Fall 2001 Graduate Courses
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- 570N/774A: 20th Century British British Modernism: Character in Shreds
- 570N/775A: 20th-Century American Blest Nouvelle or Literary Banana Republic?: An Investigation of 20th Century American Novellas
- 591: Teaching College English I
- 593: Bibliography and Methods
- 690: Creative Writing Seminar: Poetry
- 765: Theory of Literature: Fiction
- 777: Doctoral Colloquium
- 780: Special Studies Seminar: Research and Publications/Advanced Research Methods
- 780: Special Studies Seminar: Collaborative Rhetorics
- 780: Special Studies Seminar: Pop Culture
- 791: Professional Issues in Teaching College English
570N/774A: 20th Century British British Modernism: Character in Shreds
Instructor: Carey Snyder
Description:
Virginia Woolf described hers as an age in which "character [was] dissipated into shreds," while D. H. Lawrence cautioned readers not to go looking in his fiction for "that old stable ego—of character." In their manifestoes, novels, and poems, modernist writers challenged traditional notions of wholeness of character, rendering instead what was often characterized as the fragmentary, alien, bewildering panorama of modern experience. As literary critic Michael Levenson puts it, "the problem of modern character [... is] a problem of lost unity, lost because of related historical pressures: urbanism, imperialism, [...] the estrangement of social classes." To this list might be added changing gender roles, new theories of psychology and anthropology, and the cataclysmic upheaval of the Great War. Attuned to these important contexts, this course will investigate British modernist constructions of character. Though it is tempting to collapse the distinction between (historical) individuals and (fictional) characters, we will try to complicate that distinction, and so not only to historicize but also to theorize modernist constructions of character. We will ask both "what effects do these writers achieve in their fiction?" and "what work does character do?"
Readings:
Will include novels by writers such as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad; short stories by Dorothy Richardson and D. H. Lawrence; poetry by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; and criticism by scholars such as Michael Levenson and Deidre Shauna Lynch.
Assignments:
cultural-context paper (6-8 pages), presentation (of work in progress), seminar paper due on last day of class (15-18 pages).
570N/775A: 20th-Century American Blest Nouvelle or Literary Banana Republic?: An Investigation of 20th Century American Novellas
Instructor:Robert DeMott
Description:
To Henry James it was "our ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle ... the shapely nouvelle." To Stephen King, it was a literary banana republic. These pronouncements give some inkling of the range the novella covers. No matter what else one can say about this remarkably flexible and hybrid form, situated somewhere (regarding length, style, technique, etc) between novel and short story, essay and poetry, it is, given the critical discourse on fiction in America, a nearly neglected, even abused, form, and so eminently worthy of extended, sustained attention. Toward that end, we will read and discuss selected novellas (there are hundreds to choose from)—some of them more shapely than others, but all of them "blest" in one way or another—by some 20th century American authors, including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, Francine Prose, Jim Harrison, Jane Smiley, Stephen Millhauser, Eudora Welty, Richard Ford, Paul Auster, Rick Bass, Sandra Cisneros, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Mary Gordon, Stanley Elkin, etc., etc. (final text selection has not been established yet). In the process attention will be paid to the usual professional lit-crit stuff graduate courses pay attention to nowadays.
Requirements:
At least one oral seminar presentation (which will also be submitted as a short paper); two other short papers (topics to be announced); and a final written project (a 12-15 page take home examination for MA students; a 15-20 page paper for PhD students). Students will be asked to read an additional novella or novella collection not covered in the weekly assignments.
591: Teaching College English I
Instructor: Sherrie Gradin
Description:
This course is required of all entering graduate students who will be teaching. The course is designed to introduce graduate students to the philosophical and practical understandings of the rhetoric and composition program here at Ohio University. The course also supports novice teachers in learning how to teach rhetoric and composition based on current models of rhetorical and composition theory and practice, and the course serves to introduce teachers to some of the political positions and issues within the field.
Course Objectives: Following the completion of this course you should: Have an introductory understanding of writing-to-learn practice and theory; Have an introductory understanding of collaborative learning practice and theory; Have an introductory understanding of composition theory and practice; Have an introductory understanding of rhetorical theory; Have learned ways in which to link course assignments and grading to Freshman English outcome goals; Have begun to locate your centers of strengths and weaknesses as teachers.
593: Bibliography and Methods
Instructor: Andrew Escobedo
Description:
The course will function both as a practicum on research activity (library organization, locating archives, collation of information, bibliographic form, etc.) and as an introduction to the discourses of the contemporary acadamy (literary theory, conferences, publications, etc.).
Assignments:
Papers, bibliographies, research assignments, presentations.
690: Creative Writing Seminar: Poetry
Instructor: Erin Belieu
Description:
You will be expected to turn in a poem for each week of the workshop (except for the final week, at which time you will be working on a project TBA). We will use the traditional workshop model for most of the course, though we will spend time at the beginning of each meeting discussing the assigned poetry text for that week. I have chosen a number of relatively recently published books for us to examine and, perhaps, use as models for some exercises I may assign. I think it will be self-revealing to look at the work of younger or emerging poets, to rummage through what, in most cases, is either their first or second book (except in the case of Phillips). I am interested in discovering whether these very successful books, written primarily by people under the age of forty, are in any way doing something "new" or if we can trace them back into the established traditions of American poetry.
Readings:
Collection of Poetry by Carl Phillips
765: Theory of Literature: Fiction
Instructor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
In this course we look closely at some changes in the American short story over the past thirty years or so, focusing on post-modern, minimalist and contemporary stories. What I'm hoping is that we come to understand what Miriam Clark, in "Contemporary Short Fiction and the Postmodern Condition," means when she describes contemporary stories: "Read as reflections or displacements of the postmodern condition, these impossibilities of perception, these failures of coherence and accrual, have a different effect altogether." We'll try to determine what that different effect, which Clark calls "narrativity itself," is.
Readings:
Packet of theoretical articles and an anthology of short stories.
Assignments:
Individual reports; a major critical paper.
777: Doctoral 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: Research and Publications/Advanced Research Methods
Instructor: Janis Holm
Description:
This elective course, intended for graduate students who have completed English 593 or its equivalent, focuses on advanced research methods and writing. Students may have a concentration in any of our department's offerings—composition, creative writing, literature, etc.—and must be willing to work outside the traditional classroom model. The instructor will focus on skills, strategies, and techniques, and will assign training exercises accordingly. Students will work in their areas of interest and will determine (with the instructor's guidance) the content of their major projects.
Topics to be addressed include: Selecting search engines; searching electronic media; evaluating electronic sources; citing and documenting electronic sources; writing for publication; grant-writing; editing; and preparing for workshops, readings, and conferences. (Students will help determine additional topics.)
Note: Although a time and meeting place in Ellis Hall have been reserved for this class, the actual meeting times and places will be decided by class members.
780: Special Studies Seminar: Collaborative Rhetorics
Instructor: Mara Holt
Description:
In postmodernity, knowledge and relations of power are increasingly seen as situated, embedded in and emerging from interactions in particular, complex situations. Effective collaborative learning must begin with an accounting of pre-existing relations of power in order subvert prevalent ideologies through small potent gestures. Thus, I see collaborative pedagogy most effectively moving away from utopian narratives to heterotopian discourse in which conflict is productively engaged. This class will interrelate theory and practice. Thus we will practice a variety of collaborative exercises appropriate for diverse settings and students, including some specific to networked computer classrooms and/or access to the Internet. Each major strand of collaborative learning asserts, implicitly or explicitly, a theory of the student subject, the nature of knowledge and language, and a vision of power dynamics in the classroom. We will study Dewey-influenced collaborative practices in the 1930s, practices resistant to Dewey in the 1950s, Bruffee's and Elbow's collaborative learning in the 1970s and 1980s, and the contemporary practices of marxists Freire, Shor, Giroux, and feminists Shrewsbury and Schneidewind.
Readings:
coursepack, including such as the following: selections from Ann Gere's Writing Groups; Kenneth Bruffee's Collaborative Learning; John Dewey's Experience and Education; Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford's Singular Texts/Plural Authors; John Trimbur's "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning"; John Trimbur and Harvey Kail's "Guide to Collaborative Learning"; Susan Romano's "The Egalitarianism Narrative"; Nancy Schneidewind's "Teaching Feminist Process in the 1990s"; Carolyn Shrewsbury's "What is Feminist Pedagogy?"; David Johnson's and Robert Slavin's approaches to cooperative learning.
Assignments:
Library research in contemporary collaborative theory and practice will produce a class presentation and a paper at the end.
780: Special Studies Seminar: Pop Culture
Instructor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
The aim of this course will be to offer an introduction to the discourse of cultural studies, with an emphasis on critical theory and popular culture. To this end, we will engage primary material written by well-known scholars in critical theory (e.g., Walter Benjamin on the "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction"), cultural studies (e.g., Stuart Hall on race and representation), and popular-cultural theory (e.g., Cynthia Fuchs on pop "female" performativity). In tandem with this historical and theoretical overview of, among other things, the distinction between "low" or "mass" and so-called "high" or "elite" culture, we will also engage a number of media associated with contemporary popular culture (film, literature, TV, popular music, etc.). This engagement with mass-popular culture will be supplemented by medium-specific readings that address the relation between, among other things, postmodernism and multiculturalism (race, class, sex-gender, etc.).
Note: This seminar will be focused less on mastering"big-picture" theories than in seeing how much we can learn about the cultural discourses that construct us in our everyday lives by looking closely at specific literary, cinematic, and televisual texts. More simply, we will read at least one popular novel or fiction and screen a number of movies. (Previous examples of the latter are Casablanca, Virgin Suicides, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.) The aim of the course—in addition to, of course "enlightenment"—will be, to recite The Beach Boys, "Fun, Fun, Fun..."
Readings:
Required texts will include one overview of the field and a course packet comprised of critical and close readings.
Exams/Papers:
There will be weekly reading assignments. Written responses to the readings and media texts (2 pp.) will be due each week. A final, informal, "reflective" paper (3-4 pp.) will be due at the end of the quarter. I might add that, with respect to writing assignments, the aim will be to offer participants in the seminar an opportunity to experiment—via close reading and textual analysis—with different critical and rhetorical strategies.
791: Professional Issues in 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.