Rachel Burgess
Ph.D Candidate
Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Office: Ellis 344
Office Phone: 593-2785
Email: rb279305@ohio.edu
Courses
Fall, Winter, Spring 2008-2009
English 363 Creative Writing Nonfiction: The Stuff of Language
Nonfiction. It takes multiple forms, depending in what dimension and in what plane it finds itself. From the conventional linear-structured essay, to the multi-genre/interdisciplinary essay, to film documentaries, the essay is broad in its approach to telling story, to imparting to readers new perspectives from which to recognize and understand the ways one’s lived experience are shaped by forces both obvious and imperceptible. With the five assigned books, the documentaries, and spoken word pieces, this class will study and examine the way these writers use the self as a spring broad for cultural commentary about the world we live in and the historical, social, and political terrain in which we all find ourselves. This means: beyond discussing language, writing, and content, we will also discuss subjectivity and positionality. This includes talking about what some might see as contentious topics: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and power, privilege, and oppression.
AAS 110: Introduction to Black American Literature: Literatures of the Colonial to Early Harlem Renaissance Periods
This course takes students on an exploration of African American literature from colonial times to the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Students will read, critically analyze, and write about a variety of texts, writers, and themes, paying close attention to the specific historical moments from which these texts arise and the social, cultural, and political shifts to which works are responding. The purpose of the first section of this survey course is to acquaint students with a variety of classical texts, writers, and themes that have fundamentally shaped what might be called the African American literary tradition. Students will be introduced to critical questions and paradigms that are central to the discipline of African American letters:
• influence of folk elements (storytelling) and music (gospels, work songs, spirituals) on the development of the tradition
• the resonance of the trickster figure; masking techniques as mechanisms of survival
• the fight for freedom and literacy in relation to migration from the south to the north
• the subject of dual and multiple consciousness
• the complexity of audience address and the choice of language use within specific contexts (dialect, formal, Black English, Anglo and Francophone creole)
Eng 308J: Writing and Rhetoric II: “They tell me, they tell me, they tell me, they tell me—lies, lies, lies.” --Primus
There are several foundational myths that have shaped and continue to shape u.s. culture. We’re taught, for instance, that Columbus discovered this country in 1492. This just simply is an untruth; yet despite evidence, several educational institutions in this country continue to teach and hence perpetuate this lie. Using Césaire, Dussel, Memmi, Smith, and Mignolo as primary texts, this course engages questions of colonialism, examining the Western epistemologies and ontologies that undergird this culture’s thinking. Then, using the works of Brand, Breeze, Kincaid, and Miranda, students will examine what these writers are responding to, and what rhetorical tools and discursive methods these writers employ to critique/resist/negate persisting colonial legacies and their new articulations. This is also a research and writing course where students will fully engage in the research process and, with my guidance, produce a final research project of twenty pages.
Eng 363: Creative Writing Nonfiction: No One Writes in a Vacuum
What are the strands of nonfiction? This class answers this question by having students read and write within each of the following strands: the short sketch (or what some people in the discipline call the short short), the speech, the autobiography, the biography, the “how to” piece, and the essay. We will read an array of writing that falls in the categories above. We will also do in class writing and other writing exercises that will make us work on writing stronger characters, with distinctive voices, in specific places—all of which can help us create scenes to help our writing. From the conventional linear-structured work of nonfiction, to the multi-genre/interdisciplinary piece, to film documentaries, nonfiction is broad in its approach to telling story, to imparting to readers the ways others live and move through the world, and getting readers to think more critically about who they are in relation to the world around them.
AAS 210: Introduction to Black American Literature II: Literatures of the Harlem Renaissance to Contemporary Black Writers
This course takes students on an exploration of African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Contemporary Black Writers of the 80s and 90s. Students will read, critically analyze, and write about a variety of texts, writers, and themes, paying close attention to the specific historical moments from which these texts arise and the social, cultural, and political shifts to which works are responding. These cultural texts allow us to see the ways in which Black folks have contributed to, have been influenced by, and have transformed America. Particular attention will be given to the interrelationship of themes associated with race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, power, privilege, and oppression. This course treats these topics and the issue they raise as mutually constructed systems of power. Throughout the course we will use the texts to discuss these systems as intersecting frameworks and how they function in the literatures we read.
Fall, Winter, and Spring 2007-2008
English 153A The Black American Experience: They couldn’t have all been white—those Appalachian miners, farmers, and union members.
This course explores and examines the historical, social, and political accounts of black people and black miners in Appalachia. As with all histories and present day phenomena in United States society and culture, Appalachia is largely constructed in terms of whiteness. This construction supports the foundational myths that our dominant culture perpetuates and on which it relies, and denies the existence of black peoples, their communities, struggles, and triumphs in Appalachia. Before beginning a critical examination and exploration of this facet of the black American experience, it is imperative that we critically examine and engage with the issues of race, racialization, and the construction of blackness as it intersects with gender, ethnicity, and class. All of these components are important to our understanding of the experiences of blacks in Appalachia. Other issues this course will explore: sundown towns; union scuffles; black convicts in the coal mines; and race, gender, and poverty in Appalachia.
English 153A Gender: Your private parts are not descriptors for your gender identity
What constitutes gender? Why is biology—male/female—one of the primary ways by which the body is coded? Many people interrogate society's adherence to a rigid gender binary, one that affixes the man/woman label to bodies and reads them according to established gender norms. Rather than recognizing that gender is a flexible variable, one that shifts and changes in diverse contexts and at different times, notions of gender seem to roost heavily in heterosexist, patriarchal positioned contexts. Centuries of assuming that sex (male/female) causes gender (masculine/feminine) have become givens. Using various chapters from bell hooks’ s feminism is for EVERYBODY and several other readings to tease out how gender works in such constructs as family, marriage, employment, and friendship, this course explores how gender has shifted over time and how race and class mitigates how gender functions in our culture. This course also treats race, ethnicity, gender, and class as mutually constructed systems of power; thus, throughout the course we will discuss these systems as intersecting frameworks.
English 200 Introduction to (Literature) Nonfiction: Political Memoir: the uses of the self
The memoir. It takes multiple forms, depending in what dimension and in what plane it finds itself. From the conventional linear-structured essay, to the multi-genre/interdisciplinary essay, to film documentaries, the essay is broad in its approach to telling story, to imparting to readers new perspectives from which to recognize and understand the ways one’s lived experience are shaped by forces both obvious and imperceptible. With the five assigned memoirs, this class will study and examine the way these essayists use the self as a spring broad for cultural commentary about the world we live in and the historical, social, and political terrain in which we all find ourselves. This means: beyond discussing the memoir and the essay, we will also discuss the notion of subjectivity and positionality. This includes talking about what some might see as contentious topics: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and power, privilege, and oppression. This course, then, treats these topics and the issue they raise as mutually constructed systems of power. Thus, throughout the course we will use the texts to discuss these systems as intersecting frameworks and how they function in the memoirs we read.
Fall, Winter, and Spring 2006-2007
English 153 B The Black American Experience: If collective experience is a socio-historical construct, what typifies the black American experience?
This course examines and interrogates the ways in which black corporality (the black body) and its experience has been constructed. Even before we can talk about what the black experience might be, it is very necessary to explore socio-historical constructions of blackness. Divided into units, this course will critically examine and engage with issues of race, black corporality and blackness, democracy, citizenship, and the idea of colorblindness. In addition, this course will read the works and listen to the voices of established and emerging black artists who have worked and continue to work against and resist xenophobic constructions of blackness.
English 151 Rhetoric and Writing I: What’s in a Word, Bitch!: Language, Power, and Subjectivity
This course (re)introduces students to academic writing that focuses on the practices of analysis through the examination and interrogation of language and its relation to power and subjectivity. The words we use, the insults we sling, the ads we see, the gossip we transfer, and the slogans we hear are all weighted with different burdens based on who says it, in what rhetorical situation it was said—you can guess the rest. In this class we will consider, then examine how, what I call the matrix of subjectivity (race, ethnicity, ender, class, sexuality, and culture), very much influenced by the weight of history, and social, political, and economic forces, determine the way in which language functions. Rosenwasser and Stephen remind us that “Analysis is the kind of thinking you’ll most often be asked to do in your work life and in school; it is not the rarefied and exclusive province of scholars and intellectuals. It is, in fact, one of the most common of our mental activities” (2, 3rd edition). In this class, students will use these tools of analysis to explore visual, textual, and aural materials.
English 153 A: “Can’t you tell?”: Work, Mobility, and the (in)visibility of Class
The myth of a classless society is predicated upon many ideas, one of them being this: People are capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps through hard work. Ultimately, labor can transcend the barriers that prohibit people from obtaining financial success and stability. While this might be true, there are many for whom years of hard work has not given them any financial success or stability. The idea of work/labor is just one component of class that this course will explore. Using texts that show the historical and present day manifestations of class, this course will critically examine and interrogate the nature and myth of a classless society; organized labor; education and the hidden curriculum of class; class mobility; the unspoken and spoken rules of class; and the culture of class. In addition, we will look at films that challenge and question what our culture tells us about class, and films that conform and perpetuate the myth of classless society. Emphasis will be placed on how these works present and reflect upon the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality.
Fall, Winter, and Spring 2005-2006
151 Rhetoric and Writing I
English 151 focuses on writing, reading, and thinking processes and rhetorical study of language and writing. Students gain practice in composing and revising expository essays of various kinds. Students engage in informal writing, formal writing, peer critique, revision, active reading, and group work to become successful writers and thinkers both in and outside the university.
English 327: Black American Fiction: Black American Women Writers
In ten weeks we couldn’t possibly read all that we need to read of black American fiction. We’ll begin first with two bildungsroman novels. The bildungrsoman offers a particular lens from which to read, explore, and make sense of the social environment and its material reality. Children coming of age see the world in the raw, and while they do not always have the language to make sense of their world, they will, as they plot a route for themselves in the world, learn this language along the way. That said, this child must traverse a terrain that is governed by social, political, economic pressures--all of which history has helped to, continues to, and will always shape. This is an evolving landscape in which children come of age, and one of the goals of this class will be to first consider, then examine how, what I call the matrix of subjectivity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, culture, and language), is influenced by the weight of history, and social, political, and economic forces. I will frame each reading we do in a historical and present day critical framework. Our class discussions will then emerge from this place.