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Spring 2008 Graduate Course Descriptions
Past SemestersEnglish 537: Methods and Materials in TESOLProf. Lynn Stallings Course description available in RB 295. English 604: Technology in English StudiesProf. Jackie
Grutsch Mckinney Stuart Selber claims in his book Multiliteracies for a Digital Age that students ought to have three types of computer literacies: a functional literacy (How do I use this program?), a critical literacy (What are the limits of this technology? Who do those limit affect?) and a rhetorical literacy (How do I make this technology work for me?). He firmly places the teaching of these literacies within the writing classroom, which means that teachers need to have these literacies as well. This class aims to introduce you to different technologies and ways of composing with these technologies for three reasons: so you can enhance your teaching, so you have the know-how in order to teach your students specific programs, and so you can compose in the various media used for scholarly research in composition studies. At the same time that we’re developing these functional literacies, we’ll also examine the technologies critically and rhetorically since you ought to know not only how to use a technology but why and when. English 607: Literary Theory 2Prof. Adam Beach We will take a survey approach through the main theoretical movements in literary theory since 1950, including but not limited to structuralism, post-structuralism/deconstruction, feminism/gender criticism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial analysis. The course is designed to provide knowledge of foundational concepts and movements in recent critical theory. Students will give a presentation, will take a final exam, and will have to complete two 10-12 page papers as well as weekly reading responses. For further information, please email me: arbeach@bsu.edu English 612: Workshop in Fiction WritingProf. Barbara Bogue Enrollment in Fiction Writing Workshop, English 612, will draw from students pursuing the Master's Degree in English Studies: Creative Writing, students pursuing a Master’s Degree in English Studies (general, literature, rhetoric and composition), and master's degree candidates from other departments such as journalism. This workshop in graduate level fiction writing builds upon the students’ previous experiences in the undergraduate fiction writing workshops; class members will consist of those who have had considerable experience in writing fiction and who have a background in literature. The course, which will be structured upon the submissions of original works of fiction and the critiques by class members of those stories, will also include the following: reading of published stories (Best American Short Stories, handouts, and other stories of your individual selection); discussion of, and written responses (annotations) to those stories; a visiting guest writer (funding pending); reading and discussion of essay handouts concerning creative writing in the academy; a video interview or two (if time permits); assigned out-of-class or in-class exercises. Each student will also review one book on the craft of writing fiction. Attendance at readings by visiting writers to the Ball State University campus will also be expected. The focus of the class, however, is the fiction writing of each student. These stories are the heart of the class, and the students’ submissions are the most significant element of the class. The professor's goal is for the class to be a community of writers. All texts required for the course have not been determined at this early date. The following will be included, however.
English 613: Workshop in Poetry WritingProf. Mark Neely This writing workshop will be a long and vigorous discussion about the art of reading and writing poems. About half the class will be devoted to readings, which will include essays on poetics, and collections of poetry by six contemporary poets. We will talk about how authors attempt to unify these collections, and look closely at the dazzling number of formal choices poets make each time they sit down to write. Students will present each book to the class, and help focus discussion on particularly relevant questions. The readings will help inspire the poems written for the class, will inform the way we discuss (workshop) these poems, and offer strategies for revision. Students will turn in ten poems and five reading responses over the course of the semester. The final project will be a chapbook of poems and a poetic manifesto. Readings will include essays on poetics and six volumes of poems. Possible titles include: Maurice Manning, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions; Tracy K. Smith, Duende; Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office; Troy Jollimore, Tom Thompson in Purgatory; Anna Swir, Talking to my Body; and Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell. English 614: Practicum in Literary EditingProf. Mark Neely In this class we will explore the history, theory and practice of literary editing, and talk about how writers and editors work together to produce various kinds of literary texts. Students will also produce several texts of their own, as a hands-on way to learn about this art. We will talk about the various kinds of collaboration involved in producing and distributing works of art. Part of the class will be dedicated to peer-editing student work, and to an exploration of the process texts go through from inception to publication. We will spend some time learning and working with Indesign, Adobe’s layout and design software. The final assignment will be a literary editing project. In the past students have produced anthologies, limited-edition art books, literary magazines, websites, and chapbooks of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The reading list will include: issues of the AWP Writers Chronicle; Another Life by Michael Korda; The Elements of Style by Strunk and White; and The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner.
English 620: Linguistics and the Study of EnglishProf. Elizabeth
Riddle 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. We will investigate together linguistic features of literary style, metaphor, devices used to foreground and background information in written and spoken discourse, ways to handle student problems in grammar and vocabulary use in writing, and dialect issues, among other topics. Students will also have an opportunity to propose topics in their own interest areas for the class to address. In past years a number of students have developed papers for publication and presentation in this course.
English 623: Phonetics and PhonologyProf. Frank
Trechsel Course description available in Robert Bell 295. English 624: Issues in Second Language AcquisitionProf. Megumi Hamada This course outlines second language acquisition (SLA) theories and research and introduces various issues related to second language learning and teaching. The objectives of the course are to become familiar with SLA theories and research and the related issues and to learn the skills that are necessary to understand and conduct SLA research. English 625: PhonologyProf. Frank
Trechsel Course description available in Robert Bell 295. English 626: Morphology and SyntaxProf. Frank
Trechsel Course description available in Robert Bell 295. English 628: Language and CultureProf. Carolyn MacKay This course is a graduate-level introduction to language and culture, focusing on language ideology, linguistic relativity, language maintenance and death, ethnography of communication, ethnopoetics, the interaction of culture and rhetorical structure, language contact and code switching. The course will be conducted as a seminar; therefore, active participation in class discussions is required. English 629: Proseminar in Applied LinguisticsProf. Carolyn MacKay Bilingualism and Language ContactLanguage contact is the norm, not the exception, in communities around the world. The most common result of language contact is change in some or all of the languages. We will examine the various linguistic results of language contact, ranging from stable/unstable bilingualism, code-switching and contact-induced language change to extreme language mixing. Language contact has resulted in the creation of pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages but has also resulted in language death. We will examine how various kinds of bilingualism arise and examine how different speech communities have adapted to language contact. The class will be conducted as a seminar with particular focus given to the topics of interest to the students. English 630: Contrastive AnalysisProf. Elizabeth
Riddle A comparison of lexical, syntactic, pragmatic (including politeness issues and cross-cultural communication) and discourse 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. Topics in linguistic universals and typology will also be covered. Students will become familiar with important properties of a wide variety of languages. Prior knowledge of a foreign language is not necessary. English 647: African American LiteratureProf. Robert
Nowatzki The Black Atlantic in African American LiteratureThe title of this course borrows the title of Paul Gilroy’s 1993 book, which argues that the identity and consciousness of persons of African descent are not rooted in one geographical location. Rather, their identity and consciousness is shaped by the frequent crossings, both involuntary and voluntary, over the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, the West Indies, and the American continents. This course explores how such hybrid black identities are revealed in the novels, poetry, memoirs, and slave narratives of persons of African descent. Each student will be required to write a 20-25 page research paper (30%), a 4-6 page book review (15%), and one-page informal responses for each week of assigned reading (combined 15%). In addition, each student will give two 15-20 minute presentations (10% each), and will participate in each week's discussion (20%). Tentative reading list: Primary Texts:
Secondary Texts:
English 651: Studies in the NovelProf. Robert Habich In this course we will read a generous selection of novels from the American nineteenth century, formative years when narrative, nationality, and the history of publishing were bound up in complicated ways. Some of those novels will be less-read texts by often-read authors (for instance, Melville’s Typee, Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court); some will be novels by authors you may have heard of but never read (for example, Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs); some might be novels and authors unfamiliar to you (Frank Webb’s The Garies and their Friends and John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty). Our goals for the class, besides becoming familiar with a rich selection of long narratives, will be to address contextual questions like the following:
Course requirements: reading 10 or more novels, including those listed above; several oral reports; midterm and final exams; a short (10-page) revision of one of the oral reports, prepared for delivery as a conference presentation. Questions? Please contact me at rhabich@bsu.edu.
English 657: Post-Colonial StudiesProf. Lauren Onkey This course will survey some of the key themes and literary movements that have emerged in the postcolonial world. We will study the development of literatures in English from Nigeria, the Caribbean, Ireland, and India; the systems of academic classification that have labeled this literature, at different times, “commonwealth,” “new,” “world,” and “postcolonial”; and survey major debates in postcolonial theory since 1945, beginning with the work of Frantz Fanon. I have not yet finalized the reading list, but we will be reading Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Brian Friel, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, Mahasweta Devi, and David Dabydeen, among several others. Contact me at lonkey@bsu.edu if you have questions.
English 662: Renaissance and 17th Century StudiesProf. William
Stockton The Time of the RenaissanceThis class takes as its starting point recent challenges to the traditional narrative of literary history that places the Renaissance between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment in the forward march towards modernity. Can such a teleological view of history do justice to the ways in which Renaissance writers situate themselves in time? To what extent are writers in the Renaissance participants in both medieval and (post)modern conversations? And what relationship does Renaissance literature have to time and space; that is, how does the space of this literature, and the aesthetic more broadly, facilitate certain time warps? Appropriately enough, our survey will not be chronological. We will begin with a few weeks on utopian literatures, including Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World; and we will devote the last four weeks to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In between, we will read poetry by Andrew Marvell, Ben Jonson, and John Donne; Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller; Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and “Hero and Leander”; and selections from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Critics and theorists who will provide context for these readings include Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Zizek. Course requirements include weekly response notes and a final paper.
English 668: Early Twentieth-Century British LiteratureProf. Patrick
Collier Modernism and its Critics“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” - Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man “Imaginative work... is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.... But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering, human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own What is the connection between “imaginative work” and the world around it? Critics and theorists of modernism—the experimental movement in the arts that has dominated literary histories of the early twentieth century—have come up with widely diverse answers to that question. Modernist literature entered the canon as the darling of New Criticism—a methodology militantly opposed to biographical, political, and contextual analysis. In the 1980s, the New Critical version of modernism became the rhetorical enemy of post-modernist and other political critics, who described it as elitist and politically retrograde. Thanks to a series of critical paradigms that explicitly reject New Critical close reading in favor of political and contextual reading, modernism has enjoyed a resurgence of scholarly interest since the late 1990s. This course will briefly revisit these earlier critical moments before surveying early twentieth-century British literature through what I take to be the most fruitful, current critical approaches, those that:
Primary texts will include Joyce’s Ulysses, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves; D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, poetry by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and the Georgian and World War I poets, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Rose Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances, Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, and Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. We will also read critical articles and sections of recent books by John Marx, Rebecca Walkowitz, Mark Wollaeger, and others.
English 697: Contemporary RhetoricProf. Linda Hanson For more than a century, rhetoric as an academic discipline has been defined and marked by institutional* decisions that, for at least half of that time, sidelined rhetorical inquiry in English departments. Twentieth-century disciplinary boundaries, however, have proven inadequate to contain the human drive to understand and theorize our use of language to construct meaning and communicate with others. This course will examine the rich course of rhetorical inquiry through the 20th century as theorists engage the philosophical tradition, hermeneutics, linguistics, psychology, and communication to forge a rhetorical imperative for the 21st century. *Includes both degree granting institutions and professional organizations. **Yes, I’m betraying my epistemological bias. REQUIRED TEXTS
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