Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of the instructor.

Recent offerings:

Advanced Report and Proposal Writing (Spring 2011, Diaz)

This course prepares students to write workplace proposals and reports. Students will spend approximately four weeks analyzing proposals—including grant proposals—and reports. Students will spend the next eight weeks researching and writing a grant proposal, a project proposal, or an analytical report.

When possible, students will work on projects for campus clients. The last three weeks of the semester will focus on exploring visual and audio reports, including designing electronic materials that support oral presentations and preparing audio reports using podcast technology. This course will be taught as a workshop with student writers sharing drafts, providing peer feedback, and working as collaborators.

We will do short analyses of reports and a larger project that focuses on writing a report or a grant for a client. The goal is for each participant to have a significant writing portfolio sample by the end of the semester.

Texts (subject to change):

• Johnson-Sheehan, R. & Dragga, S. (2002). Writing proposals. New York: Longman.
• New, C. & Quick, J. (2003). How to write a grant proposal. New York: Wiley.
• Netzley, M. & Snow, C. (2002). Guide to report writing. New York: Wiley.

Reading James Joyce (Spring 2011, S. Evans)

This seminar will be dedicated to the task, best accomplished in good company, of reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Prior knowledge of the text, in part or in full, is welcome but by no means presupposed. We will draw on the different background competencies of seminar participants, as well as the ample (and ever-expanding) body of secondary literature, in the course of interpreting a novel that has had a decisive impact on our understanding of literary modernism and its aftermath.

Required text: James Joyce, Ulysses. Our common reference will be to the edition prepared by H.W. Gabler for Vintage Books in 1986.

Note: Students interested in taking this course are encouraged to read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the winter break.

Old English (Spring 2011, Bauschatz)

The course will be most centrally focused on helping students to learn to read Old English (Anglo-Saxon).  No previous knowledge of the language is required.  The course will begin with the easiest texts (prose) and continue with more difficult texts.  Students should eventually be able to read some poetry.  With luck, we will be reading parts of Beowulf by the end of the class.  In addition to reading, the class will focus on issues related to translation and the difficulties it presents. We will address some questions about the relation of Old English to later Englishes, to other related European languages, and to Anglo-Saxon history.  Other questions, raised by students, can also be addressed.  We will probably use the current edition of Bruce Mitchell’s A Guide to Old English, and possibly an edition of Beowulf.

Advanced Report and Proposal Writing (Fall 2010, Diaz)

Advanced Report and Proposal Writing (Spring 2010, Diaz)

Technical Editing (Fall 2009, Diaz)

This course focuses on print and online editing, including the use of traditional proofreading marks and online techniques, document layout and design, principles of copywriting, and the study of style manuals. The course follows two lines of study: one of editing/text crunching practices and one of print document design principles and practices related to the editing of documents. The cornerstone of the course is producing a newsletter or other document for a client.

Learning Objectives:

During this course, you will have the opportunity to learn the following:

To improve writing through drafting and revising the student’s own writing

• by drafting and revising one’s own writing
• by reading and editing the writing of another student

To become proficient editor

• by learning paper mark-up techniques provided in the Associated Press Style Guide
• by learning online editing techniques using MS Word
• by learning to identify parts of speech

To create effective document designs

• by learning principles of effective visual designs
• by learning how to use InDesign to create visual designs

To design, write, and edit a document that meets the needs of a client

• by working with a client to develop a brochure, a newsletter, or other document

Deliverables:

The deliverables for this course include the following:

• Weekly homework
• Three pieces of writing of 500-750 words each
• A proposal and status report for a client project
• Oral briefings and drafts of client project
• Finished client project
• The Quiz (a grammar, punctuation, spelling test)

Books:

• Cappon, Rene J. (2000). The Associated Press Guide to News Writing (3^rd ed.). U.S.: Thomson Peterson’s.
• Goldstein, Norm, Ed. (2007). Associated Press Stylebook 2007. New York: The Associated Press.

• Kimball, Miles A. and Ann R. Hawkins. (2008). Document Design: A Guide for Technical Communicators. New York and Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Seminar in Rhetoric and Social Theory (Fall 2009, Dryer)

This course will examine how the “everyday” is produced and routinized rhetorically.  By “produce” we will mean the ways in which social acts of symbolic exchange (reading, writing, talking, listening) reinscribe (and sometimes alter) commonplaces about literacy, the literary, and communicative efficacy. The first ten weeks of the seminar, we will use 2-3 of Raymond Williams’ “Keywords” weekly to ground our reading and discussion and will examine the ways in which writers have problematized concepts like “nature,” “society,” “experience,” “tradition,” and “art.”    The final third of the course will take the form of guided qualitative research projects that follow the theoretical approaches of Dorothy Smith’s “Institutional Ethnography.”  Primary sources collected by participants will take center stage as we collaboratively explore what underlying assumptions are at work in these texts, and what larger forces of cultural capital and exchange they further and/or complicate.  Readings might include, but not be limited to:

Texts:

• Bartholomae, David. “The Tidy House:  Basic Writing in the American Curriculum.”  Journal of Basic Writing.  12.1 (1993)4-21.
• Bourdieu, Pierre.  Language and Symbolic Power.  Ed. John B. Thompson.  Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.
• Brodkey, Linda. “Writing on the Bias.” College English. 56.5 (September 1994): 527-547.
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Rendell, trans. Berkeley; U of California Press, 1984.
• Giddens, Anthony.  Central Problems in Social Theory.  London:  MacMillan, 1979.
• Harvey, David. “The Body as an Accumulation Strategy.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.  16 (1998): 401-21.
• Heath, Shirley Brice.  Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms.  New York:  Cambridge UP, 1983.
• Russell, David. “Rethinking Genre in School and Society:  An Activity Theory Analysis.” Written Communication14 (1997): 504-54.
• Smith, Dorothy E. Institutional Ethnography:  A Sociology for People. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
• Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and Marxism and Literature.

Outcomes: Successful participants will see their own and others’ communicative acts as contributing to the social production of culture.   They will see how “the way things are” is in fact a collaborative effort—one that does not serve all participants equitably. Outstanding participants will develop a rhetorical methodology for intervening in such inequities for positive social change.

­ Staging History (Fall 2008, Brucher)

This course examines how history has been staged at different times, beginning with Shakespeare’s invention of the chronicle history play near at the end of the 16th century and ending with August Wilson’s and Susan-Lori Parks’ search for a dramatic form that reclaims African-American history near the end of the 20th century.  The course interprets history broadly to accommodate a variety of social, political, and cultural issues.  We’ll pay particular attention to how the plays use historical materials dramatically to examine social and political anxieties of the times in which the plays are written. The first half of the course covers English and European plays, using Shakespeare’s early history plays to establish conventions and motifs, and then pursuing those motifs (for example Joan of Arc and peasant revolts) into 20th-century plays by Shaw, Brecht, Churchill, and Stoppard.  The second half of the course emphasizes American plays that sometimes use history (and sometimes one another) to examine recurring issues in American culture.

Possible Texts:

• Bertold Brecht, Mother Courage (Grove)
• Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, adapted by David Mamet (Grove)
• Caryl Churchill, Plays, One (Methuen)
• T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (Harcourt)
• Adrienne Kennedy, The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (U of Minnesota Press)
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America (TCG)
• Eugene O’Neill, Three Plays (Vintage) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (Yale)
• Susan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (TCG)
• George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (Penguin)
• William Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth (3 parts) and Richard the Third (any edition)
• Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia (3 parts) (TCG?)
• August Strindberg, Erik the Fourteenth (photocopy)
• Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of America (TCG)
• August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (Penguin/Plume)

Evaluation: Grades are based on two oral presentations, 2 short (4-6 pp.) papers, and a longer (12-15 pp.) project.

­ A Postscript to Transgression (Spring 2008, Kress)

Beginning with Michel Foucault’s demolition of transgression as “disobedience” in his 1963 essay “A Preface to Transgression,” this course will explore both literature and literary theory as a way of building towards an understanding of transgression, particularly as it is often deployed in the world of an English department.  After Foucault, we will look at several classics of transgressive theory and literature then move into an in-depth exploration of contemporary literature that seeks to get through the romantic/traditional conceptions of what transgression may have meant:  although the term transgressive was most often attached to texts that are “simply” disturbing and rely on graphic description of the old stand-bys of drugs, sex, and violence, this course hopes to open towards a “going across” that is not merely naughty.

Possible Texts: The course will involve considerable reading in both literature and theory.  While the theory readings are more or less set, I will cut several titles from the literary side to make things more manageable, but here is the list I’ll be cutting from:

• Walter Abish, How German Is It
• Kathy Acker:  Empire of the Senseless
• JG Ballard:  The Atrocity Exhibition
• Christine Brooke-Rose:  Amalgamenon
• William S. Burroughs:  Naked Lunch
• Samuel Delaney:  Dhalgren
• Russell Edson:  The Tunnel
• Mary Gaitskill:  Veronica
• Allen Ginsberg:  Howl and Other Poems
• Jack Kerouac:  On the Road
• Vladimir Nabokov:  Lolita
• Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
• Hubert Selby, Jr.:  The Room
• Jack Spicer:  Selections
• Jean Baudrilard, “Impossible Exchange”
• Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book”
• Judith Butler, “Excitable Speech”
• Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Rhizome” and “One or Several Wolves?”
• Jacques Derrida, “Difference”
• Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression”
• Martin Heidegger, “The Question of Technology”
• Clarice Lispector, “This Sex Which is Not One”
• Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and other selections
• Michel Serres, “The Parasite”

Each student will write one research paper (approximately 20 pp.), give one in-class presentation, and create a website for the class “Transgression” website.

Evaluation: Evaluation will be based on the quality of written work, passion and depth of thought, and class participation.

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