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Spring 2006 Graduate Course Descriptions
Prof. Christopher Ely
Ref# 68822
T 4:00 - 6:40 The
course is designed to 1) investigate methods and techniques for teaching
reading in a second language, 2) investigate methods and techniques for
teaching writing in a second language; 3) provide an introduction to
research and theory regarding ESOL reading and writing
instruction/learning; 4) provide an opportunity to practice teaching
ESL/EFL reading and writing in a focused and supportive environment; 5)
provide a forum for the consideration of the role of student learning
strategies in second language reading and writing. Readings: Readings are selected from both research-oriented and
pedagogically-oriented articles and books.
Assignments: Students prepare weekly language lessons based
on the material discussed the previous week. These are taught in small
class micro-teaching settings. Reading notes are due each week. Projects
for the course can be chosen from: analytical critiques of grammar and
oral communication texts; integrated curricular plans for grammar and
speaking; producing materials for teaching ESOL grammar and speaking.
Tentative topics: Background issues in ESOL reading;
vocabulary in reading and writing (lexical groupings/morphology/phrasal
verbs/vocabulary learning); dictionaries in ESOL instruction and
individual learning; discourse analysis for reading processing;
bottom-up/rapid reading; process writing; logical organization;
multi-modal organization; academic writing for ESOL (summarizing,
paraphrasing, top-down processing); reacting to students’ writing for
placement and course instruction. Back to top
English 604: Technology in English Studies
Prof. Jackie Grutsch
McKinney
Ref# 70656
R 6:30 - 9:10 p.m.
As technologies change, so do classrooms. Whereas once it was
innovative to wheel in an overhead projector, now many college
classrooms are equipped with various technologies: TVs, DVD players,
VCRs, computers, and data projectors. The purpose of English 604 is to
prepare students to work with the variety of technologies available to
teachers of English. Thus, it’s a class which aims to show students how
to effectively teach with technology and why. In addition, this section
will contain an emphasis on document and web design.
Assignments will include a book review, a review essay, website, and
one major project.
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English 605: Teaching in English Studies (Creative
Writing)
Prof. Jill Christman
Ref# 76654
W 9:00-11:40 a.m.
This course is open to all graduate students in English Studies who
wish to examine the pedagogical issues specific to the teaching of
creative writing at the college level, with a focus on both theory and
practice. Readings will explore the theoretical, ethical, historical,
and practical and may include The Practice of Poetry: Writing
Exercises from Poets Who Teach. (eds. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell),
Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and
Pedagogy (eds. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom), The Triggering
Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry Writing (Richard Hugo),
Beyond the Writers’ Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction
(Carol Bly), as well as pedagogy papers published annually by the
Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and essays on
electronic reserve.
The course will include lectures on the fundamentals of teaching
everything from a multi-genre introductory course in creative writing to
an advanced writing workshop in a specific genre. Assignments will give
students the opportunity to 1) articulate their own teaching
philosophies in a short essay, 2) develop lessons in creative writing
via several class presentations, 3) practice evaluating creative
writing, 4) teach a short unit in a Ball State undergraduate creative
writing classroom (and reflect on that experience with your classmates),
and 5) produce a portfolio of teaching materials (including syllabi,
course policies, writing exercises, and assignments).
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Prof. Deborah M. Mix
Ref# 70664
M 6:30 - 9:10 p.m.
This course is designed to provide an overview of the major movements
in literary theory of the twentieth century as well as to offer an
opportunity to examine the work of major theorists.
Movements covered will include:
- Formalism & New Criticism—text-centered approaches
- Structuralism—approaches focusing on underlying textual
structures
- Psychoanalytic Criticism—approaches stemming from theories of
the authorial unconscious
- Marxist Criticism—approaches concentrating on class struggle and
historical dialectics
- Poststructuralism & Deconstruction—approaches examining the
processes of meaning
- Feminist Criticism—approaches emphasizing the place of female
identity and experience in literary studies
- Gay & Lesbian Criticism & Queer Theory—approaches considering
the place of sexual orientation and gender trouble in literary
studies
- New Historicism—approaches exploring the ways literature is
shaped by our understanding of history
- Postcolonial Criticism—approaches rooted in national, cultural,
and ethnic identities
- Cultural Criticism—approaches seeking to understand how we might
read a variety of texts (literary and otherwise)
We’ll approach these movements through the work of some of the key
figures in contemporary literary criticism, including Homi Bhabha,
Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Luce Irigaray, Frederic Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Zizak, and others.
The reading for this course will be drawn primarily from an anthology
(either the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism or Literary
Theory: An Anthology), and students will be required to read and
respond to at least one book-length work by a literary theorist. While
we will spend some time “applying” theoretical readings to literary
texts, we’ll concentrate primarily on the theoretical texts as texts
themselves.
Required coursework will include a book review, in-class
presentation, and seminar paper. Class participation will be central to
the course as well.
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English 611: Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Prof. Jill Christman
Ref# 68830
TR 2:00-3:15 p.m.
This is a creative nonfiction writing workshop that will focus on the
shaping of a range of personal narratives and the navigation of those
slippery spaces between remembering and forgetting, truth and invention,
experience and research. In order to write well, we must read, and so we
will split our time between workshops of student work and the discussion
of published texts. Our reading list will be diverse in terms of both
subject and form, and may include—memoirs of childhood/family (John
Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, Joy Castro’s The Truth
Book), fragmented memoirs (Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the
Family, Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities), memoirs in essays
(Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Abigail Thomas’s
Safekeeping), memoirs on a subject or event (Gretel Ehrlich’s A
Match to the Heart, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals),
and/or works of literary journalism in which the author’s life
intersects with the subject (Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family,
Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man).
We’ll read greedily with a writer’s attention to style and technique
as we get in the practice of asking the questions that are essential in
the crafting of real-life material: How much do we trust the narrator
and why do we care? How do we decide what to put in and what to leave
out? What do we consider risky either personally or technically? How is
memory constructed on the page and how does forgetting fit in? What’s
the difference between invention and lying? What responsibility do we
have to history? How does solid research and interviewing contribute to
our construction of nonfiction narratives? How do our expectations as
readers change when we’re told something is nonfiction? How do our
obligations as writers change? And so on. My hope is that when we
apprentice ourselves to the books on our reading list, we will practice
the habit of art, honing our technical skills while we locate the
patterns in our lives and the world that have something to say about the
human condition. Creative assignments will include regular short writing
assignments and one long essay (20-30 pp)—all of which will be revised.
Other requirements will include: typed reading responses of published
works and typed critiques for all workshopped material (1-2 pp).
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English 613: Poetry Writing Workshop
Prof. Mark Neely
Ref# 76948
W 6:30 - 9:10 p.m.
About half the class will be devoted to discussion of
readings, including six collections of poems by contemporary poets. We
will talk about how the authors attempt to unify these collections, and
look closely at the dazzling number of formal choices poets make in
their work. Groups of students will present each book to the class, and
help focus discussion on relevant questions. The readings will help
inspire the poems written for the class, inform the way we discuss your
poems, and offer strategies for revision. You will turn in one poem per
week, reading responses, and a portfolio of poems at the end of the
semester.
Readings will include essays on poetics and six volumes
of poems. Possible texts include: Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me, Lyrae
Van Clief-Stefanon’s Black Swan, Tim Earley’s Boondoggle,
Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual, Barbara Hamby’s
Babble, D.A. Powell’s Cocktail, Cate Marvin’s World’s
Tallest Disaster, and Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts.
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English 620: Linguistics and the Study of English
Prof. Elizabeth Riddle
Ref# 77375
M 9:00 - 11:40 a.m.
A critical study of aspects of the structure and use of English and
of social issues of language use in the United States which are
important for specialists in English literature, general English, and
composition and rhetoric.
Goals:
- Develop a basic understanding of the nature of human language.
- Develop greater understanding of some of the major features of
the structure of English, including their functions in discourse.
- Learn about some of the ways in which some social and regional
varieties of American English differ.
- Develop a critical understanding of some social issues of
language use in the United States.
- Develop familiarity with some important literature on English
grammar, including the major reference grammars, as both teaching
and research resources.
- Develop some basic skills in linguistic analysis.
Readings: Articles and book chapters.
Requirements: These will include class participation, written
homework, and one original paper of about 15 typewritten pages.
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Prof. Herb Stahlke
Ref# 58274
MW 12:00 - 1:15
Linguistic Phonetics deals with the sounds of English and the full
range of speech sounds found in the languages of the world. The first
eight weeks are devoted to a detailed analysis and description of the
sounds of English and how they affect each other in speech. Attention is
given to consonant and vowel contrasts involving articulatory strength
and to developing related skills in narrow transcription. The remainder
of the course surveys the sounds of the languages of the world,
investigating the full range of phonetic contrasts used in natural
language and their production and transcription. Tasks include
transcription quizzes, a production quiz, and three transcription
projects of increasing detail and complexity. Texts include Peter
Ladefoged’s A Course in Phonetics and Linda Shockey’s Sound
Patterns of Spoken English.
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English 624: Second Language Acquisition
Prof. Mary Theresa Seig
Ref# 58290
TR 9:30 - 10:45 a.m.
In this course, students will examine a variety of issues related to
additional language acquisition (acquisition of a language once you are
already a speaker of a first language). Students will examine various
internal and external factors which affect the speed and success of that
second language acquisition. Individual differences in learners will be
discussed in relation to the classroom and various other contexts.
Students will analyze data from second language learners and, using that
data, learn to identify error severity, patterns in the discourse, and
design ways to overcome those errors in a classroom setting.
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Prof. Frank
Trechsel
Ref# 58290
TR 12:30 - 1:45
Course description available in RB 295.
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Prof. Carolyn MacKay
Ref# 58304
R 2:00 - 4:40
This course is a graduate-level introduction to language
and culture, focusing on ethnography of communication, language
ideology, language maintenance and death, the interaction of culture and
rhetorical structure, and code switching and other contact language
phenomena. We will also discuss linguistic relativity and how the
analysis of language structures relates to the analysis of other aspects
of culture.
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Prof. Elizabeth
Riddle
Ref# 77384
W 9:00 - 11:40 a.m.
A comparison of lexical, grammatical, discourse, and pragmatic
characteristics of a variety of languages with those of English as
relevant to the teaching of English as a second/foreign language and
second language acquisition.
Goals:
- To familiarize students with selected characteristics of a wide
variety of languages in contrast to English, with language
universals, and with linguistic typology.
- To develop students’ analytical, research, and academic writing
skills.
Required Readings: Book chapters and journal articles
Course Requirements:
- Class participation and homework. 20% This includes preparing
the readings for class discussion, participation in class
discussion, and occasional written homework assignments.
- 2 take-home exams. 20% each
- 1 original paper (approx. 15 pages) contrasting English and one
or more other languages in any area chosen from among the following:
semantics, pragmatics, syntax, universals/typology, or
rhetoric/discourse: (40%)
1 page abstract (proposal) for the paper to be submitted before
writing the paper for approval of the topic and approach.
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English 642: Literature of the
American Renaissance
Prof. Robert Habich
Ref# 75984
T 9:00 - 11:40 a.m.
Romanticism in American literature during the middle
decades of the nineteenth century was dialog rather than dogma, a series
of recurring questions rather than a static set of answers. This course
will examine a variety of voices and literary strategies addressing a
central romantic issue, the integrity of the self: the philosophical
confidence of Emerson and Thoreau, the dramatized skepticism of Poe and
Hawthorne, the political qualifications of Douglass, Jacobs, and Fuller,
the democratization of Melville, Whitman, and the southwestern
humorists, and the reassessments of Dickinson, Davis, and Phelps.
Recent scholarship on Romanticism has challenged--all
but dispelled--the long-held belief that Romantic authors and texts were
defined by their opposition to the world at large. We will therefore
have an additional focus in the class: the ways in which Romantic
authors and texts are better understood in their biographical, cultural,
social, and intellectual contexts.
In addition to completing all readings, attending all
meetings, and participating actively as a citizen of the class, each
student will be asked to complete the following graded assignments:
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mid-term and final examinations (15% each of final
grade),
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a brief report to the class on recent scholarship
and critical trends on one of our authors (15%),
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a critical review of a recent or "classic" study of
American Romanticism, reported to the class (15%), and
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a seminar project of 8-10 pages that applies some
extra-textual material to an understanding of one of our texts
(40%).
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ENG 650: Remembering the Holocaust
Prof. Frank Felsenstein
Ref# 75968
TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Consultation Times: TR 11:00- 12:00 (RB 254)
‘Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to
forget, is a necessary condition for our existence’ (Sholem Asch, The
Nazarene, 1939)
‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’
(Psalms, 137.5)
This Graduate Seminar will examine the unsettling impulse to
promulgate and remember the Holocaust as for many the single most
consequential and defining experience of the twentieth century.
More than sixty years after, should the Holocaust still have
relevance to those growing up at the advent of the new Millennium? When
those that witnessed it are no more, will there be an obligation to
preserve and make iconic the memory of such an unspeakable crime against
humanity? What, if anything, should we remember? What should be learned?
Is it not best to forget -- and forgive?
The seminar will investigate the disparity between the comparative
silence in the years immediately after World War 2 and the cultural
promotion of the atrocities and sufferings of the Nazi era in recent
times (called by some the “Americanization of the Holocaust”). It will
also explore the question of “authenticating” the trauma of the
Holocaust, and why there are many who describe themselves as second or
third generation survivors. We shall try to consider the continuing
influence of the Holocaust on religious belief (where was God?), on
education (should teaching the Holocaust and Genocide studies be
mandated in schools and colleges?), on Jewish and Christian relations,
and more broadly, on the cultural imagination.
Particular aspects that will be given prominence are the
documentation of the Holocaust by witnesses through letters, diaries,
and memoirs, and its literary and cinematic representations. Although
this does not purport to be a sequential study of the history of the
Nazi era, students will be encouraged to keep a course journal in which
they should chart the progression of their thinking about the Holocaust
and its significance.
In thinking about whether you wish to enroll, please note that, in
more than one sense, this will be a highly INTENSIVE seminar.
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English 651: Studies in the Novel (Hideous
Progeny: The Children of the Gothic)
Prof. Joyce Huff
Ref# 70673
MW 5:00 - 6:15 p.m.
Subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams,
moans, bloody hands, ghosts, and graveyards: these, according to the
editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, are some of the
standard motifs of the Gothic novels that flourished in Britain in the
late eighteenth century. Although the Gothic form arose in response to
specific cultural and historical pressures in the eighteenth century,
its influence was felt long after the first wave of Gothic fiction ended
in the 1830’s. Echoes and permutations of the Gothic have continually
resurfaced in British and American fiction down to the present day. In
this course, we will look at theories of the novel and debate the place
that Gothicism occupies within those theories. We will theorize the
Gothic itself and explore the uses to which Gothic motifs and themes
were put and the cultural work that they performed in nineteenth-century
Britain. And we will chill our blood in reading a selection of
Gothic-inspired novels of the nineteenth century.
Although I plan to begin with a classic 18th-century example and end
by looking at a current manifestation of the genre, we will focus
primarily on 19th- century British novels and novellas. Possible works
for study include: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen,
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Carmilla by John Sheridan
LeFanu, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins, Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dracula
by Bram Stoker, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
There will also be critical readings on the novel and on the Gothic form
on reserve. Course requirements will include short papers, a seminar
paper, presentations and participation in discussion, both in class and
on-line.
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English 652: Studies in Poetry
(Poetry in the Age of Manifestos)
Prof. Rai Peterson
Ref# 68873
TR 5:00 - 6:15 p.m.
The period between the two World Wars was a particularly
exciting one in American poetry. Embracing, at times, William Carlos
Williams’ dictum, “no ideas but in things” and Ezra Pound’s injunction
to “make it new,” a tangled community of poets created an unparalleled
intertextuality to invent and practice new poetic theories. Such
manifestos and ideologies as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism,
Cubism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and Eugene Jolas’ “Revolution of
the Word Proclamation” shaped and described their work. It is a period
of intense collaboration and competition, mostly played out in Paris and
London but always with an eye to the American reading and publishing
audiences. This course will focus on modernist poets including Pound,
T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Amy Lowell, H.D., Kay Boyle, Gertrude Stein,
Wallace Stevens, and Williams. Small presses and magazines flourished
during this period, each with its own (and often-changing) artistic and
editorial theories. We will examine, not only poems, but the articulated
theories of poetry set down in small press endeavors such as The
Egoist, The Little Review, Transition, Poetry,
The English Review, Contact Editions, Hours Press, Plain
Editions, and Black Sun Press. This course offers us the opportunity to
study these poets in the context of their own milieu, a period in
American literary history that is rich, inspiring, and occasionally mad.
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English 655: Gender Studies: Gender, Identity, and
Performance
Prof. Kecia McBride
Ref# 76476
T 6:30 - 9:10 p.m.
When Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble first appeared in 1989, it
revolutionized the ways in which we thought about the social
construction of gender as “performance.” In this course we will begin by
returning to Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Butler’s
Gender Trouble to lay the critical groundwork for an examination of
more recent critical exploration in terms of gender and performance (in
all senses of the word). We will explore twentieth century
representations of gender in (literal) performance contexts (theater,
film, fiction) and also in other spaces of lived performance (memoir,
sports, critical writings). Primary texts will include drama (possible
texts: Maria Irene Fornes, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Tina Howe),
fiction (possible texts: to be determined), film (possible texts:
Maziyeh Mashkini, Jennie Livingston, Johnathan Caoette, Julie Dash), and
memoir (possible texts: Adrienne Rich, Azar Nafisi, Nancy Miller,
Deborah McDowell, Meena Alexander, Audre Lorde). We will discuss
contemporary feminist filmmaking and theatrical practices,
cross-dressing and drag, the social constructions of masculinity and
femininity, and the critical intersections of race, sexuality, class,
and the body. Course requirements: a seminar paper; weekly writing
responses; two reports; active class participation. Weekly assignments
may include both critical and creative readings, as well as film
screenings. Please email me at
kdmcbride@bsu.edu for more information.
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English 664: A Consuming Empire in Restoration and
Eighteenth-Century Literature
Prof. Adam R. Beach
Ref# 77154
M 2:00 - 4:40
The eighteenth century witnessed the full development of the “first”
British empire, an empire primarily driven by the desire for luxury
items. Chocolate, tea, coffee, tobacco, furs, Indian textiles and, above
all, sugar produced by African slaves in the English West-Indies
(Barbados, Jamaica and Bermuda) were the main products of the English
trade networks and imperial ventures. Yet, another important by-product
of imperial activity was the literature of empire, a domestically
produced commodity that helped to shape the ways in which the English
nation imagined itself. This class will investigate the role that
fiction played in promoting what Laura Brown calls “the ends of empire,”
while, at the same time, paying close attention to the ways that
literary texts and other writings betrayed contemporary suspicions of
imperial activities or outrightly condemned them. By contrasting
adventure tales, dramatic productions, captivity narratives, satirical
poems, and works by former African slaves, we will come to a closer
understanding of the conflicting ways that writers and readers consumed
the English empire.
Likely works will include:
- Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works.
- Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil
of Slavery.
- Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
- Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other
Writings.
- English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and
Slavery in the New World, ed. Frank Felsenstein
- English slave narratives in the volume, Piracy, Slavery, and
Redemption, ed. Daniel Vitkus.
- Neville, Henry, The Isle of Pines
- Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels
- Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” and “Windsor Forest.”
Students will be expected to complete weekly responses, several
presentations, and a 20 pg. seminar paper. Please email me with
questions: arbeach@bsu.edu
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English 696: Nineteenth-Century
Rhetoric
Prof. Linda Hanson
TR 5:00 - 6:15
Cancelled for Spring 2006.
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English 697: Contemporary Rhetoric
Prof. Carole Clark
Papper
Ref# 68881
W 2:00 - 4:40
Course description available in RB 295.
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English 725: Topics in Phonological
Theory
Prof. Frank
Trechsel
Ref# 58389
MW 2:00 - 3:15
Course description available in RB 295.
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