Courses

Course Description

Editing is about so much more than grammar and punctuation. You’ll learn how to advocate for the reader, help authors reach their audiences, manage editing projects, create in-house style guides, make research-based decisions, work tactfully and effectively with authors, and navigate freelance projects. We'll work with a variety of technical and professional writing pieces; these pieces may include professional writing from technology, business, and science, as well as texts intended for academic publication. We’ll cover the standard details you already expect, but this course will take a broad approach to editing. NOTE: We’ll also break myths. For instance, you can split an infinitive and end a sentence or clause with a preposition! (E.g., "You’ll learn to effectively use references that editors rely on.”) This course blends the study of theory and of best practices.

Requirements

Readings

Course Description

This discussion-based course will focus on the ways that knowledge about science, technology, health, and medicine are rhetorically constructed, negotiated, and communicated in and across institutional and public contexts. Key topics will include public trust in expertise and scientific authority, risk and crisis communication, and AI technology and algorithms. Students will produce weekly response papers and lead discussions, and will be encouraged to select a topic of their choice that aligns with the class theme that they can explore in depth for their final project.

Course Description

Writing is undoubtedly work, but what kind of work is it? Who— or what— performs this labor, and what value does it hold in academic, professional, and digital economies? What material, ideological, and economic forces shape the value of writing in different contexts? In this class, we will ask these questions and more as we explore what writing labor is and might become. Students can expect to critically read, respond to, and reflect on a range of scholarship, practices, and pedagogies rooted in questions of writing and writing labor.

Course Description

This course introduces contemporary approaches to web development and user experience (ux) design. Students will learn how to plan, structure, and design web content that is useful, usable, and accessible for diverse audiences. Topics include content design and markup, UX research and testing, accessibility, and web content management. Assignments include an analytic essay, e-portfolio, and client web design and ux analysis project.

Requirements

Readings

Course Description

In a chapter provocatively titled “After Words: Postmethodological Musings,” Rebecca Rickly writes that when writing is the object of our research, we have to “become a little more comfortable with what [John] Law refers to as the ‘messiness’ of research,” the ways that the study of writing is, like writing itself, often “tangential, recursive, and takes us in directions we had no idea we were going to end up in.” This seminar offers students an introduction to this “mess” of research through a sustained study of methods and methodologies in Writing Studies and related disciplines. The goal here is to prepare graduate students to design and execute research programs that contribute to disciplinary conversations, and to reflect on that research in a critical and meaningful way. As we survey the various methods for conducting qualitative and quantitative research, we will tackle the many ethical issues that arise in any research context. We will also, collectively, begin to chart methodological futures for English Studies. The exciting part of this seminar is that it will invite you not only to learn how knowledge is made in Writing Studies and related fields, but also that it will give you the opportunity to build and contribute knowledge of your own.

Requirements

Students can expect to: read and discuss key texts on methods and methodologies in Writing Studies and related fields; compose weekly reading responses and annotations; facilitate discussion for one class period; propose a pilot research study based on a methodological orientation of interest; conduct and document preliminary research; and present project to class

Course Description

This is a workshop-based course that will focus on memoir. We will read contemporary examples of the genre, deconstructing how telling the truth in a literary format works, paying attention to craft-based elements like scene versus summary, the retrospective narrator, and invented dialogue. Then you will turn your focus to your own work, producing several shorter pieces and two full length essays. Above all, we will be guided by the idea that memoir is not about the truth—memoir is about the meaning you bring to bear on the truth.

Course Description

With few exceptions, studies of Romanticism remain primarily focused on white authors. Such a focus risks advancing an idea of Romantic literature unimpacted by Black Atlantic writing of the same period. This course frames its transatlantic survey of Romanticism through its Black contemporaries, tying together British and American varietals of the movement. By engaging Romanticism as an aesthetic movement meaningfully shaped by the arts, letters, and people of the Black Atlantic, this course investigates how race, nation, and empire can re-configure our understanding and appreciation of the English literary canon. Authors studied in this course are likely to include Aphra Behn, John Milton, William Cowper, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Ottobah Cugoano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Belinda Sutton, Jane Austen, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and George Moses Horton.

Course Description

This is a course on Victorian literature and Class. The late eighteenth century and Victorian period was obsessed both with the possibility of abolishing differences of traditional caste and class and with the attempt to fix these as essential identity categories. This course will be an opportunity to think about class in the Victorian period, and earlier systems underlying and informing it. We will focus on the novel as the privileged literary locus of the elaboration of middle class subjectivity and also as a site wherein the role of class in a newly mobile, industrial and imperial society was explored. We will read a number of Victorian novels and other texts from the period, and will also spend time reading and thinking about works which interrogate and historicize our principal terms, including major theoretical approaches to social class. We will also consider the intersection of class with other emerging identity categories. Possible texts include:

Elizabeth Gaskell North and South, Mrs. Henry Wood East Lynne, Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend, Anthony Trollope The Prime Minister, Margaret Oliphant Phoebe Jr., Arthur Morrison Child of the Jago, George and Weedon Grossmith Diary of a Nobody, Florence Marryat Blood of the Vampire, Victoria Cross Anna Lombard., Nancy Armstrong from Desire and Domestic Fiction, Heidi Hartman “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”, Dror Wahrman from Imagining the Middle Class, Pierre Bourdieu from Distinction “Introduction”, Arlene Young from Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel, Stoler, Ann Laura. From Race and the Education of Desire, Koven, From Slumming, McClintock, Anne, from Imperial Leather, “, Class, ed Patrick Joyce, short excerpts on reserve.

Course Description

This course will consider how impactful authors from Lord Byron to Laura Ingalls Wilder have shaped our perception of climate change and contributed to current ideas of nature and ecology. Students will master the practice of ecocriticism and use ecological theory to read and interpret literature while they also become familiar with the concept of the canon and questions/problems therein. The course will require a seminar paper, at least one oral presentation, participation, and some short response papers. Texts may include and are not limited to the following: "Darkness," Lord Byron; "The Little Match Girl," Hans Christian Andersen; Select writings of Henry David Thoreau; Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte; D.H. Lawrence, "Bavarian Gentians,"; The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder; Edna Ferber, Giant; NW, Zadie Smith; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; and Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall.

Course Description

Requirements

Readings

Course Description

English 7940 offers a conceptual and practical foundation for graduate students in:

English who plan to teach first-year writing (Core Composition) at Auburn University and at the college level more broadly. Toward these ends, you can expect to read and discuss scholarship from the field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies; observe experienced teachers in the classroom; learn and apply good practices for teaching writing at the first-year level; generate course materials within the shared curriculum provided by the First-Year Writing Program; and develop a philosophy of teaching that reflects what you have learned in the course and through your own experiences in the classroom. The purpose of this work is to support your development in becoming skilled teachers and working professionals who can deliver high quality writing instruction and take an active role in the university community. We will also spend time in class exploring, discussing, and generally puzzling through issues that arise based on our collective experiences in the classroom.

By the end of this course, you will:

·Learn and apply good practices related to teaching college writing;

·Design course materials within disciplinary and institutional frameworks;

·Generate course materials for the first-year writing sequence based on the shared curriculum;

·Acquire practical strategies and techniques for facilitating day-to-day instruction;

·Craft a philosophy of teaching that reflects individual experience and knowledge gathered through course readings and discussion.

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. 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

This intensive six-week course will provide an in-depth introduction to the genres, forms, and modes of academic writing. We will discuss how to situate our work in an academic field and to contribute to a scholarly conversation. The course will seek to demystify the publication process. How does peer review work? How does a seminar paper differ from a peer-reviewed article? How might we expand a conference paper into an article? A dissertation chapter? A book chapter? What makes for an effective scholarly argument? How do we identify a scholarly problem, articulate a claim, and marshal sources and supporting evidence? While all are welcome, this course is aimed primarily at students who are interested in pursuing an academic career. Projects might include a scholarly article, dissertation prospectus, or statement of purpose and writing sample. Using Wayne Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research (5th ed.) as our guide, this course will include workshops, critical engagement with sample materials, and visits and contributions from guests from the world of academic publishing.

Course Description

English 7010 introduces you to the theory and practice of professional and technical communication (TPC). We’ll begin with key formative theoretical frameworks and conclude with an eye toward the future of the field. We’ll interrogate how TPC is defined within the content of culture, community, and technology with a particular focus on the following concepts: user centered design (UCD), user experience design (UX), and usability testing (UT). Students will complete one major individual project and a usability study with a group.

Course Description

“Worlds end. And worlds begin.”
– Richard E. Miller, Writing at the End of the World (2005)

The composition issues animating this course, while not new, have taken on increased
urgency as collapse continues and the polycrisis* intensifies: What does it mean to write,
study writing, and teach writing as the world as we know it comes to an end? How do we
invent and compose next worlds that are better than the worst from the ruins of this world?
How do we balance hospicing this world with doualing the next—for instance, witnessing
loss and caring for each other and our more-than-human kin? This class takes rhetoric and
composition’s most expansive capacities as two-fold: making worlds and cultivating the
relationships that comprise such worlds. Hence, twin approaches of worldmaking and
relationality underpin the work we will undertake. Students should expect to play a
significant role in shaping this course and know that an ethic of care and concern for
wellbeing will guide our time together dwelling with these dark, diRicult questions.

*The polycrisis refers to multiple, separate crises in diRerent areas—environmental,
political, economic, technological, etc.—overlapping and amplifying each other.

Readings

Readings may include contemporary texts by Richard Miller, Ira Allen, Debra Hawhee,
Joshua Trey Barnett, and Timothy Oleksiak, among others, and classics by Jaqueline Jones
Royster, Krista RatcliRe, Jim Corder, and others. Please feel free to contact Dr. Wilkes with
questions.

Course Description

A document conveys meaning in many ways. In most cases, the extra-textual components are as important, or even more important, than the written words. Picture a round, green sign with the word STOP on it, for example. Would you be confused? Design matters, particularly when there are cultural associations attached to shapes, colors, and more.

This course will approach document design as a rhetorical practice with the understanding that a document is any place where one agent may mark information for later use. This situates a document broadly as a container for meaning in a variety of media. Here, we will focus on physical and non-web-page design. We will consider a variety of material and cultural artifacts over our studies, and engage with scholarship on ethics, visual and cultural rhetorics, perception, and accessibility, among others. You will study real-world scenarios and users and produce documents under a variety of use constraints. You will work with a client.

This course will entail both hands-on and analytic work. By the end of the course, you should be able to apply and discuss principles of design; apply and discuss theories of design; discuss how differences in design shape your message; and use tools in document design to create rhetorically savvy documents.

Course Description

Not only is a novel-in-stories a tricky art form in its own right, but it can also be an excellent proving ground for future novels. In this course, we will read several classic examples of the novel-in-stories and will discuss how stories that are linked through aspects including the same narrator, the same small town, or the same family, can create a narrative arc in the same way a novel can, while often creating a unique, kaleidoscopic, or fragmented (in a good way) reading experience. Students will write two of their own linked stories or chapters in a novel-in-stories, and will contemplate what a longer project featuring the work they’ve submitted might look like. We will read and study a range of contemporary and classic novels-in-stories for inspiration.  

Course Description

Poetry of witness is generally understood to be poetry that comments on social issues. Yet any observing is arguably a form of witnessing and there are a multiplicity of artistic angles a poet can take on a subject. We will reflect on the perspectives in a poetry collection based in research into the experiences of a 1930s spelling bee winner and African American girl in MACNOLIA by A. Van Jordan and on abolitionist printing presses in Printer’s Fist by Melissa Range. We will see our own region of the American South through the bluesy Southern Gothic lens of Ansel Elkins’ Blue Yodel and a focus on a Civil War battlefield and the ethics of memory in Christopher Kempf’s What Though the Field Be Lost. And we will consider the quiet cultural critiques in the nature-oriented collections Shade is a place by MaKshya Tolbert and The Seeds by Cecily Parks. The course will, of course, teach techniques for writing about historical concerns and current events. But, no matter students’ topics of interest, class members will have the opportunity to develop the skills of crafting compelling images and effectively placing the “I” in poems, as well as learning about other essential elements of poetry such as structure and musicality.

Requirements

Class time will be divided between critical discussion of published poetry and workshop of student drafts. Activities will include required attendance of events at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art outside of regular class hours. Attending and participating in each meeting, close study of readings, and extensive revision of students’ own writing are essential to success in this course.

Course Description

Karen Harvey defines material culture as a term that “encapsulates not just the physical attributes of an object, but the myriad and shifting contexts through which it acquires meaning.” These contexts comprise a history of the object as a type, but also the particular story of the object at hand, charging any given material thing with a multitude of emotions and memories, along with a sense of its realized or potential value. In this course, we will use literary works, paintings and portraiture, clothing and textiles, ink and writing instruments, letters and other manuscripts, jewelry, and other works of art, personal possessions, household items, devotional objects and material trappings of power. You will have an opportunity to examine various categories of objects as well as some things that are very specific and unique. We will trace these objects’ histories and interpret the stories they tell us, stories that, in literary texts, are sometimes heard as suppressed murmurs and sometimes become the central points of an almost pathological fixation. We will also pay attention to the ways meaning is made non-verbally in the early modern culture and ponder how the arguments are made through visual and material media.

This course is cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies.

This course fulfills the requirement for Pre-1800 Literature. 

Requirements

Lively and consistent participation, leading one discussion, material object presentation, research project, research presentation.

Readings

Provisional primary reading list includes Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Cymbeline, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker’s Arden of Faversham, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, poetry and prose by John Donne, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth.

Course Description

As literacy rates expanded in nineteenth-century Great Britain, so did the availability of a range of reading material, to the point that many at the time felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of texts circulating amongst them.  Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53), for instance, published at the mid-point of his career, is a book obsessed in many ways with documents, information literacy, and the question of what gives texts meaning and influence. Fittingly, the books for sale in the Advertiser that accompanied the serial edition of the novel featured everything from other novels, to poetry, sermons, travel guides, maps, and books on gardening and home-making.  In this course, we will examine both the promise and anxieties associated with literacy in the Victorian period. What value did Victorian culture place on the ability to read and to own and possess books and other documents?  We will explore how literacy became associated with travel, mobility, emigration, and the ability to ‘know’ the world in a closer and more comprehensive way. Relatedly, the course introduces students to recent critical work examining the sorts of documents and texts that defined cultural and social identity in British settler colonies and other imperial contexts.  We will also consider the ways texts literally traveled and circulated at the time in the thriving periodical press, where again Dickens found himself at the center as an editor and frequent contributor to his own periodicals. In addition to Dickens, other major authors studied in the course include Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Prince, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Seacole, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ella Hepworth Dixon. 

Requirements

oral presentation; short critical essay; research essay; weekly response papers

Course Description

How did modernist writers think about popular culture? How did the popular press respond to modernism? In this class, we will pay attention to the forms of exchange between “high” and “low” culture in early twentieth-century writing, art, and performance. Inspired by Andreas Huyssen, scholars of used to understand the experimental Anglophone writing of the early twentieth century as operating on one side of “The Great Divide,” with mass culture situated definitively on the other. But more recently, the New Modernist Studies has broadened the field and opened up new avenues for considering the interplay between the popular and the avant-garde. We will consider the ways that canonical, mostly American authors of the early twentieth century were inspired by popular icons of the era such as Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker. We will also consider the way that newspapers, magazines, and lesser-known cultural critics processed the work of transatlantic writers and framed their reception in the United States. This course should be useful to students with interests in poetry, fiction, modern women’s writing, transatlantic studies, and celebrity culture.

By the time you conclude this course you should be able to:

• Define modernism as a literary period
• Find useful primary sources from the period and secondary sources discussing the period through research
• Summarize the critical conversation surrounding modernism's relation to popular culture
• Contribute to that conversation through academic writing
• Reflect on your research interests, professional goals, and skills as a writer

Requirements

Assignments will include reflections on the readings, leading class discussion, a conference paper, a literature review, and a seminar paper.

Readings

We are likely to read texts from the era by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Gilbert Seldes, Gertrude Stein, Sophie Treadwell, and Nathanael West.

We will also read contemporary critical essays by authors such as Jayna Brown, David Chinitz, Anne Enlin Cheng, Leonard Diepeveen, Jonathan Goldman, Faye Hammill, Brooks Hefner, and Karen Leick.

Course Description

One hallmark of literary fiction in the twenty-first century is what scholars have called “the genre turn.” The term identifies a phenomenon whereby “literary” writers (that is, writers identified with serious literary fiction) adopt the forms and modes of so-called “genre” fiction (science fiction, romance, horror, etc.). What is at stake in this promiscuous commingling of generic modes? What becomes of “the literary” when it encounters popular generic forms? What effects does popular culture have on “high” (or perhaps “unpopular”) art? What does literary fiction have to offer genre fiction, and vice versa? Does the literary exist apart from popular generic forms, or has it simply become one genre among many? What aesthetic qualities or social orientations distinguish literary engagements with popular genres from their (literally) generic counterparts? In this course we will read books by contemporary North American writers with an eye to thinking through the promises and perils of the genre turn in literary fiction.

Course Description

This course explores the theory and practice of teaching literature in a college setting. Designed for new graduate students and GTAs, it provides an in-depth examination of pedagogical strategies while also helping you to develop practical skills for effective classroom management, assessment, and student engagement. You will learn all about lesson planning, tools and activities that facilitate literature instruction, the art of giving and receiving feedback, time management, grading, and navigating difficult student interactions.

As a “practicum,” this course is designed to provide hands-on training, guidance, support, and, most of all, a space to figure things out, ask questions, look for answers, and share your insights. The course will be conducted through a combination of group discussions, workshops, and peer teaching/observation exercises. You will also have opportunities to design and present your own lesson plans, receive feedback, and engage in reflective practice as you understand and develop your emerging teaching persona.

  Student Learning Outcomes:

• You will become knowledgeable about lesson planning, active learning, and scaffolding, and you will implement them in your teaching of small discussion sections in core literature courses.
• You will acquire a set of class activities and skills directed at teaching literature and you will experiment with them in our class space and in the classes you teach.
• You will develop strategies for effective time and classroom management, including navigating interactions with (challenging) students.
• You will learn about the art of giving meaningful feedback, including through assigning grades.
• You will reflect on your emerging identity as a teacher and build upon those reflections and your experiences throughout the semester as you get ready for teaching composition classes next semester.

Requirements

Assignments

• Lesson plan: You will craft one lesson plan for a lesson of your choice in one of your discussion sections (1-2 pages) and review one lesson plan by one of your peers (0.5-1 page).
• Teaching observation (peer): You will observe one of your peers teaching one of their discussion sections. Please make sure you arrange this class visit yourself and take notes on the following details:
• Was there a discernable structure to the class? If so, please outline this structure.
• What went well?
• What could be improved?
• Teaching observation (faculty member): You will observe one faculty member teaching a section of Core literature. Please make sure you arrange this class visit yourself and take notes on the following details: Was there a discernable structure to the class? If so, please outline this structure.
• What went well?
• What could be improved?
• Teaching reflection: You will compose a teaching reflection on one of the classes in which you were observed by your lead teacher ORon how you have grown as a teacher throughout the semester. Please make sure to incorporate/ respond to the feedback you received from your lead teacher (1-2 pages).

Readings

Books

• Curzan, Ann and Lisa Damour. First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching. 3rd edition. University of Michigan Press, 2011. [Ordered through AU Bookstore]
• Additional readings on Canvas.

Additional Resources

• Auburn E-Portfolio Project: https://auburn.edu/academic/provost/university-writing/resources/#ePortfolios__Examples [also consider all other entries surrounding the e-portfolio]
• Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast: https://teachinginhighered.com/episodes/
• Fuss, Diana and William A. Gleason, eds. The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom. Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Svinicki, Mariella and Wilbert J. McKeachie, eds. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers. 14th edition. Cengage Learning, 2013.
• Zakrajsek, Todd D. and Linda B. Nilson, Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. 5th edition. Jossey-Bass, 2023.