Spring 2008

English 706: Special Topics in Composition Theory
Race, Ethnicity, and Rhetoric
Professor Morris Young

While histories of rhetoric from antiquity to present-day have begun to become more inclusive as recuperative projects to identify “lost voices” have “reclaimed” women and other “non-canonical” figures, disciplinary discussions centered on race and ethnicity in rhetorical studies is a relatively recent occurrence. In just the last five years we have seen an explosion (relatively) of Composition-Rhetoric scholarship focusing on African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American rhetoric. Recent discussions in comparative rhetoric have focused on the Chinese Confucian tradition, ancient India and Egypt, among other cultures. The cognate field of Literacy Studies has examined the uses of reading, writing, and alternative language systems among Pacific Islanders, South American indigenous cultures, and African tribal communities. In each of these instances, race, ethnicity, and/or culture appears as an organizing principle in the specific uses of language, or provides a specific context in the use of language.

In this course we will consider issues of race and ethnicity in the theorizing and practice of rhetoric primarily in a U.S. context. What is African American, Asian American, Latino/a, or Native American rhetoric? What are the histories of rhetoric in these (and other) communities of color? Why and how do these communities theorize and practice rhetoric? Do classical rhetorical concepts such as Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, logos play a role in the generation and use of rhetoric by these communities? How is, or is, race and ethnicity rhetorical?

Requirements will include a couple of short writing assignments (5 pp. each), a longer final project (15-20 pp.), weekly on-line discussion postings, and facilitating class.

Readings may include work by Adam Banks, Ralph Cintron, Keith Gilyard, Min-Zhan Lu, Shirley Wilson Logan, Scott Lyons, LuMing Mao, Gail Okawa, Malea Powell, Catherine Prendergast, Elaine Richardson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Victor Villanueva.

English 704 Classical Rhetoric and/as Method
Professor Bernard-Donals

This course will explore some of the canonical texts from rhetoric's 'classical' period, and describe how they could be said to provide a method or methodology for the invention and analysis of texts of all kinds. We will read, among other writers, Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero, and Augustine, and discuss questions such as the following: what is the relation of rhetoric to poetics? to what extent does rhetoric depend upon logic, mimesis, and science? what is rhetoric's 'history'? and what sorts of agencies are presumed to hold in the rhetorical subject?

English 550 Writing a Better Way: A Service Learning Course
Professor Deborah Brandt

This credit-bearing, writing-focused course will bring graduate students and undergraduate students  together with  UW employees from the custodial and food service units to form a unique learning community designed to improve literacy opportunities for workers on campus.  The class will enroll 10 employees, 5 graduate students and 5 undergraduates.

Much of the class time will be spent in small group tutorials to help employees who want more writing in their lives.  Several will be  immigrants who need more opportunity to engage with writing.  Almost all will need writing to advance in employment.  We also will meet  together in seminar style and use writing, talking, and other media to learn about each other and about ways that language can unite and divide. Depending on how things go, we might collaborate on a whole-class project around issues of literacy on campus.

This course will be of interest to graduate students who want to gain direct experience with service learning.  Graduate students will help design class experiences and provide leadership for undergraduates who also will be enrolled.

Enrollment is by permission only and is limited to 5 graduate students.  Knowledge of Spanish or Hmong is a plus. 

English 700: Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric

The field of composition studies in the United States is relatively new. It developed during the first half of the 20th century as a reaction against prescriptive language instruction and a drive toward standardization that was common in the nineteenth century university. But as the field matured, it began to reconsider its "genesis myth": Though the study and teaching of writing evolved out of a context that was more or less Anglo-American, it nonetheless has roots that date back to antiquity.

Much recent work in the field has gone back to examine how some of the epistemological and philosophical assumptions of rhetoric can and do inform how we understand–and teach–writing in the university, and has moved on to consider how the teaching of writing is inextricably bound to a much broader question: What is English studies? This course situates the contemporary study in writing in its three defining moments: its roots in classical rhetorical theory, its development in the American context, and its connection to the broader (theoretical) field of English studies. We examine recent trends in the study of writing–the process movement, the Aristotelian revival, the study of argument, post-process and cultural studies in composition, to mention only a few examples–and trace their roots in classical (or renaissance, or enlightenment) philosophical and cultural tradition, and their connections to the contemporary theoretical moment in literary studies. We also pay close attention to the implications of the field's history for the writing classroom, and ask, "Just what does this matter to our students?”

English 701: Language and Learning: The Case of Writing

English 701 situates issues about writing and learning in the context of more general inquiry about language and learning, and we examine the potentials of both writing and talk for learning and shaping understandings. We read a wide variety of research on classroom discourse and learning, plus work on writing and learning, and writing across the curriculum. Course, structured as a seminar, is organized according to conceptions of language and epistemology.

Part I. How writing came to be linked to learning in Anglo-American schools: A brief history
Part II. Conceptualism foundations: Language and learning

• Phenomenology
• Cognitive Constructivism
• Formalism
• Social Constructionism
• Dialogue & Dialogism
• Contextualism

Part III. Pedagogy: Classroom use of response groups & Disciplinarity: Reading, Writing, & Knowing in the Academy

English 702: Perspectives on Literacy

English 702 is a rapid reading course focusing on works from the New Literacy Studies. This movement treats writing and reading as pluralistic cultural practices whose forms, functions, and effects take shape in contexts–social, political, historical, material and, always, ideological. The New Literacy Studies arose in reaction to earlier theories that treated literacy as an autonomous technology delivering certain predictable consequences, social and cognitive, to its users. Our readings (below), which come from a variety of disciplines, are in chronological order, and we discuss them with a particular eye to the difficulty of studying literacy in context, looking carefully at the theoretical and methodological choices that the authors make. Among other questions, we assess the implications of this research for literacy teaching and learning in school contexts. We also try to identify the next frontier in new literacy studies: What should be studied now and how? Finally, we ask whether the premises of new literacy studies have themselves reached a level of orthodoxy worthy of questioning and, perhaps, overturning.

Syllabus

Fall 2007

English 705: Sources of Composition Studies (II): Modern Rhetoric, Poetic, Aesthetics

If composition studies thinks about rhetoric at all, it tends to think of it as a theoretical monolith and as the principal foundation of the field whose focus is the study of writing. This course has two purposes. The first is to examine rhetoric as a rich, and certainly not monolithic, theoretical complex, whose contradictions and whose elements make some of the assumptions of those working in compositions studies seem hasty at best. The second is to examine two other theoretical strands of discursive study – poetics and aesthetics – that are also mainly ignored by theorists and practitioners of composition studies but which form at least as broad a foundation for the field as rhetoric does.

In the first half of the course, we will explore these three strands of discursive study – rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics – and pay close attention to their interanimation and their foundational place is the study of writing; in the second, we will trace these three strands of study as they find their way into contemporary composition theory and practice. Not only will we be able to answer, by the end of the seminar, the question, “what is rhetoric” (along with “what is poetics” and “what is aesthetics”) but also to be able to explain how the field of composition studies fits into English studies more broadly, and to make clear the debt composition and rhetoric owe to theoretical traditions that may at first seem only remotely related to it as a field.

English 710: Discourse Analysis

English 710 is an interdisciplinary approach to interactional aspects of English discourse. Designed for graduate students of English, composition and rhetoric, applied linguistics, linguistics, and related fields, it provides theoretical and methodological grounding for research on discourse as an interactional phenomenon.

This course introduces craft and theory for analyzing a prevalent form of discourse: talk-in-interaction. Readings include analytic and theoretical pieces, and each semester has a theme of inquiry. The theme for this semester is language as action. Class meetings involve discussions of readings and, as the semester progresses, joint analysis of data. Students collect, transcribe, and analyze "naturally occurring" interaction (preferably face-to-face and videotaped). In groups, students tape and transcribe a 5- to 10-minute segment of talk. Each student develops two analysis papers based on their data and on concepts from our readings. Everyone is responsible for required readings, but as interests emerge, is expected to develop a special knowledge of a particular research area. The course culminates in a formal research proposal, including conversation analysis as one of its methods.

English 727: Out of Europe: History, Memory, and Exile since 1945

The year 1945 marks a watershed, with the end of the second world war and Nazism, the beginning of the end of colonialism, and the advent of the nuclear age. Within three years the state of Israel had been carved out of the middle east, apparently redeeming the Holocaust but displacing hundreds of thousands just as the Holocaust itself had done. New borders led to displacement and social upheaval in Europe, in north Africa, in South America, and in south Asia. Moreover, the modes of representation that had previously sufficed for the writing of history and other narratives seemed after the Holocaust and the war to collapse under the weight of atrocity. In short, what has come out of Europe since 1945 is a profound shift in how we understand the relation of history and memory, of national identity and exile.

This course will take account of these shifts, particularly in writers and theorists whose aim is to reimagine Europe, and how the events of Europe in the middle part of the 20th century have had profound effects elsewhere. At least as significantly, we will take account of the ways in which "since 1945" is itself a problematic phrase in the European context because of its insistence upon temporal and historical fixity. The course will challenge traditional notions of history and temporality, of place and origin, of authenticity and identity in part because many if not most of the authors and theorists we'll examine in this course themselves have put enormous pressure on these categories. Are Israelis European? Are the German-speaking children of Turkish migrant workers? What are we to make of the phenomenon of Peronism in Argentina, as a homegrown national socialism or as a distant relative of Mussolini's fascism? To what extent can state terror after the Holocaust (in South Africa or Argentina, for example) be understood it terms of its own history? And how, in an age of manufactured historical reality, do we determine how writers, historians, and individuals are acting in good faith?

Among the theorists we'll read will be Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Hayden White, Alain Finkielkraut, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marianne Hirsch, Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Dominick LaCapra. Among the authors we'll read will be Antje Krog, Aharon Appelfeld, Luisa Valenzuela, Jorge Luis Borges, Sarah Kofman, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmoud Darwish, and Albert Camus. We will also view several films and series of photographs.

Syllabus

Fall 2007

back to top

Last Updated: March 19, 2007 For any questions, including accessibility issues, contact the Web Administrator Best if viewed at 800x600 or !higher!