Fall 2009
M/W, 6 - 7.15PM
ENG 323.001: Writing in the Rhetorical Tradition
Room: Tompkins G117
Syllabus: Check back in mid-August
W, 3.00 - 5.45PM
CRD 701.001: History and Theory of Communication
Room: Winston 003
Syllabus: Check back in mid-August
Past courses @ NC State University
ENG 101: Academic Writing and Research
[Syllabus, TBA]
Intensive instruction in academic writing and research. Basic principles of rhetoric and strategies for academic inquiry and argument. Instruction and practice in critical reading, including the generative and responsible use of print and electronic sources for academic research. Exploration of literate practices across a range of academic domains, laying the foundation for further writing development in college. Continued attention to grammar and conventions of standard written English. Satisfies the freshman year composition and rhetoric component of the General Education Requirements in Writing and Speaking. Successful completion of ENG 101 requires a grade of C- or better. This course satisfies the freshman composition and rhetoric component of the General Education Requirements in Writing and Speaking.
This course is taught part-time in a computer classroom.
ENG 208: Studies in Fiction: Electronic Fiction and Poetry
[Syllabus: Summer 2007]
This course is a survey of literary experiments in electronic or digital writing. We will begin with some of the precursors, such as Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," Robert Coover's "The Babysitter," and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. With an appreciation for the ways in which these print-based writers experimented with narrative and character development, we will turn to our first genre of e-literature known as hypertext. We will read Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, as well as excerpts from Michael Joyce's Afternoon. Following these hypertexts, we will turn to another genre of e-literature known as technotexts (and a subset of this genre known as codeworks). We will study a number of representative works that include Talan Memmott's "Lexia to Perplexia," and the artist Mez's "the data][h!][bleeding texts." To help make sense of this genre, we will read select chapters from N. Kathryn Hayles' Writing Machines, which will provide you with a critical vocabulary for reading and writing about technotextuality. In the final three weeks of the semester, we will study a number of projects published in Born Magazine, which is an online journal devoted to literary experiments in e-fiction and -poetry. Most every one of the projects published in Born uses Adobe’s Flash application.
In addition to your studies in e-fiction, you will develop three writing projects, and you will take a final exam. The first writing project will be a conventional essay in which you'll be asked to define and analyze Jackson's Patchwork Girl. Your second essay will be a hypertext, which will be written in HTML. The focus of the second essay will be the technotextuality. The final writing project will be developed in the Flash application. Since we will study a number of Flash-based writing projects, I wanted to provide you with the opportunity to learn how to program in the Flash application. This course is taught in a computer classroom.
ENG 260: Introduction to Literary Studies
[Syllabus, TBA]
In this course, you will be introduced to a variety of theoretical approaches, from disciplines across the Humanities, which have impacted the study of literature, poetry, film, and culture in the twentieth century. The approaches to which you will be introduced are the following: American New Criticism, Russian Formalism, French Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Feminism(s), Psychoanalytic and Post-Psychoanalytic Theory. We will learn about these approaches by reading and writing about them, and by talking about them in class.
As the semester progresses, there are two additional approaches or perspectives that I hope you will learn to appreciate and/or understand: 1) the potentially infinite range of approaches that can attend your studies of literary and poetic texts; 2) the pattern(s) of transformation that have attended the study of language and textuality in the past century. From a markedly anti-humanist approach to the literary in the first-half of the century, a renewed focus on subjectivity reemerges in the second-half only to explode in to what has been referred to as a thousand tiny subjectivities by the turn of the millenium. Although this second approach is more of a heuristic than a definitive narrative, I think it will help us appreciate why there is such a wide range of approaches to literature and culture today.
ENG 422: Writing Theory and the Writing Process
[Syllabus: Fall 2006]
Welcome to ENG 422. This course is an introduction to "the process," a concept that many scholars in Rhetoric and Composition characterize as a paradigmatic moment in the emergence of their relatively young field. In the 1970s, compositionists celebrated a new era in writing theory and practice when they turned to the study of inventional processes of writing. Previous to this turn or shift, some scholars argued that the theory and instruction of writing had reached an impasse: in increasingly diverse educational settings, "current-traditional" methods of writing instruction were inadequate. Traditional writing pedagogies were narrowly focused on the final- or end-product (rather than the pre-writing and drafting processes), and in doing so were overlooking a rich area of concern of writers and instructors alike. Moreover, as a renewed interest in rhetoric emerged across the Humanities in the second half of the twentieth century, the exigency developed to reconnect writing pedagogies to the rhetorical traditions of which they were a dim reminder. To this day, the legacy of the process persists, and as we move from “first generation” process theory to more recent versions of “post-process,” you will come to recognize the concerns of a group of scholars who helped to define an era of scholarly and pedagogical concern in the US.
ENG 426: Analyzing Style
[Syllabus: Spring 2008]
Welcome to ENG 426. Our semester is divided in two parts. In the first part, we will focus on prose stylistics. Working from Richard Lanham's text, Analyzing Prose, we will learn how to identify and write about a dozen interrelated styles like the periodic, several types of running styles, the verb style, and visual styles. We will learn to talk and write about the ways in which a fiction writer, an essayist, or a political speaker transforms or "turns" the conventional meanings and uses of words and phrases in order to elicit an emotion or a desire from an audience, or to more clearly or compellingly convey the meaning of an idea. In the second part of the semester, we will change gears and study what might be called "life stylistics." Arguably, we are experiencing a stylistic turn on a cultural level. In an increasingly wide range of industries and professions, stylistic considerations are the basis for creating and promoting products and services by associating them with real or imagined ways of living. Due to the ways in which consumer culture has developed, we are experiencing an age of style. In the second half of our semester, we will learn how to apply the prose styles from the first half in our exploration of consumer/popular life and style.
ENG 491: Understanding Hypertext: Fiction, Poetry, Theory
[Syllabus, TBA]
This course is designed as an introduction to rhetorical and literary perspectives related to experimental writing in new media. We will focus primarily on writing for art-spaces (as opposed to work-spaces), oftentimes studying emerging tendencies in e-fiction and –poetry in historical and/or cultural contexts. To develop this focus, the course is divided in four parts. In the first part, we will read and respond to an important theme in digital writing studies: virtualization. While “virtual reality” continues to hold a fairly fetishized and distanced place in popular culture, some theorists and scholars have pointed to a general process of virtualization that affects us (and our texts) in postmodern, post-industrial society. The goal in the first part of this seminar is to appreciate the extent to which textual practices reflect changes in society and culture in the late twentieth century. Leading into the main focus of the course, at the end of the first part or section, we will look at the first of four methods or “dimensions” of writing that can be found in various new media: link-based writing. In the second, third, and fourth parts of the semester, we will focus on the following dimensions of writing: the visual/spatial, the algorithmic/procedural, and the kinetic. As we go “deeper into the machine,” as N. Katherine Hayles has dramatized the learning process, an important goal in this seminar is to develop a critical vocabulary of theory and practice for this relatively new area of writing studies.
This course is taught in a computer classroom.
ENG 498A.001: The Alphabet and Its Mere/Mirror Image
[Syllabus]
This independent study was designed as an advanced honors undergraduate seminar. The subject of the seminar is the historical, cultural, and visual/creative foundations of the Western alphabet. In this seminar, the history of the alphabet will be studied with attention to its visual forms. To this end, pre- and post-alphabets will be studied.
ENG 511: Theory and Research in Composition
[Syllabus, TBA]
This course serves as an introduction to Rhetoric and Composition theory and research. One of our primary goals is to develop a basic understanding of the pedagogical objectives and scholarly trends that have informed the field in the past thirty years. To this end, we will focus our attention on scholarship representative of the following pedagogies: radical and moderate expressivist; cognitivist; social constructionist; critical/Marxist. Thirty years ago, a 'current-traditional' model of writing instruction was largely replaced by a new set of pedagogies. In the late-sixties and seventies, expressivist, cognitivist and critical/Marxist writing pedagogies emerged in reaction to the inadequacies of current-traditional methods. In the eighties, social constructionist pedagogies emerged on the scene. Informed by poststructuralist and Cultural Studies theories, social constructionists simultaneously critiqued and extended the initial explorations of writing instruction after the current-tradition. Since then, the field continues to grow in size and concern, the legacy of these four pedagogies echoing in to the present.
In addition to the primary goal of developing a basic understanding of the conceptual terrain of the field, I hope that you will endeavor to connect the legacy of this field – its philosophical underpinnings; the social and cultural contexts with which it is engaged – to your own professional interests. Moreover, I hope that you will find as engaging as do I the study of an emerging discipline. In terms of its scholarship, Rhetoric and Composition is nearing the escape velocity of its first and second generations, professionalizing as they did in the sixties/seventies. As we move through each of the above mentioned pedagogies, I hope that you will join me in a conversation about the futures of writing – especially as they relate to your own work and study. As our (post-)national society continues to change and grow, so do the ways in which we relate thought to communication. As a field, Rhetoric and Composition is an important disciplinary voice in the exploration of that relation, focused as it is on writing and the legacy of writing as rhetoric.
ENG 515: Rhetoric of Science and Technology
[Syllabus, TBA]
This course explores the interrelations among the three terms, rhetoric, science, and technology. To this end, we will sample a wide range of twentieth and twenty-first century theories and philosophies of sci-tech including some of the following: Einstenian relavity; networked computing; chaos; artificial life; haptics; micro- and nanotechnology; genetics. These readings will be distributed across 4-5 topic areas and linked to examples of rhetorical discourse found in fields like the workplace, the network, and several kinds of social space.
Over the course of the semester, you will give one in-class presentation and write two 10-12 page papers. One of the 10-12 page papers may be assigned as a creative/technical project.
ENG 586A: Posthuman Culture and Communication
[Syllabus, Spring '05]
586A Blog
The figure or concept of the posthuman has changed considerably from its techno-dystopian roots in cyberpunk fiction, film, and philosophy in the 1970s and (early) 1980s, when it was expressive of an ambivalent wonder about our so-called future. Increasingly, the posthuman is now expressive of a paradigm shift in Humanities research. The shift is from a human-centered study of our life world to one in which the human is reconceptualized along a growing number of continua like the following: animate-inanimate, culture-nature, human-animal, and naturalartificial. In other words, a study of the posthuman is a study of our changing relations within life in general.
So, how do we theorize our relations to culture, art, and politics in a “posthuman” context? Related to this question, to what ends must we change the ways in which we study rhetoric, literature, and the arts? What is a posthuman, and is there a post-Humanities? In this course, we will develop responses to these questions and others by studying a selection of works published in literary theory, rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and philosophy. We will read works by N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Lévy, Paul Virilio, Brian Massumi, Alphoso Lingis, Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Cary Wolfe, and Manuel De Landa. Moreover, we will look at a small selection of contemporary art installations and performances that explore the same milieu of concern of which the figure of the posthuman is expressive.
ENG 669: Bibliography and Methods of Research
[Syllabus, TBA]
This 1-credit course is designed as an introduction to the expanding domains of current research methods and materials available in print and digital media. Moreover, it is designed to prepare you for some of the bibliographical practices that will attend the development of your MA thesis in English. In the first part of the semester, you will analyze the rhetorical and textual design of a sample MA thesis as well as develop an academic profile of a graduate faculty member in your subject area. Working in small groups based on disciplinary interest, you will pool your resources, collaborating and sharing information. One of your basic goals is to better understanding the disciplinary terrain of the department in which you are studying. In the second part of the semester, you will choose a specific area of research (a concept, a theme, or an author), and develop an annotated bibliography in the MLA format. Ideally, you should pick a topic related to your future thesis research, but the choice is ultimately yours. Short lectures at the beginning of each class will introduce you to specific methods of research across various media. Once you have completed your annotated bib’, you will learn how to use ISI Researchsoft’s Endnote application, republishing your work in this piece of programmable media. For the third and final part of the semester, you will expand your research methods to professional genres of writing, like the conference paper, the book review, and the (short) academic essay. You will learn how to find relevant 'Calls for Papers' (CFPs) for graduate student conferences and e-journals. In the final weeks of the semester, you will develop an abstract for a CFP, and you will develop a short version of the argument that you might ultimately submit, gaining additional experience documenting and formatting a scholarly argument or analysis.
This course is pass/fail. It will be taught in a classroom with portable laptops connected to a wireless LAN.