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Elements of Old English grammar, with selected readings in Old English literature.
This wood has come to remind you of the hands that carved it”
Introduction to Old English
REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS:
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English . 7th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009.
Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer . Rev. Norman Davis. 9th ed. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986.
Raffel, Burton , trans. Poems and Prose from the Old English . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
R. M. Liuzza, trans. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation . Orchard Park: Broadview, 2000.
Yorke, Barbara. The Anglo-Saxons. Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 2000.
DESCRIPTION OF COURSE:This class is an introduction to the language and literature of England from around the 8th to the end of the 11th century. Because this is in part a language class, we will spend at least half of our class time (and probably more than half of the preparation time) studying the grammar of Old English. Though the possibility exists, I cannot promise that this aspect of the class work will be riotously entertaining. However, learning to read the language teaches us not only about the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons, but also about our own language and culture, and our own interpretive processes: it also provides access to the oldest literature in English, literature, in my estimation, that nothing that came afterwards could ever match.
In addition to our work with the language, we will also read, in Present Day English translation, Old English texts ranging from the early laws to the lives of the saints, from heroic and elegiac poetry to the sometimes extremely obscene riddles. We will begin to read and examine Old English texts in their manuscript form: this means we will study how to read Anglo-Saxon scribal hands, as well as consider the interaction between visual and textual representation so significant to the interpretation of early manuscripts. Finally, because Old English literary culture was in transition from orality to literacy, and the art of memory (much of it now lost) was integral to the transmission of its texts, recitations from memory will be part of the work of this class. As we memorize, recite, and listen to these texts, we will also consider the ways in which the transmission of literature through memory, rather than writing, asks us to re-think questions about the relationship of embodiment to linguistic performance, about the contemporary notion of the solitude of reading, and about what might be gained, and lost, in the transition to the literacies of today.
FORMAT OF COURSE:
This course will be in part a language course. As such it will involve translation, language drills, and repetition. This course will also be in part a literature course and a seminar. As such it will be an ongoing and evolving conversation about the texts and contexts. Active and informed participation is a requirement for a passing grade in this course.
20th century drama written in English and related criticism.
The Dialectic
Required Texts (some are digitized)
Shaw. Major Barbara [1905]
O’Neill. The Iceman Cometh [1939. 1946]
Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire [1947]
Miller. Death of a Salesman (1949)
Albee. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [1962]
Jones/Baraka. The Dutchman [1964] & The Revolutionary Theater (1966)
Wilson. The Rimers of Eldritch [1967]
Crowley. Boys in the Band [1968]
Beckett. Not I [1972] Pas Moi
Shepard. True West [1980]
Kushner.Angels in America: Millenium Approaches [1991]
Parker, Lopez, Stone. The Book of Mormon [2011]
THEORISTS CONSULTED:
Brecht, Brooks, Artaud, Esslin, Miller, Marx, Kott, Freud, Jones/Baraka, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Case, Deleuze/Guattari and others.Description of Course
Stage & Page. We will attend to performance as inextricable from text. The course poses the following binary: Does art provide instances of liberation or containment? We'll test the assumption that the theatrical spectacle has the potential to critique the larger spectacle of patriarchy, sexism/heterosexism, orthodox religion, racism, capitalism, militarism, and other politically correct concerns, etc. by reading the structure and effects, obsessions and pleasures, successes and failures of more than a dozen plays and attendant critical theory. To that end both "traditional" and "contestatory" texts are represented--categories we'll put into question as well. Consider ENG 328 as an intensive introduction to, dialectical analysis and immersion in the nature of British and American Modern/Postmodern drama in many of its forms ranging from Realist/Naturalist, Avant-Garde, Modernist-Absurdist, Feminist, Postmodern, Queer, and contemporary performance art. We will attend at least one performance as a class. Screenings of selected other plays will be scheduled/negotiated in class.Format of Course
Lecture/Seminar/Playgoing/Screenings/Discussion. All students will:
1. Post weekly responses (500 word minimum) to readings/lectures/discussion in ReggieNet due each Thursday 11:59pm;
2. Prepare and when called upon give an analysis of a passage from each week's play;
3. Compose a short interpretive essay on one of the plays scheduled during the first 6 weeks (Grads 1800 words min/Undergrads 1300 words min.)
4. A written proposal of the final research project
5.A final research paper on "drama" and performance (with an eye toward publication) 2500 words (minimum) for undergraduates and 3500 words (minimum) for graduate students
I reserve the right to amend this syllabus. Students may not choose those assignments (regardless of the point value) they wish to complete.
Grade evaluation will be determined by satisfying #s 1-5 and the student's ability to synthesize one or more of the theoretical approaches presented in readings and lectures, and apply such a perspective to a cultural "text" or "site" in a well-written, coherent final essay.
Grading Formula
26 points Weekly posts/writing assignment
14 points Class Participation
25 points Essay #1
35 points Research paper
Topics in specific literary figures, genres, or movements.
Selected Figures in English Literature: The Cult of John Keats
John Keats lived a scant 25 years, and he wrote poetry during only 5 of them, but his legacy has endured and his reputation as a poet increased fairly consistently since his early death. What is it that makes Keats so ardently admired by his readers, and particularly by other writers and artists? Keats was a key figure for the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as for Aestheticism at century’s end. His work inspired dozens of poetic tributes, including perhaps the earliest and most famous example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, published just months after Keats’s death. In recent years he’s become the subject of a biopic (Bright Star), and even features in a four-book science fiction saga by Dan Simmons, wherein a cyborg Keats reassembled from the poet’s DNA becomes perhaps the nerdiest of all literary tributes to the poet.
This course will assess Keats’s status as a cultural and literary figure beginning with the milieu in which he lived and wrote. Far from the image of Keats as a solitary dreamer apart from the concerns of the world, as he often gets portrayed, the Keats of 1815 to 1821 was part of a radical group of writers and thinkers deeply and communally engaged with reimagining the world after it had been fundamentally altered by the tumult of revolutionary France and the Napoleonic Wars. We’ll move from that Keats to the one enshrined as a victim of fate and literary squabbles in the decades following his death, then to his various influences on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde and other later nineteenth century writers, and finally to 20th and 21st century incarnations of Keats. Our investigations will query such issues as, the relationship between the poet’s life and work, the nature of literary influence, the role of “fandom” in literary criticism, the interrelation of literary and other arts, and, perhaps most crucially, the worth of aesthetics, or why and how it matters that “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” as Keats asserted and as so many of his later devotees repeated.
Our readings will include lots of poems by Keats, lots of letters by Keats, fewer poems by other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites, two experimental modern biographies of Keats, and critical and theoretical scholarship on all of the former categories.
Aims and methods of linguistic science. Nature and functions of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, variation. Relationship of language to culture.
Methodologies and techniques for teaching English as a Second Language; evaluation of materials for various levels and instructional goals. Includes clinical experience.
Assessing oral and written proficiency in English as a Second Language.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will provide an introduction to basic principles and current and innovative approaches in the assessment and testing of English as a second or foreign language in various instructional contexts. We will be familiar with the various options we have for preparing or adapting tests, and to understand test construction as a process, which is woven into the fabric of curriculum development and classroom instruction. Once we have discussed a model for the process of test construction, we will apply this knowledge to evaluating currently available tests and further relate language testing to educational and social policies. The procedure of test preparation, administration, rating and interpretation, and the use of computer technology in language testing will be addressed.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will provide an introduction to basic principles and current and innovative approaches in the assessment and testing of English as a second or foreign language in various instructional contexts. We will be familiar with the various options we have for preparing or adapting tests, and to understand test construction as a process, which is woven into the fabric of curriculum development and classroom instruction. Once we have discussed a model for the process of test construction, we will apply this knowledge to evaluating currently available tests and further relate language testing to educational and social policies. The procedure of test preparation, administration, rating and interpretation, and the use of computer technology in language testing will be addressed.
Workshop format for individual projects; related theory.
Functioning as both seminar and workshop, this iteration of English 347:01 “Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry” will focus on experiment and the dynamics of performance and discovery in the generation of new print & audio work. Assigned materials will include poetry (print, audio, and video/multimedia sources) and essays on contemporary issues in poetry and poetics. The workshop will regularly provide space for critique of original student poems, collaboration, and experiment. All students will complete a portfolio of finished poems and will present their work in a public reading.
Workshop format for individual projects; related theory.
Instruction and practice in editing, proposals, and analytical writing; attention given to style manuals, research writing, and (as needed) publication. Computer-assisted.
ENG 349 engages and promotes diverse creative and critical ways for thinking about and communicating in a variety of global and local workplaces and spaces. Although the course title suggests that we will be focusing on technical *writing*, we will study and develop a variety of "texts"—print, digital, visual, verbal, and audio/video—and examine how they communicate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of social, cultural, and organizational professional contexts. Consequently, this course introduces rhetorical concepts, like appeals, purpose, audience, style, organization, etc, and asks you to consider them in relation to cultural and ethical frameworks and professional and technical communication genres and conventions.
The primary goals of ENG 349 are to:
* Interrogate what "professional” and “technical” communication means, what professional/technical communicators do, and how professional/technical communicators work
* Introduce and engage the rhetorical principles, professional practices, research skills, and cultural considerations you will need as a professional/technical communicator
* Interrogate the relationships between power, actors, and organizational and technological networks what these relationships mean for your communication agency in workplace contexts
* Interrogate the relationships between culture, community, communication, and technology and what these relationships mean for your communication practices
* Promote an understanding of professional and technical communication as ethical action
* Develop the project management strategies and skills required of professional and technical communicators
* Encourage responsible teamwork and collaboration skills, by providing a set of shared, hands-on learning experiences with your classmates.
Ultimately, by engaging rhetorical and professional communication theories and practices, this course offers you the opportunity to learn more about the field(s) of professional and technical communication, to experience the various roles and work of professional and technical communicators, and to further develop and hone your skills in research, analysis, persuasion, documentation, and document design within the contexts of invented and "real world" professional spaces.
Document design as a rhetorical activity and the application of theories of visible rhetoric to document production. Computer assisted.
Workshop using digital technologies to compose complex, multimodal, web-based texts for a variety of rhetorical situations. Computer-assisted.
Hypertext to me mean means nonlinear reading and writing. Over the years, students and I have explored this non-linearity in a variety of forms. Most recently, the class has taken on a distinctly web 2.0 turn. In particular, we will look at the impact of template culture on reading and writing, that is how templates are shaping people’s reading and writing on the web, and what you can do to critically resist that shaping.
We explore these ideas through readings and responses and through a series of projects. Students first create a web site with a content management system--WordPress and then recreate that website in Dreamweaver. Students then, as a final project, complete a major web publishing project in any area of web culture that interests them using any method of production.
Graduate students in the class complete an additional project, and I offer a good deal of flexibility in shaping that project to fit there interests and program.
Textbooks
Beaird, Jason. (2007). The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Sitepoint, ISBN 098057689X Redish, Ginny. (2007). Letting Go of the Words. Morgan Kaufman. ISBN 0123694868 Lessig Laurence. Remix. Penguin ISBN 0143116134
Theory and practice of editing and management of documentation in industry and other organizational settings. Computer assisted.
Technical Editing is a course that introduces students to the theories, principles and practices of editing technical and professional documents. Students will learn about the editing process, as well as how to define an editor's responsibilities and revise at both structural and sentence levels, while also addressing stylistic conventions of different fields. The class is designed to meet the needs of a variety of students in different concentrations but it is a technical editing course.
In the class our focus will be on the role of the editor in organizational settings, which we will explore both theoretically and practically. We will rely on one or two editing textbooks, as well as the Chicago Manual of Style, as we work with paper-based, online and digital editing of both visual and verbal texts.
On a practical level we will learn the common methods of copymarking documents within professional and organization settings and how to distinguish between grammatical and stylistic emendations as we study the principles of contextual editing and editorial activities. In addition, we will explore different methods for analyzing, critiquing, and revising manuscripts for different audiences and understand how to create successful writer/editor dialogue. We will also review the most common writing errors to increase our mastery of grammar, mechanics, punctuation, and spelling. Finally, we will explore the theoretical implications of culture and technology in the editing process.Required Texts:
1. Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition book or online subscription (Univ. of Chicago)
2. Technical Editing, 5th Edition by Carolyn Rude and Angela Eaton (Allyn & Bacon)
3. Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) by Carol Fisher Saller. Univ. of Chicago Press.
Focus on issues that have shaped contemporary literary publishing.
This course will examine the field of literary publishing in the United States as a mechanism of mediation between authors and readers. The focus will be on the history of publishing with special emphasis on how changing technology has reframed a set of ongoing issues (risk of publication, copyright, censorship, marketing, distribution, and so on). We will also examine some case studies in the relationship among author, text, and editor.
Class meetings will be discussion-based. Each student will participate in a collaborative research presentation. There will be four three-page essays and one research-based essay.
Texts I anticipate using include:
Nicole Howard, The Book: The Life Story of a Technology
Eugene Exman, The House of Harper
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs
Tod Striphas, The Late Age of Print
John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture
Kalpanik S., Inside the Giant Machine
History of print culture from orality to digital text; introduction to principles and practices of bibliographic investigation and scholarly editing.
In this course, students will become investigators. ENG 355 will engage in the study of books as physical objects and of the details of their production and consumption within specific historical contexts. At once an historical and theoretical survey of manuscript, print, and digital cultures and a hands-on practicum in historical bibliography, analytical bibliography, and the scholarly editing of artifacts for both print and digital media, the course will introduce students to the terminology and methodologies of bibliographers and editors. We will pay close attention to the material and institutional conditions of Medieval manuscript production, to the economic and technological conditions of print shops and bookselling from the 16th through the 19th centuries, including considerations of licensing and copyright laws, and to the range of forensic strategies bibliographers must use to understand the textual productions of those periods. These strategies will include forensic ink and paper examination, knowledge of print types, typographical and handwriting analysis, and attention to paratextualities.
Case studies will include the Nowell Codex, in which Beowulf appears, the printing and circulation of Christopher Columbus’s letter to the King and Queen of Spain, the printing and consumerism of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Pamela Controversy, Horace Walpole’s private press at his gothic Strawberry Hill mansion, the production history of William Wordsworth’s poetry as adapted from his sister, Dorothy’s, diary, the impact of Edgar Allan Poe on 19th-century American printing, and the current state of ebook and tablet publishing. Finally, students will be introduced to a brief post-1980s history of digital coding and bibliographical software and gain a foundation in the best practices of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Requirements will include demonstration of bibliographical knowledge and methodologies and a digital editing project using the Early English Books Online database.
Survey of theories creative writers explicitly and implicitly employ and consider. Includes editing, analysis, and writing of creative and theoretical texts.
Studies in literature and theories of women's writing.
REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS:
Fuchs & Howes, Teaching Life Writing Texts
Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark
Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin (diary)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Mary Gordon, The Shadow Man
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Marjane Satrapi, PersepolisDESCRIPTION OF COURSE:
This course focuses on the diversity of women's autobiographical expression historically, cross-culturally, and generically. We'll interrogate the similarities/differences between types of life writing discourse such as diaries, essays, testimonio, graphic life writing and historical/cultural narrative, and ask how the assumed/implied audience, the historical period, multiple voices, the geographical location, as well as issues of race, class, age, ability, sexual orientation, and relationship affect women's autobiographical acts. We'll question whether the term autobiography fits women's practices, consider if the term life writing is more appropriate, and discuss what distinctions between autobiography and biography or literature seem meaningful.
Because life writing extends across the boundaries of English Studies as well as transgresses the boundaries of other disciplines to include art, history, and psychology, for example, it’s ideal for thinking about how and why we read texts and considering teaching strategies. This course will ask how reading a variety of women’s life writing texts helps us learn about ourselves as critical consumers and about others’ lives, and suggest some strategies for how to teach life writing. This course is ideal for anyone who ever wanted to think about how his/her life might be written, to investigate how different women have written their lives, to explore how you might convey the dynamics of a life to anyone who wants to think about how important living a life is.
Because a major component of the course is pedagogical, it fulfills the pedagogy requirement for graduate students. Because of its emphasis on teaching, it is also ideal for undergraduate education majors. It also is an elective for the Women and Gender Studies minor.
This course is interdisciplinary in nature and would benefit rhetoric, writing studies, linguistics, creative writing, and technical communications specialists.
FORMAT OF COURSE:
The class will be primarily discussion with background material supplied when necessary. There may be pop quizzes from time to time. Each of you will keep your own course autobiography in which you'll situate yourself in relationship to four of the major texts we read, as well as comment on what life writing questions/issues that major text suggests and how these might illuminate pedagogy. Each entry should be 1-2 typed whole pages; a Works Cited page is required but may not be counted in the total number of pages; entries on earlier texts cannot be turned in after a course autobiography due date has passed. A research paper of 15-20 typed whole pages illuminating a text or life writing aspect perhaps suggested by your class autobiography will be required. If you prefer, you can create a life writing project in lieu of a more traditional research paper but this will need to be approved by me. Your research paper/project should deal in some way with pedagogy so that you link the reading and critique of life writing texts to strategies for teaching them. Graduate students will be expected to write a research paper/construct a project of 20-25 typed whole pages, and to generate an annotated bibliography of at least 10 whole pages and at least ten critical/theoretical secondary sources. Works Cited pages are required for the research paper but are not part of the required number of pages.
Advanced critical examination of 20th and 21st century literature for children and young adults with emphasis on trends and research.
Description of Course:
This course is intended to introduce students to growth of British and American children's literature during the last one hundred years. This course is a continuation of the study of the history and development of children’s literature found in English 370: Studies in the History of Literature of Young People. This course will examine the changing concepts of childhood and how children's books help to establish an ideology of childhood. The course will focus primarily on influential children’s texts from the Anglo-American tradition that have been published during the twentieth and twenty-first century. The course will also introduce students to a variety of critical approaches to children's literature and examine the development of the criticism of children's literature as an academic field. The course should be of interest to students working in Children’s Literature, Education, Popular Culture, Visual Studies, and American Studies.Required Texts: (Tentative)
L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Illustrated by W.W. Denslow. Dover
A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh. Illustrated by Ernest Shepard. Puffin.
Virginia Lee Burton. The Little House. Houghton Mifflin.
Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Little House on the Prairie. Illustrated by Garth Williams.
Harper Collins.
Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon. Illustrated by Clement Hurd. Harper Collins.
E.B. White. Charlotte’s Web. Illustrated by Garth Williams. Harper Collins.
Crockett Johnson. Harold and the Purple Crayon. Harper Collins.
Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat. Random House.
Ezra Jack Keats. The Snowy Day. Puffin.
Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are. Harper Collins.
S.E. Hinton. The Outsiders. Speak.
Judy Blume. Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? Delacorte Books.
Shel Silverstein. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Harper Collins.
Beverly Cleary. Ramona the Brave. Illustrated by Tracy Dockeray. Avon Camelot Books.
David Macaulay. City: The Story of Roman Planning and Construction. Graphia.
Jon Scieszka. The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Illustrated by Lane Smith.
Puffin Books.
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Illustrated by Mary Grandpre. Scholastic.
Additional critical readings on reserve at Milner Library.Format of the Course:
Undergraduates will be required to write one short research paper (8-10 pages), while graduate students will write one short paper (8-10 pages) and one longer critical paper (15-20 pages). In addition, all students will write a book analysis (3-5 pages) on a significant illustrated children’s text selected from a list provided by the instructor. A midterm exam and a final exam will be given. Graduate students will have the opportunity to lead class discussion on one of the assigned texts. All students will be expected to regularly attend class, and actively contribute to class discussion.
Advanced critical examination of literature for young adults with emphasis on trends and research. May repeat if content different.
In this edition of 375, we’ll be looking at three major themes that thread through issues of adolescence, literature, and contemporary culture: negotiating identity, who’s watching?, and why we read. Psychologists and cultural critics agree that adolescence is a sociocultural phenomenon, the experience of which is highly dependent on the values, material goals, and affluence of a particular society. It is a time for negotiating identity in the matrix of discourses of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, technology, spirituality, embodiment, and ethics. But recent research on adolescence indicates that the experience of adolescence is also a biological one: teens have distinct ways of thinking and feeling that are related to the structure and growth of their brains. What stories, then, do contemporary authors of young adult literature tell, and how do they affect and influence a readership that is biologically predisposed to lead with their emotions while they are actively engaged in sorting out their identities and their values? To approach these questions, we will be reading books and viewing films that inspire strong emotional responses (you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll say eeeuw) while also asking readers to think about contemporary issues such as the growth in surveillance culture (dust off your Foucault), what it means to be white/ black/ brown/ other/ straight/ gay/ male/ female/ other/ zombie/ drunk/ dying/ autistic/ other, and who gets to decide what such identity categories mean anyway. The theoretical orientation of the class is a synthesis of neuropsychoanalysis, cognitive poetics, cultural theory, and multimodal engagement.
Texts:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Mexican Whiteboy, by Matt de la Pena
Bend it Like Beckham (film)
Smoke Signals (film)
You Don’t Know About Me, by Brian Meehl
Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgol
The Rock and the River, by Kekla Magoon
The Spectacular Now, by Tim Tharpe
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher
Feed, by M.T. Anderson
Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly
The Infects, by Sean Beaudoin
The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
theory readings as assigned
In this edition of 375, we’ll be looking at three major themes that thread through issues of adolescence, literature, and contemporary culture: negotiating identity, who’s watching?, and why we read. Psychologists and cultural critics agree that adolescence is a sociocultural phenomenon, the experience of which is highly dependent on the values, material goals, and affluence of a particular society. It is a time for negotiating identity in the matrix of discourses of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, technology, spirituality, embodiment, and ethics. But recent research on adolescence indicates that the experience of adolescence is also a biological one: teens have distinct ways of thinking and feeling that are related to the structure and growth of their brains. What stories, then, do contemporary authors of young adult literature tell, and how do they affect and influence a readership that is biologically predisposed to lead with their emotions while they are actively engaged in sorting out their identities and their values? To approach these questions, we will be reading books and viewing films that inspire strong emotional responses (you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll say eeeuw) while also asking readers to think about contemporary issues such as the growth in surveillance culture (dust off your Foucault), what it means to be white/ black/ brown/ other/ straight/ gay/ male/ female/ other/ zombie/ drunk/ dying/ autistic/ other, and who gets to decide what such identity categories mean anyway. The theoretical orientation of the class is a synthesis of neuropsychoanalysis, cognitive poetics, cultural theory, and multimodal engagement.
Texts:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Mexican Whiteboy, by Matt de la Pena
Bend it Like Beckham (film)
Smoke Signals (film)
You Don’t Know About Me, by Brian Meehl
Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgol
The Rock and the River, by Kekla Magoon
The Spectacular Now, by Tim Tharpe
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher
Feed, by M.T. Anderson
Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly
The Infects, by Sean Beaudoin
The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
theory readings as assigned
Rhetorical theory from ancient Greece and Rome, 500 BCE to 100 CE, emphasizing the Older Sophists, Aspasia, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. Also discusses contemporary applications of classical rhetoric and rhetorics of other cultures in the western classical era.
Observation, case studies, tutoring, instructional assistance, and some teaching experience in English as a Second Language.
Course goals:
The TESOL Practicum offers students seeking an endorsement in TESOL the opportunity to acquire clinical hours while observing and participating in ESL instruction in an Illinois public school. The Practicum also offers graduate students pursuing the graduate certificate in TESOL the opportunity to obtain clinical experience in a local adult ESL center. Students should have completed at least two of the TESOL courses (343, 344, 345, 346) in addition to the prerequisite to these (391) before enrolling in 394, since the assignments in this course will require students to use the concepts discussed in those courses to structure their observations.This practicum is intended to provide you with focused observation of teachers of English to non-native speaking learners, practice for you in teaching such learners and an opportunity to view and evaluate yourself as a teacher, and an opportunity for you to provide a service to both the TESOL profession as well as to a specific community of learners. Much of the work for the course will be completed as an independent study during which you will organize, manage, and complete observations, tutorials, etc. on your own.
Theory and practice in the teaching of language, literature, and composition at the seconfary and community college levels.
Many people do not have the background to teach Holocaust literature in nuanced and accurate ways. In this course we will study texts that are often used in college and secondary school courses in which Holocaust literature is taught in addition to texts that provide critiques of and supplement those texts, and texts that provide necessary historical and cultural background. We will discuss complicated questions embedded in Holocaust literature that shed light on many contemporary issues and link prior and current genocides, as well as specific challenges teachers face when dealing with religion, morality, trauma, and ethics in educational settings. The course will be interdisciplinary, especially integrating literature with history. We also will study pedagogies that improve crosscultural communication to help students overcome defensiveness and therefore better withstand challenges to their biases that interfere with learning.
This course is appropriate for English; History; Language, Literature, and Culture students, and anyone interested in Holocaust studies.
Texts will include, among others: Maus by Art Spiegelman; Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, by Francine Prose; along with Truth and Lamentation, an anthology of Holocaust literature. In addition, we will read Doris Bergen’s War and Genocide, and numerous articles by literary and historical scholars such as Sara Horowitz, Lawrence Langer, Shoshana Felman, and Lisa Heineman.
This course is appropriate for English; History; Language, Literature, and Culture students; and anyone interested in Holocaust studies.
For further questions, contact: Dr. Paula Ressler, pressle@ilstu.edu, 309-438-7798.
Supervised field experience in English with local, state, national, and international businesses, agencies, institutions (including colleges and universities), and organizations.
Directed independent study in an area of English Studies. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor and Graduate Coordinator.
Introduction to bibliography, methods of research, critical evaluation of scholarship, and recent developments in literary theory and criticism.
Introduction to theory, research, and practice in the teaching of composition. Required for students with teaching assistantships in composition at ISU.
Improving the quality of writing instruction in middle and high schools. Topics: .01 Major Figures in the Teaching of Writing; .02 Issues of Grammar; .03 Writing Assessment; .04 Using Technology to Teach Writing; .05 Applying Rhetoric to Teaching of Writing; .06 The Writing Project. Prerequisite: Middle or Secondary School certification or consent of instructor.
COURSE PACKET: A packet of readings is available on campus.
Selected Readings:
Baron, Dennis. Grammar and Good Taste. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.
Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Urbana: NCTE, 1963.
Brosnahan, Irene, and Janice Neuleib. “Teaching Grammar Affectively: Learning to Life Grammar.” The Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction. Eds. Susan Hunter and Ray Wallace. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995.
Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47 (February 1985): 105-27.
Neuleib, Janice. “The Relation of Formal Grammar to Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 28 (October 1977):247-250.
Neuleib, Janice, and Irene Brosnahan. “Teaching Grammar to Writers.” Teaching Developmental Writing. Ed. Susan Naomi Bernstein. Boston: Bedford, 2001. 91-97.
Neuleib, Janice. Writing Skills. Grand Rapids: Instructional Fair, 1996.
Scharton, Maurice, and Janice Neuleib. “Comfortable Clothes: Using Type to Design Assignments.” Most Excellent Differences. Ed. Tom Thompson. Gainsville, FL: CAPT, 1996.
Scharton, Maurice, and Janice Neuleib. Inside/Out: A Guide to Writing. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1993.
Zebroski, James. Thinking Through Theory. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
DESCRIPTION OF COURSEA Scottish word for grammar is glamour, used because learning was associated with magic (New American Heritage Dictionary). In this course, we will investigate the ways in which schools have used grammar instruction as a kind of magic bullet to solve the complex problems of student learning, student composing, student critical thinking, and student satisfaction with nearly everything. Grammar does have magical powers for our profession, for the subject can raise passions, spark discussions, and sometimes even please and amuse those of us who love systems and complex problems. We will read recent research and theory on school grammar and spend time looking at school practices. We will look especially at what different schools do with grammar instruction and at the reasons for their choices. This course will provide an opportunity to observe what is done, theorize about those practices, and then draw conclusions from these investigations.
FORMAT OF COURSE:
The class will include a variety of kinds of group work including group investigations of grammar instruction in classes (or lack thereof), research designs for these investigations, and group responses to the studies produced by the class members. We will read around various texts and will discover together the strands and directions for our projects. Everyone will contribute through both reading and writing about the topic but also through responses to others’ writings about their work. The class will work through logs, short papers, and research reports. A research portfolio will develop during the semester which will culminate in a paper/project that will have a clear possible place of publication. The theme of the course will be teacher research into this wonderful and mysterious subject of grammar. We will all work together to solve the mystery of why grammar continues to be such a challenge in the schools.
Figures, movements, or genres in the AMerican Realistic-Naturalistic Period, treating authors such as Dickinson, Clemens, James, Crane, Dreiser.
Contending Forces
In this course, we’ll be looking at how writers grappled with the Civil War and its aftermaths. How did people write about their experiences running away from the war (Mark Twain’s Roughing It; Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage), fighting it (Ulysses S. Grant’s bestselling autobiography), protesting it (Ambrose Bierce’s anti-war writings) and reconciling its contradictory impact on African Americans (Pauline E. Hopkins’ Contending Forces; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poetry and “rediscovered” novels)? The war also brought about a revolution in American identities from geopolitical to gendered, so we’ll also be delving into several of the authors from this period who offer critiques and competing visions of the new, soon-to-be coast-to-coast, uninterrupted nation, interrupting and interrogating its seamless righteousness and imperial aspirations to peer into its unseemly innards: Upton Sinclair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Edith Maud and Winnifred Eaton (Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna), Zitkala-Ša, Hamlin Garland, and Yone Noguchi.
REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS:
Many of the texts for this course will be available online at no charge. Students wishing to purchase particular titles may use the supplementary book order as a guide, or consult with me for tips on other editions.
We will be reading in full or in excerpt from the following titles and collections: Mark Twain’s Roughing It; Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage; Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant; Ambrose Bierce’s anti-war writings; Pauline E. Hopkins’ Contending Forces; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poetry and the novels Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph; either The Jungle or King Coal or Oil! by Upton Sinclair (any requests?); Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home; Joaquin Miller’s Life Among the Modocs; Bret Harte’s prose writings; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’ Life Among the Piutes; Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance; some choice novel by Onoto Watanna (TBD…too many to decide now, it’s only March!); Zitkala-Ša’s The Sun Dance Opera; Hamlin Garland’s works; Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl and other writings.
We will also be drawing on critical and theoretical works by various authors.
FORMAT OF COURSE:
The class will be conducted in a seminar format to maximize engaged discussion and contributions from various perspectives. Course assignments will include: a research project; a pedagogy project, or alternative for students in non-teaching-related programs of study; regular, well-informed weekly participation (completion and thoughtful consideration of the readings, etc.).This course is designed to accommodate all students and I assume no prior experience or expertise. A commitment to engage with critical and theoretical approaches to literary and cultural texts will be expected of all students. Interdisciplinary projects emerging from any or all the areas of English Studies and/or from other disciplines outside of English Studies are welcomed and encouraged. Students at the university who are engaged in graduate study in an area other than English are encouraged to enroll. Please contact me at 438-8660 or susankalter@ilstu.edu with any questions.
Figures, movements, or genres in American literature since 1920, treating authors such as Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner.
After the Revolution: U.S. Postmodern Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
U.S. postmodern fiction can be characterized by some or all of these features: double coded language or, more popularly, irony; self-referentiality; experiments in form and style; contingent truths manifested through multiple, dialogic narratives that work to subvert totalizing systems; the breakdown of the autonomous, integrated individual. The postmodern fiction of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s made use of these features to challenge readers’ expectations for how fiction could work and, more broadly, how the world could be known and how a person could situate herself in the world. In one sense, postmodern fiction sought to turn the world into fiction so as to expose the mendacity of the culture we have inherited and to invite us to invent other, better cultures. Curtis White sums this up in the first paragraph of his short story “Remember John Lennon”: “Everybody of my generation has the same memory. We were twelve or thirteen or we were twenty-one, for that matter, and we were going to be veterinarians or we were, like Ringo, going to own a hairdresser’s parlor. We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, ‘Life can be other than it has been.’ ”
In the transition from the late twentieth to early twenty-first century, however, a number of factors converged, demanding a reconsideration of postmodernism. One was the general pendulum swing to the right, marking a pervasive political and cultural conservatism inimical to the formal experimentation, iconoclasm, and countercultural ideology of most postmodern fiction. Another was the sense that the usefulness of irony as a means of engaging the culture was exhausted. David Foster Wallace, for one, argued that the postmodernists of the 1960s made good use of irony for tipping various sacred cows, but by the end of the century, when all sacred cows have been tipped, irony leaves us caught inside a self-referring trap, unable to assert any belief, unable to connect with others, unable to make a new world. A related factor was 9/11, a catastrophic event, which, as Akbar S. Ahmed argues, blasted the U.S. cultural mood from contingency, relativity, and situationalism into a revival of “Grand Narratives” about West and East, Christianity and Islam, good and evil. In the days after the towers fell, journalists never tired of announcing the end of irony, presumably another nail in the coffin of postmodernism. A fourth factor is the process of globalization, in which all international and intercultural relations are defined in terms of economics. Human relations are subsumed to the demands of economic growth, and cultural difference is lost in the hegemonic workings of the Western (primarily U.S.) culture industry.
This course will examine the state of postmodern fiction in the new century. To what extent has it stayed the same? To what extent has it changed? To what extent has it been rejected? Where do we go from here?
Among the texts I’m considering are:
Mary Caponegro, All Fall Down
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City
Rick Moody, The Diviners
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Colson Whitehead, Zone OneWe’ll also be reading some critical essays by Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, Richard Powers, Stephen Burn, Brian McHale, and in the collection Postmodernism. What Moment?
The class meetings will be discussion-based. Students will take turns leading the discussions. There will be a research presentation, two short essays, and a long essay.
Practice in the writing of either poetry or fiction for graduate level or professional writers. Available as 447.01 Creative Writing Seminar: Poetry; 447.02 Creative Writing Seminar: Prose (may be repeated for maximum of 12 hours). Consent of instructor. May be repeated.
Selected readings from antiquity, mostly Biblical and classical, with consideration to Eastern literature.
The premise behind this course is that to accurately study texts from the western tradition, one needs a knowledge and understanding of its Judaic and Christian underpinnings. This is true from the beginning, in medieval literatures all the way up to the present. Regardless of whether or not this underpinning is articulated, I think you can argue rather convincingly that it either informs or is the opponent of almost all texts written in English. This is even true of literary criticism, academic and scholarly journals and presses, and social and political histories.
However, very few people, in what has now become a very secular world, know their own textual past regarding the “monotheistic tradition” (for lack of a better term). Most people are unaware that Christianity could have taken a very different path, that its genesis was in fact suspect for being the most radical political movement of the ancient world in terms of social and gender equity.
And sadly, that political movement was ended once and for all by Augustine’s defeat of Pelagian theology; by his encapsulating of human history, past, present, and future, as inescapably sinful; and perhaps most important of all, by his explicit “partnering” of the church with the state, with the state assuming responsibility for policing and punishing sinful humanity.
We will be working with a number of really really interesting texts, drawing from: the “suspect texts” such as The Forgotten Books of Eden, the Infancy Texts, etc.; and The Nag Hammadi Gnostic Texts; Augustine’s Confessions; Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack; Marvin Harris’ Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture; Elaine Pagels’ Adam, Eve, and Satan; Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas; The Gnostic Gospels; Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and A Case for God.
You don’t have to be religious to enjoy this course. I myself am a recovering Southern Baptist. I find it amazing that there is this gigantic textual history, reservoir, account that offers us such a fundamentally different view of Christianity that questions the essence of Christianity, as it is currently understood. I encourage you to consider reading your own past and promise you that our reading and discussions will offer you a great deal of understanding about both your culture and, perhaps surprisingly, your own personality and world view.
Inquiry into the issues, methods, and resources involved in teaching technical writing at the college level.
This class will provide a foundation for teaching an introductory technical writing course in a university, community college or industry setting. In the class we will learn about the theory and the practice of technical writing, including its history. We will be reading extensively, writing frequently, discussing readings and different pedagogy approaches, observing technical writing classrooms, conducting interviews and practicing pedagogy. The field of technical communication has a rich history and an ever-evolving pedagogical approach, particularly as both paper and online assignments are expected.
While we will begin with a history of the discipline, we will also study current issues in the field from a critical standpoint. Students will also investigate how the pedagogy of technical writing can meet current challenges in online and visual communication, as well as global and cultural communication. You will use this knowledge in the development of a syllabus.
We will also be examining textbooks and different types of assignments, both paper and online. Each student will work with a teacher/mentor and observe several sessions of actual technical writing classes.
Participation and regular attendance are crucial for both individual students and the class as a whole. Active listening and speaking together about readings and experiences is key to success in the class. Assignments will include reading responses, which are due on the day we discuss the reading; the writing of a course syllabus; a review of two textbooks; a teacher-mentor assignment, a coursework synthesis essay and a seminar presentation.
Required Resources:
Solving Problems in Technical Communication [Paperback] by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber, Editors. University of Chicago Press.
Resources in Technical Communication: Outcomes and Approaches by Cynthia Selfe. Baywood Press
We will also have a number of pdfs or handouts of articles that will be available online for those enrolled in the class.
Topics in texts for children and adolescents: genres, authors, critical approaches, themes, or historical developments.
Fantasy and Feminist Ethics
The realities of current politics, economics, and technology daily remind us of the web of connections that link people all over the globe, for good and for ill. This course will bring together two bodies of writing that explore this idea of interrelatedness: the field of feminist ethics and the genre of fantasy for children and adolescents. Interrelatedness is central to feminist ethics, which holds that concepts of care, responsibility, particularity, and relationality should supplement or replace the principles of justice, rights, universality, and objectivity as foundations for ethical decision-making. Children’s authors such as Philip Pullman, Madeleine L’Engle, Terry Pratchett, and J.K. Rowling take advantage of the freedom offered by fictional worlds to approach the issue in another way; they use fantastic creatures, environments, and abilities to depict, problematize, and reimagine connections among various kinds of living creatures and the worlds that they inhabit. Given that feminist ethics seeks to integrate into philosophical theory those experiences that have come to be associated with women, such as care for vulnerable others, gender will of course form an important part of our discussions about how the literature and philosophy intersect.
Readings will include fiction (individual novels and series) by authors such as Pullman, L’Engle, Pratchett, and Rowling and philosophical theory starting with the pioneers of feminist ethics (Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings) and continuing through various stages of response and reformulation (Virginia Held, Sara Ruddick, Joan Tronto, and Margaret Urban Walker, for example). Student responsibilities will include thoughtful and informed participation in discussions, a seminar paper, and a number of shorter writings responding to the theory or engaging closely with the fiction. The course will appeal to students with interests in children’s literature, ethics, feminist theory, social justice, and narrative.
Advanced study of recent theory and research in Rhertoic and Composition Studies.
Authorship is under attack, and has been under attack for as long as we’ve conceptualized authorship as the result of a singular, autonomous, individual, genius. Authorship is under attack in the academy and it is under attack in the popular press, evidence for which can be found via the simplest internet search for plagiarism or fraudulent memoirs. We are a society uncomfortable with authorship, and this course argues that this discomfort arises from the very real tension between the ideal of the autonomous, individual, genius, and the recognition, rarely articulated, that we are all—as writers, as readers, as human beings—interdependent. The pages and pages devoted to dismantling the concept of the autonomous author in the last half decade alone should suggest to us that perhaps we may be protesting too much. Why has our interdependence been something that we’ve had to learn? Why are we continually surprised by the truth of collaboration and memory work?
This course argues that the increasing attention to plagiarists, fake memoirists, liars, hoaxers, and forgers in mainstream media constitutes what Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger call agnogenesis, the construction and maintenance of ignorance. In the case of contested authorship, the construction has already been accomplished: we want to continue to believe that an author is and can continue to be autonomous, original, sincere, authentic, moral, and genius. The maintenance of this belief in the form of a continuous expression of surprise at the material and psychic conditions of textual production constitutes agnogenesis. We know that no author works alone, that authors, like all of us, are dependent on the work of others who came before them, that accusations of plagiarism perform important cultural work, that memory often betrays us. But even as we in the academy continue to do this important work, each day sees a new exclamation of surprise in response to an academic administrator’s accusations of plagiarism, of a memoir whose “facts” turn out to be embellished, of ideas stolen and timelines fudged. The deeply entrenched commonplace belief in the autonomy, originality, and morality of the author cannot, it seems, be challenged with scholarly arguments to the contrary. In this course we will consider this central question: how does a culturally insistent belief in the autonomous author function rhetorically to deflect the knowledge we have about how writers write?In addition to a number of articles, required texts may include:
Armstrong, Julie Buckner. Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood.
Crafts, Hannah, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Bondswoman’s Narrative.
Eubanks, Philip. Metaphor and Writing.
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators.
Howard, Rebecca Moore, and Amy E. Robillard, Ed. Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright
van Alphen, Ernst, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, Ed. The Rhetoric of Sincerity.
Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi, Ed. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature.
Supervised field experience in English with local, state, national, and international businesses, agencies, institutions (including colleges and universities), and organizations. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.
Directed independent study in an area of English Studies. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor and Graduate Coordinator.
Research in selected areas of literary and/or cultural study framed within the contexts of pedagogy and English Studies.
Course Description: This course will assess the place of English studies and literary and cultural studies in our globalizing world. The course is designed to bring into dialogue six important strands of contemporary theoretical discourse: theories of English studies, theories of world/comparative literature, theories of transnationalism, pedagogical theories, cultural studies theories, and theories of globalization. The course will begin by introducing students to globalization theory, assessing the ways in which globalization presents a challenge to the way in which we currently understand literary/cultural studies and English studies. The course will next address the way in which globalization intersects with classroom practices. We will next turn to the concepts of globalization, comparative literature, world literature, global cultural studies, and transnational studies as differing paradigms for thinking about literature and culture in a global frame. Grounding these debates in classroom practice, the course will conclude with thinking about concrete classroom pedagogies for teaching in a transnational or worlded manner. Over the course of the semester, we will also read Karen Tei Yamashita’s brilliant transnational novel, Tropic of Orange, in order to use it as a concrete example of a transnational text.
Format: This course will be taught in seminar format. There will be the option of either two ten page papers or one twenty-page paper. There will also be an oral/written presentation.
Texts:
- David Damrosch, Teaching World Literature. Modern Language Association, 978-0321209207.
- Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 978-0199552269.
- Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America. U of Chicago P, 978-0226005522.
- Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Globalizing American Studies. University of Chicago Press, 978-0226185071.
- Christopher Leigh Connery and Rob Wilson, The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. North Atlantic Books, 978-1556436802.
- Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke UP, 978-0822334422.
- Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange. Coffee House Press, 978-1566890649.
Research in the configurations of rhetoric and composition studies, with emphasis on English Studies and the post-secondary teaching of writing.
Teaching of lower-division English courses with emphasis upon new techniques; under faculty direction, at Illinois State University or off campus; in conjunction with tutorial meetings. Prerequisite: completion of doctoral course work.
Research involving the gathering of materials and data and the writing of a dissertation.
