: Longman, 1992.
Assignments:
A five-page paper comparing translations of a single text. A class presentation on one aspect of the history of English. A twenty-page paper involving a combination of primary and secondary linguistic research.
537: History of Criticism
Instructor: Kasia Marciniak
Description:
At the end of his well-known 1986 text, "Mapping the Postmodern," Andreas Huyssen proposes the notion of a "postmodernism of resistance," a concept which invites an understanding of postmodern productions as drawing upon "the productive tension between the political and the aesthetic." In 1990, bell hooks in "Postmodern Blackness," while critiquing postmodernist discourses as often elitist and dominated by the voices of white male intellectuals, postulates that "to change the exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of resistance." Both Huyssen and hooks seem to favor the notion of the postmodern that is political, interventionist, and inclusionary. This course seeks to explore the terrain of contemporary cultural productions—literature, film, performance, theory—to reflect upon the aesthetic enactments of a postmodernism of resistance. The larger theoretical ground for our investigations will embrace transnational feminist intersections, specifically poststructural discourse, postcolonial, queer theory, and theories of abjection. In particular, we will focus on the ways in which feminist postmodernist discourses re-conceptualize humanistic notions of the self and probe the notion of embodied subjectivity in language. Our philosophical inquiries will consider a number of questions: Why does Western thought historically pose the universal "I" as pure and rational, away from materiality? What is the connection between the flesh and the process of meaning making? What are the postmodernist feminist ways of reconceiving the body as a site of epistemological limitation? What are the historical connections between a traditional vision of the self and ethnic cleansing?
Readings:
Andreas Huyssen, bell hooks, Rene Descartes, Julia Kristeva, Fredric Jameson, Susan Suleiman, Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, Simon Tylor, Mary Douglas, Lynda Hart.
Assignments:
Several explication responses, one formal project.
570O/775C: American Literature to Civil War (From Wilderness to Textuality: What We Write About When We Write About Nature)
Instructor: Robert DeMott
Description:
Nature is our widest home, Edward Hoagland claims. This course will investigate the related and determinate issues of nature, place, landscape, and environment in selected works of 19th and 20th century American writing, including fiction, non fiction, and poetry. In that writing about journeys in/to real places leads to questions of textuality (priority, origination, construction, artfulness, etc.), we will also be taking up problems of representation, authenticity, audience, etc., to discover ways in which writing about nature goes beyond, for example, a limited vocabulary of praise and a narrow emotional band (Joyce Carol Oates's charge). To do so will mean becoming familiar with the burgeoning area of ecological criticism and theory, a critical approach which has ramifications for students in all areas of our discipline—composition, creative writing, and literary criticism.
Readings:
Texts for the course are not yet set, but players will range from foundational texts of 19th century by:
- Emerson, Nature
- Audubon, Birds of America and Ornithological Biography
- Melville, Moby-Dick and
- Thoreau, Walden
to contemporary examples such as:
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
- Jim Harrison, Wolf
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Place
Assignments:
Requirements will be a couple of a short papers/presentations including one on a recent critical/theoretical book. Ph.D. students are required to lead the seminar on at least one of the primary texts. There will be a longish final take home essay (12-15 pp) for MA students, and a longer (20-25 pp) research paper for PhD students.
692: Creative Writing Seminar: The Personal Essay
Instructor: David Lazar
Description:
An introduction to writing the personal essay.Readings:
Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Woolf, Orwell, Didion, M.F.K. Fisher, Rachel Blau Du Plessis...and three or four essays presented to workshop.
692: Creative Writing Seminar: Fiction
Instructor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
The seminar will be a fiction workshop; that is, we'll spend most of our time discussing your fiction—reading closely, critiquing, offering suggestions. Our focus will be on the short story, but you are welcome to work on novel chapters. We will also read fiction and critical theory. I'm hoping that the reading will provide us with specific and concrete ways of talking about your writing, that we'll set up a practical (other stories) and theoretical background for the class discussions.
Readings:
Your fiction; stories and critical articles
Assignments:
Portfolio.
765: Form and Theory of Poetry
Instructor: Erin Belieu
Description:
To Be Announced.
777: Colloquium
Instructor: Josephine Bloomfield
Description:
This colloquium prepares doctoral students in English for the profession of college teaching and research. It discusses professional matters which are not usually addressed in more traditional, subject-matter centered courses. These concerns may be practical or theoretical. Specific topics will be suggested by contemporary conditions within the profession and they will vary from year to year.
780: Special Studies Seminar: The History of the Composition Discipline
Instructor: Betty Pytlik
Description:
In this course, we will study the history of the relatively new discipline of Rhetoric and Composition (usually the 1960s are identified as the beginning of the discipline) by examining essays in popular and professional journals, textbooks, memoirs of early composition teachers and biographical accounts of contemporary composition teachers, and collections of essays from historians of the discipline published through the 1900s. To identify the roots of our discipline, we will seek answers to these and other questions: What is English Studies and where does composition fit into the tradition of English Studies? What has been the relationship between the teaching of literature and the teaching of composition? Where did freshman composition come from? How—and why—has it changed since the 1870s? How have textbooks influenced the composition curriculum? What has research in composition focused on? How have movements like the Efficiency, Progressive, General Education, and Communication Movements, social upheavals like World War II, and technological advances like television and computers changed the teaching of composition? How have graduate students been prepared to teach composition?
Class activities will include lectures, class discussions, reports on primary and secondary texts, the preparation of an annotated bibliography of an area of interest in the history of teaching composition, and a final paper that traces the history of one aspect of the teaching of composition, such as placement testing, advanced composition, articulation between high schools and colleges.
Readings:
- Turn-of-the-century memoirs on reserve
- coursepack of journal articles
- Robin Varnum's Fencing with Words: A History of Writing Instruction at Amherst College during the Era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966
- Robert Connors' Composition-Rhetoric: Background, Theory, and Pedagogy
- excerpts from Mariolina Salvatori's Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819-1929
791: Professional Issues Teaching College English
Instructor: Betty Pytlik
Description:
Colloquium for apprentice teachers designed to explore alternative approaches to classroom planning and presentation and to discuss professional issues in the discipline.
792E: Computers and Composition Pedagogy
Instructor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
This course investigates the impact of computers on written communication, reading, and the teaching of college English courses, primarily rhetoric and composition and secondarily, literature pedagogy. Topics include the use of new forms of composition and communication in hypertext, e-mail listservs, Web discussion forums, Usenet newsgroups, MOOs, and Web sites with particular focus on the impact of these venues on composition pedagogy.
Readings:
We will read a variety of scholarship in the field of computers and composition and discuss issues such as student and instructor authority, computer-mediated communication genres, gender and identity politics, multiple literacies, play, virtual communities, and other topics that have arisen with the use of networked computer classrooms. We will situate current practices within the movements of composition, critical, and literary theories, and the history of computers and writing. As a class we will discuss readings face-to-face, in email, and in a MOO (online text-based virtual reality). Our listserv messages and MOO transcripts will be posted to our course Web site, so that we can read and reflect upon the texts of our discussions. Students will post weekly responses to the readings (with different students leading the discussion each week), write a 10 page paper, compose and post a personal Web page, and collaborate in small groups on a major project either composed for the Web to be posted on the course web site or in MOOspace.
Readings will be mostly articles and book excerpts collected into a course packet, plus some on-line articles linked from the course site.
Assignments:
- Assigned readings for the first six weeks to be followed by group work on final projects.
- Weekly on-line postings keyed to discussion of that week's readings.
- A portfolio of a selection of listserv and MOO discourse demonstrating your contribution to the class's understanding of the texts and issues. The portfolio will include a 2-3 page analysis and discussion of the selected discourse (20% of grade).
- Students will take turns facilitating the e-mail listserv discussion for one week.
- A simple, personal home page to learn how to compose for the WWW .
- A syllabus of a composition course for use in a computer classroom, an annotation of the syllabus, and justification for computer-based activities OR a researched essay (10 pages) on an issue in the field (40% of grade).
- A group proposal for the final project. Topics must be approved by the instructor and shown to contribute to critical perspectives on computers and writing.
- A substantial final project (in groups of 2-3) researching, analyzing, and critiquing a significant issue germane to the field, to be composed for the WWW and posted to a course web site, OR create a site (Web or MOO) that serves a pedagogical purpose specific to a computer-based course to be taught in the department (40% of grade).