Designed as a survey course, composition theory provides an introduction to various writing theories, focusing almost exclusively on modern theories. While many of these theories emerge from studies of teaching writing, our focus will not be on the practice of teaching. Rather, the course interrogates the act of writing itself--how it takes place, what effect it has on people and their world, what purposes/goals it serves the writer, how it functions within culture, etc. Our primary goals will be to understand both the variety of perspectives on how writing might be theorized as well as the debates and disagreements that exist between and among these theories. Broader questions that will be pursued include the relationship between writing and reality, questions of difference and the writer, the ideologies of writing theories, and the function of teaching writing within the institution and broader culture. By the end of the course, students should have a clear understanding of what is at stake in such theorizing and begin to consider how they position themselves within these debates as teachers and scholars. Readings will be drawn from a wide range of approaches, including expressivism, cognitive theory, social construction, rhetorical theory, Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Specifically we will read work by scholars such as Bartholomae, Bizzell, Britton, Brodkey, Burke, Elbow, Flynn, Horner, Lu, Malinowitz, Trimbur, and Villanueva.
This seminar investigates literacy as a social phenomenon, exploring how meaning is made not only through reading and writing but of reading and writing (Brandt). We will explore foundational and newer scholarship from literacy studies through inquiry, posing questions like
• What is literacy? What are its events, practices, and activities?
• Where is literacy found (in the head, the heart, the hands)?
• How does literacy move among spaces, contexts, and languages?
• How does a diversifying society redefine literacy as effective, creative, illegal, failing?
• Why and for whom does literacy matter? What can or can’t it accomplish?
Scholars in this interdisciplinary field—compositionists, literary scholars, education researchers, linguists, anthropologists, social historians, and economists—have sought to examine these questions and analyze literacy through varied methods (theoretical, historical, quantitative, interview-based, ethnographic) and units of analysis (literacy data from public records, literacy acts and events, literacy practices and contexts). Therefore, the course will attend to methodologies for studying literacy and practices of teaching it, as well as the contemporary social contexts that inform it. Reading will include work from Barton and Hamilton, Besnier, Blommaert, Brandt, Gee, Graff, Heath, Kalmar, Olson, Ong, Scribner and Cole, Street, and others.
This seminar has two aims: to provide a framework for reading and evaluating empirical research and to help prepare participants to conduct their own research. We will focus primarily on qualitative, context-based methodologies although we will consider the aims, methods and assumptions of a variety of approaches, including experimental, descriptive, and interpretive, and a variety of methodologies including ethnographic, case study research, and teacher-research. We will read about and experiment with such specific methods as interviewing and text analysis through various means, including critical discourse analysis. As we consider research approaches, we will look as well at the theoretical perspectives that inform them, including rhetorical, post-structural, critical linguistic, feminist, and other composition theories. Course assignments will include short experiments with specific research methods, two short reviews of specific studies, a longer review of research on a given question or review of a research methodology, and a pilot research project.
This course explores writing through the lens of language: How do writers move among their languages? How do "soft boundaries" between languages impact writing in English around the world? How are language boundaries used to control writing and whose interests do they serve? The course will address these questions by considering theoretical work and empirical studies on World Englishes, language politics, and pedagogical responses to language difference and variety. Seminar participants will write a review of research on a current problem in language diversity, a conference paper proposal, and a conference-length paper on a language diversity-related topic. Reading will include Baca, Kachru, Blommaert, Norton, Kalmar, Horner& Trimbur, Prendergast, Canagarajah, Makoni & Pennycook, Phillipson, Pratt, and others.
In this course, we will examine the most recent research into the connections between computers and writing, looking at both the practical applications and the theory grounding such applications. The course will begin with an historical perspective on technology, examining how technological writing spaces both challenge and reinforce other forms of print culture in order to situate technology within similar historical changes in writing production (e.g. manuscript culture, the printing press, etc.). From this brief historical overview we will move to cultural theories of technology, examining work in media studies, philosophy, and composition focused on understanding the “effect” of the information economy and new forms of writing on our society. As such, the course will draw from work in cultural studies analyzing new technologies and in computers and composition looking at how technology has influenced the teaching of writing. Our focus will be on how writing processes, concepts of authorship, genre, intellectual property, identity politics, civic engagement, and power relations are affected by working with technology. We will consider technologies ranging from discussion technologies (e.g., e-mail, listservs, chat, discussion boards) to hypertext (i.e., interactive fiction, web sites, blogs, electronic publishing) to new multimedia genres merging print with sound and the visual. (No technical expertise required, though!).
This course explores the relationship between genre and transfer as social action. Rhetorical approaches to genre analyze how texts emerge from and shape recurring social situations. Theories of transfer explore how writers’ literate knowledge moves (or doesn’t) across social situations. So how, then, are genres implicated in the transfer of writing knowledge? How might rhetorical genres and writing transfer work together to shape writers’ attempts at social action or transformation? The course will explore these questions by considering theoretical work in and empirical studies on rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, the teaching of writing, and the transfer of writing knowledge.
This course focuses on writing program administration (WPA) in the United Stated. It will offer a brief historical overview of how this work developed and how it is currently practiced, and it will address its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. The goal of the course is to help students understand the nature of WPA work and to begin to prepare them to take it on in the future. The class will discuss some of the most crucial questions of composition and rhetoric and investigate how they impact WPA work. We'll read theories and perspectives of experts in the field, discuss their values and applications to our own local educational conditions, and apply them to curricular and programmatic projects.
This course focuses on approaches to writing curricula and pedagogy. Implicitly, then, it engages questions about our conception of the nature of writing and our models of learning and teaching. The course will include both reflection on our own experiences as writers, learners, and teachers, and readings on theories of writing and teaching. We will consider, in particular, expressivist, rhetorical, critical, feminist, and cultural theories that inform curriculum design and pedagogy. Readings from such anthologies as Tate-Myers' Writing Teacher's Sourcebook and Lee Odell's Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Offered as an introduction to the field to MA/PhD students and area K-12 teachers. Course assignments will include a writing project, a book review, and an inquiry (research) project. The curriculum will include experience in all aspects of the writing process--drafting, giving and receiving feedback, copy-editing, publishing--and in reflecting on the experience.
Historically, American political and educational policies have alternately restricted, invalidated, and/or affirmed particular racial group’s language practices. Language has simultaneously performed race (late 19th- and early 20th-century judicial writings that performed whiteness/nonwhiteness) and been a vehicle for restricting access (literacy testing as prerequisite for voting and citizenship). More recent manifestations of racialized understandings of language have included U.S. English movements, dismissals of Black English, and characterizations of bilingual education as un-American. To challenge the tangled relationship between writing and race, scholars in rhetoric and composition, education, linguistics, and critical race theory have interrogated the continuing effects of this legacy and explored how writers have upset writing conventions in order to challenged prevailing conceptions of racialized (or race-neutral) writing and reading subjects. This seminar focuses, in particular, on composition pedagogy and racial minority student writers; studies of racial minorities’ writing practices; composition studies’ response to language politics in the 1974 publicationStudents’ Right to Their Own Language; writing and borderlands; and critical re-writings of race.
The study of rhetoric is the study of how messages are crafted by individuals and groups to achieve their desired effects in others, whether that study is a matter of art (helping speakers and writers use verbal and other devices to accomplish their ends) or interpretation (helping readers and listeners understand and criticize the intended effects of texts and how those effects are produced). The oldest rhetorical theories are arts of public speech, but rhetoric has also been important as a school subject devoted to eloquence in general. Today, “rhetoric” survives as a somewhat narrow term of political abuse, on the one hand, and as a loose collection of approaches for looking at the suasory function of discourse, on the other. With the twentieth century revival of classical rhetoric, it also remains probably the best developed and most powerful verbal art available to us. The course will be divided into two parts. In the first, we’ll look at the development of ancient rhetorical theory and pedagogy in classical Greece, especially as that can be discerned in the works of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. In the second, we’ll not only test and evaluate the usefulness of ancient rhetoric in contemporary life but examine modern and postmodern developments in rhetorical theory, from Kenneth Burke to Judith Butler, especially as these have grappled with the new conditions of our lives and new ways of thinking about language, intention, identity, and community. Students will turn in two medium-sized scholarly projects, one for each of the two parts of the course.
Feminist rhetorical theory began as a historical recovery effort in the late 1980s and 1990s whereby feminist rhetorical scholars sought to add to the classical rhetorical canon women’s voices. However, it is now a dynamic and robust part of rhetorical scholarship. This class will take an in-depth look at the development of feminist rhetorical theory and in doing so, consider this development alongside core conversations in Feminist Studies more broadly. Following the lead of feminist scholar Clare Hemmings’ approach to critically analyzing a field and considering the politics of its grammar, we will take note of the patterns of inquiry and scholarship that have taken place across the field in order to consider the utility (and indeed, ask utility for whom and at what point?) for feminist work in rhetorical studies. In particular, we will examine how race and difference, class and political economy, and geopolitics intersect (or how they don’t) with gender in the field of feminist rhetorical studies and in doing so, create a vision for the future of feminist scholarship in feminist rhetorical studies.
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to transnational studies in rhetoric. In doing so we look to the critical projects of transnational, feminist, postcolonial, international political economy studies to consider how they have served as a precursor to transnational rhetorical approaches. As a class we will consider how empires, economies, and transglobal relationships thrive through historical grammars and rhetorics. We will address how global capitalism, austerity politics, and the economic, social, and political conditions of contemporary neoliberalism, neocolonialism and neo-imperialism are supported by gendered, raced, and classed rhetorical patterns. Toward that end we will consider: What rhetorical frameworks and narratives of nation, empire, and economy underlie laws, policies, literatures, and media and shape processes of cultural and legal recognition and delimit public responses to violence and injustice? How do various rhetorics activate cultural and transnational narratives and social and political relations? And what might rhetorical methods and intervention—various means of disrupting, challenging, re-shaping these rhetorics and their material and cultural effects—look like in response to current transnational crises?