Courses

Course Description

Many will enter; few will win. 

Humans have a hard time processing numbers, so how can we communicate meaningfully about risk so people can make informed choices? How about harm, whether it’s physical, environmental, cultural, or something else? What affects our perceptions of each? What rhetorical strategies have been used to communicate more effectively, and what strategies have been used to skew perceptions and interpretations? We’ll explore these elements of the rhetoric(s) of risk and harm, examine cases of disproportionate harm, and look at how technical and professional communication is working toward advocacy and justice.

Course Description

In his 1994 book Bomb the Suburbs, William Upski Wimsatt discusses how his experiences as a graffiti
writer shaped his thinking on the relationship between writing and urban space. “Graffiti,” Wimsatt
writes, “taught me all I know about space.” For Wimsatt, the future success of graffiti—and, we
might say, all writing—“depends in part on whether we can continue to surprise with the use of
space.”
But what is writing? Says who? Who gets to theorize it? Who gets to teach it?
Who gets to write about writing?
This seminar will provide students an overview of some of the ways we in Rhetoric and
Composition have answered these questions, all while considering the potential for new voices and
new answers. That is, we will engage with theories and studies of writing from within Writing
Studies, but also from beyond it, looking to other writers, other spaces, other ideas about writing
(like Wimsatt’s) that might inform or push back on some of our long-held disciplinary assumptions.
By broadening our focus on what constitutes “composition theory,” the hope here is that we
broaden our own research and teaching of writing and writerly identity.
Students can expect to leave this seminar with a more robust understanding of where Composition
came from, where it has been, where it is, and where it might be going, as well as a familiarity with a
diverse range of approaches to teaching and research from within and beyond the academy.
Together, we will examine the major theories, histories, debates, and pedagogies in the field and the
extracurriculum, identify gaps or absences, and project a path forward.

Requirements

Weekly reading responses and comments; discussion facilitation for one class period; a pedagogy
prospectus; a series of writing assignments leading to an article-length seminar paper or comparable
scholarly project; and an in-class conference presentation on final project.

Course Description

This course will cover the design, implementation, and usability of websites. Students will learn how to use HTML5 and CSS to code, design, structure, and manage websites. Students will also learn about principles of site usability, localization, and accessibility for diverse and global audiences.

Requirements

Students will work on client-based web design projects and give short presentations to the class. Students will complete a usability report and several short writing assignments.

Readings

DuRocher, D. (2021). HTML and CSS QuickStart Guide. ClydeBank Media LLC. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1636100005, $24.49 on Amazon; Ritter, M. & Winterbottom, C. (2017). UX for the Web. Packt Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1787128477, $42.27 on Amazon

Course Description

In 1572, when Montaigne was attempting to categorize the new shape his journal writing had begun to take on, he chose the Middle French word essai, meaning “trial,” “attempt,” “experiment.”  The word lyric, on the other hand, is primarily aligned with the realms of poetry and song, as well as the slippery, indeterminate concept of the “Lyric I.”  A lyric essay, then, as Kazim Ali writes, attempts “to bring the resources of poetry into prose, to allow new structures for the mind in its thinking.”  John D’Agata popularized the term “lyric essay” through his ongoing work as an editor for the Seneca Review, as well as his well-known 2003 anthology The Next American Essay.  There remains much debate, however, over what the label actually signifies, along with the respective merits of D’Agata’s work, both as an editor and as a writer.  This course will take a deep dive into the forms, origins, idiosyncrasies, and various controversies associated with this latest nonfiction sub-genre. 

The content of the essays we will focus on in class will traverse the familiar ground of literary journalism, creative criticism, and place-based writing, yet all will take on a markedly lyric or experimental approach. While the terms lyric and narrative in regard to the essay are not mutually exclusive, most of the creative work we will be studying looks to resist, complicate, or distract the reader from narrative, making use of such techniques as associative leaps, fragmentation, and/or other formal inventions to de-center a linear narrative structure. 

Craft-based discussion of readings will occupy about half of our class time, with the other half being devoted to workshop.  End-of-the-semester portfolios will consist of two substantially revised essays.  In-depth peer-review and an ongoing critical component are also required for the course.     

Course Description

Shakespeare and his queen have come to exemplify the brilliance of early modern England—one as a playwright and poet whose work transcends the constraints of time, geography, and national culture; the other, as the most successful female monarch in English history. In the recent decades, however, Elizabeth’s role as an accomplished writer has received an increased scholarly attention. In this class, we will listen to Elizabeth’s voice and examine her rhetoric, reading the queen’s poetry, speeches, and letters for the signs of their author’s ingenious hidden and overt messages, communicated in a rich metaphoric, symbolic, and allegorical imagery held together by the syntactical structures that communicate intricate messages of their own. We will read these monarchal writings against the backdrop of the political and cultural challenges faced by England and its queen. As our discussion moves back and forth between Elizabeth and Shakespeare, we will look for Shakespeare’s dramatic response to these political and cultural challenges. Drawing the connections between the two most luminous figures of the period, we will not limit the subject of our conversation to Shakespeare’s reflection of Elizabeth and her multi-gendered nature in his plays, but also question the extent to which the writing of both is integrated in the same web of cultural, political, and gender-specific concerns. The materials we’ll examine in this course will not be limited to literary texts, but will extend to the products of visual culture (such as prints, drawings, paintings), historical documents (such as treatises, letters, proclamations), and artifacts (such as needlework, clothing, and jewelry).

Objectives for this course include the enrichment of your understanding of early modern British literature and culture through analysis of some of the major texts by Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare; exploring how the centrality of court culture shapes and affects the writing of the period; providing you with opportunities for original research and writing of your own.

This course is cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies. This course fulfills the requirement for Major Author(s) and Pre-1800 Literature. 

Requirements

Lively participation, leading one discussion, scaffolded article-length research project, research presentation.

Readings

Provisional primary reading list includes Elizabeth’s poems, speeches, and letters; Shakespeare's Midsummer’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Richard II. We will read other primary texts to understand the cultural and political forces at play in early modern England. Relevant scholarship will be also included.

Course Description

What is “rhetoric,” and who gets to theorize, practice, and teach it? What cultural, intellectual, and material forces shape rhetorical theories and instruction? In this class, “Histories of Rhetoric and Rhetorical Education,” we will attempt to answer these questions through close study of rhetoric over time, both in terms of various theoretical approaches as well as the pedagogies that emerged alongside them. Beginning with classical Greek rhetoric and ending with contemporary rhetorical scholarship like digital and posthuman rhetoric, this course will expand your perspective of rhetorical history and education, and will introduce you to rhetorical historiography, or the writing of rhetorical histories. 

While we’ll engage with the “traditional” canon of Western rhetoric, we’ll also work to disrupt that canon, questioning how and why it came into existence, and what its limitations are. Through our readings, we will not only gain a sense of the evolution of rhetorical theory and education, but will also be able to articulate the role of rhetoric and rhetorical education in making knowledge, building communities, and shaping the future.

In this class, you can expect to: 

• Critically read and respond to a broad range of rhetorical theories and pedagogies beginning in the classical period and extending into the twenty-first century. 
• Articulate various scholarly perspectives on rhetorical theory and rhetorical pedagogies, and begin to define your own.
• Define and practice rhetorical historiography, questioning whose rhetorical theory “counts,” and how texts become canonized.  
• Communicate your arguments/expertise to an audience of scholarly professionals in appropriate genres and mediums (writing, oral, and/or multimodal).

Course Description

What counts as an archive? To whom does an archive belong? And how does archival research help us read African American literature? This course provides a survey of Black archival thought by examining various theories, methods, and literary texts engaged with the idea of the archive. We will engage “the Black archive” as a philosophical and practical framework for literary analysis. Through in-class discussion and visits to Special Collections and Archives, we will study how Black writers, scholars, librarians, and artists have imagined the relationship between cultural, institutional, and personal memory. Though nineteenth-century African American life and culture––and literature and scholarship about the same––will be our focus, students are encouraged to bring questions, interests, and expertise in other periods and regions to our collective study. This course will investigate how Black archives and literatures demand we reimagine our critical, ethical, and readerly relationship to historical and documentary evidence. Authors studied in this course will likely include Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, David Walker, Charles W. Chesnutt, Arthur Schomburg, Margaret Walker Alexander, W.E.B. DuBois, Saidiya Hartman, and Dorothy Porter Wesley.

Course Description

Reading theory is a bit like reading a foreign language, the language of advanced literary and cultural analysis. In this course, we will discuss readings from a broad (though far from exhaustive) range of theoretical schools. We will practice explicating theory in clear and accurate terms, applying it as a framework for textual analysis, and considering which approaches make sense when. No prior knowledge of literary theory is necessary.

Course Objectives - By the time you finish this course, you should be able to:

• Explicate critical theory essays from a number of theoretical schools
• Apply a theoretical framework in the reading of a literary text
• Synthesize the ideas from multiple critics in service of your own argument

Readings

• Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction 9780199691340
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric    9781555-97690-3
• Ling Ma, Severance 9780374261597
• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 9780393602951
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 9780151009985

Course Description

For this course in American literature, we will consider what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has called the "wisdom of the novel ... the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood.”  Our readings will help us to trace important stylistic and thematic developments in the American novel and short story at approximately 50-year intervals: (1) the antebellum decades of national churn just before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery (1820-1855); (2) a turn of century that witnessed increasing United States urbanization and industrial power (1890--1905); and (3) an era that gave birth to a complex American civil rights movement (1945-1955).  We will pay particular attention to the historical context in which these works were produced, including the issues of national expansion, racial and gender formations, technological change, and regional differences.

Primary goals of the seminar are to read extensively in American fiction, considered in the light of advanced scholarship on 19^th and 20^th century writers, while developing the research and writing skills necessary to complete an original seminar paper approximately 20 pp. in length.

Requirements

assigned discussion leadership, research prospectus, research paper, final exam.

Readings

will likely include works such as Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824); Herman Melville, Typee; or, A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (1852); Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Lifted (1892); Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905); Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)

Course Description

In this course, we will be reading fiction through the lens of the coming-of-age narrative. We will read a variety of short stories told from the perspective of young characters who are having an awakening, whether it relates to realizing their own parents are just people, discovering love for the first time, facing death head on, and more. We will use this subject to discuss the elements of the craft of fiction that include plot, character, setting, and dialogue, and will discuss how to believably write from the point of view of a young character, how to make the stakes of young life feel vital, and how to make your story feel original even if it is part of a long tradition of fictional characters coming into their own.

Requirements

Students will participate in workshops where they will share their work, which will include full-length stories and shorter pieces. Not all writing for the course will have to fall under the umbrella of a coming-of-age narrative. We will also discuss autobiographical fiction, as much of coming-of-age fiction falls under this umbrella. 

Course Description

Following the respectable success of The Hobbit, a novel directed toward clever children, J. R. R. Tolkien, Professor of English Language at Merton College, Oxford, was asked by his publisher, Allen & Unwin, to provide a sequel. The result twelve years later was The Lord of the Rings, the best-selling English-authored work of the twentieth century. This course will be a slow walk through what has been considered the greatest example of epic fantasy. First, we will read his early success, The Hobbit, a novel that its sequel reinterprets. We will also approach Tolkien through a theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of the habitus since Tolkien went to great lengths creating a habitus for every race in his epic. In the course of the semester, we will explore the intersections between sociological theory and medieval texts on Middle-Earth, perhaps discovering how, with Tolkien, such an examination is hobbit-forming.

Requirements

Oral Presentation, Analytical Paper, Teaching Project, an irrepressible appreciation of the pun

Readings

The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

Course Description

The role of the editor in technical and professional communication is complex. Historically, “editing” has focused on instrumental work: “correcting” grammar, “fixing” language, shaping texts to audiences and outcomes. And while those elements are still important in the world of editing, we’re now increasingly aware of the biases embedded in that traditional model: whose grammar is correct? Is language ever really broken?

In this course we follow Clem & Cheek’s Inclusive Editing Paradigm (2022) to exam what it means to be an “editor” and to “edit” another’s work. We will consider differential positionality, privilege, and power (p. 135) as we examine the relationships embedded in editor/author and organizational/editor dichotomies, and work to unpack how editors might become ethical advocates for multiply marginalized voices.

Over the course of the semester, we will consider the many roles of editors in document creation and production. Along the way, we’ll consider styles of editing and levels of edit, editing conventions, writing styles and style guides, and the ethical burdens (and challenges) of doing editing.

During the semester, the class will form two unique publication teams (i.e., two different journal organizations). Assignments will be based on the work you do for those organizations, such as writing submission guidelines, style guides, ethics and mission statements, and process documents for editing and review. As we create these publications, we will study existing organizations and processes. Finally, we will be submitting work to each other’s publications for review. The class will culminate with a final paper on the process of editing shaped by your professional intent (industry, academia, or something else entirely).

Clem, S., & Cheek, R. (2022). Unjust revisions: A social justice framework for technical editing. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 65(1), 135–150.

Readings

Our readings will include Cunningham, Malone, & Rothchild’s Technical Editing, along with academic articles.

Course Description

What are the rhetorical principles, professional practices, and research skills vital to workplace communication? You will learn about them by interrogating what technical and professional communication means, building an understanding of professional communication as ethical action, and discovering the meaning and value of core concepts such as culture, community, and technology.  Given the nature of technical and professional communication, you will engage in both individual and collaborative work.   

Requirements

Tentative assignments: An individual research report, a collaborative research project, an annotated bibliography

Readings

• Johnson-Eilola, Johndan & Selber, Stuart A., eds. Central Works in Technical Communication.  Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Spilka, Rachel, ed. Digital Literacy for Technical Communication. Routledge, 2010.
• Barnum, Carol M. Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set . . . Test. Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.

Course Description

Do you plan to teach at the college level after you complete your degree? Do you plan to go on to a PhD program in English? Do you plan to teach secondary English Language Arts? Then Pedagogy in Writing Studies is the course for you! Pedagogy remains the beating heart of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies and a site of theorizing and enacting social justice in both that field and Technical and Professional Communication. This seminar features major foundational and contemporary pedagogical currents: critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, linguistic justice, threshold concepts, teaching for transfer, and writing with generative AI. You will gain a solid foundation in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies pedagogies that will inform your teaching across a variety of courses and contexts. Further, since research typically has a pedagogical dimension in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, you’ll also gain insight into potential research projects that could grow from your pedagogical commitments.

Course Description

The goal of English 7080 is to introduce students to the theory and practice of document design.  To accomplish this, the course will introduce design theories and design tools and teach students how to use these theories and tools to produce visually compelling and effective documents in a variety of print and online genres.

Course Description

The best “weird” writing isn’t just weird for the sake of being weird, but rather, it uses weirdness to make us see the truth about our own worlds. In this course, we will take a look at a variety of fiction that makes the familiar strange, leading us to see love, family, growing up, societal injustice, and more in a new light. We will read a range of novels and short fiction that fall outside the category of realism which includes magical realism, science-fiction, zombie stories, communing with long-dead relatives, and more. Students will be invited to write one story that leans heavily on “the weird” and one story of their choosing, one of which they will revise in a final portfolio. They can also expect to complete short writing assignments and to participate in hearty workshop discussions along the way.

Course Description

This poetry workshop’s text and activities will center on ekphrasis, which has traditionally been defined as the poetic description of visual works of art. We, like the contemporary poets whose work we study, will go beyond description to  more imaginative and subversive conversations with art, looking beyond frames to consider larger contexts; creating narratives and connecting personal experiences to paintings and sculpture; and re-telling stories in famous images by, for example, giving voice to women who are positioned as the silent objects of male gazes or examining constructions of race and use of color.

Whether or not you think you are particularly interested in art, ekphrasis can teach you to be a better observer, compose stronger images, and approach your pages’ text and white space as visual media. Also, ekphrastic poetry’s content is broad enough that it can also be categorized as poetry of witness, elegy, writing about family, and more. Our ekphrastic theme will lead us to investigations of the subject matter you wish to write about and collections you choose to read

Requirements

Class-time will be divided between critical discussion of published poetry, writing exercises and activities, and workshop of student drafts. Activities will include required attendance of Thursday evening poetry readings and talks (outside of regular class hours), field trips to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art, and student presentations.

Readings

Our central texts will be books by Diane Seuss, Paisley Rekdal, Derek Austin, Mary Syzbist, and Victoria Chang, with additional readings by Natasha Trethewey, Arthur Sze, Robert Hass, Mark Doty, Chelsea Rathburn, and others.

Course Description

Many of the challenges of literary adaptation and historical representation now playing out in big-budget, mass media film and television screens, in fandom and enthusiast organizations, have been playing out for much longer in the world of smaller-budget, niche video, roleplaying, and board games. 

This seminar will ground students in the current scholarly debates in eighteenth-century studies through groupings of primary literary and cultural works from the long eighteenth-century, recent peer-reviewed and public-facing scholarship, and modern games that draw upon the period for inspiration. 

Requirements

The course will also include out-of-class and in-class play from Dr. Friedman's library of games, with required play session reports and reviews. Students will also be responsible for weekly reflections and scaffolded assignments leading to a final project of their devising according to their larger research and/or career goals.

Readings

Primary texts will likely include Haywood's The Adventures of Eovaii (1741), Burney's Evelina (1778), at least one Austen novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), and games such as Marrying Mr. Darcy (2014), The Lady's Choice (2016-23), Obsession (2018), Herald (2017), The Page I Didn't Write (2019), Thousand Year Old Vampire (2020), Truths Untold (2020-), and TEETH (2023). Secondary readings will draw from game studies, adaptation studies, cultural studies, and eighteenth-century studies. Guest speakers may include games studies scholars, professional games journalists and critics, and game designers and performers.

Course Description

When votes for women were described as “unnatural” in 1894, Mona Caird replied succinctly: “whatever is natural is certain to be wrong.”  Digging into Caird’s claim, this course will examine how and why nineteenth-century women writers, subjects of or subject to the rule of Britain, wrestled with the idea of nature. Authors will include familiar figures such as Mary Prince, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, the Brontë Sisters, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliot, and less familiar writers such as poet Michael Allen (a pseudonym for the creative team of Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper), and L.T. Meade, a popular woman author of detective fiction and contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle. We will consider these authors and more from the perspective of women’s and gender studies, eco-criticism, and cultural studies. By the end of the course, we will inquire into why, despite their lively inquiry into the idea of nature, nineteenth-century women writers have historically been excluded from the genre of “nature writing.” And, we will address that gap by studying how their work might be reclaimed through traditional scholarship and new work in digital humanities.

Requirements

One presentation on a nineteenth-century writing, one on a critical perspective, several short writings. Final project includes the option of  a traditional research paper or digital project.

Course Description

This course focuses on American poetry in the first quarter of the 21^st century and on poetry’s curious place in contemporary culture. That the two most talked-about books on poetry published in the last few years are The Hatred of Poetry (Ben Lerner) and Don’t Read Poetry (Stephanie Burt) is a curiosity. The writers of those books are poets and scholars themselves and the books’ titles are meant to suggest the cultural ambivalence and misunderstandings associated with the whole idea of poetry; neither writer actually wishes you to stop reading it, but still. Another curiosity is that poetry continues to play small but weirdly central part in ongoing discussions of what generative AI can do. It can write “poetry,” that much is known, and better all the time by some accounts. But is it “good” poetry? Is it “authentic”? If not, can AI learn to supply the missing human elements—"understanding,” “inner experience,” “consciousness,” “emotional urgency,” fill in the blank? “Poetry might be the canary in the coal mine,” one cognitive psychologist wrote not long ago, “an early indicator of the extent to which AI promises (threatens?) to challenge humans as artistic creators.” We are not going to follow that canary down.

Instead, we will turn our attention to the human work of poetry in our time. Focusing on nine volumes, published between 2002 and 2024, and a modest selection of critical and theoretical writing, we will consider how (and of what) poems are made, what they do, and how they matter. The books we will read reflect the remarkable diversity and vitality of 21^st century poetry but they have in common an interest in the pressing and deeply human question of how to live in times like these (Adrienne Rich).

Requirements

Attendance and well-prepared participation; 6 brief discussions; a presentation; and a 20-25 page seminar paper.

Readings

The volumes we will read include Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins; Jorie Graham, [To] the Last [Be] Human; Robert Hass, Time and Materials; Maurice Manning, One Man’s Dark; Carl Phillips, Then The War; Jericho Brown, The Tradition; Layli Long Soldier, Whereas; Nikky Finney, Head Off and Split; Rose McLarney, Colorfast.

Course Description

Ancient Greek accounts describe encounters between travelers and hairy, savage men and women. One such source named them “Gorillae,” and in the nineteenth century Western scientists would borrow this name for a newly “discovered” great ape (the local people were of course already familiar with these uncannily human-like beings). Coinciding as it did with the revolution in natural history catalyzed by the work of Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, this scientific encounter prompted a radical rethinking of the relationships between humans and their nonhuman primate relatives. This paradigm shift in natural history overlapped both with accelerating European colonial occupations of Africa and elsewhere and with the enslavement and emancipation of African-descended people in the United States and throughout the Americas.

In turn, literary and cinematic engagements with encounters between men, women, and non-human or quasi-human animals became ubiquitous in twentieth-century popular culture. Why do such literary and filmic representations of encounters between humans and other animals maintain such cultural currency and fascination? This course will investigate the cultural history of such representations, situating them in an intellectual and narrative lineage that encompasses scientific discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, narratives of colonialism, and these narratives’ anxious engagements with race, gender, and sexuality. The course’s first section will focus on five key narratives: Paul du Chaillu’s non-fiction Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861); Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1914); Merian C. Cooper’s film, King Kong (1933); Harry Essex’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); and Pierre Boulle’s novel, La Planète des singes (Planet of the Apes) (1963). Each of these narratives has also been remade, adapted, and retold countless times, from R.M. Ballantyne’s fictional The Gorilla Hunters (published immediately after du Chaillu’s narrative) to the first film adaptation of Tarzan in 1918 to Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 The Shape of Water to the myriad adaptations of Kong and Planet of the Apes. The course will then turn to literary revisions of these narratives whose representations of their female protagonists’ psychological interiority challenge and counter these earlier male-centered narratives. Key examples include Rachel Ingalls’s novel, Mrs. Caliban (1986), Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014), Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman (2016), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau (2022).

These texts and films provide screens through which readers and viewers encounter questions concerning race, sex, gender, and what it means to be human. In working through them, students will engage with and bring together conversations from cinema and media studies, animal studies, gender studies, and the critical study of race and racism.

Course Description

THIS COURSE FULFILLS THE LITERARY THEORY COURS REQUIREMENT. This course will introduce you to the work of several of the most significant literary theorists who have articulated the concerns, issues and problems with the slippery concept of “ideology.” Ideology has proved to be one of the most flexible, supple, powerful and important concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse. Although “ideology” has a common, “everyday” meaning roughly corresponding to a worldview (as in, if you subscribe to leftist progressivism you support Bernie Sanders; if you subscribe to “alt-right” conservatism you support Donald Trump), the theoretical senses (since it is not a monolithic term) of ideology are rather different is not a way of viewing the world that we freely choose and can freely discard as autonomous beings and it is not a set of ideas located in the immateriality of consciousness. Indeed, despite their differences, theories of ideology tend to agree that we ourselves are to some degree the effects of ideology, which inscribes itself within material actions and practices performed within what Louis Althusser (whom we shall be reading) termed Ideological State Apparatuses, eg., the family, the school, the church, the nation-state, etc.—actions and practices stemming from the unconscious which, as literary critic Fredric Jameson reminds us, is always a “political unconscious.” Contemporary ideology theory has its roots in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (and they are the theorists with whom we’ll begin), who used it to discuss the social construction of class identity. After undergoing elaborations throughout the 20^th century by prominent Marxists theorists, feminists have found the basic outlines of the theory adaptable for use in their examination of the cultural production of gender. The concept of ideology has proved indispensable to race and ethnicity studies, queer theory—that is, to theories that concern themselves with the actions and discursive practices through which subjectivity is produced, especially the subjectivity of those marked as “the Other.” We will :refinements to its migration to literary critical (and social) movements like gender studies, critical race studies and queer studies. In the process, you will learn to position yourself—no matter what your critical methodology—so that you may practice ideology critique within your textual analyses.

Requirements

20-25 page essay (60%), weekly 2-page reading responses (20%), a 15-minute oral presentation based on the reading response (15%), lively, consistent and courteous participation    

Readings

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race; Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society; Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology

Course Description

The Practicum will provide guidance, support, and, most of all, space to experiment and explore for the new Graduate Teaching Assistants (first-year MAs & MTPCs in English). I invite you to think of the Practicum as a Studio-Lab. This will be, first and foremost, a safe space to share, ask questions, and look for answers. It will be a Studio because teaching is an art, and it will be a Lab because teaching also has elements of science. Of course, you need some knowledge about pedagogy and the subject you teach, but you also must never lose the ability to be surprised, to be creative, and even to be confused. Undoubtedly, as novice teachers, you need the substances, ideas, and research findings developed in the field, as well as the equipment and tools with which to experiment. In our Studio-Lab, we will roll up our sleeves and learn both through art and science, through theory and practice, through trial and error.

Requirements

Requirements will likely include faithful attendance, lively participation, keeping a reflective teaching journal, designing partial and full lesson plans, conducting a teaching observation, developing a Teaching Philosophy, and creating a teaching ePortfolio.