Graduate Classes
Spring 2013
English 711 : Topics in Professional Writing sec 202
Subtitle: Writing for Social Media
Dave Clark
Online
"In this course we will look at social networking, with an emphasis on the practical and theoretical concerns of writers. Students will be expected to read and discuss numerous key mainstream and academic texts, including excerpts from the following: • Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody • Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You • Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds • Lessig’s Free Culture • Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor We will also, of course, learn and evaluate some of the most common social media. Students will evaluate and develop their own use of social media tools and approaches, write and revise several response papers, evaluate and critique an organization’s existing social media approach, and design and test a social media plan for a small organization."
More info: dclark@uwm.edu
English 711 : Topics in Professional Writing
Subtitle: Educational & Advocacy Writing in Health & Medicine
Scott Graham
Thursdays 4:30
ENGL 711 is designed to teach students the latest techniques for the development of effective educational and advocacy communication in health and medicine. Students will learn about and practice strategies for audience-centered information design, usability testing, and data visualization development—all while keeping a focus on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of health education and advocacy. Specific course units will focus on 1) general theories of medical and public health communication, 2) adjunctive patient education, 3) community-outreach public health campaigns, 4) illness-based advocacy communication, and 5) health industry criticism and activism.
More info: http://sscottgraham.com/archives/355, grahams@uwm.edu
English 741 : Approaches to the Modern II
Subtitle: Modern Times: History and Modernity
Theodore Martin
Tuesday 4.30 to 7.10p
This course begins from the premise that one of the signal inventions of modernity is “modernity”—not just a new period in history, but a new idea of historical periods. How does modernity change our relation to history? What happens once we tumble into modern time? We will survey the range of theoretical, historical, and political issues that arise from modern accounts of history and temporality. These include theories and critiques of modernity proper; the methodological demands of historicism and new historicism; the uses and abuses of periodization; queer and postcolonial histories; the so-called “end of history”; the slippery category of the present; and finally, the new historical situation of climate change. Throughout the course, we’ll find ourselves grappling with quintessentially modern categories like capitalism, colonialism, progress, and utopia. And we’ll begin to ask how such categories—rather than unfolding neutrally in history—end up producing their own, self-sustaining terms of historical thought. Writers to be studied include Hegel, Marx, Benjamin, Koselleck, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Spivak, Latour, Love, Chakrabarty, Berlant, and Jameson, among others.
More info: marti449@uwm.edu
English 754 : Multicultural Literacies sec 001
Subtitle: An Introduction to Literacy Studies Through First-Person Narratives and Community Experiences of Reading and Writing
Mary Louise Buley-Meissner
Thursday, 4:30-7:10 pm
"This course is designed for M.A. students in the English Department and the School of Education, particularly those with a special interest in literacy studies as a foundation for working effectively with students from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. By focusing on first-person and community experiences of learning to read and write, the course addresses key issues related to literacy education in multicultural American society. During the past thirty years, for example, ""the literacy crisis"" has been highly publicized in mass media. Yet relatively little attention has been directed to answering such fundamental questions as these: How is literacy itself being defined? In what specific contexts is literacy being assessed,and for what reasons? When literate/illiterate distinctions are being made, whose interests are being served? Particularly in the public education system, how can students be encouraged not only to acquire nominal literacy (minimal competency in reading and writing), but also to develop active literacy (self-articulated and community-situated awareness of language's rhetorical and cultural power)? As suggested by the selection of course books, class discussion will cover the meanings and consequences of literacy for people in a variety of educational settings, including Hmong refugees in the urban Midwest; Latina/o students in a rural, predominantly white high school; African American students labeled “at risk” in high school and college; and immigrant students in a Chinatown middle school. For a deeper understanding of the personal meanings of literacy, we will delve into the autobiographies of two poets (June Jordan and Jimmy Santiago Baca); a family biography by “a child of war” (Kao Kalia Yang); and a collection of first-person essays by Asian American college students addressing self-formation in higher education."
More info: meissner@uwm.edu
English 813 : Special Topic in Creative Writing sec 002
Subtitle: Writing the Body
Dr. Rebecca Dunham
Tuesdays, 3:30-6:10
This multi-genre creative writing course will focus on both reading texts that explore historical, ethical, and aesthetic ways of writing the body, as well as allow students to produce and workshop their own creative writing. Students will choose the genre(s) they produce texts within. Drama, prose, poetry, hybrid/digital texts -- are all welcome. The anticipated reading list will include Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, Lucy Grealy, Mary Shelley, Lucia Perillo, Sappho, and Dana Levin. Students will be required to submit reading responses, comment on one anothers' writing, lead a group discussion, and submit a final portfolio of their creative work at the semester's end.
More info: dunham@uwm.edu
English 858 : Seminar in Professional and Literary Nonfiction sec 001
Subtitle: Mikhail Bakhtin: Text and Subtext
Charles Schuster
Wednesdays, 3:30-6:10 p.m.
"Mikhail Bakhtin: Text and Subtext In this seminar, we will work toward developing a philosophy of language that emerges from theories of literary and nonliterary discourse derived from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Volosinov. Through reading, writing, speaking, and listening we will work hard to grasp more fjully the ways we communicate and comprehend text. Readings will be drawn primarily from Volosinov and Bakhtin, but we will also read both published and nonpublished work which will help anchor our discussions. We will explore various Bakhtinian principles and practices that bear directly on how we understand and evaluate texts, how we think about language as communicative and creative expression. That means we will focus on concepts such as the dialogic, genre, heteroglossia, novel, carnival, addressivity, responsability,and unfinalizability, while staying true to Bakhtinian methodology and resisting the impulse toward explicit definition. Right now, my best hunch is that the texts will be: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Valentin Volosinov Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin Speech Genres and other Late Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin A selection from Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin A selection of student essays Selections from: John McPhee, Kathleen Jamie, D. H. Lawrence, Jamaica Kincaid, etc. Assignments will incorporate both an oral and a written dimension, which is appropriate given the nature of our subject in this course."
More info: cis@uwm.edu
English 877 : Seminar in Film Theory
Subtitle: U.S. Cinema, 1967 - 1980
Gilberto M. Blasini
Wednesdays, 4:00 - 8:00 PM
The seminar surveys U.S. cinematic practices during a 13-year period that was marked by the emergence of a new generation of directors who reinvigorated filmmaking as an artistic practice linked both to politics and to formal and aesthetic experimentation. This period is commonly referred to as “the Hollywood Renaissance” or “the New Hollywood.” 1967 represents a strategic starting point for the class. This year has been used by some film historians as the beginning of contemporary U.S. cinema in terms of issues affecting both the film industry (the rise of independent filmmaking, the disappearance of the Production Code and its replacement by the rating system, new directions in filmmaking) and the U.S. as a nation in general (the Vietnam war, civil rights movement, women's movement, college students' activism). The seminar will focus on how these films created new cinematic versions of the U.S. as a nation by engaging and reconfiguring the social discourses circulating during the late 60s and 70s. We will examine specific genres and cycles that emerged during this period—e.g., road movies, disaster films, blaxploitation cinema, conspiracy films—as well as others that found reinvigoration during these years—e.g., horror film. In terms of the specificity of cinema as a medium and an art form, we will pay special attention to the construction of narratives and characters, and to questions related to film style (the composition of mise-en-scene, the articulation of space and time through editing techniques, the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, etc).
More info: gblasini@uwm.edu
English 885 : Seminar in Critical Theory
Subtitle: New Media Theory and the Dark Side of the Digital
Richard Grusin
Monday 6-8:40
At least since the 1980s, the digital has been the occasion for enthusiastic, often utopian, dreams. In almost every area of human and nonhuman endeavor, digital technologies have been heralded as revolutionary if not redemptive. Much of the development of the field of new media theory has been fueled by digital utopianism. But there has always been a dark side to such enthusiasm—dark places that scholars of the digital and new media theorists tend to overlook as they illuminate new fields and paths; dark practices that intensify social inequalities and accelerate environmental destruction; and dark politics that often remain obscure to global new media users. We will take up critical, theoretical, and creative work that pays particular attention to the conjunction of neoliberalism and socially networked digital media, in order to consider how new media theory and practice can best move forward in the 21st century. The seminar will provide a survey of 20th/21st-century new media theory, focusing on the challenges to its more utopian elements. It will also operate as preparation for C21's spring conference on “The Dark Side of the Digital.” Several of the readings and creative works that the seminar will engage will be selected from scholars who have been invited to speak at the conference, which will provide an excellent opportunity for seminarians to engage with many of the issues that will be debated at the conference in May. In addition to smaller writing assignments throughout the semester, students will each write a seminar paper relating to some elements of new media theory or the dark side of the digital.
More info: grusin@uwm.edu
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