COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

ENC5028 Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Kristie Fleckenstein
This course explores 20th century configurations of rhetoric. We will do that by studying the influence of specific philosophers/rhetoricians (Richards, Burke, Perelman, Toulmin, Foucault, Grassi, Anzalda, Haraway, Hayles, Gates, etc.), particularly in terms of a set of issues (agency, identity/community, materiality, and technology) that characterize rhetoric in the early days of the 21st century. While the focus is on 20th century rhetoric, we will be drawing on 2500 years of Western rhetoric to provide a background and context for the current moment. Thus, to understand Richards, we will examine 18th century Common Sense Realism; for Grassi, we will read Vico. To study the neo-Aristotelian Chaim Perelman, we will also study Aristotle. The primary focus, however, remains on 20th century rhetoric.

ENC5700 Theories of Composition, Michael Neal
English 5700 focuses on major theories of composing with an emphasis on composition as a discipline and historical and contemporary theories of composition. We will examine the act of composing/writing itself and the social, cognitive, linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of the way people communicate in writing. Students will develop their own theories of composition in relationship to such key issues as genre, rhetorical situations, composing processes, literacy, and media and through readings by scholars such as Faigley, Berlin, Fulkerson, Bitzer, North, Brandt, Bizzell, Yancey, and Wysocki. We will give special attention to ways that composition is evolving in response to digital technologies and multi-modal literacies. The class will be an interactive graduate seminar that will feature weekly readings, discussion, collaboration, a response blog, presentations, and a seminar paper.

ENC5720 Research Methods in Composition and Rhetoric, Kathleen Yancey
A course in epistemology, that is, a course that takes as its focus both what we know and how we know in rhetoric and composition. Such a course is both disciplinary-taking up questions important to the discipline-and (as in many fields) interdisciplinary-begging, borrowing, and stealing methods from elsewhere to re-make them as the discipline's own. Because research methods in composition and rhetoric are diverse (including the historical, the theoretical, and the empirical), we'll read a diverse array of texts and create, as a class, a number of research designs. We'll thus review theoretical scholarship and critique large-scale studies, pose questions that guide historical research projects, and design studies relying on adapted social science methodologies. Projects in the course include 3-5 written reviews of research and scholarship; a research notebook; and a research design project that may lead to thesis or dissertation projects.

ENG5933 Visual Rhetoric, Kristie Fleckenstein
W. J. T. Mitchell, in Picture Theory, claims that, on the cusp of the 21st century, Western culture has shifted from the linguistic turn to the pictorial turn. We live the world historically and know it visually. For Mitchell, such a pictorial turn includes not only the image artifact in its many configurations, but also the visual as an epistemology: as a way of knowing the world. Thus, he asks and follows up on the question: What happens if we picture theory?

My goal in this course is to explore the fuzzy category visual rhetoric as it plays out in the visually bedazzled West, examining it from the perspective of the following questions:
 
What is rhetoric?
What is the visual?
What happens when we put rhetoric and visual together?
Does it matter how we put them together?
Does it matter when (historically) we put them together?
What is the scope of visual rhetoric? How might we teach visual rhetoric?

While we will not be able to address any one question in depth, my plan it to provide you with a foundation that will allow you to push forward with your own explorations after this class has ended.

ENG5933 The Digital Revolution, Web 2.0, & Convergence Culture, Kathleen Yancey, "How We Read, Write, and Make Knowledge in the Age of the Internet"
Using several frames of reference, ENG5933 will explore two related questions. First, what difference does technology, especially digital technology, make in the ways that we read, the ways that we compose, and the ways that knowledge is made, sanctioned, and shared? Second, what do the changes related to digital technology mean for those of us who teach reading, literature, and composing? To answer these questions, we'll consider briefly the relationship between literacies and technologies, marking the shift from manuscript culture to print culture; and from models of private knowledge to mass consumption of knowledge abetted by mass media and the role of politics, economics, and ideology in each shift. Our focus, however, will be on the changes that are occurring now: What are they? What do we make of them? As scholars and teachers, how do we respond to them?

A preview: According to Sven Birkets of The Gutenberg Elegies, changes wrought by the digital revolution undermine our ability to think and write coherently. According to Richard Lanham of The Electronic Word, our new ability to see at and through the screen afforded by the Internet resuscitates the manuscript culture of the Renaissance for a new kind of (digital) Renaissance with new emerging rules governing intellectual property. According to Sherry Turkle of Life on the Screen, the Internet is a genuinely new space for identity formation, and according to Howard Rheingold, for political action. According to Mark Prensky, today's students are "digital natives," and we who teach them "digital immigrants." Echoing Prensky's observation, some scholars call for a return to the past; others, like Gunter Kress of the New London Group and Glenda Hull of Berkeley call for a new reading and writing curriculum based in a convergence of print, screen, and Internet. Collin Brooke, in Linga Fracta, suggests that through skillful electronic networking, we both create new knowledge and represent it in new ways, while Jim Porter argues that the Internet is remediating the rhetorical canons. In the midst of all this speculation is the undeniable effect of Web 2.0: a recent report claims that teenagers spend 16.7 hours a week online, and if you really want to know what your students are thinking, you should facebook them, and yes, it's now a verb.

After completing this course, you will be able to identify both the significant questions currently in play around digital culture and a range of perspectives on those questions. You will be able to cite key works in, and thinkers commenting on, network culture and understand how they talk to, around, and across each other. And you will be able to consider what all this means for education, now and in the future in terms of reading practices (both close and distant reading qua Morretti); in terms of researching; in terms of composing; in terms of sharing information; in terms of changing understandings of intellectual property. Through completing a project—options include a print bibliographic essay; a hypertext review essay; a creation of a weblog or set of wiki entries on the one or more issues, and a syllabus keyed to these issues—you will develop the expertise that comes from investigating a topic in considerable depth.

To accomplish these goals, we'll read in print and online; write in print and online; talk and present to each other; raise questions and try to answer them as members of a community. In exploring digital culture, we will develop a new vocabulary defining this emerging interdisciplinary field and project how current trends may play out. If we succeed in these efforts, you'll find that you are knowledgeable as a teacher and a scholar about issues that are likely to inform English Studies and education more generally well into the 21st century.

ENC5933 Designing Writing, Michael Neal
This course begins with the assumption that writing and the academic programs that support it should be designed in response to current theories and research in rhetoric and composition. We will examine several themes across writing programs that concern design and observe how they play out in academic settings where writing takes place. The principal sites for writing we will study in this course are first-year composition, writing centers and studios, and writing across the curriculum. We will look at questions surrounding how, where, when, and by whom writing is designed and delivered. Through investigating theories, research, and best practices in designing writing and its programs, we will explore questions such as:

How is college writing understood by students, teachers, and administrators?

Who teaches, tutors, advises, responds to, and evaluates student writing? In what settings and contexts? And what preparation do they have in composition theories and research?

What are the roles and relationships between and among different writing programs?

How can college writing and writing programs be designed to reflect current theories, research, and best practices in the discipline?

Students in this seminar will be asked to read, critique, and analyze articles/chapters throughout the semester. They will need to understand the roles of the three major writing program divisions in the course as well as how they work together to shape a coherent approach to college writing. Students will produce a minor project for each of the three divisions and an in-depth project for the final.

One-Hour Offerings

ENG5998 Contemplation and Reflection Reading Group, Kristie Fleckenstein
Reflection has played a role in composition studies since the inception of the process movement, although the role that it plays has diversified over time. In this part of Contemplation and Reflection, we'll take an historical approach, looking at reflection through four lenses: (1) its role in writing process; (2) its role in self-assessment and in transfer of learning; (3) its role in making knowledge more generally in a variety of disciplines; and (4) current questions surrounding reflection, including how it may change in digital environments.

While reflection is an integral part of composition studies, contemplation has a less central position in the discipline. Associated with meditation, silence, and mysticism, contemplation has, if anything, been marginalized from mainstream disciplinary conversations. To renew attention to contemplation, we have chosen selections that align with the four categories organizing the readings on reflection: writing process, learning, knowledge making, and current questions. We hope that you will see these texts as conversing with one another, a prelude to the conversations we hope to have as a class.

ENG5998 Genre and Arrangement Reading Group, Kristie Fleckenstein
Arrangement, one of the five classical divisions of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), serves as the primary focus of this 1-credit reading group, particularly as arrangement intersects with genre: the means by which discourse is defined, categorized, and performed. During our bi-weekly meetings, we will read and discuss articles that allow us to explore arrangement and genre through a series of questions: What are the elements contributing to arrangement? What is the role of the text? The reader? The writer? How do text, reader, and writer come together in genre and arrangement? How does that nexus function as a performance? The discussions culminate in a brief (2 pages) response paper.