Combined Graduate Course Descriptions, Fall 2017

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH COMBINED GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS, FALL 2017

CREATIVE WRITING

ENGL 501 ……………………………………….…………………………...... …...Ander Monson W 12:30-3:00 PM The graduate workshop in nonfiction traffics in writing that explores the space between world and self, the objective and subjective. It’s difficult to care much about one without the other, so nearly all work that matters invokes tensions between them. Our principal job will be to consider and assess your own work-in-progress and to harness your energies to make this work more focused and productive, pleasurable, and penetrating. Another of our semester-long tasks will be to consider the world in which we work and how it might power (or constrain) or own work. I hope also to be able to start up some projects that you may not currently be considering. This may entail redirecting some of your current writing practices or projects and perhaps retooling them completely. This is all to say that I consider the workshop a space for play, where we bring things we would like to try out. Mostly we’re going to be talking about your own written (to some extent—visuals are okay, as long as your projects use language as their main engine) projects this semester and discussing them as a way not just of improving or expanding the projects under discussion but talking about what it is we do. That is, when we’re workshopping essay X, we’re really talking about craft question Y in your unfinished essay Z (you just can’t really see it easily by looking directly at Z; often it is easier to see how we might better solve writing problems of our own by looking at similar or related problems in others’ work). I will also give you a series of open-ended, process-oriented writing or research assignments, roughly once every 2-3 weeks. These are required, and are designed for you to either start something new or reorient something ongoing.

ENGL 595A-004...... Ander Monson F 10:00-10:50 AM Colloquium

ENGL 596H-001…………………………………………...... Fenton Johnson T 12:30-3:00 PM The Interior Journey (Multi-genre craft seminar with emphasis on creative nonfiction)

In a world beset by global warming, refugees fleeing war, economic, and environmental upheaval, the vast and growing gap between the rich and the poor, the growth of the police state and the prison economy, the reassertion of racism, sexism, homophobia, the rekindling of

1 religious and class wars we thought we could address through education and progressive legislation, the worldwide promotion of greed at the expense of compassion, the sometimes open hostility between science and religion—at this time of crisis, why study solitude and silence? Because these problems are symptoms, not causes. Because healthy, sustainable relationships to each other and the planet require examining and developing our interior lives. Because the most challenging journey is not exterior but interior. Because science and technology, so successful at filling our world with noise and speed, themselves thrive in silence and slow study. Because the difference between knowledge unaided and knowledge tempered by wisdom is the difference between war and diplomacy, between suffering and contentment, between the gun and the pen. (Or screen.) This course will look at creative nonfiction and fiction (with poetry making guest appearances) in the rich mode of interior journey: spiritual, philosophical, metaphorical. Students will be encouraged to work on using reading and writing as a means to shaping and interacting with their particular understanding of the great existential questions, and to continue and develop reading and writing as lifelong disciplines to shape our encounters with the planet, with each other, with ourselves.

As a literary form, the memoir began with an interior journey – St. Augustine’s Confessions, with which we will open the course. We’ll then travel through history, reading excerpts from the following reading list. This is a craft course, so our emphasis will consistently be on how we can apply lessons from the craft of these writers to our own work. At the level of the sentence or line, my goal is that students would enrich their understanding and practice of metaphors of grace, beauty, spirit. At a thematic level, I hope that students would develop and deepen their understanding of the inseparability, for the dedicated writer, of life and literature.

Students will be asked to write short response papers to the weekly readings. I am also considering how to incorporate an element of practice, that may involve visiting teachers from various contemplative traditions, e.g., Jewish, Native, Sufi, Christian, Buddhist, with teachers from Zen and Vipassana traditions; this last is the practice adopted by many agnostics and most atheists.

Candidates for the reading list:

Historical: Augustine, Athanasius, Macrina, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, Sor Juana Ines, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Bashō, Walt Whitman, Rumi, Meera Bai, Emily Dickinson, William James, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.H. Auden. Twentieth / Twenty-first centuries: Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, bell hooks (Buddhist writings), W.S. Merwin, Wendell Berry, James Galway, Jane Hirshfield, Malcolm X, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dalai Lama, Norman Fischer, Shohaku Okamura, Abraham Heschel, Nora Gallagher, Jim Crace, Richard Rodriguez.

ENGL 596H-002 ……………………………………………………...... ……………Susan Briante M 9:30 AM-12:00 PM Studies in Documentary Arts

2 In 1936, noting a turn toward the documentary in a variety of arts, Wallace Stevens explained the Depression had focused attention "in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact." At a time of economic crisis and drone strikes, of Wikileaks and reality TV, we may be experiencing another such turn. Over the course of the semester, we will read hybrid documentary work and criticism. Despite its relationship to "objectivity" we will consider how aspects of documentary or investigative thinking can impact even the most personal projects. Then we will experiment with a variety of documentary approaches. As a cross genre class, our studies will not only help to inspire new documentary-based projects but demonstrate how documentary approaches can stimulate work already in progress.

ENGL 596H-003………………………………...... …………..Aurelie Sheehan M 9:30 AM-12:00 PM The Art of the Short Novel

In this seminar, we’ll study a number of short novels, investigating structure, use of language, manipulation of time, and strategies for narrative engagement. We’ll identify and articulate each novel’s particular character. Additionally, we’ll use the seminar as a workshop for drafting short novels of our own. The class will require generation of a significant amount of creative material (over a hundred pages). The reading list is still under construction. Three likely candidates are: Train Dreams/Denis Johnson, The Hour of the Star/Clarice Lispector, and Pedro Paramo/Juan Rulfo.

ENGL 604-001 …………………………………….……………………...…….....Julie Iromuanya W 9:00-11:30 AM

This graduate level fiction-writing workshop will be concerned primarily with reading your writing in the interest of helping you to develop your work and refine your craft as a writer. As such we will be invested in both mining your draft for its possibilities and cultivating an insight into your aesthetic proclivities and sensibilities as a writer-artist. To inform this endeavor, our secondary goal of the course will be to explore the ways your work is (or can be) in conversation with broader literary tradition(s). We will begin by considering influential literary works and focusing on how aesthetics shape the writer at work. During the second half of the term, we will consider the ways we counter or destabilize traditions. At the end of term, you will be asked to write a geography of your aesthetics, a statement that maps the key ways that your work intervenes in the literary landscape.

ENGL 609- 001 ……………………………………….…………….……………Farid Matuk T 4:00-6:30 PM

3 This is a collaborative learning course. Our role is to fill in gaps in one another’s critical and literary vocabularies, in one another’s sense of how poems can take shape and do work, and in one another’s sense of the cultures across which we live and write. We seek to fill these gaps not only to develop our individual writing practices but also to create a shared exploratory conversation of substance and urgency. Together we will decide on a reading list that may range across languages of origin, across time periods, and across styles. Our time together may include whole and small group critiques, as well as generative writing exercises done in and out of class. Students may choose to offer for critique relatively small packets of single poems or longer sequences that form significant portions of their thesis projects.

4 ENGLISH APPLIED LINGUISTICS

ENGL/SLAT 506...... Shelley Staples MODERN ENGLISH GRAMMAR FOR TESL W 3:30-6:00 PM

This course covers basic concepts in English grammar and linguistics for teachers of English as a global language, and is useful for students of TESL, English, and Linguistics. The first part of the course, grounded in data-driven usage examples, introduces the basics of linguistics by examining English phonology, lexico-grammar, and socio-pragmatics from both structural and functional perspectives. The second part of the course, grounded in problem-based pedagogical examples, introduces the pedagogy of English pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse.

ENGL 555-001...... Hayriye Kayi-Aydar INTRODUCTION TO TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE T 3:30-6:00 PM

This course will provide a general overview of the TESOL profession covering prominent theories, methodologies, and procedures influencing the field. Throughout the semester, students will engage in a range of theoretical, pedagogical, and reflective activities to inform their instructional practices. They will also become familiar with diverse educational contexts in which English is taught and learned as well as standards, materials, methods, and assessment tools used in such settings.

ENGL/SLAT 589...... Jon Reinhardt INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES IN L2 TEACHING AND LEARNING Th 3:30-6:00 PM

This course explores theory, practice, and pedagogical application of the latest Internet and computer technologies in second/foreign language education, including synchronous and asynchronous chat, blog, wiki/collaborative docs, audio (podcasting), video, virtual world/digital gaming, mobile/handheld computing, and social media technologies, in view of CALL (computer-assisted language learning), CMC (computer-mediated communication), SLA/D (second language acquisition and development), and literacy/ies research.

5 ENGL/SLAT 596J...... Shelley Staples SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RESEARCH T 12:30-3:00 PM

This course is designed to explore the nature of research in SLA and to help situate students theoretically and methodologically in this research domain. The focus is on classroom-oriented research in various educational settings, which investigates both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research and processes of conducting research, from identifying problems, formulating research questions, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data, to writing up research for presentation and publication.

ENGL 596O-001...... Dwight Aktinson INTRO TO APPLIED LINGUISTICS Th 6:00-8:30 PM

Applied linguistics is the main theoretical and research base for TESOL and second/foreign language teaching. It is also an interdisciplinary field with strong influences from psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, and cognitive science. This course will provide a wide-ranging view of applied linguistics, from some of its primary theoretical assumptions to some of its primary research methods to some of its primary sub-areas of inquiry.

ENGL 596O-002...... Christine Tardy GENRE THEORY AND PEDAGOGY Th 12:30-3:00 PM

Although the term genre is often associated with literary forms, its use has expanded to texts ranging from academic research articles to political blog posts. Applied linguists, rhetoricians, and language and writing teachers have increasingly turned to genre as an important concept in understanding the relatively stable (or “stabilized-for-now”) texts that occur in response to recurring situations—texts that are often essential for participating in academic and professional environments. In this course, we will explore contemporary genre theory and pedagogy, including questions such as how genres are created and changed over time, how genres function within communities, and the processes of learning to use genres. We will draw upon various disciplinary perspectives from applied linguistics, rhetoric and composition, and education to study:  contemporary genre theory, including discussions of multimodal genres and intertextual genre relations  research methods for studying genres and the communities in which they are used

6  research into how genres are learned in classrooms and other environments  approaches to facilitating genre learning and awareness in language and writing classrooms Students will complete an individual project exploring their own questions about genre theory and/or pedagogy.

ENGL 620...... Dwight Atkinson TESOL & CULTURE T 5:00-7:30 PM

"Culture" is a central yet underexamined concept in the field of TESOL. It has even been called “the fifth skill” after listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This course will examine the culture concept carefully and critically, both from general/theoretical and specific/practical perspectives. Having taken this course, students should be able to generate researchable topics in the area of TESOL/second language teaching and culture, as well as have a clearer sense of the perils, possibilities, and means of working with cultural matters in and beyond the TESOL/second language classroom.

7 LITERATURE

ENGL/AIS/MAS 524-001...... Jennifer Jenkins STUDIES IN SOUTHWEST LITERATUREs: SPACE, PLACE AND IDENTITY Th 4:00-6:30 PM

We will explore the greater US Southwest/Borderlands as image, motif, and location in oral narrative and texts, in still and moving images, and in material culture from 1000 BCE to the present. We will examine how understandings of place shape identity through depictions of the land; social and cultural deserts and borders; boom/bust cycles; the mirage of the “land of enchantment;” and representations of indigenous and insurgent cultures. The class will take advantage of the rich array of primary sources available in local archaeological and historical sites, archives, and repositories, and explore literary geography as both concept and digital expression. Literary texts may include works by Silko, Sekaquaptewa, Azuela, Fontes, Castillo, Nichols, McCarthy, Sherwood, Traven, Abbey, Bird, Austin, and others. Films will be drawn from across genres and periods, including Westerns, Noir, documentary, and cross-cultural U.S- Mexico adaptations. Students will choose a research topic for the semester in consultation with me. Writing requirements: abstract; research bibliography; lit review; all leading to a conference presentation or journal article draft.

ENGL 531-001...... Frederick Kiefer SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER Th 6:30-9:00 PM

Ann Jennalie Cook, former head of the Shakespeare Association of America, has written that the most significant development over the past fifty years has been the study of Shakespeare in performance. She said: “Three distinct areas of interest have emerged: theatrical conditions during Shakespeare’s lifetime, the history of Shakespearean performance to the present day, and critical interaction with contemporary professionals in the theater.” A stroll across the mall to our library will reveal shelves and shelves of books on these topics, which have intersected scholarship that deals with the editing of Shakespeare’s plays. A generation ago editors sought to reproduce the scripts as they left Shakespeare’s desk. No one aspires to do that today. Instead, editors seek to produce new editions that capture the plays when they were being performed in Shakespeare’s theater. This change acknowledges the fact that a text based on performance is infinitely superior to one based on a theoretical reconstruction of Shakespeare’s draft. This change also acknowledges that play production is a collective activity, involving directors, actors, costumers, and designers of special effects. Writing plays was an essentially social process. And keep in mind that Shakespeare was himself an actor in a repertory company. English 531 will seek to keep in mind the trends that are sweeping our profession, especially the attention to staging, something that academics used to ignore. Consider: some years ago I was having lunch with my mentor. He asked me what I was working on. I replied that I was writing a stage history of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. With the greatest skepticism, he asked: “Why would you want to do that?” His disdain reflected the views that had infiltrated the profession for

8 decades. I made no apology for my work. I knew that times had changed and that it would be foolish to ignore the most exciting new emphases in academe. Our course will survey plays throughout Shakespeare’s career, from the earliest comedies, to the history plays, to the tragedies, to the late romances. Students will be asked to write three papers, one of which will deal with the staging of a play.

ENGL/AIS 549A...... Franci Washburn FOLKLORE, THE STORY OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN THE U.S. W 6:30-9:00 PM

The stories that a culture creates and tells about itself can inform outsiders of what that culture values. Now more than ever, we citizens of the United States should examine those values of cultures others than our own to create cross-cultural tolerance and understanding. While the broad definition of folklore includes not only stories, but also sayings, dances, art forms, and other objects of material culture, this class will primarily examine the stories, while touching lightly on sayings, such as colloquial expressions, and jokes or other forms of humor from three broad cultures: Middle Eastern (Jewish and Arabic); Latino, and Native American. Then, we will discuss how the stories of these cultures are different or similar to those of Main Stream U.S. culture, if such a thing as a predominantly “mainstream” U.S. culture truly exists. I am primarily interested in sparking vigorous classroom discussion and engagement together, rather than projects completed separately. Each student will be required to do one oral storytelling presentation to the class (no written notes, no printed handouts, no power points or other computer assisted information) and to write one paper of conference length. Reading list has not been compiled yet, but will likely consist of at least one book from each of three general cultures listed above, as well as individual essays or chapter from books delivered via D2L or other means.

ENGL 566-001...... Charles Scruggs THE GREAT WAR AND ITS IMPACT UPON MODERNISM M 3:30-6:00 PM

The Great War (1914-1918) was a seminal event in world history and for modern literature. The war triggered both the Russian Revolution (1917) and the Irish Rebellion (1916), and ended by toppling monarchies and destroying empires. But perhaps the “Shock of the New” that came as the biggest surprise was the horror of modern warfare: machine guns, mustard gas, tanks, airplanes and guns so monstrous that they blew people to bits. The phrase “missing in action” first appeared in that war, a theme that would not go unnoticed by contemporary writers. The individual as cannon fodder (insignificant, inconsequential) haunts the literature of the period, as well as the phrase “No Man’s Land” which, in its multiple meanings, will find a place in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot’s poem and Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) are probably the most famous post-war texts, but these are only two of many brilliant works, fiction and poems, that the war produced. English poets like Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves reshaped the way we not only perceived war but poetry itself.

9 Although the United States did not enter the war until late (1917) and its military forces were “over there” for only eighteen months, American society underwent a monumental transformation. That change is reflected in one of the best novels of the Twentieth Century, John Dos Passos’s USA, his modernist trilogy that, only other things, documents the first thirty years of the American Century (as Walter Lippman called it). At home, the war created the “Security State” (surveillance, suppression of dissent, censorship of the press, and the creation of the Bureau of Investigation–the future FBI). The failure of Wilson’s “Fourteenth Points” at the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the death of Progressivism, and the rise of organized crime (due in part to Prohibition) led to a new kind of literature, ranging from pulp fiction to radical experimentations with form and language. This occurred on both sides of the Atlantic and profoundly affected what we today call Modernism.

ENGL 595a-001...... Tenney Nathanson FIRST YEAR COLLOQUIUM W (alternating with the Job Search Workshop) 12:00-12:50

The colloquium provides an exchange of information about professional studies, the Graduate Literature Program, and the English Department. In a small group setting, first-year students discuss strategies for academic success, opportunities for professional development, engagement with learning communities in and beyond the university, and balancing myriad roles while earning an advanced degree in English. Attendance is required of all first-year students; other interested graduate students are welcome to join us for any of the classes. Instruction will include presentation by faculty, returning students in the Program, and other members of the university community.

ENGL 595a-003...... Tenney Nathanson Job Search Workshop W (alternating with the First Year Colloquium) 12:00-12:50

This workshop is open to any PhD student who has completed the comprehensive exams and is planning to enter the academic job market. Ideally, students will take the workshop one year in advance of applying for jobs so that they can prepare and revise all materials required for the search. Each class will focus on a different aspect of the application process. Students will critique drafts of C.V.s, cover letters, dissertation abstracts, and teaching philosophies. We will also discuss letters of recommendation, preparing a dossier, unpacking job ads, teaching portfolios, writing samples, MLA interviews, phone interviews, campus visits, and negotiating an offer. Students who plan to attend the MLA convention may choose to participate in a mock interview with English Department faculty at the end of the semester. Members of the workshop and anyone who is applying for an academic position will be subscribed to the Department's placement listserv. Participants may post questions, discuss ideas, and read information pertaining to the job search.

10 ENGL 596a-001...... Lynda Zwinger 19TH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL: TIME / BEING Th 12:30-3:00 PM

We will read important English novels (all of which either appear on the MA Exam Reading List or can substitute for a text by the same author on the list). Our particular lines of inquiry will be more or less anchored to questions of time in/and the genre (which will inevitably merge with last semester’s anchor, “subjectivity”); our tentative answers will be absolutely anchored in the texts. There will be two options for student work in this seminar: a term paper crafted as a draft article written for a specific peer-reviewed academic journal; the other, which will require a longer reading list, is to elect to take the seminar as a "reading course" in order to prepare more broadly for, say, the MA exam, Comps, a dissertation, or conceptualizing an article for a journal. The latter option will require a reading journal. Students choosing either option will be expected to make formal presentations to the seminar at least once during the semester. Theoretical readings as needed (e.g., Freud, Lacan, Dogen, Miller, Cameron) and tba, usually via D2L. We will probably have occasion to discuss some films (adaptations of the novels and/or exemplifications of games with time). Required novels (students on both plans will read): Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847) or Villette (1853). tbd Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861) George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881 and 1908) Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)

ENGL 596F-001...... Daniel Cooper Alarcon TRAVEL NARRATIVES, TRAVEL FICTIONS W 1:00-3:30 PM

This seminar will provide an opportunity to read, consider, and discuss a diverse array of texts we might broadly categorize as travel literature. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between travel narratives and what I call travel fictions, and the ways in which these fictional accounts have often anticipated ideas central to critical studies of travel, tourism, and migration. I also use the term travel fiction to indicate the ways in which so-called factual accounts of travel often fabricate useful mythologies of people and places. Thus, another focal point of the course will be the different kinds of cultural work that travel literature performs at different historical moments. For example, travel narratives often played a key role in sustaining and promoting colonial and imperial enterprises. More recently, travel narratives and travel fictions have

11 played an important role in creating both an itinerary for travel to particular destinations and a set of criteria by which to evaluate a site’s authenticity. Simply put, travel literature helps to shape the ways in which travelers perceive and respond to the places they visit, and the people and cultures they interact with. As we take up travel literature since World War II, we will consider tourism as a discourse deeply implicated in the formation of cultural identities and vital to the economies of many developing nations, as well as tourism’s mirror image: the migration from Third World to First, driven usually by economic necessity. The reading list for the course is still taking shape, but will probably include travel narratives written by Cabeza de Vaca, John L. Stephens, Jack London, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as the novels The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles), Jasmine (Bharati Mukherjee), Volkswagen Blues (Jacques Poulin), and Motion Sickness (Lynn Tillman). Theoretical works will include Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, MacCannell’s The Tourist, and Kaplan’s Questions of Travel, as well as shorter works by Paul Fussell, R. Tripp Evans, Heidi MacPherson and Jonathan Culler. To sum up, this course will be helpful to anyone with interests in post-colonial studies, the long relationship of travel writing and empire, attempts at cross-cultural representation, issues of diaspora and migration, and the impact of migration and travel upon cultural identities.

ENGL 596G-001...... Johanna Skibsrud INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS: A FAUSTIAN VOYAGE M 12:30-3:00 PM

In this course we will plunge into the Heart of Darkness, beginning with the texts and contexts that influenced Conrad, including the travel journals of John Franklin and Goethe’s Faust. We will also look at the texts influenced by Conrad’s famous work: from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Emmanuel Dongala’s The Fire of Origins. By investigating the historical context of adventurism, colonialism, and race central to Conrad’s famous novel alongside a consideration of the enduring Faustian paradox, we will gain not only a richer sense of the complexities of the Modernist era, but also of our own. Further critical and creative readings may include excerpts from Nancy Rose Hunt’s A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies and Reverie in Colonial Congo, Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy, Hans Christoph Binswanger’s Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, Peter Sellars’ Doctor Atomic, Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, Jacques Pauw’s Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins, Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass, Fred Moten’s “Blackness and Nothingness,” Michelle M. Wright’s The Physics of Blackness, and poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Brodsky, and Carol Anne Duffy. Questions we will ask: What is the contemporary inheritance of the binaries and blindnesses within Heart of Darkness? How does that inheritance continue to influence our notion of the modern (or postmodern) subject? What are the limits and possibilities of rethinking the history of colonialism, and the ongoing struggle between good and evil, darkness and light? The class will be discussion based. Students will be asked to submit short weekly response papers, deliver one twenty-minute in-class presentation, and complete a final 15-20-page research paper. Students are also encouraged to have read or re-read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness before the first day of class.

12 ENGL 596G -002...... Susan White STANLEY KUBRICK W 3:30-6:00 PM

This is a course on the films of Stanley Kubrick. We will also consider several sources for the films’ adaptations. By means of close reading and in the context of film theory, we will cover most of Kubricks’s films. We will also read Nabokov’s Lolita, Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Clarke’s “The Sentinel.” You can expect an intensive study of Kubrick’s films. One major goal of the class is to learn to translate complex visual images to the written word via the specific terminology of cinema studies. Students will write midterm and final papers and present at least once to the class on readings and/or their work.

ENGL 596K- 001...... Scott Selisker KNOWLEDGE WORK T 3:30-6:00 PM

“When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?” Marshall McLuhan asked this question in 1967, and we’ll plan to look at the questions beneath it and their implications for literary studies now. What do we value as human in an information economy in which many of the key players are algorithms? This seminar in contemporary fiction and digital humanities will take up a cluster of questions related to work, creativity, and the knowledge economy. We’ll consider what kinds of work and leisure both novelists and critics depict and perform, and we’ll use these questions to reflect on recent methodological debates, the place of scholarship in the contemporary media ecology, and other current questions in the field. We’ll be sure to read a few works on the MA reading list and some foundational works of theory and criticism, in addition to getting a foothold in both contemporary literary studies and in digital humanities conversations. We’ll narrow down the reading list of 5 or 6 novels following our first class meeting, but likely primary authors include: Vladimir Nabokov (we’ll definitely start with Pale Fire), Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jennifer Egan, Maggie Nelson, Ben Lerner. We’ll pair the novels with criticism, sociology, and critical theory, and a substantial unit will survey major books and questions in digital literary studies. (Across our secondary readings, we’re likely to encounter Karl Marx, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, Fredric Jameson, Susan Sontag, Richard Florida, Boltanski and Chiapello, Alan Liu, Mark McGurl, Amy Hungerford, Franco Moretti, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and others). Requirements include occasional brief reading responses, a small-scale digital experiment (working at your level), and a seminar paper.

13 RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH (RCTE)

ENGL 595A – 003 ..……………………………..………...... ……...Damián Baca Colloquium W 1:30-3:00 PM

Colloquium, taught each Fall semester by the director, introduces new RCTE graduate students to issues of professional development in the field of Rhetoric & Composition studies and provides opportunities for collaborative learning with each other, the director, and others about program structure and requirements, professional opportunities (conferences, funding sources, job market trends), and possibilities for improving the program.

ENGL 596L...... Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan T 11:00 AM -1:30 PM TOB "Postcolonial Temporalities" This seminar in postcolonial literature and critical theory will participate in a longstanding conversation about the time of the postcolonial (when was—is—it? when are we?) while exploring postcolonial contributions to our understandings of temporality more broadly. From theories of belatedness, to critiques of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, Postcolonial Studies offers rich conceptualizations of historicity, modernity, and futurity. In the era of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, this work has renewed relevance and urgency. Postcolonialists know that there is no going back to a time before capital or before colonial occupation. But might we yet rewrite and revision the future? In our effort to understand what Paul Virilio would call postcolonialism’s “chronopolitics,” we will undertake two forms of inquiry. First, we will consider a range of key postcolonial interventions into the study of time, including the concepts of allochronism, heterotemporality, History 2, alternative modernities, power-chronography, the temporality of emergence, and the posthuman. Given the interdisciplinary nature of Postcolonial Studies, the critical texts we read will span the fields of anthropology, history, communication and cultural studies, philosophy, media studies, queer theory, and literary studies, including work by Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pheng Cheah, Lee Edelman, Jed Esty, Johannes Fabian, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Reinhart Koselleck, Caroline Levine, Theodore Martin, Ashish Nandy, Sarah Sharma, and Takeuchi Yoshimi. Second, we will animate the above concepts in the close reading of novels that variously mediate the “real” and “narrative” time of the postcolonial (potential authors include G.V. Desani, E.M. Forster, Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, and V.S. Naipaul). Course requirements will include short reading responses, class presentations, and a final seminar paper.

ENGL 597R…………………………………...... ……………….…..…..…....Shelley Rodrigo

14 TBD Research Methods in Rhetoric and Composition

Description to be added shortly.

ENGL 696S—001…………………………………...... ……………….…….….Matthew Abraham Rhetoric and the New Materialism M 9:30 AM-12:00 PM

This RCTE graduate course will survey the latest research methods in rhetorical studies, with a specific emphasis on the turn towards “the new materialism,” as we acknowledge—and attempt to account for—how human and non-human actors interact to produce complex entanglements or assemblages. This perspective will enable an understanding of how material objects contribute to the creation of what Thomas Rickert calls “ambient rhetoric.” During the semester, we will read the following texts: Laurie Gries Still Life with Real Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, as well as selections from Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s edited collection, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. At the beginning of the class, we will do a brief review of the history of rhetoric from antiquity to the present.