Course Descriptions Spring 2016 Department of English

ENGL 3100: Critical Writing about Literature David Coombs This class is designed to serve as your gateway to the English major. Our primary goal will be to prepare you to read and to write about literature critically. To that end, this class will familiarize you with some key concepts and methods of literary criticism, most centrally with close reading —the practice of making texts meaningful through careful analysis of their verbal structures— as well as with how to apply what you've learned in rhetorically effective writing. In addition to developing your skills in critical analysis, this class will encourage you to bring those critical skills to bear on the practices of literary criticism itself. We will thus seek to address some basic questions raised by the same practices of interpretation you'll be learning over the course of the semester: What is literature and what can it tell us about the world that makes it worth such careful attention? What does the "critical" in critical reading and writing mean and how is it different from other modes of reading and writing? Students will learn practices of close reading and interpretation applicable to literary works; in analyzing a wide variety of literature, students will engage in the highest levels of analysis, reasoning, critical thinking, and problem solving.

ENGL 3100: Critical Writing about Literature Will Stockton This course aims to equip you with the analytical skills necessary to succeed in other upper- level English courses. It teaches you how to read literature closely and discuss it productively. We will focus primarily on poetry, developing our skills through the study of one poem each week. Please be advised that this course is a composition course. The reading load for this course is relatively light, but in turn the writing load is relatively heavy. By semester’s end you will have produced about thirty pages of polished prose.

ENGL 3140: Technical Writing Sharon Kathleen Nalley In this class, you will learn to evaluate audience, purpose, context, and constraints of various technical communication practices and write and design technical communication projects. This particular class will be 1) focused on strengthening critical thinking skills in every aspect of our course, and 2) using Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games as the conceptual framework of our tech comm genre projects. Emphasis is placed on teamwork, evaluation, reflection, and communication problem-solving strategies. Planning, working in groups, and evaluating rhetorical situations will feature prominently, and students will be able to take advantage of in- class workshops and peer reviews to get feedback on their projects. Students will spend considerable time presenting their work to the class. Additionally, this class is participating in Clemson’s “CT2” campus-wide Quality Enhancement Plan to target undergraduate critical thinking, an invaluable skill for you to develop during your college career (employers highly value this skill!). We will focus on consciously practicing critical thinking skills throughout the semester: in our discussions, assignments, reviews, and reflections. You will complete two versions of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) and submit an artifact (one of our genre projects) of your progress in critical thinking at the end of the semester.

ENGL 3140: Technical Communication Melissa Dugan This course focuses on the fundamentals of technical communication. The course is broken into three major units: the history and practice of technical communication as an art form, essential contemporary workplace communication skills, and the application of this knowledge in the form of a client-based multimodal group project proposal. In addition to the proposal, students will create memos, emails, reports, standard operating procedures, resumes, cover letters, and infographics. Students will read selections from well-known historical texts created with the purpose of explaining technical processes and have the opportunity to develop their technological expertise by working with the software made available through Adobe Creative Suite. Ultimately, the goal of the technical communication course is to equip students with a broad range of communication skills in order to make them versatile and effective communicators in whatever profession they choose.

ENGL 3140: Technical Writing Brian Smith This course is geared toward student professional development and effective communication skills in various online/digital contexts. Utilizing the Adobe Digital Studio and the Adobe Creative Cloud, a heavy emphasis will focus on the production of professional instructional video relevant to the student’s major/career, as well as pertinent topics and practices like crowdsourcing, promotional materials, professionalism in social media, and the 21st Century video boom. Therefore, students will also utilize The Social Media Listening Center and The Pearce Center for Professional Communication. LinkedIn profiles, Behance Accounts, and professional YouTube channels, among other things, will be generated. Students will often collaborate in teams in the audio-visual production of professional products based both upon industry standards as well as a few unexpected and creative outlets.

ENGL 3140: Technical Writing La’Cresha Green This course is an “intensive, project-based application of principles of audience, context, purpose, and writing strategies of technical writing” as stated in the university handbook. Students will produce documents such as proposals, reports, manuals and other communication deliverables used in science and technology settings. Students will produce four writing projects with multimodal foci; other research based class assignments will focus on issues raised in the reading assignments and class discussions during the semester. The writing assignments will give students extensive practice in reading critically, thinking critically, and writing using the full range of the writing processes—invention, arrangement, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading—for multiple assignments. Students will explore technical writing theory and rhetorical theory through use of multimodal texts.

ENGL 3330: Writing for the News Media Geveryl Robinson On May 21, 1971, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? album was released. Hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the top 10 albums of all time, the themes addressed in What’s Going On? are still, unfortunately, prevalent today. From war and poverty to unemployment and racism, not much has changed in our country or in our world in the last 45 years. Therefore, in this course, students will learn how to write hard news copy, online news stories, and feature articles, culminating in the creation of an online newspaper, titled, In Black and White. Because the class focuses heavily on news that is happening not only in our country, but also around the world, students will be required to read and listen to everything news related. Access to Twitter is also key, as many news stories break on this site.

ENGL 3370: Creative Inquiry John Pursley/Keith Morris Students pursue scholarly activities individually or in teams under the direction of a faculty member. Creative Inquiry projects may be interdisciplinary. Arrangements with faculty must be established prior to registration. May be repeated for a maximum of nine credits. Permission of the instructor required.

ENGL 3450: Structure of Fiction Nic Brown The Structure of Fiction is an introduction to the creative writing and critical study of prose fiction in which students will write short creative exercises, read a variety of examples of contemporary short fiction, and write longer pieces of fiction that will be workshopped by the class.

ENGL 3460: The Structure of Poetry Candace Wiley This course is an introduction to the creative writing and critical study of poetry, with a particular focus on contemporary poets. We’ll look at basics of poetic structure, variant poetic forms, strategic line breaks, and bringing poems to life on stage. Additionally, we will read the work of the nationally- recognized poets we’ll be meeting at the Annual Clemson Literary Festival from March 29-31, 2017. Come excited to read living poets and write many poems in a variety of structures.

ENGL 3480: The Structure of Screenplay Nic Brown This is an introductory workshop in the writing of screenplays. Students will examine examples of screenwriting from film and television as well as write and workshop screenplays of their own.

ENGL 3540: Literature of the Middle East and North Africa Angela Naimou In this course, we will study a variety of 20th and 21st century literary texts of the Middle East and North Africa, including work by poets and prose writers from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, and Egypt. In our study of major trends in poetry and fiction since the mid-twentieth century, we’ll also turn to other genres of writing—history, literary criticism, news, personal essay, and cultural critique—to examine the capacity of art to be of the world and not merely reflect it. Students can expect regular reading and writing as well as actively contributing to discussions.

ENGL 3570: Film Amy Monaghan Examination of the film medium as an art form: its history, how films are made, why certain types of films (western, horror movies, etc.) have become popular, and how critical theories provide standards for judging film.

ENGL 3850: Children’s Literature: Dis/Ability in Children’s Media Megan MacAlystre How do culture, gender, and dis/ability interact within the plots and imagery of picture books? Do lessons on conflict resolution differ when disability is allowed to enter the picture? How do able-bodied authors present characters with disabilities to their audiences, and does this differ from depictions by disabled authors? And what power is conveyed or restricted in the language of dis/ability itself? In this section of ENGL 3850: Children's Literature, we will explore representations of dis/ability, including characters with physical, cognitive, and mental disabilities, in order to identify and problematize the explicit and implicit messages about disabilities that are given by classic and contemporary texts for children. Topics of discussion will include accessibility, intersectionality, and didacticism in children's literature, while the texts under discussion will include traditional novels like Heidi and Walk Two Moons, graphic novels like El Deafo, and picture books by such authors as Mo Willems, Todd Parr, and Tim Tingle.

ENGL 3970: British Literature Survey II John Morgenstern This class will survey the literary history of Britain from 1789 to the present, with particular emphasis on literary texts in dialogue with other art forms. The title of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, often considered the start of the Romantic period, points readers to its musical aspect. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey refers us to Gothic architecture. Blake’s richly illustrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience implies a relationship between poetry, visual art, and music. Both Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) constructed novels around imaginary paintings. We will examine how these and other literary texts appeal to other art forms and discuss how this broader cultural context informs the way we read them. Ultimately, this cross-medial and trans-historic investigation will allow us to consider broader questions, such as what makes literature distinct from other art forms and what aspects of a literary text are portable into other art forms and historical periods.

ENGL 3980: American Literature Survey I Rhondda Thomas This course provides a survey of intriguing early American literature from the Age of Exploration to the Civil War. Our main work will be to evaluate a variety of literary forms—pamphlet, journal, essay, autobiography, poetry, plays, captivity and slave narratives, the novel—explore different recurring themes, consider historical and cultural contexts across the centuries, examine important rhetorical strategies, and think carefully about scholarly frameworks. Students will be expected to thoughtfully analyze texts and engage with their classmates and professor in invigorating and insightful discussions. Two essays, discussion board posts, a class presentation, and a final exam are required for the course.

ENGL 3980: American Literature Survey I Susanna Ashton This junior-level class for English Majors, Education Majors and other enthusiasts of all stripes will wander through a couple of centuries and across all sorts of hazy borders…where does the United States begin and where does Mexico end? Do a couple of letters written on boat that was sailing back from the Caribbean really document the “discovery” of America? If someone wasn’t allowed to be a full citizen, are we actually insulting her by calling her work “American”? Is a Narragansett dictionary written by a missionary in New England really literature? And if a story or poem isn’t “set” in the US but seems to happen in Europe or some vague fairy kingdom (Hello, Poe), does that help us actually understand anything about the culture of the USA? Slave narratives were written to manipulate readers, is that different from any other sort of stealthy text? And what about that great novel of supposed anti-slavery thought, Twain's "Huck Finn"-- the book that was actually written two decades after slavery had been abolished? As you can tell, I have some questions. I will keep teaching this American Literature survey until I sort them out, dang it. Please help me. In this class, you’ll participate with verve or why bother to come? You’ll write messy inchoate thoughts and then you’ll rewrite them into sharper analyses for at least two meaty papers. Regular quizzes may terrorize or delight, a final exam will give you an opportunity to show off the kind of teacher or student you want to be and every step of the way I expect you to add to my question list.

ENGL 3990: American Literature Survey II Walt Hunter This lecture course is an introduction to the extraordinary vitality and capaciousness of modern American literature. We begin with two poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, whose work offers us a prismatic view forward into the aesthetic, political, ethical, and global concerns of the fiction writers, poets, dramatists, and filmmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Then we’ll proceed chronologically through major literary movements, genres, and preoccupations, from realist fiction (James) to expressionist drama (Treadwell); from pre-WWI Imagist poetry (H.D., Pound) to post-WWII “confessional” lyric (Plath, Lowell); from postmodern prophecy (Pynchon) to postcolonial apocalypse (Diaz). Our geographical reach will extend far beyond the nation, even as we take the nation as the platform from which to understand the global involvement of the US: Charles Chesnutt’s North Carolina, Claude McKay’s Harlem, Willa Cather’s Nebraska, William Faulkner’s Mississippi, and Marilynne Robinson’s Idaho will be just a few of the sites where contemporary questions of citizenship, nationalism, immigration, social vulnerability, and economic precariousness find their clear and prescient articulations in breathtakingly innovative literary forms. The course will conclude, combust, and collect itself anew with the celebrated Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine. Course evaluation will be conducted via two midterms and a final exam.

ENGL 4070: The Medieval Period Andrew Lemons Histories of medieval English literature, blinded by the clarity of hindsight, have emphasized England’s cultural and geopolitical connections to the continent, and to France in particular. This course, however, explores the ways in which medieval England can be said to belong more to its northern than to its southern neighbors. In a range of readings drawn from Old and Middle English literature alongside works in Old Norse and Old Icelandic (all in translation), we will play with and examine the possibility, obscured but not erased in 1066, that early English literature might best be read as Scandinavian, rather than European. Texts may include Beowulf, the Poetic Edda, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, The Saga of the Orkneys, The Visions of Birgitta of Sweden, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, and Egils Saga.

ENGL 4110/6110: Redressing Rosalind Andrew Lemons Shakespeare’s heroines are often cunning code-switchers and able cross-dressers. They can tease, traverse and transcend the limits of normative gender roles and, thereby, sometimes even turn their circumspect and critical eyes on the properties of dramatic representation itself. But it is precisely these capacities, which make Shakespeare’s leading ladies so exceptional, that are often redressed in the course of their respective plays, leaving them by the end broken, dead…or married. In this course we explore transvestism, its significance and literary history, in some of Shakespeare’s most memorable women, especially Rosalind in As You Like It. We will also read a selection of works from medieval and modern literature—for instance, the Roman de Silence and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, that present informative cases of female cross-dressing and gender-bending, along with a range of relevant philosophical and literary-theoretical texts.

ENGL 4110: Shakespeare Elizabeth Rivlin What makes a man a man? What’s at stake, beyond sex, in a woman’s sexuality? Is there such a concept as “race” in Shakespeare’s time? When does love or desire become something else? What is rape, and what is it about? To what extent does a person’s destiny coincide with the circumstances of his or her birth? Under a monarchy, do the people have any voice? Does Shakespeare have any inkling of what would come to be known as “democracy”? We’ll use these questions and others to investigate how Shakespeare represented human problems and relationships in terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, politics, and religion. Our questions will also give us insight into how Shakespeare reshaped genres and created new possibilities for literature and drama. We’ll study performance as well, both our own and others’, so that we can understand how performing—not just reading—the plays gives rise to a range of interpretations. Works include The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Cymbeline. Writing is an important course priority; we will pay special attention to textual analysis and thesis construction. Requirements include three papers and a take-home final exam, as well as active class participation and student performances!

ENGL 4190/6190: Postcolonial and World Literatures Cameron Bushnell In this course, we will explore World Literature and Anglophone postcolonial literature from three large geographical areas (Caribbean, Southeast Asia, East Africa) written from the 19th to the early 21st centuries. We will begin with writings from the earlier period when European colonialism and imperialism defined the social, cultural, and political landscape. We will progress through literature, which reflects postcolonial attitudes generated in independence movements, migration, and globalization. We will examine the conditions of postcoloniality, including geographical displacement, subaltern history, cultural imperialism, hybridity, exile, and diaspora. The course will look at the ways in which world and postcolonial literatures affect social and cultural movements, such as women’s rights, human rights, environmentalism. We will read works, such as George Orwell’s Burmese Days, TsiTsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Secondary readings will come from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Saidya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak, P.R. Kumaraswamy, Ato Quayson.

ENGL 4200/6200: American Literature to 1799: Early American Literature Jonathan Field Caribbean texts, archives, and theory from European contact to the Haitian revolution. Reading knowledge of French, Spanish, or Dutch welcomed, but not required.

ENGL 4250/6250: The American Novel Susanna Ashton Are novels just short stories run amuck? This course is going to take as its premise the notion that the novel is a quintessentially modern genre, deeply intertwined with the historicity of the modern period… that is to say, we are going to read novels alongside critics asking questions about novels, particularly American novels, and try to unpack how novels were historically contextual and how novels historically contextualize. In short, we are going to try to figure out what a novel is, why they occurred when and how they did, and why we should care.

We shall read chronologically from the 18th century through the 21st. Get ready for Revolutionary-era crossdressers in Mann’s The Female Review and cruel townhouse dads hogging real estate in Henry James’ Washington Square. We shall goad on ghosts of murderous puritans in The House of Seven Gables, bemoan perpetual moochers in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and quietly sift through a town of grotesques in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio (is that even a novel?). We shall chase after disembodied voices in Invisible Man. And finally, we shall cringe throughout Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Ghost World and puzzle over racially fraught alternative histories and futures in Colson Whitehead’s Underground. To frame, ground and unsettle these novels we shall be looking at critical perspectives in shorter pieces written by Cathy Davidson, Wai-chee Dimock, Judith Butler, Scott McLeod, and others

Attention: Please note that the reading load of this course is carefully paced and manageable but undeniably hefty. That’s hard to avoid in a NOVEL class ;-) Requirements will include two papers, two presentations, some quizzes or low-stakes writing exercises and, always, punchy participation. ENGL 4320/6320: Modern Fiction Gabe Hankins In this class we will read modern experiments in autofiction, autobiographical works that blur the lines between the life of the writer and the work of fiction. Beginning with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we will trace out some of the antecedents of contemporary autofiction in Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nabokov, and Calvino. Contemporary authors may include Teju Cole, Maggie Nelson, Chris Kraus, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante. Class requirements: brief daily writing as preparation for class discussion, two longer papers, and careful work on a final revised paper.

ENGL 4360/6360: Feminist Literary Criticism Michelle Ty This seminar will explore radical traditions of feminist thought and practice. We will attend primarily to artists and activists who have worked during and beyond feminism’s “third wave.” That is, we will study how thinkers have theorized and mounted resistance against the oppression of women—and have done so in a decidedly transnational context. We will consider, further, how literature and visual arts have been integral to contesting monolithic definitions of “women” and “femininity.” What, we will ask, are the limits of white liberal feminism? How do conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality vary within and across disparate cultural formations? How do various writers account for the intransigence of patriarchy, as it structures social life beyond the ambit of the nation?

Films and readings by Leila Ahmed, Lygia Clark, Trinh T. Minh Ha, Chantal Ackerman, Mel Chen, Saba Mahmoud, Michelle Wallace, Silvia Federici, Maria Dalla Costa, Rosa Luxemburg, Audre Lorde, Martha Rosler, Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, Andrea Smith, Stephanie Lemenager, Jack Halberstam, Gloria Anzaldúa, Theresa Cha, Chandra Mohanty, Sarah Ahmed, Leslie Feinberg, and bell hooks, Alison Bechdel, Gayatri Spivak, and Saidiya Hartman.

ENGL 4400/6400: Literary Theory Michelle Ty Psychoanalysis and Anti-Racist Thought This course will offer an introduction to fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, while keeping at the fore the latter’s origins and limits as a Eurocentric discourse with pretensions to universality. Our seminar will be animated by three aims. First, we will consider how anti-racist thought may help to confront the cultural myopia of classical psychoanalysis, whose privileged site of investigation is the nuclear family of Western bourgeois society. We will study, for instance, how Freud draws from and revises discourses of primitivism; how the “discovery” of the unconscious may be implicated in fantasies of imperialist conquest; and how psychoanalysis, understood as a scientific discipline, relates to and fails to acknowledge its own geopolitical specificity. Second, we will explore how the resources of the psychoanalytic tradition have been mobilized in order to resist colonial occupation, racial violence, xenophobia, and the afterlives of slavery. How, we will ask, have authors appropriated or borrowed lightly from psychoanalytic notions (i.e. aggression, projection, inferiority, repression, disavowal, fetish, reparation)—both to critique racialization and to give an account of social experiences of the oppressed? Third, we will develop a practice of reading comparatively. That is, we will attune ourselves to how theoretical commitments are often expressed through preferential modes of reading. We will ask, in other words, how the very same text may yield divergent insights when taken up in a primarily anti-racist or psychoanalytic frame.

Readings include selections from the work of Melanie Klein, Edward Said, Ovid, Saidiya Hartman, Sigmund Freud, Anne Cheng, Maud Mannoni, Frank Wilderson III, Gayatri Spivak, D.W. Winnicott, Ta- Nehisi Coates, Jasbir Puar, Fred Moten, Jean Laplanche, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Frantz Fanon.

ENGL 4420/6420: Cultural Studies: Mad Men, Advertising, and Midcentury Modernism Gabe Hankins In this course we will analyze the television serial Mad Men as a cultural text, one that looks backward to the midcentury reception of literary, artistic, and architectural modernism and forward to our own moment of pervasive (self-)marketing and digital disruption. Readings will include relevant midcentury texts from Frank O’Hara’s poetry to the fiction of Richard Yates, as well as critical approaches to studying serial television as a genre. Daily class work will include close analysis of scenes, sets, and costume design, and presentations on important literary and artistic points of reference. Class requirements: daily analytic writing, two papers on the series and its literary referents, and two extended scene analyses. Our discussion will assume familiarity with the series as a whole, so viewing before the semester begins is highly encouraged.

ENGL 4450/6450: Fiction Workshop Keith Morris Workshop in the creative writing of prose fiction. May be repeated once for credit.

ENGL 4460/6460: The Poetry Workshop Jillian Weise Pre-requisite ENGL 3460: The Structure of Poetry. The majority of class time will be spent on your poetry. Horace writes about his workshop experience: “If Quintilius read a manuscript of yours, he’d say, ‘Please, if you will, change this, and this,’ and if, after you tried and failed to make the corrections he’d advised you to make, he’d tell you to tear it up and take it back to the forge.” Flaubert gave Maupassant one-line writing exercises to sharpen his descriptive acumen. Gertrude Stein held salons in her home where she famously got into a fight with Hemingway, who later wrote a sly insult—“a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble”— in For Whom the Bell Tolls. So workshops have a rich and varied history. Required readings will provide examples of techniques we discuss. The readings will likely include Meg Day, Wendy Xu, Patricia Lockwood, Camille Rankine and other poets visiting Clemson in Spring 2017.

ENGL 4580/6750: Adaptations of World Classics Lucian Ghita The course examines film and other media adaptations (YouTube, multimedia) of Shakespeare across several historical periods (from silent film to postmodern cinema), cultural contexts (from Hollywood to Asia and Eastern Europe), and genres (from popular adaptations to art- house productions). The course focuses on the stylistic and thematic intersections between Shakespeare’s plays and their film adaptations, with attention to adaptation theory, language, form, history, and culture. Primary texts (plays/films discussed): Macbeth (Polanski, Kurosawa), Hamlet (Olivier, Almereyda) Titus Andronicus (Taymor), Twelfth Night (1910 silent film, Trevor Nunn), The Merchant of Venice (Radford), The Tempest (Greenaway, Taymor). Related critical texts: Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Robert Stam, Brian McFarlane, Dudley Andrew, Peter Donaldson, Courtney Lehmann, etc.

ENGL 4650/6650: Topics in Literature from 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at Large Garry Bertholf This course will introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Readings may include The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), Darkwater (1920), Dark Princess (1928), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Dusk of Dawn (1940), Color and Democracy (1945), and The World and Africa (1946). Secondary authors may include C. L. R. James, Marina Bilbija, Paul Gilroy, Cedric Robinson, Nahum Chandler, Hazel Carby, Lewis Gordon, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Tukufu Zuberi, and Adolph Reed.

ENGL 4750/6750: Writing for Electronic Media Jonathan Field We will read and discuss texts written for electronic media, with the goal of producing and publishing texts for established electronic media outlets. Class will feature live and Skype appearances by writers, publishers, and editors working in electronic media.

ENGL 4760: Filmmaking for Mobile Media Brian Smith Students in this course will be a very special part of Clemson University history, as this is the first time this course has ever been a part of Clemson’s curriculum. Over 50% of online traffic now comes from a mobile device, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (owned by Google, the largest), and now over 50% of YouTube views are from a mobile device. It would take one approximately 50 years to watch only the content uploaded to YouTube yesterday. Globally, we are just in the beginning of the 21st Century video boom. This course will prepare students to professionally and creatively participate in this cultural and technological phenomenon.

Students will learn industry standard skills and practices in contemporary filmmaking, being trained in working with Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, Adobe After Effects, tentatively other relevant Adobe software programs, and camera/lighting/audio equipment resources from the MATRF and Cooper Library. While filmmaking for mobile devices is relatively identical to contemporary filmmaking in general, professional and prosumer filmmakers must now take into account that viewers may be watching a very large production on a very small screen.

This course is heavily production-oriented, with no required reading, aside from technical documents and videos that will assist in understanding the production workflow. The course will begin with basic and intermediate editing and production skills, working with the instructor to edit and finalize at least one project involving numerous Grammy Award winning musicians on a “Long Form Music Video” / “Music Documentary” as per Grammy submission specifications.

As the semester progresses, the class will tentatively collaborate on music videos and one final feature length film project. Students will also be guided in understanding and generating industry standard legal documents such as “personal release forms”, as well as the process for US Electronic Copyright of individual intellectual property.

ENGL 4780/6780: Digital Literacy Megan Eatman In “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” Walter Ong notes that composition technologies are never neutral. Even writing, the default mode of composition in many situations, has affordances and limits that shape how we understand problems. “Writing” as we typically understand it has many uses, but, like any technology, it can only do so much. In Digital Literacy, we will work through problems using video, sound, and programming technologies in addition to writing in order to explore what an expanded version of “literacy” can offer. Readings from media studies and rhetorical theory will allow us to look at as well as through these technologies.

This class neither requires nor expects prior technological expertise. It does, however, require a tolerance for the discomfort and frustration that often comes with learning new technologies. I will provide resources and in-class time to work with the programs we discuss, but students in the course must also be ready to experiment and sometimes fail as they learn new ways of composing. The course’s revision policy is designed to facilitate experimentation and occasional failure. Assignments include regular reading responses and lab reports. Students will be responsible for proposing and designing their own collaborative or individual final projects that adapt methods from our class.

Readings may include: McLuhan, excerpts from Understanding Media Kirschenbaum, excerpts from Track Changes and/or Mechanisms Chun, excerpts from Updating to Remain the Same Hayles, excerpts from Writing Machines Brooke, excerpts from Lingua Fracta

ENGL 4890/6890: Special Topics in WPS: Digital Creativity and Mobility Instructor: Jan Holmevik This course examines the roles of creativity and mobility in digital communication across three forms of mobility: Personal, professional, and disciplinary. Learning through invention forms the epistemological foundation for this course, and insights into communications theory and praxis come together through development of digital solutions designed specifically for mobile platforms.

ENGL 4920/6920: Modern Rhetoric Megan Eatman In “The ‘Q’ Question,” Richard Lanham describes two defenses of rhetoric: “weak” and “strong.” The weak defense argues that rhetoric is a neutral tool that can be used for good or bad ends. The strong defense argues that rhetoric structures shared values—thus, there is no “good” or “bad” preceding rhetoric. The strong defense, so designated because it allows for a deeper understanding of rhetoric’s work, positions rhetoric as generative rather than ornamental. For Lanham and many other scholars, rhetoric is an essential part of how we come to understand group identity, community values, and other aspects of the world around us.

In Modern Rhetoric, we will examine readings from the 18th century forward to trace controversies about what and how rhetoric means. We will examine the investments and anxieties that competing models of rhetoric suggest. We will also apply these competing models to political and legal rhetoric to see what each model conceals and reveals. Major assignments will include frequent short reading responses, three 5-7 page papers, and a project that uses digital research methods.

Readings may include: Campbell, excerpts from The Philosophy of Rhetoric Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Various Kenneth Burke readings Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” and several responses (Consigny, Vatz, Biesecker, Edbauer) Rickert, “In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience” Boyle, “Rhetoric as Posthuman Practice”

ENGL 4960: Senior Seminar: Contemporary Literature and Refugee Timespaces Angela Naimou What can contemporary literature contribute to our imagination and experience of time and space? When literature contends with the problems of time—in this present widely described as one of endless if unevenly experienced war, and with a refugee “crisis” that’s been one long emergency--what aesthetic forms does it take or remake? How do the temporal modes of refugees’ flight to a future refuge interact or meddle with contemporary art forms? How do refugee times and the attempts to manage those times interact and interfere with each other? How do our readings of contemporary literature change when we read within the frameworks of refuge, exile, asylum, diaspora, detention, or immigration? These questions are the starting points for the senior seminar, which will be a collaborative and intensive inquiry into the poetry and fiction of writers TBD from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. We’ll pay special attention to literary form, which we will study alongside social science and humanities scholarship on the new critical refugee studies.

ENGL 4960: Senior Seminar: The Poet as Spy Jillian Weise As students living in the age of the ubiquitous status update, you are already familiar with spying and being spied, watching and being watched, surveying and being surveyed. So you will make that familiarity manifest by considering the ways in which you duplicate yourself for the public, perform multiple selves and act according to certain codes for certain audiences. Broad questions for the course include: How does surveillance serve poetry? What is the function of close observation for the poet? How do poets make discoveries? Personal questions for the course include: Who am I? What do I not know? Auxiliary theories for the course may include: W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness, Freud/Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Butler’s performativity and Baudrillard’s simulacra.

ENGL 4960: Senior Seminar: Composing Life: Black Auto/biography Rhondda Thomas How does one compose “life,” particularly when writing from the margins? How does memory and trauma inform the writing process? What makes autobiographies and memoirs so popular and controversial? We will address these questions and many others in this seminar as we consider the relationship between biography and autobiography, and between personal and historical themes. We’ll discuss texts by and about Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Margo Jefferson. An example of paired texts could be Phillis Wheatley’s poems and Will Harris’s brilliant essay “Phillis Wheatley: A Muslim Connection” (2015) or Frederick Douglass’s 1865 Narrative with John Stauffer’s illuminating Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (2015). Genres examined will include autobiography, memoir, journals, biography, film, photography, artwork, and poems, read with insightful scholarly works. The course will also feature guest mini-lectures by prominent scholars. Students will make a class presentation about a specific author and text, complete an annotated primary auto/biographical text assignment, write discussion board posts about our texts, and research and write the seminar paper.

PAS 3010: Intro to Pan-African Studies: The Material and Ideological Foundations of Pan Africanism, 1900-1974 Garry Bertholf This course will introduce advanced undergraduates to the intellectual history of Pan- Africanism, to the idea of Africa, and to the invention of the African diaspora. We will trace the Pan-African movement from the first Pan-African Conference in London (1900) to the sixth Pan- African Congress in Dar es Salaam (1974). We will also consider the significant impact of this history on the related development of African Diaspora Studies. Authors may include W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, St. Clair Drake, Kwame Nkrumah, George Shepperson, Joseph Harris, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, David Scott, Brent Hayes Edwards, Tsitsi Jaji, and Keisha Blain.