2009-2010 Graduate Courses
Return to current courses and course archives.
Download the Graduate_Course_Booklet_for_2009-2010.pdf
Fall 2009 Courses
Eng 509/709 - Medieval Language and Literature
King Arthur in History and Literature
Professor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
Once upon a time, perhaps, a great hero fought boldly but unsuccessfully to save his people. The time and place? Mid-fifth-century England. The people? The Celts, resisting invading Germanic tribes—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The hero? Well—he's known in history as King Arthur. The invaders' defeat of the Celts, despite Arthur's prowess, culminated in a vast array of legend and literature known in the Middle Ages as the Matter of Britain, English and French works of nostalgia for a golden age of heroism, chivalry, courtly beauty, and loss. This course will begin with fourth and fifth century works introducing Arthur and continue through Arthurian fiction of the mid-twentieth century.
Assignments
Three papers (about 20 pages in all); one seminar presentation and class leadership
Texts:
Works in The Romance of Arthur, ed. James Wilhelm (Garland, 1994) Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Simon Armitage (Norton, 2008) Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur, ed. Helen Cooper (Oxford UP, 2008) T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (Collins, 1998) 356/556
Eng 537 - Critical Theory
Professor: Ghirmai Negash
Description:
This course assumes that students have taken English 399: Critical Theory (or a similar undergraduate course), and builds on it. It is intended to further students’ grip on the most pertinent, sometimes contending, other times complementing, critical tools of inquiry practiced today transnationally in literary and cultural studies. Reviewing postmodern and postcolonial critical statements in the context of their application, it will invite students to critically examine and (re)think concepts and issues regarding power and resistance, centeredness and marginality, writing, textuality and representation, difference and sameness, selfhood and otherness, hybridity, gender, ethnic and national identities, and race in their local and global contexts across culture, time and place. We will examine how these Enlightenment-oriented binary concepts and relationships have been at once appropriated and unlocked, and on the different ways in which they are constantly being reformulated and transformed, particularly by minority communities, for their potential significances to social, public, intellectual, and cultural matters at local and global levels in a rapidly changing environment.
Requirements:
To do well in this course, students must be prepared to do a lot of reading, and to participate in class actively.
Eng 356/556 - Teaching Young Adult Literature
Professor: TBA
Eng 570N/727 - 20th Century Literature (Modernism)
Professor: Joseph McLaughlin
Description:
This course will explore five works of Twentieth- (and Twenty-first-) century fiction. We will focus on topics related to the evolving imaginative geography of Britain in an age of empire and globalization. The works we will read pay special attention to how changing discourses of spatial relations cohere around a number of sites, but in particular display a particular fascination with the "country house." Our primary texts will include Forster's Howard's End, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and McEwan's Atonement. In addition, we will read a number of primary sources from fields such as urban planning, tourism, heritage, and advertising, as well as some classic reflections on spatial theory including essays by Bachelard, de Certeau, and Jameson.
Eng 591 - Teaching College English
Professor: 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; 3) to allow teachers to develop their own theoretically-based strategies for teaching writing; 4) to provide a brief overview of the history, theory, and research shaping practices in composition teaching.
Texts:
Teaching Composition: Background Readings edited by T.R. Johnson, latest edition, Bedford/St. Martins Press, Engaging Ideas by John Bean, Jossey-Bass Publishers, College Writing and Beyond: A new Framework for University Writing Instruction by Anne Beaufort, Utah State University Press.
Assignments:
Responses to assigned readings, two take-home exams, a weekly teaching journal, and, as a final project, a teaching portfolio.
Eng 592A - Major Rhetorical Theories and the Teaching of Composition
Professor: Mara Holt
Description:
English 792A, Major Rhetorical Theories and the Teaching of Composition, will focus on current practices and theories in the discipline, examining both original theoretical materials that are reflected in current discourses (Bauman, Levinas, transnational feminisms, Giddens, others) and on practices that are in dialectic with both theoretical discourses and the material circumstances of the moment. This could include, for instance, service learning, global rhetorics, rhetorics of the environment, and whatever else we dig up. Students will ground their work historically with the Octalog+Six resource: Composition History and Theory Timeline (http://www.english.ohiou.edu/cifer/cifer_theory/).
Assignments:
Summaries of chapters in required texts, Intermittent reports on professional journal selections, Final Essay
Summaries:
You will read each required book in parts, each student reporting on selected chapters and handing out a one-page summary that includes the chapter’s thesis and main points. Be able to talk about: relation to book’s thesis, to other course materials, and/or to your journal selections.
Journal Selections:
Each of you will focus on one or more professional journals in the field. You will intermittently report on what you discover and its relation to contemporaneous social, cultural, and educational conditions. Possible journals include JAC, College Composition and Communication, College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Composition Studies, Journal of Teaching Writing, Pedagogy, Boundary 2, Social Text, Writing on the Edge, Kairos, and Computers and Composition.
Eng 593 - Bibliography and Methods
Professor: Janis Holm
Description:
A practical introduction to research and scholarship
Goal:
To develop research skills and a professional vocabulary
Readings:
MLA Style Manual, by MLA; Literary Research Guide, by Harner; Literary Theory, by Eagleton; 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: Fiction
Professor: Joan Connor
Description:
Recently I have begun to think about how we tell our stories as only we can tell them. What is the quality which distinguishes an individual’s work from all other? How do we enter the telling of our own stories? What is an author’s particular and peculiar slant? To answer some of these questions and others, we will look at student work and stories in Extreme Fiction. Students will be responsible for sharing the leadership of the class and for occasional presentations.
Eng 690 - Creative Writing Seminar: Poetry
Professor: Mark Halliday
Description:
Students will aim to write eight new poems during the fall quarter. These may include a few that respond to suggestions we have agreed on in the workshop. I will ask for at least one poem to be rhymed. Other activities will include an in-class presentation by each student on a contemporary poet she or he has selected; and, discussion of poems of political/social critique, exemplified by (among others) the work of Kenneth Fearing, Adrienne Rich, and Kevin Prufer.
Eng 777 - Colloquium on Profession
Professor: Marsha Dutton
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.
Eng 791 - Professional Issues in Teaching College English
Professor: 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 2009 Courses
Eng 503/703 - English Language and Literature
Professor: Josephine Bloomfield
Description:
The purpose of this class is to familiarize you, intellectually and viscerally, with the history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, and to introduce you to current linguistic vocabularies and theories that can help you make sense of that history (or reject it). You will become familiar with the sounds and textures of the language in its various historical stages, and with theories of language that have been considered over the last few hundred years to explain language development. The most important goals of this class are to enhance your work as a writer/teacher/scholar by giving you a deeper understanding of the textures and dimensions of English and to get you engaged in the contentious issues that have made it a topic for perpetual dispute.
Texts:
Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots; David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
Exams/Papers:
Small research projects, responses to readings, oral report, final conference-length paper
Other Readings
TBA
Assignments:
One oral report, One conference-length paper
Eng 523/723 - Romanticism and Suicide
Professor: Nicole Reynolds
Description:
The controversial topic of suicide preoccupied British philosophers, literati, and legal pundits at the turn of the nineteenth century: a time when the long-held notion of suicide as a diabolical crime against the self had largely given way—in public opinion if not in point of law—to the notion of suicide as a manifestation of mental distress, an act requiring sympathy rather than punishment. Long believed to be a peculiarly English malady, suicide provided a fluid and multivalent trope through which British Romantic writers articulated some of their most pressing concerns, among them the concept of individual rights, the cult of genius and its clash with the demands of the literary marketplace, and the management of empire. In a revolutionary era, the philosophical tradition of rational suicide—dispassionate, considered suicide on principle—modulated into a defense of suicide as one of the rights of man (and of woman), while the literary conventions of romantic suicide— impulsive, desperate suicide over lost love—underscored the primacy of feeling and worked to establish a secularized and individualized understanding of human happiness. In this seminar we’ll study the relationship between Romanticism and the hermeneutics of suicide, exploring the extent to which Romanticism defined itself against its suicide narratives; more broadly, we’ll consider how suicides provided opportunities to expose and critically examine stresses and cracks in the foundation of European modernity.
Possible Readings:
Frances Burney, The Wanderer; Herbert Croft, Love and Madness; William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; David Hume, “Of Suicide” and “Of the Immortality of the Soul”; Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (excerpts); Charles Moore, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (excerpts); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama; Mariana Starke, The Widow of Malabar
Assignments:
Conference-length paper (8-10 pages) and presentation; Annotated bibliography and proposal for final paper; Final paper (15-20 pages)
Eng 532/732 - Renaissance Drama Excluding Shakespeare
Morality and Money in Renaissance Drama
Professor: Jill Ingram
Description:
In the burgeoning capitalist society of Elizabethan England, public (and private) drama participated in and reflected aspects of the market. Buying and selling, borrowing and lending, penury and debtors’ prison were hot topics. We will explore some of these topics, including the ethics of excessive profiteering; the social power of the female moneylender and cutpurse; and relations between debtors and creditors (including the perils of cross-class friendships and patron-client relations). We will acquaint ourselves with the Biblical and Classical allusions with which early modern audiences would have been familiar, many of these drawn from the tradition known as “wisdom literature”: parables, proverbs, and emblematic anecdotes, including the Parable of the Talents, the Prodigal son, Midas, the Unjust Steward, and Dives and Lazarus. We will also look at ways in which the emblematic figure of Fortune was deployed to comment on venturing, risk-taking enterprises. The primary point of inquiry to all our readings will be: what were the moral and ethical limits for earthy gain or reward, and how were those related to notions of eternal reward? Were economic and religious redemption coterminous? In addressing these questions, we will read widely across a variety of Renaissance dramatists from the late Tudor period to the mid-Stuart period: Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; the Anonymous play Arden of Faversham; Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday; Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost; Middletown’s The Roaring Girl; Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair; and Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. We will also look at drama performed at court on festive occasions as entertainment for the crown. 2 presentations and 1 final paper.
Eng 570N/734 - 20th Century British and American
The Posthuman Future
Professor: Johnnie Wilcox
Description:
In the era of the postmodern, subjectivity was characterized as fragmented, alienated, and moribund, a victim, perhaps, of the very discourses elaborated to empower it. More recently, a posthuman subject arises in the intersection of cybernetics, biotechnology, gender, and race, and species. In this course, we will consider how postmodern theory has created a critical environment in which any necessary aspect of the “human”—such as embodiment, intelligence, genetics, etc.—is understood as a vestige of the disappearing subject of liberal humanism and how this disappearance of the liberal humanist subject is tied to representations of apocalypse. Some of the thinkers who will guide our discussions include (in no particular order) Étienne Balibar, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Adrian Mackenzie, and Thomas Foster. The cultural works we MAY analyze include Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, Max Brooks’s World War Z, Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang.
Assignments (tentative):
one in-class presentation of 3-5 pages, one 2-4 page prospectus, and one 12-15 page term paper
Eng 591A - Teaching College English II
Professor: Jennie Nelson
Description:
This course is designed to continue the introduction of new teachers to some of the practical and theoretical issues involved in teaching composition. In the past, major assignments have included new course development, teaching portfolios, composition textbook reviews and presentations, and collaborative teaching observations and responses.
Readings:
Crosstalk edited by Victor Villanueva and TBA
Eng 592D - Rhetorical Tradition
Professor: Sherrie Gradin
Description:
Primary texts will include selections from Bizzell’s and Herzberg’s Rhetorical Traditions. We are likely to read Jarratt’s ReReading the Sophists and Murphy’s a Short History of Writing Instruction (2nd Edition). Other readings might include Vitanza, Schiappa, Octolog, and selected articles. We will consider social, cultural, and political activities that have shaped rhetoric's history. We will raise questions about the definition of rhetoric; who has defined it; how rhetoricians have constructed rhetoric as theory and as practical action; whether it matters if rhetoric is thought of as primarily oral or written; what the relationships are between rhetoric and epistemology; why the study of rhetoric at or near the center of liberal education for 2300 years suddenly fell out of favor during the 19th Century. Also we will ask of what use is study of rhetoric to the writer? To the writing teacher? Should composition theory attempt to tie itself to a rhetorical past? What practical and political questions arise if we do so?
Course Assignments:
Written projects and presentations.
Eng 691 - Creative Writing Seminar: NonFiction
Persona and Voice
Professor: Dinty W. Moore
Description:
This workshop will focus on persona and voice in nonfiction. As author/editor Philip Gerard reminds us, readers seek “the sense not only that you are hearing a story, but that somebody is telling you that story – somebody distinctive, somebody you could pick out of a crowd, somebody whose voice you’ll listen for and recognize the next time your hear it.” Among the writers we may read along the way are Nancy Mairs, Debra Marquardt, Robin Hemley, Robert Benchley, Brian Doyle, and Lauren Slater. The primary focus, however, will be on work generated by those enrolled in the class.
Eng 691 - Creative Writing Seminar: Poetry
Professor: Jill Allyn 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 777 - Colloquium on Profession
Professor: Marsha Dutton
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.
Eng 780 - Special Studies Seminar: African Literature
Professor: Ghirmai Negash
Description:
As big and as diverse as the continent itself, typologically African literature can be categorized into a) orature, b) African language written literature, and c) African literature written in European languages. Recognizing this diversity but also acknowledging the fluidity of and exchanges between the three categories, this class introduces students to primary texts, both creative and critical, of African literature written in English. In doing so, we will read a handful of critical writings to introduce us to some key issues and recent debates regarding Anglophone African literature, and study a selection of literary texts, particularly focusing on their contributions and interventions in the project of constructing an African national identity, and the later disenchantments with the post-colonial African state, within the framework of a global, post-nationalist and post-apartheid era.
Approach:
In reading the creative texts we will start with the ‘symbolic’ (the literary/aesthetic) as the focus of our discussion, but also use it as the interstitial point to connect us with the post-colonial African realities and issues (the historical, political, anthropological, gender, etc.) at different levels of analysis.
Requirements:
Participation & Presentation 20%; One response paper per studied text (1-2 pages) 40%; One hand-in critical essay (10-12 pp.) on a text or topic discussed in class 40%
Critical Reading:
1. All students will be required to read chapters 1-3 from: Oyekan Owomoyela (ed.), A History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures (University of Nebraska Press, 1993), and other selected, critical texts to be assigned during the course. 2. Ph.D. candidates will be asked to do supplementary readings relevant to their area of concentration in African literature.
Novels:
Most of the novels selected for this quarter will focus on the theme (s) of tradition and modernity, de-colonization and “the transition years,” globalization and transnationalism, genocide and “bare life” in Africa.
Spring 2010 Courses
Eng 519/719 - 18th Century Literature
Professor: Jeremy Webster
Description:
Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy has been called “the dirtiest novel in English.” While this description is an obvious exaggeration, it raises a key question about this novel: how did an Anglican minister come to write a book that revels in double entendre, sexual slang, and bawdy humor? This seminar will take up this and other questions raised by this unique and fascinating product of the eighteenth century. Our primary goal will be to try to make some (any?) sense of this novel. To do so, we will contextualize it within the tradition of eighteenth-century philosophy and satire found in works by John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. We will also read selections from Sterne’s sermons and will attempt to familiarize ourselves with the major scholarly discussions of his work.
Readings:
John Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, The Rape of the Lock, and other poems, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Sterne’s Sermons, and, of course Tristram Shandy. We will supplement our primary reading with scholarship on the authors and works we read.
Assignments:
an abstract of one critical essay, a review of scholarship (5 pp.), and a conference-length paper (10 pp.) with proposal and extensive bibliography
Eng 533/733 - American Literature 1865-1918
Happiness in the Early Republic
Professor: Thomas Scanlan
Description:
After a brief survey of historical and philosophical notions of happiness, this course will focus on primary documents (novels, magazine essays, short stories) from the 1790's that attempt to deal with the new nation's promise of an "unalienable right" to pursue happiness.
Assignments:
There will be short weekly writing assignments, a bibliographical project, and a final paper.
Eng 535/734 - African American Literature
Reading Race and Empire: Postcolonial Theory and the United States
Professor: Amrit Singh
Description:
Cultural Studies as an interdisciplinary field can be traced back to British figures such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the U.S., Cultural Studies has been influenced significantly by the post-1968 changes signaled by the replacement of Hoggart by Stuart Hall as the Director of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with U.S. practitioners concerning themselves mostly with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual preference. In this course, we will read selected works from U.S. and Canadian literature through the discourses of Postcolonial Theory and Globalization, as we examine the critical relevance of imperialism to the construction of nation, race, and ethnicity in North American history and culture. This relevance has become much easier to establish in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and the varied responses to the event within the U.S. and around the world. Since the early 1990s, scholars such as Donald Pease, Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe, and Lawrence Buell have studied canonical white male writers such as Herman Melville and Mark Twain in relation to the incidence of "manifest destiny" in 19th century U.S. Kaplan has, for example, noted how the ideological strains of U.S. imperialism right into the 20th century contrast with the territorial imperialism we associate with West European adventures around the globe since the eighteenth century. Along with appropriate theoretical readings, we will focus in this course on how postcolonial concepts such as mimicry, hybridity, and “third space” could bring a new understanding to our readings of African American, American Indian, and Asian American writers. We will explore the literary writings (poems, essays, short stories, plays and novels) by writers of these three distinct backgrounds in relation to their historical experience as marginalized groups. Writers studied will include a selection from among the following figures: W. E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, William Attaway, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Kogawa, David Henry Hwang, Meena Alexander, Thomas King and N. Scott Momaday. Historical events that form the backdrop to the course include the following: Indian Removal Act of 1830 (followed by the “Trail of Tears”); the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 (followed by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments); the End of the Reconstruction in 1877; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (renewed in 1892, 1902, and made permanent in 1904); Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Niagara Movement (1905) and establishment of NAACP (1909); several U.S. Immigration Laws passed between 1917 and 1924; as well as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Course requirements include tpaper, and Final Research Project.
Eng 552/552L - Teaching Language and Composition
Professor: TBA
Eng 692 - Creative Writing Seminar: Fiction
Professor: Zakes Mda
Course Requirements:
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. 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. 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? 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.
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 write 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 765 - Theory of Literature: Fiction
Professor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
In the past I've taught 765 with two goals in mind, and I plan to do that again. One is that we will look at contemporary America novels. The second goal is that we will frame the novels in a particular critical theory. In the past I've used J. Hillis Miller's Ariadne's Thread and once used a collection of critical articles. I have also used Gary Soul Morson's Narrative Freedom. I see the class as an on-going exploration, not as an attempt to bring definitive answers to contemporary literary issues.
Reading:
4-5 novels; one critical text
Assignments:
writing one substantial critical paper and leading one class discussion.
Eng 765 - Special Studies Seminar: Introduction to Film/Theory
Professor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
This course will be specifically designed for graduate students in English who are interested in learning the fundamentals of film analysis and theory. Accordingly, one part of the course will be devoted to a review of the elements of the “close,” formal analysis of film, including lighting, editing, composition, mise-en-scène, cinematography, etc. For participants, the aim of this part of the course will be to acquire a working knowledge of how to “read” a film. (The implicit, “pedagogical” premise is that participants will subsequently be better prepared to teach film in their classes.) The second part of the course will focus on film theory and, in particular, applied film theory. Here, the emphasis will be not so much on reviewing the history of film theory as on using theoretical readings of specific films in order to address issues of, inter alia, race and class, sex and gender, nation and ethnicity.
Reading:
Specific readings of films will be available on-line (“Libraries/Course Reserves”). There will probably be at least one British Film Institute book (e.g., Camile Paglia on The Birds). With respect to the films, examples will be selected on the basis of period (1930s to the present), genre (horror, [e.g. Cat People], sci-fi [e.g., Alien], gangster [e.g., Bound], melodrama [e.g., Far from Heaven], comedy [e.g., Superbad, etc.), and theoretical interest (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.).
Assignments:
With respect to written work, participants will be asked to write mini-essays, at once compact and thorough (2-3 pp.), on that week’s film as well as readings. As in all my classes, attendance and participation, as the word “participant” has been used throughout to suggest, will be imperative. After more than two “skips,” participants’ grades will be reduced. (Those students who choose not to participate may have their grades reduced at my discretion.)
Eng 780 - Special Studies Seminar: Eco-English-Ecology in Composition and Criticism
Professor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
In this course we will explore ecological approaches to writing and other cultural expression. This will include the theories and practices of teaching writing through 1) students’ and instructors’ relation to nature, place and community; 2) the application and implications of ecology as a descriptive concept and metaphor for discourse and literacy 3) teaching environmental literacy to promote activism on issues of sustainability. We will also explore eco-criticism, the study and teaching of literary and cultural texts (visual texts, e.g.), which may include issues of representing nature, development, technology, Manifest Destiny, colonization of native tribes, eco-feminism, and so on. Our readings will range from theory and pedagogy articles from the 1980s through the present, book excerpts, environmental writing and rhetoric, and fiction and visual texts.
Texts (extremely provisional):
Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches Eds. Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin; The Future of Environmental Criticism : Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination by Lawrence Buell; Geographies of Writing : Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference by Nedra Reynolds; The Almanac of the Dead by Leslie M. Silko; Excerpts from: The Green Studies reader: from Romanticism to Ecocriticism ed. Laurence Coupe; American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, ed. Bill McKibbon; The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition by Margaret Syverson; Articles from journals, links to web spaces, .pdfs in Blackboard.
Assignments:
regular blog posts and commenting on the readings; a multi-modal “essay” on your relationship to place, past and present; presentations on readings, assigned and not; research-based essay on eco-English topics/issues, with an abstract of the argument
Eng 791 - Professional Issues in Teaching College English
Professor: 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.