Courses
Graduate Seminars: 2008–2009
Download Graduate Seminar Descriptions
- 2008-09 | PDF, 284 KB | 8 pages
- 2007-08 | PDF, 224 KB | 6 pages
- 2006-07 | PDF, 196 KB | 13 pages
- 2005-06 | PDF, 356 KB | 13 pages
- 2004-05 | PDF, 80 KB | 12 pages
- 2003-04 | PDF, 72 KB | 8 pages
- 2002-03 | PDF, 56 KB | 13 pages
- 2001-02 | PDF, 72 KB | 16 pages
- 2000-01 | PDF, 52 KB | 16 pages
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Graduate seminars are open to both masters and doctoral students, and topics are offered on a rotating cycle.
Summer I (2008)
ENG 690 | Bodies and Their Places in Modern American Narratives (4)
MW | 1–4:45 | 5/19–6/25 | Susan Morgan
This seminar will explore the conjunctions of geographic location, narrative structure and ideas of the body in some twentieth century American narratives. We will be interested in the interrelation between representations of indigenous space and representations (including erasures) of bodies and sexuality. What does place have to do with sexuality and narrative structure? In reading American literature, what of the distinctions between domestic and transatlantic subjects and/or between fiction and non-fiction? We will pay particular attention to questions of narrative technique.
We will begin during the first week with a classic early novel of place, and the body: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. For the next four weeks we will look at some well-known twentieth-century American narratives, both fiction and creative non-fiction: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Toni Morrison’s Sula. Each week we will also read critical selections, from such authors as Rich, Foucault, Anderson, Armstrong, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Robbins, D’Emilio, and Warner. Students will be responsible for the readings, a class presentation, some short responses, and a final project.
Summer IV
ENG 731 | The Theory and Practice of College Composition | [4]
MTWRF | 9-12:30 | John Tassoni, Kerrie Carsey, and TBA
This course meets from August 4 – August 20, and is required of all first-year Graduate Assistant instructors and Teaching Associates. This seminar introduces the histories, theories, and practices of composition studies to prepare graduate student instructors for teaching English 111 and 112 and to help them construct their version of Miami’s standard syllabi. Topics are approached from both the perspective of current theoretical debate and practical classroom application and include composing processes (invention, drafting, and revising), classroom dynamics, collaborative writing, peer response groups, argument and the rhetorical tradition, ways of responding to student writing, assessment and grading, creating assignments, and style and grammar.
Semester I (Fall 2008)
ENG 602 | Introduction to Rhetoric for Technical and Scientific Communicators | [2]
R | 2–4:40 (Part II Sprint Course with ENG 695) | Michele Simmons
This sprint-length introduction to the study of rhetoric highlights the major issues of traditional rhetoric as they are understood by professional writers and researchers in modern settings. Since many students take this course as a requirement for the MTSC program, particular attention will be paid to the application of rhetoric to the domains of technical and scientific communication.
ENG 603 | Theories and Their Histories | [4]
R | 1–3:40 | Martha Schoolman
This course aims to introduce graduate students to some of the major texts and conversations in twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural theory. Our inquiry will be grouped around three major topics: language and discourse; ethics and subjectivity; and nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Among the authors considered will be: Benedict Anderson, J.L. Austin, M.M. Bakhtin, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, Jürgen Habermas, G.W.F. Hegel, Emmanuel Levinas, Martha Nussbaum, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Elaine Scarry. In addition to an intrepid attitude toward the challenges of reading theory, course requirements will include a presentation, periodic response papers, and brief (10-12 page) concluding essay in intellectual genealogy.
ENG 614 | Introduction to Old English Language and Literature | [4]
M | 1–3:40 | Patrick Murphy
This course is an introduction to the language and literature of Anglo–Saxon England (roughly 500–1100 AD), with an emphasis on developing a sound reading knowledge of Old English. The first half of the semester will accordingly focus on study of Old English grammar, syntax and vocabulary, as we gain experience translating short passages of poetry and prose. In the second half of the semester we will have the opportunity to read several important short works—such as The Wanderer and Alfred’s Preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care—in the original, as well as to read and discuss longer texts in facing–page translations, including Heaney’s Beowulf. Course requirements will include several written quizzes, a midterm, and a final research paper on a topic of interest to the individual student.
Likely texts:
- Baker, Introduction to Old English
- Heaney and Niles, Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition
- Course Reader
ENG 620 | How to Have Promiscuity in a Renaissance | [4]
M | 4–6:40 | James Bromley
The title of this seminar is taken from Douglas Crimp’s essay “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” where he talks about the politicization of sexual practice in the wake of AIDS. This course will look at the ways that sexual practice is politicized in Renaissance drama. From Shakespeare’s Othello, we may be familiar with the story of the woman falsely accused of adultery and murdered, but what do we make of plays where characters experience and/or act on transgressive desires? We will look at dramatic representations of masochism, adultery, prostitution, sodomy, pederasty, and beyond. Why was there interest in granting representational space to desires and acts that ran ostensibly counter to dominant ideologies about sex? Are representations of these activities cautionary tales? What role does disease play in the way characters talk about sex? Do these plays encourage audience members to imagine the pleasures of transgression? Can we understand anything about sexual practices, the boundaries of normalcy and deviance, and the cultural place of the theater in the Renaissance through these representations? To answer these questions, we will discuss the relationship of genre to representations of transgression, the relationship of sexuality to subjectivity, and the use of sexual practice to articulate political concerns. Possible readings include a play or two by Shakespeare; the anonymous Arden of Faversham; Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Women Beware Women; Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling; Marlowe’s Edward II; Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan; and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy and Philaster and associated critical and theoretical readings. Assignments will include a presentation, short paper (5-7 pp.), and long seminar paper (ca. 15 pp.)
ENG 650 | Graduate Fiction Workshop | [4]
R | 4–6:40 | Margaret Luongo
Our goals in the graduate fiction workshop include pursuing your interests; refining your writing through the practice of craft and analysis of your work, the work of your peers, and the work of published authors; challenging and expanding your ideas concerning what makes a story a story; developing and refining your aesthetic, keeping in mind visual artist Robert Raushcenberg’s comment, “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetic.”
ENG 651 | Graduate Poetry Workshop | [4]
R | 1–3:40 | David Schloss
ENG 652 | Graduate Creative Nonfiction Workshop | [4]
W | 1–3:40 | Eric Goodman
Although the course will be primarily organized as a workshop, wherein students produce writings to be critiqued in class and then revised, creative non–fiction is a fairly new field within creative writing. Therefore, this course will have a substantial introduction to the genus and species, including quite a bit of reading (and short exploratory assignments in writing) preliminary to the actual workshops. Creative non–fiction is non–fiction that adapts the techniques of fiction and poetry, although by now it has accumulated its own conventions, which can be well observed by the memoirs on the list of texts below. It is also a kind of writing that asks interesting questions about truth and literary procedure, many of which are discussed in Hampl’s thoughtful I Could Tell You Stories. The class will read this book, as well as Wolff’s and Karr’s in the first weeks of class, as a foundation on which to build. By the end of the class, we will be reading more experimental work (such as David Eggers’), with a view toward describing how the literary memoir as it was practiced by earlier writers (particularly in the 1990s) might be changing and extending its range of tone and narrative reach.
The reading list may well also include Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life; Mary Karr, Cherry; David Eggers, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Susan Allen Toth, Blooming; Nancy Mair, Remembering the Bone House; Henry Louis Gates, Colored People; and Susan Kaysden, Girl, Interrupted.
Note: Creative writing students may elect to take this workshop instead of ENG 652/Issues in Creative Writing or may substitute it for a literature requirement by petitioning the Graduate Committee. Students in other specializations may take the workshop to fulfill a distribution requirement with approval of the Director of Graduate Studies and by petitioning the Graduate Committee. Students may also take the workshop as an elective without petitioning.
ENG 690 | Generational Shifts of the Signifying Monkey: Modernity, Post–Modernity in African American Literature | [4]
T | 4–6:40 | Cheryl Johnson
This seminar will focus on the development of African American literature and criticism in the twentieth and twenty–first centuries. We will acknowledge the “generational–shifts,” as Houston Baker argues, in black literature as it responded to the social, historical, political, and cultural locations of African Americans, and we will study the ways in which African American authors signified on American cultural and literary traditions. We will begin with literature of the Harlem Renaissance, and move through the protest tradition, the black power movement, and black feminism. We will also read theoretical and critical works that reflect on the function of African American literature in the representation and misrepresentation of racial, gendered, and sexual difference. Authors will include Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Robert P. Jones, Z.Z. Packer, and others. Theorists and critics include W.E. B.DuBois, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Mae Henderson, Robert Reed–Pharr, and others.
ENG 692 | Introduction to Technical and Scientific Communication | [4]
M | 3–5:50 | Jean Lutz
This course addresses history, theory, and practice in technical and scientific communication. Of the four–plus hours allotted to the course, a two–hour portion is devoted to reading, roundtables with practicing professionals, and discussion. A second two-hour segment addresses basic and advanced writing strategies–including an introduction to problem–solving–and standard genres. Completing projects for clients is typical.
ENG 693 | Technical and Scientific Editing | [2]
R | 2–4:40 (Part I Sprint Course with ENG 696) | Jean Lutz
Roles, responsibilities, and practices of the editor of technical and scientific communications.
ENG 695 | Linguistics for Technical and Scientific Communicators | [2]
T | 2–4:40 (Part I Sprint Course with ENG 602) | Katherine Durack
The major objective of this course is to prepare MTSC students to analyze and adapt to language practices in their future professional communities. It offers insights into the relationship of community contexts to oral and written language use and how language shapes and is shaped by organizational cultures. Students will gain a basic awareness of linguistic analysis at the discourse level, review language issues at stake in professional discourse communities, and carry out supervised practice in the analysis of naturally occurring talk and texts.
ENG 696 | Managing Technical/Scientific Communication Publications & Departments | [2]
T | 2–4:40 (Part II Sprint Course with ENG 693) | Katherine Durack
Introduction to responsibilities of people who manage technical and scientific communication systems, including in–house communication departments, independent companies, organization–wide information policies, and professional journals and similar publications.
ENG 698.A | Teaching Workshop for College Composition | [2]
W | 10–10:50 | John Tassoni, Kerrie Carsey, and TBA
Required workshop for first-year Graduate Assistants and Teaching Associates teaching ENG 111.
ENG 698.B | Teaching Technical and Business Writing | [2]
W | 1–2:40 | Jean Lutz and Michele Simmons
Required of new graduate assistants teaching ENG 313/315. Readings, discussion, practice grading sessions, activities with current graduate (teaching) assistants and practical exercises.
ENG 733 | History of Rhetoric: Rhetorical Traditions | [4]
W | 1–3:40 | Kate Ronald
The purpose of this seminar is to provide foundational knowledge of the field of rhetorical studies. Rhetoric has a long and rich tradition that began well over two thousand years ago, and contemporary teachers operate out of this tradition whether they know it or not. We will explore the history of rhetorical theory and practice from classical Greece and Rome, through the Renaissance and the 18th and 19th centuries, into modern or “new” rhetoric and finally toward postmodern rhetoric and the influence of cultural studies. But we will not simply study history for its own sake. I want us to move continually back and forth between the rhetorical tradition and current theory and practice, to identify certain beliefs about writing and reading and writers that drive our own teaching and have their roots somewhere in history.
This course will offer, as its fundamental organizing principle, a chronological history of Western rhetoric, but we will not simply cover the received rhetorical (capital T) tradition. Of course we will begin with the sophists, then move to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, but in our run from the classical tradition to the postmodern era, we will simultaneously read Hortensia, Anna Julia Cooper, and Virginia Woolf, to name just of few of the women rhetors in the course. In other words, we will examine the history of women’s rhetorics alongside and in relation to the canonical history. I may also ask students to read at least history/historiography of the discipline of rhetoric, as time allows.
Primary Texts:
- Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, 2000
- Ritchie and Ronald, Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), 2001
Possible Additional Texts:
- Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 1998
- Donawerth, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, 2002
- Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination, 1994
- Logan, We are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of 19th Century Black Women, 1995
- Mao, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie, 2006
- Gilyard and Nunley, eds. Rhetoric and Ethnicity, 2004
- Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening, 2006
ENG 736 | Engaging Non–Western Rhetorical Traditions: Comparative Rhetoric Reconfigured | [4]
T | 1–3:40 | LuMing Mao
This seminar focuses on non–Western rhetorical traditions—on, more specifically, how such traditions are being studied under the general rubric of comparative rhetoric and with a particular interest to compare them with their Western rhetorical counterparts. I begin this engagement with Robert Kaplan, with his insights that different cultures have different rhetorical tendencies. I situate Kaplan’s work in the context of the ethnography of communication (Dell Hymes) and linguistic and cultural relativity (Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf). Out of Kaplan’s insight grew comparative rhetoric—one that aims to study other rhetorical traditions on their own terms and in their own contexts (Robert Oliver). I explore tensions that characterize comparative rhetoric—tensions, for example, between the desire to search for a General Theory of Rhetoric (George Kennedy) and the disposition to develop local terms and local traditions (Mary Garrett); between an appeal to logic and rationality and a call for aesthetic, analogical ordering (David Hall and Roger Ames). Drawing upon works by Ien Ang, Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, and others, and taking a cue from comparative philology in the 19th century where searching for a “third” (in this case an earlier origin from which the two under comparison were derived) was the stated objective, I explore a third voice (or the yin–yang) in comparative rhetoric. I specifically consider: (1) the knowledge and power that get (re)produced and/or (re)created at points of comparison and dissemination; (2) the possibilities and impossibilities of studying the other on its own terms and in its own context; and (3) the art of recontextualization as a heuristic for comparative rhetoric and the art of reflective encounters as comings–to–be. I use Chinese and Indian rhetorical traditions as my points of reference.
Participants in this seminar will likely be responsible for, among other things, two papers, an individual presentation, as well as weekly reading responses on Blackboard.
The readings for this seminar are likely to include:
- The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. Trans. Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. New York, NY: Ballantine, 1998
- Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001
- Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994
- The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. W. J. Johnson. Oxford UP, 2007
- Connor, Uller. Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second Language Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996
- Garrett, Mary. “Some Elementary Methodological Reflections on the Study of the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition.” International and Intercultural Communication Annual 22 (1999): 53–63
- Hall, David, and Roger Ames. Thinking Through Confucius. Albany: SUNY P, 1987
- Hall, David, and Roger Ames. Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture. Albany: SUNY P, 1995
- Combs, Steve. The Dao of Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY, 2005
- Kennedy, George. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross–cultural Introduction. New York: Cambridge, 1997
- Lipson, Carol, and Roberta Binkley, eds. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. Albany: SUNY, 2004
- Lu, Xing. Rhetoric in ancient China, fifth to third century, B.C.E : A Comparison with Classical Greek Rhetoric. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998
- Mencius. Trans. D. C. Lau. England: Penguin, 1976
- Oliver, Robert. Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1971
- Phaedrus. Plato. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995
- Rhetoric. Aristotle. Trans. George Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991
- Ying, H. G. “The Origin of Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 10 (2000): 259-268
- Young, Robert. Global Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995
ENG 750 | The Theory Wars | [4]
T | 1–3:40 | Brit Harwood
The problematic of this course is a bridging of the gap between two areas of contemporary critical theory/practice—history and psychoanalysis. In the major paper for the course, members of the seminar have the opportunity to integrate this problematic with an interest of their own. Moreover, students will choose those texts from the medieval and early modern periods that the class will read in common in considering an articulation between historicist theory and psychoanalytic.
The class will first take up the two developed historicist theories that, in the instructor’s view, continue to exercise contemporary power: Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production and Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature. The class will read collaterally in Marx and Althusser as necessary and, briefly, in examples of critical practice. The class will also take up psychoanalytic theory in selected Freud and Lacanian texts (“Infantile Sexuality,” portions of The Interpretation of Dreams, The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”) and selected psychoanalytic criticism by Julia Kristeva and Barbara Johnson.
The class will then examine examples of critical practice simultaneously historicist and psychoanaltic—for example, the instructor’s “Psychoanalytic Politics” (ELH 2001), Louise Fradenburg’s Sacrifice Your Love, Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Power of Transgression.
Finally, in order to situate historicist and psychoanalytic critical practice, separately or together, in relation to other contemporary critical practice, the class will take up for purposes of comparison one or more selected texts undergirded by Foucault—New Historicist, feminist, decolonial, black queer theoretical, or so on. The specific focus here will be identified by the students.
Student writing will include two short papers suitable for development into conference presentations and one longer paper suitable for development into an article.