Programs and Areas

Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy

Winter Course Offerings

Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) Vik Muniz.

Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is offering numerous special topic classes winter quarter. Offerings include: English 467: Writing and Learning; English 569: Digital Media In English Studies: The Digital Projects Seminar; English 573.01: Rhetorical Theory and the Analysis of Discourse; English H591.02: Truthiness, Misinformation, and Other Bullshit; English 750: Introduction to Graduate Study in Literacy; English 779.02: Rhetoric from the Renaissance to the 20th Century; English 789: Introduction to Graduate Studies in Digital Media; and English 879: Whose Text? Modern & Contemporary Rhetorical Theory & Pedagogy.

Image: Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) Vik Muniz

English 467: Writing & Learning

Amie Wolf
MW 9:30-1:18

Course Description
The course will concentrate on the study and application of composition and rhetorical theory, the intersections between writing and learning, and facilitating and tutoring the writing processes of college students in a variety of contexts. Students will study class concepts through readings, writing, discussion, and hands-on experience. Students will serve as Peer Writing Consultants and facilitate a small writing group of first-year writers once each week. Students who successfully complete the course are eligible for employment as writing center tutors. Texts will focus on tutoring and/or writing groups, for example; The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring, and Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom. Materials will be presented through class discussion, lecture and workshops. Evaluation will be based on multiple short writing assignments, a research project, and a self-evaluation of tutoring and writing group facilitation.

Amie Wolf and former English 467 students Jade Faul, David Maynard, James Sweterlisch, Sarah Call, and Brandi Gilbert after presenting"Approaching Solutions: Theories in Writing Facilitation" at the 29th Annual Conference of the East Central Writing Centers Association, Bowling Green, Ohio. March 15-17, 2007.

English 569N: Digital Media In English Studies: The Digital Projects Seminar

Scott DeWitt
MW 5:30-7:18

Course Description
This course will take up the study of digital media and its relationship to the projects students bring to the seminar. We will study and produce texts that combine sophisticated digital imaging, video, sound, and animation. Certainly, many digital media texts still utilize alphabetic print. However, we are interested in digital media texts that resist print-privileged modes of communication and instead emerge as rich, layered, and dynamic representations of stories, concepts, and arguments, with or without the use of the printed word. To do this, we will need to explore the idea of "visual rhetoric," how graphic imagery and visual design can convey meaning, affect tone and mood, and make arguments. We will also study the role of audio in digital media composing.

The most significant part of this course focuses on the "P" word: Production. This course is structured mostly as a studio class, where we will be working together in the Digital Media Project's studio. The success of a studio course depends on your willingness to use class time to invent, create, play, and critique. Hopefully, most of our conversations will emerge from our work in the studio in ways that today, are unpredictable. We cannot talk intelligently about digital media technologies until we, ourselves, compose with them. This is your opportunity to do just that. You will learn a number of digital media technologies, and you will be able to create your work in the spaces these technologies afford you.

Students from across the areas in the Department of English-literature, film, creative writing, folklore, etc.-or in majors outside of English will propose and create a project that they would like to work on in the seminar. For example, students might bring a seminar paper they have created in another class or a presentation they have given that they would like to imagine in a digital format. They may also have in mind a project idea that involves their work outside the university. Students could also start from scratch in developing a project.

This course is being offered as an evening seminar to meet student requests that we offer more night courses. The Digital Media Project's studio will remain open after our course so that students can continue to work on their projects if momentum is working in their favor.

English 573.01: Rhetorical Theory and the Analysis of Discourse

Nan Johnson
MW 11:13-1:18

Course Description
This course will instruct students in the methods of rhetorical criticism through the analysis of a range of genres and the study of critical approaches that allow us to understand how arguments function in our culture and our lives. We will examine a range of texts including non-fiction, popular culture, film, fiction, poetry, oratory, pamphlets, posters, advertisements, and periodicals. We will focus on the formal rhetorical strategies used in these texts to persuade audiences to beliefs and actions. Crucial elements of audience analysis such as rhetorical context, age, race, gender, region, historical period, ethnicity, and life style will also be stressed as major considerations in rhetorical criticism. Students will be encouraged to contribute their own interests in literary genres, cultural discourses, and historical periods to our discussion. Reading Packets will be provided by the Instructor. Part of class work will also include the collection of sample texts which will be the focus of class discussion. Required work for this course will include a mid-term assignment, a final project, and short writing assignments spread over the quarter. Participation in small group and class discussions will also be expected and required.

English H591.02: Truthiness, Misinformation, and Other Bullshit

James Fredal
MW 1:30-3:18

Course Description
In this course, we will ask fundamental questions about the nature, purpose, and ethical implications of bullshit in theory and practice. We will explore the relationship between bullshit and lies, gossip, humbuggery, obfuscation, wikiality, falsehood, marketing, chewing the fat, doublespeak, woofing, spin, nonsense, sophistry, bollocks, impression management, innuendo, pulling one's leg, rubbish, trashtalk, rhetoric, misinformation, propaganda, the dozens, public relations, ideology, and truthiness. Under what conditions are any of these practices moral, legal, ethical, tolerable, remediable, or even laudatory? Who gets to say, and when will it stop? What are the implications of these kinds of speech? How are they different from "the truth," "the facts," "knowledge," or sincerity in general? And how can we learn to do it better?

Readings may include some of the following:

Roger Abrams "Playing the Dozens"
Augustine "Of Lying"
F.G.Bailey. Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership
John Barnes. A Pack of Lies: Toward a Sociology of Lying.
Edward Bernays Crystallizing Public Opinion
Max Black. The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays
Heinz Brandenburg. "Short of Lying: The Prevalence of Bullshit in Political Communication"
Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent
C.A. Cohen. "Deeper into Bullshit." Contours of Agency. Ed. Buss and Overton. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Anything by Stephen Colbert
T.S. Eliot. "The Triumph of Bullshit"
Harry Frankfurt. On Bullshit. Princeton, Princeton UP, 2005.
Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Jim Holt. "Say Anything" New Yorker.
Daniel Mears. "The Ubiquity, Functions, and Contexts of Bullshitting." Journal of Mundane Behavior 3.2 (2002): 233-356.
Nietzsche. On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense.
Various articles found in The Onion
George Orwell "Politics and the English Language"
Perry, William G. "Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology"
Plato Gorgias
Neil Postman "Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection"
Alan Sokal "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217-252.
---. "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies." Lingua Franca 1996: 62-64
Various episodes of The Daily Show

Assignments will include the regular production of oral and written bullshit: weekly response papers, independent research, active class participation, and a final project and presentation.

English 750: Introduction to Graduate Study in Literacy

Harvey Graff
TR 9:30-11:18

Course Description
*This is a required core course for the GIS in literacy studies*
This is a foundational course for graduate students interested in engaging in further studies in literacy. It is also an interdisciplinary course relevant to graduate studies in disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, education, public policy, and related fields.

The study and understanding of literacy has changed enormously in recent years. Although its importance is undoubted, literacy emerges as a much more complicated, mediated, and context-dependent subject than previous students, scholars, policymakers, and publics appreciated. It is therefore a much richer, challenging, and, in some ways, significant subject. Writing, reading, and other literacies are seen as pluralistic cultural practices whose forms, functions, and influences take shape as part of larger contexts: social, political, historical, material, and ideological. Literacy studies demand new, interdisciplinary, comparative, and critical approaches to conceptualization, theories, analysis, and interpretation.

Toward that end, our topics include: "great debates" over literacy, its uses, impacts, and meanings; theories of literacy; histories of literacy; literacy and literacies; reading and writing and beyond; ethnographies of literacy in everyday life; academic and school literacies; literacy and language; literacy and schooling; literacy and social order-class, race, gender, ethnicity, generation, and geography; literacy and collective and individual action; recent research; research design and methodologies. Readings may include the work of Shirley Brice Heath, Jack Goody, Deborah Brandt, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, Brian Street, Donald McKenzie, Harvey Graff, David Barton, Ruth Finnegan, Mike Rose, among other readings across the humanities and social sciences.

English 779.02: Introduction to Graduate Study in Rhetoric: Renaissance to 20th Century

James Fredal
TR 11:30-1:18

Course Description
The course presents the history and theory of rhetoric from the Renaissance to the present.

English 789: Introduction to Graduate Studies in Digital Media

Dickie Selfe and Louie Ulman
MW 1:30-3:18

Course Description
Required for the M.A. Concentration in Digital Media Studies in English

Meets the third core course requirement for the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Literacy Studies

English 789 offers graduate students an opportunity to survey the history, theory, and applications of digital media in English studies, and to explore the challenges and opportunities presented by reading, viewing, listening, and composing in digital environments.

Through readings, original research, and digital media production, students will build theoretical frameworks useful for digital media studies; methods of conducting research on, and within, digital media environments; and the production skills they will need to explore further how digital literacies might inform their work as scholars, teachers, and citizens.

English 879: Whose Text? Modern & Contemporary Rhetorical Theory & Pedagogy

Wendy Hesford
TR 3:30-5:18

Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) by Vik Muniz.

Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) Vik Muniz

Course Description
In this course, we will examine shifting configurations of authorship and key rhetorical concepts such as agency, memory, delivery, silence, listening, and the public sphere from a variety of perspectives, including modernist, postmodernist, feminist, postcolonial, and materialist perspectives. The course is designed to highlight key debates within rhetorical theory and pedagogy and to help prepare students for graduate exams.

Readings will span a range of genres, including critical essays, public policy documents, performance art, documentary video, and a screenplay.

Tentative List of Required Texts:

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives
Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds., The Rhetorical Tradition
Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence
Lucaites, John Louis, et al., Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader
Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire
Ronald, Kate and Joy Ritchie, eds. Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice

Additional readings will be selected by students in the course.

Course Requirements include weekly response papers; a mid-term seminar paper/project proposal, seminar paper (conference length) or multimedia project; and weekly attendance and class participation.