Graduate Classes

Fall 2012
Spring 2012
Fall 2011
Fall 2011 – other
Summer 2011
Summer 2011 – other
Archive

Fall 2012

English 404: Language, Power, and Identity sec 001 U/G
Patricia Mayes
Wednesday 4:30-7:10

This course is designed to provide students with a broad understanding of the relationship between language and society. In investigating this relationship, we will consider how language is involved in the construction of social identity and power structures. Our investigation of social identity will include not only examining how individuals construct their identities but also how language is implicated in the formation of social groupings such as class, ethnicity, gender, and regional affiliations. The approach taken in this course is both descriptive and critical in that we will examine how language is implicated in creating and maintaining power for certain groups through such constructs as standard dialects and more broadly through public policies. English 404 can be taken for undergraduate or graduate credit.

Course Materials

Lippi-Green, Rosina (2012). English with an Accent, 2nd Edition. Routledge
Readings on e-reserve in the library

More info: mayes@uwm.edu

English 449: Writing Internship in English 1-4 units; U/G
Rachel Spilka
Monday 4:30-7:10pm
Note that this course will meet just three times in the fall.

This flexible-credit internship is an opportunity for graduate students to gain "real world" writing or editing experience that can supplement their academic credentials and broaden their marketability for postgraduate positions in both academia and industry. Internship placements are available in publishing, public relations/advertising, and non-profit agencies and in larger businesses or corporations. Students might be called upon to complete a variety of tasks in an internship placement, but typically their work involves research, writing, editing, proofreading, and other activities related to communication.

If you are interested in setting up a summer or fall internship, contact Rachel Spilka at spilka@uwm.edu this spring.

English 713-001: Qualitative Research in Writing and Literacy G
Rachel Spilka
Thursday 5:30-8:10pm
This course is available to all graduate students interested in researching topic areas related to writing and literacy. Note that it is offered just once every two years.

Graduate students in English and related fields need to master fundamental research methods to prepare for upcoming dissertation and other empirical work and to maximize their job marketability and potential to "add value" to postgraduate positions in academia and elsewhere. For those heading for academic or workplace careers in professional writing, English 713 will provide core skills needed to excel in these career directions.

This seminar provides thorough instruction in qualitative research in any area of study related to writing and literacy. During the semester, you will examine the philosophies that ground qualitative methods, consider criticisms of this type of research, develop skill in critiquing research designs and identifying rival hypotheses for research findings, and reflect on ethical matters that arise in field research. You will also propose, design, conduct, and report on a small-scale pilot study of writing or literacy in an educational or workplace setting. Most likely, you will spend seven weeks preparing to enter the field, five weeks doing field (pilot study) work, and four weeks analyzing data and preparing a research report.

From this course, you will gain experience in completing the following tasks:

Preparing for a Qualitative Study

Define and describe common features of qualitative research.
Understand when it is appropriate to conduct qualitative research.
Write appropriate research questions for a qualitative study; succinctly state the main purpose of a qualitative study.
Select appropriate methods for a qualitative study and provide a convincing rationale for your methodological choices.
Learn how to gain access to a research site and plan fully for a research project.
Write and submit an IRB (Institutional Review Board) proposal.
Understand the primary criticisms, controversies, and ethical issues of this type of research and make deliberate decisions about how to cope with those while planning, conducting, analyzing, and reporting on your study.

Conducting a Qualitative Study

Conduct effective observations and interviews; design effective surveys and project log sheets; conduct usability tests.
Take effective field notes while conducting qualitative research.
Identify field research problems and find reasonable ways to resolve them.

Analyzing and Reporting on Qualitative Data

Apply common methods for identifying, charting, and modeling patterns of data you have collected.
Learn multiple ways to report qualitative study data; understand rhetorical and ethical issues of those choices.
Develop the ability to critique reports on qualitative study; become accustomed to considering rival hypotheses.
Learn how to analyze pilot study data and report on it in informative and persuasive oral and written research reports.

For more information, please contact Rachel Spilka at spilka@uwm.edu.

English 742: Media Culture G
Tasha Oren
Tuesday 3:30-6:10pm

This course serves to engage student in contemporary scholarship, emerging areas of interest, interdisciplinary research, and current debates in media studies. In the first eight weeks we will discuss theoretical essays, screenings, and case studies in film and television studies, digital culture, and popular culture, paying particular attention to argument construction and methodology. In the last few weeks of the semester, as students begin their own research projects, we will work extensively on identifying research questions, honing writing and argumentation skills, presenting work-in-progress in a workshop setting, and producing a draft publication submission.

English 806-001: Seminar in Linguistics: Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis G
Patricia Mayes
Monday 3:30-6:10pm

Part theory, part methodology, this course is designed for graduate students in English and other language arts fields, who are interested in the study of naturally occurring discourse. Since some graduate students may not be familiar with either ethnomethodology or Conversation Analysis (CA), I begin with a brief explanation of these terms.

Ethnomethodology was developed by Harold Garfinkel in the mid-1950s and was influenced by the work of microsociologist Erving Goffman as well as the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology. It focused on revealing how social structures are created and maintained through individual actions, and ultimately influenced the work of Harvey Sacks who subsequently streamlined the focus into the subdiscipline of CA. CA might be described as a branch of microsociology that focuses on social action as revealed through verbal and non-verbal actions (e.g., utterances and gestures). This focus is not only relevant for sociology but for other disciplines that concern language, such as linguistics, anthropology, rhetoric, education, etc. Indeed, over the past three decades these disciplines have demonstrated a growing awareness of the relevance of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches. This is probably due to the strict focus on both empirical evidence and the moment-to-moment emergent nature of individual actions and reactions. It might be argued that emergence is an idea "whose time has come" in part because recent technological developments and social upheavals have made change (and emergence) seem more relevant, but also because of a growing understanding of the dynamic nature of context and its role in shaping human behavior. CA focuses our attention at this level of human behavior.

We will begin by studying the historical development and theoretical underpinnings of ethnomethodology and CA, focusing on some of the seminal works, as well as newer works that show how this field is evolving (e.g., the current focus on institutional discourses). Early in the course, students will be asked to collect some data from a social setting they are interested in. As we go through the course material, we will be applying the theoretical and methodological approaches to these data samples, culminating in a final research project. We will also do periodic "data sessions," -- the CA term for a get-together in which one person brings a data sample that is then examined and discussed by the whole group, a sort of "brain-storming" exercise concerning a particular example of language in use.* The reading materials for this course will consist of scholarly articles either on e-reserve at the library or photocopied as a reading packet.

For more information, please contact Professor Mayes at mayes@uwm.edu

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* Although conversation analysts have traditionally focused on "talk-in-interaction" (i.e., spoken interaction), ethnomethodologists have focused more broadly and include written documents. In addition, some researchers have used CA to analyze newer types of language use, such as text messaging.

English 813-001: Special Topics in Creative Writing: Hybrid Fusions: Creating Inter-arts, Collage, and Trans-lingual Texts G
Brenda Cárdenas
Tuesday 4:30-7:10pm

Some of the most inventive creative texts of our time have fused the visual arts with poetry, collaged various source materials, and moved back and forth with ease between different languages. Consider the verbi-voco-visual works of conceptual poets like Mary Ellen Solt, Steve McCaffrey, and Derek Beaulieu; the palimpsests of Tom Phillips' A Humument and the assemblage of Anne Carson's Nox; Cecilia Vicuña's weavings of polylingual text, installation, and earthworks; Craig Santos Perez's fusions of translingual collage and open-field poetics; the Zaum/Dada meets Nuyorican performance poetics of Edwin Torres; and the digital literature/VizPo of Brian Kim Steffans, Juliet Martin, Young-Hae Chang, Sharon Daniel, and many others.

In this (yes, I'll say it, "everything-including-the-kitchen-sink") studio course, we will work both individually and in collaboration with others to create various hybrid projects (both on and off the page) that explore conditions of mutability, liminality, and rupture by fusing visual and textual elements and by combining multiple languages and/or registers of language.

As we examine published creative and critical works, as well our own works-in-progress, we will consider each project's various elements and how they may be juxtaposed to, layered over, or interlaced with one another; how they may be in conversation with or counterpoint to one another; how they compliment, interrupt, and transform one another; and, of course, what effects these hybridities produce. Primary texts I am considering include Anne Carson's Nox, Terrance Gower and Monica de la Torre's Appendices Illustrations and Notes for The Black Box, Susan Howe's and Susan Bee's Bed Hangings, Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton, Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution, Barbara Jane Reyes' Diwata, Craig Santos Perez's from Unincorporated Territory: Hacha and Saina, Edwin Torres' The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker, Cecilia Vicuña's Saborami, and a number of digital and visual texts available online. I will ultimately pare down this list and welcome student input as I do so. To set contexts for our work, we will also read critical articles and chapters by scholars, such as Alfred Arteaga, Derek Beaulieu, Johanna Drucker, Steven Kellman, W. J. T. Mitchell, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Keith Smith, and Doris Sommer, which will be made available on e-reserve.

English 814-001: Seminar in Irish Literature: Inventing Ireland G
José Lanters
Tuesday 3:30-6:10pm

This seminar takes as its (broad) starting point Declan Kiberd's premise, in his book of the same title, that the Irish "invented" Ireland -- with a little help from the English. How that (self-)image is constructed depends, of course, on who is imagining that Irish community, and to what end. Indeed, Kiberd contends that Irish society has had an extraordinary capacity to assimilate new elements through all its major phases, which bears out the fact that, as he puts it, "identity is seldom straightforward and given, more often a matter of negotiation and exchange."

In this course we will read texts written between the Act of Union and the present day and examine how they reflect changing historical, political, and social circumstances on the island and negotiate the question of Irishness.

Reading list t.b.d but the following authors may be included: Maria Edgeworth, Dion Boucicault, William Carleton, J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Patrick McCabe, Hugo Hamilton, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Roddy Doyle.

English 854: Seminar in College Composition, Theory and Pedagogy: Teaching Writing With Digital Technologies G
Anne Wysocki
Wednesday 5:00-7:40pm

The class's subtitle probably misleads, for this is not a class focusing on how to teach with Powerpoint or D2L. Instead, we will consider how networked digital communication technologies play with our understanding of "writing." How therefore might we play with what it is to teach "writing," be a "teacher of writing," shape a "classroom," or responsibly prepare others (as well as ourselves) for future communications? What happens to students, learning, bodies, aesthetics, distance, and rhetoric through such networked play? What counts as "critical"?

In addition to reading a range of texts supportive of our inquiry, we will be "writing" our own texts -- with color, video, animation, and space -- to ground our readings, questions, and arguments. We will explore a range of environments and interfaces -- gaming, immersive, graphic, narrative, non-linear, social, non-western, drill-and-kill -- so that you experiment with the positions and communications (and hence teaching and learning) possible within them.

You need have no particular technological proficiency for this class, but you do need a strong critical perspective to bring to the play. You will keep a reflective journal throughout the class, and will propose(alone or collaboratively) a final project that supports your pedagogical/research interests.

The reading list is likely to include writings from Nancy Baym, Lauren Berlant, Ian Bogost, danah boyd, by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Mary Flanagan, Tracy Fullerton, James Gee, Anya Kamenetz, Jane McGonigal, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kurt Squire, and McKenzie Wark.

English 855-001: Rhetorics of Science and Medicine G
Scott Graham
Tuesday 5:30-8:10pm

Science and medicine are each part of vastly complex cultural enterprises which include, but also extend far beyond what is done in the laboratory or what happens in scientific journal articles. Scientists, technologists, doctors, patients, regulators, policy makers, journalists, and the general public each interact with and participate in technical, scientific, and medical discourses in a wide variety of ways. English 855 will examine scientific, technical, and medical communication both in the contexts of research and dissemination and in terms of larger cultural and material concerns. The course will provide students with the foundation necessary to explore key problems in rhetorics of science and medicine and how those issues interface with rhetorical studies and technical communication more broadly. Students will read a wide range of scholarship including: 1) canonical articles in the rhetoric of science and medicine 2) related works in technical communication, and 3) cutting-edge texts in science and technology studies. Specific authors include: Annemarie Mol, Bruno Latour, Carl Herndl, Carolyn Miller, Charles Bazerman, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Joseph Dumit, Judy Segal, Peter Galison, and Randy Allen Harris. Students will facilitate one class discussion, write several reading synthesis essays, and compose a final paper of article length.

English 875-001: Seminar in Modern Literature
Becoming modern: gendered narratives G
Kumkum Sangari
Wednesday 1:00-3:40pm

This course will explore "modernity" as an ensemble of expectations, desires, class and colonial impositions, alternative visions or critiques, and material transformations through the emergence of gendered public spheres in the late 19th and early 20th century. The sites of "becoming modern" include literacy, reading and writing; new women; colonial exhibitionary complexes and civilizing missions; the city and visuality alongside the gendering of urban labor and consumption; and early cinema as a tutelary and phantasmatic public sphere. The texts to be studied, both formally and historically, are drawn from several countries (England, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, north America), include short stories, dreams, autobiographies, personal narratives, lectures, polemical essays, posters, sketches, films and critical theory. They lead, potentially, into a theorization of the "global modern."

English 876-001: Seminar in Media Culture: Understanding Participatory Media G
Stuart Moulthrop
Thursday 11am-1:40pm

This is a seminar on theoretical approaches to those media and cultural forms that may be described as interactive, ergodic, or participatory: a large category that could include digital writings, videogames, and various forms of social media. Given this focus, the seminar will address the challenge of rapidly evolving, emergent practices, and the difficulty of making scholarly writing answerable to post-print, computational media. A range of approaches will be considered, including traditional cultural studies, New Marxism, Scandinavian neo-formalism, procedural rhetoric, subversive play theory, and applied poststructuralism. Appropriate subjects for research could include games (video- or otherwise), experimental writing practices, virtual communities, trans-media narratives, and any other development with a significant emphasis on participation or co-production.

Requirements include a short paper, a seminar paper (ideally, first draft of an article for journal publication), and an application project, which will involve some engagement with digital technology, and may be undertaken collaboratively. No special technical skills are required.

Possible readings:

This is a tentative list. A final selection will be available when book orders come due, probably in May.

Galloway, Protocol
Bogost, Unit Operations
Perloff, Unoriginal Genius
Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers
Flanagan, Critical Play
Eskelinen, Cybertext Poetics
Holmevik, Inter/Ventions
Terranova, Network Culture

For more information please contact Stuart Moulthrop at moulthro@uwm.edu.

English 882: Seminar in 19th Century American Literature: "Reading and Writing Nature" G
Richard Grusin
Wednesday 3:30-6:10pm

In the first hundred years of its existence, the United States of America was often understood as "Nature’s Nation." In this seminar we will read key texts of the 19th century American literary representation of nature, with an eye towards ecological, political, and philosophical issues. We will focus on works from before the Civil War, including Ralph Waldo Emerson’s important 1836 essay, "Nature," Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Or Life in the Woods, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The class will combine close and careful reading of these extraordinary literary texts with readings selected (mainly) from 19th-century natural history, ecology, and philosophy. The course has several aims: to make you better readers of American (and other) literature; to make you better critical writers; and to introduce you to the complex engagement with the concept of nature in the development of American literary, political, and ecological thought.

Students will write frequent, mainly very short, papers and a final 15-20 page seminar paper. Each student will be asked to do an in-class presentation on an assigned critical work.

My personal motivation for teaching this class is to have an excuse to re-read Walden or Moby-Dick, two of the most essential and remarkable books of the American literary canon. If you have not read these texts, or even if you have, this class is for you.

English 885-001: The Frankfurt School G
Andrew Kincaid
Thursday 5:30-8:10pm

In the early part of the twentieth century, a group of German and German-Jewish intellectuals grappled with the legacy and questions of Western philosophy. Writing against the emergence of Nazism, monopoly capitalism, and Stalinism, they investigated the inheritance of the European Enlightenment: What is progress? How can knowledge be used for human emancipation? What is the future of philosophy? What are the connections between culture and power, aesthetics and politics? Based initially in Frankfurt, under the auspices of the Institute for Social Research, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and others began a series of interdisciplinary studies that would apply these questions to a range of cultural texts: popular and classical music, popular fiction as well as high literary modernism, newspapers, radio, and other mass media. The questions and problems raised by the Frankfurt School developed out of their response to Western philosophy but have continued to dominate and influence contemporary theoretical trends, from poststructuralism through cultural studies and postcolonialism to globalization and media studies. In this course, we will read several of the key texts by members of the first and second generation of Frankfurt School theorists. We will attempt to understand these writings in their own historical contexts, as well as to evaluate the limits of their current applications. Writers to be studied will include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas.

Spring 2012

University Online Schedule

English 404: Language, Power, and Identity U/G
Patricia Mayes
Tuesday 3:30-6:10

English 416-002: Poetry Workshop U/G
Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Thursday 11:00-1:40pm

I welcome all students who are open to growing as writers and readers. This will be a hands-on class, where you will regularly engage in writing exercises; attend a poetry reading and write a review of it; read, listen to, and discuss poems by professional poets, collaborate on a performance poem; and write and revise your own poems-in-progress to be copied, read and analyzed by the class. We'll take a very constructivist approach, always asking ourselves what effects and experiences we hope to evoke in our readers and how we might arrange the language of our poems toward these ends. I aim to foster a supportive and insightful community of poets.

Required texts:

Leaves of Grass (1855 edition) by Walt Whitman. Dover Thrift Editions
New Goose by Lorine Niedecker
Flies by Michael Dickman

English 431: Writing for Social Media U/G
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

They will write and revise several response papers, evaluate and critique an existing social media approach, and design and test a social networking plan for a small organization.

English 442: Writing Center Tutor Practicum U/G, 1 credit
Margaret Mika
Time: TBA

This course is designed to prepare peer tutors to work one on one with writers who visit the UWM Writing Center. We will begin to examine writing and tutoring processes on theoretical and practical levels. Specific topics will include the role of the peer tutor, the rhetorical situation, strategies for talking with writers at different stages of the process, different genres of academic and personal writing, cultural perspectives in writing and English as a Second Language issues.

English 444: Technical Editing U/G
Rachel Spilka
Online

This course is a hands-on practicum in which students are responsible for both individual and collaborative editing projects. Students learn that in work contexts, the scope of editing tasks can vary dramatically: In some cases, editors "fix up" minor grammatical and usage errors (copyediting); in other cases, editors question, "re-envision," and then reshape major aspects of a document such as its purposes, target audiences, content, style, organization, and design (comprehensive editing). The primary goal of this course is to prepare students to handle both copyediting and comprehensive editing tasks—and to edit both hard copy and electronic documents—in future work contexts. A secondary emphasis is on helping students better understand the roles and responsibilities of editors, the ethical dimensions of editing, how editors contribute to document effectiveness, how editors relate to writers during a document's life cycle, and what is involved in becoming a successful editor.

Weekly course assignments are likely to include discussion forum posts on ethical issues and the editor-writer relationship, in addition to "mini assignments" aimed at developing skills and practice in copyediting; relearning (or learning for the first time) the fundamentals of English grammar, spelling, mechanics and usage; and gaining competence in proofreading and editing technical material. Major editing assignments are likely to include copyediting and comprehensive editing tasks on actual work documents in a variety of content areas (such as public policy, science, and health/medicine). A final collaborative course project will involve working in a team to conduct a comprehensive edit on an actual organization's document, website, or set of documents.

English 616-001: The Architectonics of Designing a Collection (Advanced Workshop in Poetry) U/G
Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Thursday 5:00-7:40pm

I welcome all students who are open to growing as writers and readers. This is the capstone course in your undergraduate sequence as a creative writer. The subtitle is "The Architectonics of Designing a Collection." By this, I mean to say that we will spend time thinking about how poets go about the task of taking a rough group of poems and eventually shaping them into a structured poetry collection. We'll study three very different early collections with a particular eye toward thematic and linguistics structures. This course is also available for credit to graduate students. As such there will be a researched component. You will also spend much of the semester composing your own new works of poetry and offering practical criticism on the poems-in-progress written by your peers. I will expect that you have upper-level competence as a poet. More importantly, I assume you want to continue to improve, experiment, and to grow as a writer, so that I hope you welcome well-intentioned and sophisticated feedback from me and from your peers. I aim to foster a supportive and insightful community of poets.

Required texts:

Leaves of Grass (1855 edition) by Walt Whitman. Dover Thrift Editions
New Goose by Lorine Niedecker
Flies by Michael Dickman

English 624: Dangerous Fictions (Seminar in Modern Literature) U/G
Jason Puskar
Wednesday 12:30 PM-3:10 PM

This research seminar studies American fiction's attention to risk and danger, often in novels thought to be dangerous themselves. From violent crime to modern warfare, industrial accidents to infectious disease, American novels have a history of seeking out danger, and many of the books that did so were condemned and sometimes banned.

We will study works by Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, James Cain, and Don DeLillo, as well as Orson Welles's original 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds." We will pay special attention to the cultural history of certain kinds of danger, including crime, pollution, natural disasters, and riots. We also will read these novels in relation to recent theories of risk and danger from a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology to philosophy. Some questions to be asked: Is fiction more or less dangerous because it is "not true"? How does American culture construct risks and dangers through language? How can we understand the relationship of literature to modern institutions of risk analysis and risk management? This course requires students to complete a guided research project.

English 634: World Englishes (Seminar in English Language Studies) U/G
Patricia Mayes
Thursday 3:30-6:10

The English language now has more than one billion speakers world wide. Many millions speak English as a native language, many more speak English as a second language, but most speak it as a foreign language. Yet, the Englishes spoken by the largest group are considered distinct from traditional "native" varieties of English, and are sometimes referred to as "New Englishes," or "Auntie Englishes," or even "Weird Englishes." This course explores the historical, political, and sociocultural issues associated with the globalization of Englishes, focusing on some of the structural differences of these variaties, but also on the ideological underpinnings of debates about nativization, standardization, identity, and ownership. In exploring these issues through course readings and class discussion we will consider whether aspects of language use can be considered a 'choice,' as is often assumed, or the result of powerful social and political forces. We will also consider how World Englishes are related to common pedagogical problems and concerns in the English language teaching profession.

Likely Text:

Schneider, Edgar W. 2011. English around the world. Cambridge University Press.

Possible Texts:

Jenkins, Jennifer. 2009. World Englishes: A Resource Book for Students. 2nd ed. Routledge.
Phillipson, Robert. 2009. Linguistic imperialism continued. New York and London: Routledge.
Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Other course readings will be chosen from among the following, and placed on e-reserve:
(Note that this means that I may select another [only one more] text from this list or use a few chapters from one or more of these texts. In the latter case, those chapters would most likely be available on e-reserve.)

Bruthiaux, Paul. 2009. "Multilingual Asia: Looking back, looking around, looking forward." In Lim, Lisa & Low Ee Ling, eds. Multilingual, Globalizing Asia: Implications for Policy and Education. AILA Review 22: 120-130.
Cowie, Claire. 2007. "The accents of outsourcing: the meanings of 'neutral' in the Indian call centre industry." World Englishes 26(3): 316-330.
Deumert, Ana and Sibabalwe Oscar Masinyana. 2008. "Mobile language choices: The use of English and isiXhosa in text messages (SMS)." English World-Wide 29(2): 117-147.
Hickey, Raymond. 2005. "Englishes in Asia and Africa: Origin and structure." In Raymond Hickey, ed. Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 503-35.
James, Gregory. 2001. "Cantonese particles in Hong Kong students' English e-mails." English Today 67 17(3): 9-16.
Jenkins, Jennifer, Marko Modiano and Barbara Seidlhofer. 2001. "Euro-English: Perspectives on an emerging variety on the mainland of Europe, from commentators in Sweden, Austria and England." English Today 17(4): 13-19.
Kachru, Braj. 1992. The Other Tongue. University of Illinois Press.
Kachru, Yamuna & Cecil L. Nelson. 2006. World Englishes in Asian Contexts. Hong Kong University Press. 93-107 (Chapter 7, "Standards, codification and world Englishes")
Lim, Lisa. 2009. "Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages?" In Lisa Lim & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes. Special Issue of Englishes World-Wide 30(2): 218-239.
Mesthrie, Rajend & Rakesh M. Bhatt. 2008. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Variables. Cambridge University Press. (Chap 1)
Modiano, Marko. 2007. "Euro-English from a 'deficit linguistics' perspective?" Review article. World Englishes 26(4):525-533.

English 710: Advanced Project Management for Professional Writers G
Rachel Spilka
Online

This course will benefit two types of students in particular:

Students from any discipline who are seeking to broaden their knowledge base and credentials in project management and professional writing.
Graduate students and workplace practitioners who seek a theoretical foundation for the work they are doing or will do in project management, along with advanced practice and skill in this important type of work.

In this course, students will learn effective strategies for:

Managing both simple and complex documentation projects for actual clients in work contexts. During the first half of the course, you will collaborate within a small team on managing a single, relatively small-scale documentation project, and during the second half of the course, the entire class will collaborate on planning and managing a complex, large-scale documentation project.
Negotiating and learning "best practices" for key stages of the writing process, including the following:
- Research (including audience research and an initial client interview)
- Task analysis (based on research findings)
- Project planning (focusing on identifying goals and constraints and creating planning charts)
- Project management (focusing on smooth collaboration and problem identification/solving)
- Project evaluation (including usability testing), revision, delivery, and debriefing

Our textbook will be Stanley Dicks' Management Principles and Practices for Technical Communicators. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. Other readings will be posted on our D2L course site.

English 720: Modern Literary Theory G
Barrett Kalter
Wednesday 5-7:40 PM

As a body of writings and as a set of principles and practices that orient us toward our objects of analysis in distinctive ways, literary theory cuts across all historical and geographical fields within the discipline of literary studies. This survey of literary theory will therefore provide a foundation for advanced seminars as well as for your own research and future teaching of literature. We'll begin in the eighteenth century, when the convergence of print culture and the public sphere generated a modern literary criticism that served the projects of nation formation and class consolidation by seeking to standardize taste and form a canon. Then we will examine the central schools of criticism that emerged during the twentieth century: formalism (Brooks, Bakhtin), Marxism (Williams, Jameson, Bourdieu), post-structuralism (Derrida, Barthes, Foucault), theories of race, gender, and sexuality (Sedgwick, Butler, Gilroy), and examinations of the post-colonial and the global (Said, Spivak, Casanova). A running question will be, how has the shift in purpose from evaluation to critique transformed criticism and its impact both inside and outside the academy?

The second half of the semester will consider the implications of these theoretical models for the study of literature through an examination of three novels. We will read Robinson Crusoe, Pride and Prejudice, and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton in conjunction with writings on generic change, character and the invention of interiority, modes of fictionality, and narrative structure. Criticism will include influential treatments of these aspects of the novel as well as fresh approaches to them: thing theory (Brown), the new formalism (G. Stewart), and recent engagements with the sciences, such as narratological analyses that borrow from cognitive psychology (Zunshine) or the data mining that enables a "distant reading" of literary form (Moretti). While allowing us to gauge the value of different kinds of criticism, this range of works will also give us the opportunity to address more practical matters, such as how one might use theory to develop a research methodology and conceptualize a thesis/dissertation topic. Assignments will include an annotated bibliography on a variety of criticism or a critic of your choice (a good head start for exams), a review of a new work of criticism (with an eye toward publication), and two 10-page papers.

English 776: Early Women Writers G
Gwynne Kennedy
Tuesday 5:00-7:40 PM

Women's writings from earlier centuries have received considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, and an informal "canon" of early English, European, and "American" women's writings has emerged. We will read a cross-section of these major writers in this course. The texts span the 15th through the 18th centuries, within early transnational contexts, from England, France, Spain, New Spain, and North America, and multiple genres: defenses of women, drama, fiction, and poetry. Supplemental readings will provide literary, historical, and cultural context.

Several broad questions will connect the readings, including the representation of female authorship and authority, the role of race and gender in constructing national identity, proto-feminist arguments against women's inferiority, and changing ideas about the body, erotic desire, and normative sexuality.

No prior knowledge of the texts or historical background is required. All readings are in English. For students interested in more contemporary women writers, the course offers a valuable historical perspective.

This class satisfies the pre-1800 literature requirement.

Texts will include:

Christine de Pizan, from The Book of the City of Ladies (earliest defense of women)
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam (first play by an English woman)
Louise Labe, Sonnets (the Petrarchan mistress speaks)
Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (also a Petrarchan mistress-poet) and Urania (first romance by an English woman)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (novella) and The Rover (play) (first English woman to support herself commercially as a writer)
Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure (closet drama)
Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz (defense of women, poems, drama) (a nun in New Spain)
Katherine Phillips (poems)
Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, from Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion
Anne Bradstreet (poems)

English 816-001: Poem Series (Seminar in Poetry Writing) G
Brenda Cardenas
Tuesday 4:30 PM-7:10 PM

This course will focus on the creation, critique, and revision of student poems written in series that explore particular subjects/themes and/or forms/approaches (for example, a sonnet cycle, lyric sequence, or series of inter-connected aleatory or collage poems). By working in series and presenting three poems at a time for workshop, students may begin to form sections of their dissertation manuscripts or potential chapbooks. To this end, we will also examine published books comprised of poem series to analyze how the poems in each series compliment, are in conversation with, and are juxtaposed to one another, as well as the tensions and effects that emerge from their arrangements and combinations. With a partner, each student will present questions for and lead discussion on one of the required books (titles TBA). Students will also complete and submit a manuscript of revised poems produced during the semester with a critical introduction that explores the students' poetics, approach and influences in creating this particular project.

English 825: Samuel Beckett: Prose, Poetry and Plays G
Andrew Kincaid
Thursday 5:10 to 8:30 PM

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is one of the giants of twentieth century literature. His plays, Waiting for Godot (1948), Endgame (1955), Happy Days (1961), and Krapp's Last Tape (1958), reinvented theatre by pushing the limits of the medium. His drama lacks precise setting, has a minimal plot, and is inhabited by broken characters. The dialogue is often monosyllabic and terse. His plays don't tell a story as much as they are poetic and symbolic attempts to stage memory, time, life and death. His dramas are both disliked and worshipped, but they have entered the canon as modern masterpieces. And they are not without their humor, often slapstick and silly. Beckett's prose, too, is both modernist and experimental, moving from the Joycean-inspired wordplay of Murphy (1935) to the internal, rambling, broken narrators of Molloy (1947) and the later short prose pieces, such as Stirring Still (1989) and First Love (begun 1946). Beckett wrote for radio, too. Embers (1957) and Rough for Radio (1961) are intricately detailed plays that use background sounds, silence, music, and taut, structured dialogue not only to examine the possibilities inherent in the form of radio (its immateriality, sound editing, voiceovers, etc.), but also to develop his recurring themes of loss, life's purpose, hope and survival.

He wrote and developed a film, entitled Film (1963), for Buster Keaton. Beckett's range of medium, therefore, is part and parcel of what we now might call performance art, a lifelong ahead-of-the-curve effort to push art, both form and content, into new directions. While his experimentations are avant-garde and difficult, they are not indulgent works of art for art's sake; Beckett, while not an activist, was political, and he saw literature and theatre as means to express, detail, and uphold human dignity, to get audiences to reflect on the needy and the outcast (Waiting for Godot found a willing audience at San Quentin prison), on human cruelty, on torture, on bureaucracies and the arrogance of those who claim to know answers and push solutions.

His name, like Kakfa's, has entered everyday language as a term used to express a certain outlook of life. "Beckettian" refers to a world that appears to consist of pointless or misunderstood communication, that seems to lack purpose and direction, and yet, in the midst of despair, we survive, find inner strength, and continue to look for hope and salvation. A Beckettian world is dark, but not unforgiving. And we see evidence of his writings in many aspects of popular culture, from Seinfeld, a show, like Waiting for Godot, about nothing, to the often cited last lines of The Unnameable (1949), "I can't go on. I'll go on."

Part of the attraction of Beckett for readers lies in his use of minimalist language and forms. His works are symbolic, and because little action happens on stage or in text, everything becomes potentially significant. There is a great freedom of interpretation in Beckett. He never argues about why the world is the way it is, and he himself never attempted to explain the meaning of his works, stating once that he "refuse[d] to be involved in exegesis of any kind." Beckett did not, then, seek to provide definitive answers. Rather his works challenge our expectations: what do we do with a text that is open, free to us to read how we will, a work that is difficult both in its 'obscurity,' but also in its simplicity? This openness means, of course, that Beckett's oeuvre has been interpreted through many lenses: political, psychoanalytic, religious, postcolonial, and existentialist. In reading Beckett we have an opportunity not just to explore an author whose life spans most of the twentieth century, but also the chance to negotiate different literary theories, to see how academia has treated an author who famously avoided the spotlight, and to consider what is at stake in interpretation. In short, reading Beckett allows us to consider basic questions in English Studies today: Why read? How should we read? What's at stake, what matters about the conclusions we draw from a piece of literature?

Readings to include, but not limited to:

Drama:
- Waiting for Godot
- Endgame
- Happy Days
- Krapp's Last Tape
- Breath
- Catastrophe
Prose
- Murphy
- Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
- "Dante and the Lobster"
- First Love
- Stirrings Still
Radio Productions:
- Embers
- Rough for Radio II
Cinema:
- Film
Poetry:
- Whoroscope
- Echo's Bones
- Dieppe
- My way is in the sand flowing
- What would I do without this world
- I would like my love to die

Secondary Reading:

Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Oppenheim, Lois, ed. Samuel Beckett Studies. Palgrave Macmillan. 2004

English 853: Philosophical Bases of Contemporary Rhetorical Theories: Issues, Concepts, and (Some) Major Figures G
Dennis Lynch
Monday 3:30 PM-6:10 PM

The course will be structured around three interrelated sets of issues informing the field of rhetoric and composition. These issues arise from the shift in the mid-twentieth century in rhetorical studies from notions of persuasion to notions of identification (and from rhetorical effect to symbolic action); this shift has raised questions about the scope of rhetoric and the ability of traditional rhetorical concepts to account for embodiment and for non-cognitively, non-linguistically mediated experience. Our issues/concepts and possible readings will therefore be:

Persuasion, Identification, and Subjectivization (Burke, Zizek, and Foucault)
Ethics and the Scope of Rhetoric (Perelman, Leff, Butler)
Pathos and Purpose/Invention/Production (Heidegger, Nussbaum, Hanson, Massumi, Rickerts)

English 855: Rhetoric of Technology G
Dave Clark
Tuesday 5:30-8:10

"Rhetoric of technology" is a slippery term and, even more than "rhetoric of science," is a hard-to-define category of literature that spans science studies, anthropology and sociology of science, cultural studies, and rhetoric and professional writing. What unites the texts is a common assumption that technologies are inseparable from the rhetorics that describe, promote, and of course document them, and that it can be useful to conceive of technologies as tools with rhetorical constructions and implications. In this course, we will read across the category, including texts from such authors as Susan Leigh Star, Gary Downey, James Gee, Glynda Hull, Dorothy Winsor, Steven Shapin, Charles Bazerman, Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu, and Andrew Feenberg. Students will write weekly responses, and will write several short essays that will contribute to their production of an article-length final paper.

Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies (JAMS) 860: Video Games (Seminar in Media Studies) G
Michael Z. Newman
This class will meet on Thursdays from 5:00-7:40 pm for seminar (discussion), and on Mondays from 7:00-8:00 pm for a game lab, which will usually meet at the library.

Note to Plan H graduate students: this is an MA level course (as JAMS courses do not conform to our course numbering system) and an elective, not an 800 level media seminar.

In this course we will consider video games as a technology, industry, cultural form, and set of social practices. We will also survey game studies as an emergent academic field with backgrounds in many disciplines. Students will be expected to play a variety of games, to read extensively in the literature of game studies, and to formulate an original research project which will become a final paper. My interest in games is primarily as a subject for cultural history, but this course will also look at video game criticism and theory. Students are encouraged to pursue any approach to their research that appears useful and appropriate. One way of looking at games is as a form of new media, and particularly as an instance of convergence of technologies, in particular audiovisual technologies such as TV, cinema, and computers. This will be one way of approaching video games. But to many writers, digital games are also a medium unto themselves, and their distinctness from other media is also a matter for serious consideration. Among the specific topics likely to be considered are:

The early history of video games and the establishment of their cultural identity.
The spaces of play and the significance of gaming in everyday life.
The association of gaming with identities, particularly those of age and gender, and dynamics of power inherent in such cultural constructions.
Gaming as an practice situated in communities, online and offline.
Gaming as a product of advanced capitalist industry and culture.
Video games as a textual, aesthetic form.
Game genres such as first-person shooter, rhythm game (e.g., Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero), and simulation; games as remediations of practices such as shooting, musical performance, and earlier forms of play like boardgames and D&D, and of genres of popular culture such as science-fiction and fantasy literature and film.

Readings for this course may include (books may be assigned in whole or just as excerpts):

Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (Random House, 2011).
Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism (MIT, 2006).
Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006).
James Paul Gee, "Why Game Studies Now? Video Games: A New Art Form," Games and Culture 1 (2006): 58-61.
Henry Jenkins, "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" in The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (NYU, 2006).
Jesper Juul, Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (MIT, 2005).
Sheila C. Murphy, "'This is Intelligent Television': The Emerging Technologies of Video Games, Computers, and the Medium of Television," How Television Invented New Media (Rutgers, 2011).
T.L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT, 2006).

English 875 (Seminar in Modern Literature) Becoming modern: gendered narratives G
Kumkum Sangari
Wednesday 12:30-3:10 PM

This course will explore 'modernity' as an ensemble of expectations, desires, class and colonial impositions, alternative visions or critiques, and material transformations through the emergence of gendered public spheres in the late 19th and early 20th century. The sites of 'becoming modern' include literacy, reading and writing; new women; colonial exhibitionary complexes and civilizing missions; the city and visuality alongside the gendering of urban labor and consumption; and early cinema as a tutelary and phantasmatic public sphere. The texts to be studied, both formally and historically, are drawn from several countries (England, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, north America), include short stories, dreams, autobiographies, personal narratives, lectures, polemical essays, posters, sketches, films and critical theory. They lead, potentially, into a theorization of the 'global modern.'

English 885-001: Critical Race Theory and Cultural Studies G
Gregory Jay
Monday 4:30 PM-7:10 PM

This graduate research seminar will explore the field of "critical race theory" and its applications in the study of literature, film and media, education, and culture. The definition of the field remains broad, including investigations of the social and historical construction of race and the articulation of such constructions through legal, political, pedagogical, aesthetic, and cultural practices. New developments in critical race theory have included critical whiteness studies, queer theoretical analyses of race, and comparative racialization studies within a postcolonial context.

Students from all disciplines and departments are welcome. Early in the semester, each seminar student will design and submit a proposal for an individual research project on a topic or problem of their choice. Completion of the research project, typically resulting in a paper aimed at publication, will be the primary assignment for the semester. The readings for the course will be used to establish key concepts and issues useful to students as they undertake their research. The selection of texts for the course could include such texts as:

Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (or Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy
E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson, eds, Black Queer Studies
Toure, Who's Afraid of Post Blackness?

We will also read essays from the Special Issue of PMLA on Comparative Racialization (Vol. 123, no. 5: 2008).

English 885-002: The Nonhuman Turn G
Richard Grusin
Wednesday 3:00 PM-5:40 PM

This seminar takes up the "nonhuman turn" that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century: actor-network theory, particularly Bruno Latour's career-long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman agency, and the politics of things; affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer theory; animal studies as developed in the work of Donna Haraway, projects for animal rights, and a more general critique of speciesism; the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda, Latour, and others; new brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence; new media theory, especially as it has paid close attention to technical networks, material interfaces, and computational analysis; the new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and marxism; varieties of speculative realism like object-oriented philosophy, vitalism, and panpsychism; or systems theory in its social, technical, and ecological manifestations. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their aims, objects, and methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of 21st century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Running roughly parallel to this nonhuman turn in the past few decades has been the "posthuman turn" articulated by such important theoretical works as Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe's What Is Posthumanism? Thinking beyond the human, as posthumanism is sometimes characterized, clearly provides one compelling model for 21st century studies. But the relation between posthumanism and humanism, like that of postmodernism to modernism, can sometimes seem as much like a repetition of the same as the emergence of something different. Thus one of the questions that this seminar will take up is the relation between posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, especially the ways in which taking the nonhuman as a matter of critical, artistic, and scholarly concern might differ from, as well as overlap with, the aims of posthumanism.

The seminar will operate as well as preparation for the C21 spring conference on "The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies." Several of the readings will be 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 some elements of the nonhuman turn to their own areas of interest in their graduate research.

Fall 2011

University Online Schedule

English 404: Language, Power, and Identity sec 001 U/G
Patricia Mayes
W 3:30 - 6:10 pm

English 414: Special Topics in Creative Writing sec 001 U/G
Subtitle: Whitman's Children
Susan Firer
MW 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

Course description (doc 26k)

English 431: Topics in Advanced Writing sec 201 U/G
Subtitle: Professional Writing for Nonprofits
Sally Stanton
Online

This course explores the theory, practices, lore, and written communication used by professional writers in nonprofit or social sector workplaces, such as theatres, museums, libraries, social service agencies, art centers, humane societies, and other community organizations. Students will:

Learn the purpose and defining characteristics of the nonprofit sector.
Understand the critical role of written messages in communicating social sector values and results.
Explore persuasive writing strategies for nonprofits (including case statements, donor and constituent messages, and proposal-related communications).
Adapt business communication theories and strategies to the nonprofit sector.
Apply sector-specific theory and approaches to producing annual reports, websites, social media, grant reports, and unique documents such as artist statements and resumes, exhibition catalogs, and advocacy materials.

Students will gain practical experience in researching, designing, and writing documents commonly prepared by nonprofit professionals. Assignments will also require learning effective strategies for managing writing projects, audience analysis, and collaboration.

English 433: Creative Nonfiction for Publication sec 001 U/G
Carolyn Washburne
W 4:30 - 7:10 pm

In this course, students will write in a number of creative nonfiction formats, including the personal experience article, personal opinion essay, review, and profile, as well as a researched article using a creative nonfiction approach. The course will explore using fiction and poetry techniques, such as metaphor, dialogue, voice, and point of view, to make the nonfiction writing more eloquent and compelling. The course will also cover how to get nonfiction work published. To illustrate the principles being discussed, the class will critique published articles and evaluate each other's work in peer editing sessions and class workshop discussions.

English 435: Professional and Technical Writing sec 001 U/G
Nancy Nygaard
Online

This course is an orientation to the work and field of professional and technical writing. Students will develop foundational skills in researching, planning, drafting, and revising common types of workplace documentation as they complete individual and collaborative projects for either hypothetical or actual clients. Students will also gain skill in adapting documents for different types of audiences and analyzing writing projects rhetorically, contextually, and from a problem-solving perspective. One important segment of this course will be about job and career preparation; as students learn about "best practices" for job networking, interviews, and site visits in this field, they will develop their own electronic resumes, cover letters, and writing portfolios.

English 439: Document Design sec 001 U/G
Anne Wysocki
TR 4:00 - 5:15 pm

In this class we focus on producing documents that work: given the audience for whom you are creating a document, and given the purposes you hope to achieve with that audience, what strategies—of layout; size and material; typography; use of photograph, illustration, chart, or diagram; readability and usability—are appropriate? In other words, this is a course in the rhetoric of document design. Through producing and analyzing many different kinds of print documents (from simple, text-only single page layouts to multi-page instruction sets), you will learn how to work with differing current expectations about the strategies named above. This course is appropriate for all students with an interest in or need to produce documents for professional contexts. Students from all plans and majors are welcome.

English 442: Writing Center Tutoring Practicum sec 001 U/G
Margaret Mika

In many ways, learning to tutor well is a baptism-by-fire enterprise requiring hours of on-the-job practice. This course provides Writing Center tutors with a foundation of concentrated study and supervised practice from which to begin. Therefore, the first two-thirds of class will be frontloaded, i.e., conducted before the semester starts and 3 weeks before the Writing Center opens. We will meet for 10 hours over two days during the week prior to the first day of classes and again for 1.5 hrs, one Friday each month to complete the course requirements. As important as these formal classes will be the many day to day opportunities for tutors to talk with the director, the graduate assistant coordinator and fellow tutors once the Center opens.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission required to enroll. Students must have attained junior status, successfully completed the Writing Center application process and hired as a prospective Writing Center tutor. All majors, especially non-English, are welcome.

English 443: Grant Writing sec 201 U/G
Sally Stanton
Online

Grant Writing combines richly descriptive storytelling and subtle persuasion within technical limits established by potential charitable funders of these organizations. The practical skill of preparing clear, concise grant proposals is valued and desired by employers in higher education, engineering, science and medicine, human services, the arts, and cultural institutions.

In this class, students will learn the basics of researching and writing effective, persuasive grants, and will then develop and apply that knowledge in an integrated service-learning project with a community-based nonprofit organization. They will learn how to research and analyze the sources of charitable funding information available to Milwaukee area organizations and how to effectively organize and present that information for writing grants. Students will leave this course with marketable skills and a greater knowledge of the ways in which effective communication adds value to the workplace.

English 445: Composing Process sec 001 U/G
Subtitle: Teaching Composing Processes
Alice Gillam
MW 2:00 - 3:15 pm

This course is designed to introduce pre-service teachers to composing process theories and pedagogies as part of their preparation for teaching writing. Clearly, no single course, particularly one that does not include actual practice, can adequately prepare future teachers for the complexity and challenges of teaching writing. However, this course aims to begin that process by:

introducing theories and debates related to the teaching of writing that can, in turn, serve as critical lenses for teaching and reflecting on practice;
suggesting a repertoire of pedagogies that can be adapted and transformed to suit various classroom situations; and
offering opportunities to develop and reflect on your own writing practices and identity as a writer.

English 454: Milton sec 001 U/G
Gwynne Kennedy
MW 2:00 - 3:15 pm

The primary reading for the course will be John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, an enormously influential literary text. We will also read some of Milton's other poems and prose. The most substantial work we will do in the course is reading Paradise Lost—not easy, but very rewarding. It is a text best read in a group, rather than alone, so class discussion plays a large role. There will be weekly short responses, midterm and final exams, and a short paper.

English 709: Writing, Rhetoric and Information Technology sec 201 G
Dave Clark
Online

This course explores theories, practices and tools used by professional documentation specialists. Our topics will include knowledge management, information architecture, information design and of course instructional writing. While designing and producing individual and group projects, students will have the opportunity to gain both theoretical and practical experience with designing and writing tools, processes and languages. Projects will also require learning effective strategies for managing writing projects, audience analysis and usability testing, and collaboration. This course does not assume any prior technical expertise, and students from all plans and majors are welcome.

English 715: Narrative Craft and Theory sec 001 G
Subtitle: Creative Nonfiction
Liam Callanan
M 12:00 - 2:40 pm

"Creative Nonfiction" has come to mean many different things, both in and out of workshop classrooms. Of late, it's come to mean, specifically, personal essays (and even more specifically, memoir). This course, however, will have a broader focus: we will read (and write) literary journalism, long-form feature journalism, scholarly work, memoir, and yes, the personal essay. The expected make-up of this class—serious writers—drives its goal: serious writing.

English/MALLT/History 740: Approaches to the Modern I sec 001 G
Mark Netzloff
M 4:30 - 7:10 pm

Course description (doc 29k)

English 743: Introduction to Film Theory and Criticism sec 001 G
Tami Williams
W 3:30 - 7:30 pm

This course is a survey of classical and contemporary film theory. It is designed specifically for graduate students interested in expanding their understanding of film and media studies. It provides an in-depth introduction to the history of the field (including the history of film theory, debates about film and the other arts, film and reality, film and the spectator), providing a theoretical basis for approaches to film analysis. It also considers recent innovations in the field, and the increasingly complex and convergent relationships amongst film and media in an era of globalization.

Required texts:

Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press, 7th edition preferred.
Reinventing Film Studies. Eds. Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill. Arnold Publishers, 2000.
Course reader available at Clark Graphics (2915 N Oakland Ave).

Prerequisites: Graduate standing. This course is part of the new track in Media, Cinema and Digital Culture.

English 761: Discourse Analysis sec 001 G
Patricia Mayes
M 3:30 - 6:10 pm

Course description and texts (doc 78k)

English 776: Women Writers sec 001 G
Subtitle: American Poets Elsewhere
Jason Puskar
T 3:30 - 6:10

This seminar is an intensive study of three American women poets, all of whom write with a heightened sense of spatial or historical dislocation, a sense of being "elsewhere": H.D. (1886-1961), Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), and Louise Glück (1943-). Together, these poets span a full century of American writing, from the birth of high modernism to the present, and they exhibit a wide range of temperaments, politics, and styles. A patient of Sigmund Freud, H.D. combined the insights of psychoanalysis with the traditions of nineteenth-century aestheticism. Rukeyser was a committed communist, disinherited by her wealthy family, but she wrote just as compellingly about the politics of the personal. Glück pioneered a new idiom of post-confessional austerity, dense with accumulated mythologies and haunted by her remarkably ethereal voice. Their dislocations are various too. H.D. emigrated to England and later Switzerland, while Rukeyser wrote compellingly of the Spanish Civil War. Just as often, their travels were imaginary. H.D. and Glück make poetic journeys within the Homeric legends; Rukeyser dreams of air travel and the experience of flight; Glück identifies with the underground lives of plants. Together, these three writers exhibit many of the key phases of twentieth-century poetry, even as the work of each one helps illuminate that of the others.

Texts:

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ISBN0822959240 $28
H.D.: Collected Poems, ISBN9780811209717 $25
Four volumes by Louise Glück (to be determined), estimated cost: $45

English 812: Seminar in Theories of Composition and Rhetoric sec 001 G
Subtitle: Feminist Rhetorical Theory
Alice Gillam
W 4:30 - 7:10 pm

Andrea Lunsford describes the aim of feminist scholarship in rhetoric as "not an attempt to redefine a 'new' rhetoric, but rather to interrupt the seamless narrative usually told about the rhetorical tradition and to open up possibilities for multiple rhetorics, rhetorics that would not name and valorize one, traditional, competitive, agonistic and linear mode of rhetorical discourse but would rather incorporate other, often dangerous moves" (Reclaiming Rhetorica 6). In this class, we will "interrupt" the rhetorical tradition in four ways that roughly correspond to those proposed by Krista Ratcliffe in Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to Rhetorical Traditions. Specifically, we will:

examine feminist rereadings of canonical classical texts,
study feminist projects to reclaim rhetorica,
analyze non-rhetorical feminist texts to extrapolate rhetorical theory from their practices, and
consider recent conceptualizations of rhetorical theory from feminist perspectives.

Our purpose will not to be to derive a single coherent feminist rhetorical theory or to embrace a single methodological approach but rather to consider the debates, diversity, and ongoing questions regarding the means and ends of feminist rhetorical studies: what is rhetorical theory and what work can/does it do in the world? what does it mean to call a rhetorical theory "feminist" or a feminist theory "rhetorical"? what are the implications of feminist rhetorical theories for us as scholars and teachers?

English 813: Special Topics in Creative Writing sec 001 G
Subtitle: Social * Media * Writing
Stuart Moulthrop
T 11:00 am - 1:40 pm

This seminar/workshop examines consequences for creative identity, literary culture, and the practice of writing, arising not so much from emerging technologies per se, as from their participation in various reconfigurations of the social. While we will engage specific social media—Facebook, Twitter, Google, wikis, virtual environments, among others—this is not simply a course in writing for digital networks. Though we may experiment with concepts like crowdsourcing, community authorship, writing games, and other forms of reception-as-production, we will focus mainly on the role and identity of the writer in a time of increasing connectedness.

The course has two major objectives: (1) to expand possibilities for expression that question or transform traditional literary solitude; and (2) to map within those possibilities promising areas for research, critical analysis, and pedagogy. You should expect to finish with, at very least, new approaches to writing, and conceivably with innovative publishable work. You should also discover possible ideas for scholarship and teaching that could confer significant advantage in the job market. For more information, go to http://tinyurl.com/SMWriting.

English 878: Seminar in Feminist Critical Theory sec 001 G
Subtitle: Cultural diversity, multiculturalism and globalization: gendered debates
Kumkum Sangari
W 1:00 - 3:40 pm

Is cultural diversity synonymous with multiculturalism? What produces cultural diversity?

This course works towards a critique of multiculturalism based on exclusivist, primordial and normative notions of culture, religion and race. It will explore the feminist debate on multiculturalism, try to disentangle market-centred notions of multiculturalism, and work towards a different understanding of diversity in both national and transnational arenas. It will focus on modes of exclusion and containment as well as on social and economic processes of diversification through a discussion of caste, class, religion, race, labour, market, migration, nation, state and patriarchies. The course sets out to explore and understand the social processes that have produced as well as suppressed diversity within old colonial and new global regimes.

All readings for this course will be available through Library E-reserve.

English 855: Seminar in Theories of Business and Technical Writing sec 001 G
Subtitle: Issues in Quality, Audience, and Usability
Rachel Spilka
M 5:30 - 8:10

This course examines the history, theories and practical applications of theories that surround issues of quality and audience in the field to technical communication. Special attention is paid to approaches over the past forty years to determining how writing within and across professional contexts can help achieve "quality" by meeting the needs of stakeholders and especially target internal and external audiences of documentation. Through class discussions, workshops and practice-based assignments, students examine, critique, and identify promising theory- and practice-based approaches—past, present and yet to be developed in the future—of measuring and achieving quality of technical communication. Examples of such approaches are cognitive psychology principles, document design guidelines, user engagement guidelines, readability measures, quantitative metrics and usability methods. An important goal of this course is to identify how technical communicators might build on promising past and new approaches in order to model (more accurately) the modern (digital and global) multiple audience and then seek ways to collaborate or partner with that audience toward higher levels of "quality" and "success."

English 885: Seminar in Critical Theory sec 001 G
Subtitle: Psychoanalysis, Gender, Sexuality
Jane Gallop
M 3:30 - 6:10

In this course, we will consider the place of psychoanalysis in Feminist and Queer Theory. We will read influential theorists rethinking gender and/or sexuality with and through psychoanalytic theory: e.g., Chodorow, Irigaray, Butler, Bersani, Freud.

Fall 2011 – other

University Online Schedule

Learning from New Orleans G

Architecture 585: Research Methods in Architecture | Arijit Sen | F 9:00 - 11:40 am
Architecture 533: History/Theory: Global History of Urban Disasters and Rebuilding | Manu Sobti
Architecture 825: Comprehensive Studio | Harry van Oudenallen | TRF 1:30 - 5:20 pm
Architecture 645/855: Studio on Urban and Community Design Theory | Arijit Sen | TRF 1:30 - 5:20 pm

The Learning from New Orleans course bundles four different courses for an integrated study of social justice, urban history, urban politics and urban culture. By focusing on New Orleans as a case study this class carefully studies the politics of urban rebuilding, the role of citizens in this process, and the historical nature of such processes. The course also explores how participatory design can (or can't) involve various stakeholders in the rebuilding of cities.

Course Structure: There are three kinds of courses. Students can take one of more courses to suit their interest. However architecture students taking 6-credit studio are required to take the 3-credit research methods course and the history/theory course in addition to the studio. Non-architecture students are invited to take one or more courses to suit their disciplinary interest. They can take the research methods and/or history/theory course or do an in-depth research project in New Orleans. Non-architecture majors may choose to participate in the design studio via a directed study co-instructed by their advisors or course instructors.

Course Content: In the research methods class students will learn how to analyze and make sense of information gathered from census, cartographic, archival, ethnographic and environmental sources. A focused study of how race, gender, ethnicity and other forms of identities frame the urban experience will also be part of the research methods class. In this class students will learn how to read and analyze the built environment as a cultural artifact.

The history/theory course will introduce students to urban rebuilding and disaster politics in cities across time and geographies. Case studies will include cities outside the United States.

In the studio courses students will apply the knowledge gained in the research methods course by producing strategic, urban, and architectural interventions. Non-architecture students enrolled in the studio may produce heritage maps, urban history analysis, oral histories, documentary films and other forms of documentation and knowledge relevant to their field of study.

Course Objectives: This course focuses on and distinguishes design from other forms of research and practice seen in the social sciences and the natural sciences. Design involves a humanistic understanding of social, material, cultural, political, economic and environmental circumstances of human habitation and this knowledge results in informed interventions in the city. This process will require students to look for patterns and systems that underpin the physical and social reality of what they are studying. In this case it is the Lower Ninth Ward and surrounding impacted areas in New Orleans.

This class follows a teaching strategy called Problem-Based-Learning (PBL) where resolving real life problems are planned into the curriculum in ways that promote higher-level cognitive learning. PBL is a teaching method that is best applied in the study of complex knowledge domains such as culture and architectural design where there is no single scientific answer or resolution. It also allows students to apply and evaluate complex information that they encounter during research directly into their design. On completion of this class students will gain the following skills:

An ability to collect empirical data and do field work.
An awareness of ethnographic, archival, architectural, observational, and ecological data collection strategies and an understanding of interpretive, qualitative and correlational analysis. An ability to collect, analyze, synthesize and evaluate material and social data.
An ability to craft a thesis statement and produce an appropriate program of inquiry.
An ability to evaluate and apply information.
An ability to take an informed position on the politics of urban rebuilding and urban culture.

This is a Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Course. For more information, please contact Dr. Arijit Sen at senA@uwm.edu.

Summer 2011

University Online Schedule

English 404: Language, Power, and Identity sec 091 U/G
Patricia Mayes
MTWR 1:00 - 3:30 pm
7/25-8/20

English 711: Topics in Professional Writing sec 251 G
Subtitle: Writing for Social Media
Dave Clark
Online 6/27-7/23

This course will be an intense, four-week 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

Students will write and revise several response papers, evaluate and critique an existing social media approach, and design and test a social networking plan for a small organization.

Summer 2011 – other

University Online Schedule

French 401: French for Reading Knowledge sec 291 U
Rachel Ney
Online 7/25-8/20

This course is for students with little or no previous knowledge of French and is especially useful to graduate students fulfilling a language requirement.

Spanish 499: Spanish for Reading Knowledge sec 251 U
Nancy Bird-Soto
Online 6/27-7/23

This course is for students with little or no previous knowledge of Spanish and is especially useful to graduate students fulfilling a language requirement.