Courses

Course Description

With the recent debut of ChatGPT, the question of automated writing has become more and more visible. Although some suggest that Large Language Models models like ChatGPT are just the latest iteration of writing technologies that seek to automate writing practices--a smarter version of spell check and text prediction--others note that these tools raise complicated questions around authorship, intellectual property, privacy, and more. There is no doubt, however, that we have become increasingly comfortable with automating writing tasks and sharing the work of composing with nonhuman tools. But what are the limits of this technology? Who does it serve, and who does it leave behind? What kind of writing (and knowledge) does it value? What kind of relationship(s) might we form with this technology? In this class, we’ll explore these questions and many more as we examine the political, ethical, and pedagogical implications of automated writhing technologies. Students can expect to complete weekly reading responses, discussion facilitation for one class period during the semester, and a series of scaffolded assignments leading to a substantive scholarly research project to be presented to the class. 

Course Description

You will have an edge in many fields if you learn how good, original, accessible websites come together, as well as how to maintain a site. The ability to be a vital part of the website creation process will open doors to a variety of writing and design jobs. So will being able to design and run a usability test—to work with real users to find out how to improve a design. You’ll learn all of that and more in this course. 

Most students will enter the course not knowing any coding; everyone will leave being able to use a web editor and HTML and CSS to develop, troubleshoot, and maintain sites. (“Many will enter; all will win.”)

In addition to learning how to design, structure information, code, test, and implement a site, you will learn how to create and edit web-appropriate content and work with content management systems. You will also learn how to tap into available resources, adopt a professional development workflow, adapt a site for diverse and global audiences, and create websites and web content accessible to users with disabilities.

Requirements

Students will work on web development projects and give short presentations to the class. Students also will complete a usability project and several short writing assignments. 

Readings

TBD

Course Description

In this class we’ll cover the basics of grant writing including how to analyze funding opportunities, respond to a request for proposal, write the different sections of a grant proposal, construct the overall argument for your grant and persuade your readers to fund your ideas, and use effective document design to ensure that your readers can follow your main ideas. Students will work for a non-profit client and write a major proposal and give a final presentation. During the second half of the semester students should plan to meet with their client as needed outside of class as well as be prepared to conduct research and work independently under the supervision of the instructor.  

Course Description

This course is for students with writing experience who are eager to delve into the expansive world of creative non-fiction. Students will be expected to write one more traditional personal essay, and another that experiments with subject matter or form. We will discuss the elements of craft and read essays that reflect a variety of styles and subjects, with an emphasis on the autobiographical or personal essay, the blurry lines between fact and fiction, and a discussion of how our real-life experiences can be shaped into a meaningful and original narrative. Students will also complete shorter writing assignments along the way. They can expect to participate in thorough writing workshops and hearty discussions of published works.    

Course Description

This course will focus on contemporary fiction. We will read and analyze the five 2023 National Book Award in Fiction shortlist novels, with an eye toward craft, and then you will write your own short pieces in a style based on a specific author. The class will be divided between critical assessment of fiction and then writing and revising your own work. You should have a basic knowledge of craft in fiction in preparation for this course, and be prepared to read, and write, a great deal. Be prepared to write and workshop five three-to-four page pieces and one twelve-to-fifteen page short story.

Course Description

Both fashion and style begin with an imitative impulse, as Jeff Dolven’s work on Tudor poetics reminds us. This course focuses on one of the most frequently imitated and versatile literary fashions of Tudor and Stuart England: the pastoral mode. In addition to matters of genre and form, we will be pursuing the question of taste: what was it about this literary mode, with its Arcadian setting, poetic contests, tree inscriptions, pathetic fallacies, and aristocrats masquerading as shepherds that retained the interest of generations of English poets, even those like Milton and Marvell who were living through significant scientific and political changes? As we explore the variety of genres gathered under the rubric of the “pastoral,” including lyric poetry, plays, epics, masques, and even prose fictions (or proto-novels), we will consider how each new adaptation of the Arcadian setting contributes to period debates about poetic skill, authenticity, imitation, self-fashioning, and even horticultural art. Some early modern authors defended pastoral “toyes” as a means of absorbing exemplary conduct (a literary “fashion” capable of “fashioning” a virtuous reader), others argued that any exposure to tales of love incited dangerous passions. At the same time, Arcadian rhetoric offered a way for English poets to create an image of their island as a paradise both on page and on ground—a paradise that could rival the great cultural centers of continental Europe. Our primary texts will span the period between the printing of the first English eclogue in 1518 and the iconic pastoral transformations of Milton and Marvell in the mid-seventeenth century. Along the way, we will examine the various types of scholarship that the pastoral mode has attracted, paying particular attention to major critics in the field, but leaving room for excursions into genre studies, cultural studies, textual studies, and environmental studies.

Requirements

Discussion leading; conference-style presentation; research project (c. 20 pages); class participation

Readings

Primary readings may include early English translations of Theocritus, Virgil, and Horace; the pastoral response sequence inspired by Marlowe; selections from the prose romances of Sidney and Wroth; book-length segments from the epics of Spenser, Browne, and Milton; Lodge’s proto-novel Rosalynde; the verse narratives of Dickenson and Barnfield; Shakespeare’s play As You Like It; Milton’s masques presented at Ludlow and Harefield; and Marvell’s “Mower” lyrics.

Secondary readings may include key selections from the work of William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral), Thomas Rosenmeyer (The Green Cabinet), Raymond Williams (The Country and the City), Helen Cooper (Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance), Annabel Patterson (Pastoral and Ideology), Paul Alpers (What is Pastoral?), and Ken Hiltner (What Else is Pastoral?). The interests of seminar participants may influence the choice of readings during the course of the semester.

Course Description

Taking a blue humanities focus, this course examines the significance of waterways in nineteenth-century British literature and culture from a variety of socio-cultural, ecocritical, aesthetic, and theoretical perspectives.  British cultural identity has always been heavily invested in the sea and its contact points with land—beaches, ports, and seaside towns and villages.  The sea afforded the island nation added protection from invasion while also enabling it to become a global economic and political superpower in the nineteenth century.  But as Siobhan Carroll remarks in An Empire of Air and Water, the sea inspired contradictory impulses in the British imagination: the antithesis of “the stable, ordered space of the nation,” the world’s oceans were the “the medium of Britain’s interface with the globe and the international space to which Britain must expose its imperial agents, even as it fears the disorderly consequences of such exposure.”  Inland waterways as well, above all the Thames, often served as focal points of an idealized, organic sense of British national identity—but one under increasing threat from the forces of industrialization and urbanization. These fluid spaces, then, were nothing if not dynamic and complex. We will study a range of nineteenth-century literary and popular texts that sought to negotiate these competing currents of natural, cultural, and imperial identity.  Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), which we will read in serial installments over the course of the semester, will serve us as a historical and cultural linchpin, along with several other examples of “Blue Dickens” selected from his journalism and travel writing.  The course also emphasizes the transatlantic and circum-Atlantic contexts of nineteenth-century British literature, featuring travel writing and memoir by Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Harriet Martineau, Philip Henry Gosse, and (from a neo-Victorian perspective) Caryl Phillips. Other major authors studied include Jane Austen; Charlotte Smith; Alfred Tennyson; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; George Eliot; Charles Kingsley; Robert Louis Stevenson; Joseph Conrad; and H.G. Wells. 

Requirements

oral presentation; short critical essay; research essay; weekly response papers

Course Description

In this seminar we will explore appreciation as a mode of literary engagement for our time. We will consider the recent history of literary appreciation, its resurgence in 21^st century criticism and theory, and its place among other forms of postcritical reading. And we will consider what it means to read appreciatively, “respecting the objects [of our study] and describing them for what they are (not what they hide or reveal),” on the one hand, and, on the other, “making our affective relationships to objects count in our inquiries” (Schmidgen, New Literary History, 2023). Then we will turn to our own objects of study—and the focus of our semester together—a selection of contemporary American poems and short, non-fiction prose pieces. These volumes have in common an interest in the making of art and the experience of it—of beauty, pleasure, value—against loss and terror.

Requirements

Regular attendance and participation; six brief essays and discussion pieces; and a seminar paper of 20-25 pages.

Readings

Jorie Graham (To 2040), Brian Teare (Doomsday Days), Maurice Manning (One Man’s Dark), Rose McLarney (Forage), Robin Coste Lewis (Voyage of the Sable Venus), Terrence Hayes (How to Be Drawn), Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes)

Course Description

In her foundational essay, “The Race for Theory,” Black Feminist critic Barbara Christian writes that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic.” Black writers, Christian continues, theorize through “narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.” Taking Christian’s insight as our jumping off point, this class will explore how Black authors in the 18^th and 19^th-century United States theorized through literary form. We will read poetry by writers such as Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, fiction by Julia Collins and Frank Webb, and selected other works. Alongside these primary works we will read a carefully curated selection of foundational and recent secondary works from writers including Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, and Christina Sharpe. Throughout the semester, we will focus on teasing out and exploring the theories that early Black writers offered through their literature, and use contemporary writers to help us better understand some of those theories.

Requirements

Students will complete a series of short writing assignments including a paper abstract and two annotated bibliographies, as well as a longer research essay.

Course Description

This course examines how early American writers conceived of nature and the environment at a time of complex ecological transformation. We will explore the relationship between human and non-human actors, and the complicated links between material circumstances, human desire, and the structures of power embedded in imperial formations. Considering questions of gender, race, and class, we will analyze works by, for example, Olaudah Equiano, Charles Brockden Brown, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, as well as a range of recent criticism from the environmental humanities, health humanities, and oceanic studies.

Course Description

English 7940 offers a conceptual and practical foundation for graduate students in

English who plan to teach first-year writing at Auburn University and at the college level more broadly. Toward these ends, you can expect to read and discuss scholarship from the field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies; explore the sociocultural and institutional dimensions of teaching at a land grant university in the U.S. South; observe experienced teachers in the classroom; learn and apply good practices for teaching writing at the first-year level; generate course materials within a framework provided by the Writing Program; and develop a philosophy of teaching that reflects what you have learned in the course and through your own experiences in the classroom.

The purpose of this work is to support your development in becoming skilled teachers and working professionals who can deliver high quality writing instruction and take an active role in the university community. We will also spend time in class exploring, discussing, and generally puzzling through issues that arise based on our collective experiences in the classroom.

By the end of this course, you will:

• Learn and apply good practices related to teaching college writing;
• Design course materials within disciplinary and institutional frameworks;
• Generate course materials for the first-year writing sequence;
• Acquire practical strategies and techniques for facilitating day-to-day instruction;
• Craft a philosophy of teaching that reflects individual experience and knowledge gathered through course readings and discussion.

Course Description

In this course, we will be reading fiction through the lens of the coming-of-age narrative. We will read a variety of short stories told from the perspective of young characters who are having an awakening, whether it relates to realizing their own parents are just people, discovering love for the first time, facing death head on, and more. We will use this subject to discuss the elements of the craft of fiction that include plot, character, setting, and dialogue, and will discuss how to believably write from the point of view of a young character, how to make the stakes of young life feel vital, and how to make your story feel original even if it is part of a long tradition of fictional characters coming into their own.

Requirements

Students will participate in workshops where they will share their work, which will include full-length stories and shorter pieces. Not all writing for the course will have to fall under the umbrella of a coming-of-age narrative. We will also discuss autobiographical fiction, as much of coming-of-age fiction falls under this umbrella. 

Course Description

Following the respectable success of The Hobbit, a novel directed toward clever children, J. R. R. Tolkien, Professor of English Language at Merton College, Oxford, was asked by his publisher, Allen & Unwin, to provide a sequel. The result twelve years later was The Lord of the Rings, the best-selling English-authored work of the twentieth century. This course will be a slow walk through what has been considered the greatest example of epic fantasy. First, we will read his early success, The Hobbit, a novel that its sequel reinterprets. We will also approach Tolkien through a theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of the habitus since Tolkien went to great lengths creating a habitus for every race in his epic. In the course of the semester, we will explore the intersections between sociological theory and medieval texts on Middle-Earth, perhaps discovering how, with Tolkien, such an examination is hobbit-forming.

Requirements

Oral Presentation, Analytical Paper, Teaching Project, an irrepressible appreciation of the pun

Readings

The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

Course Description

The role of the editor in technical and professional communication is complex. Historically, “editing” has focused on instrumental work: “correcting” grammar, “fixing” language, shaping texts to audiences and outcomes. And while those elements are still important in the world of editing, we’re now increasingly aware of the biases embedded in that traditional model: whose grammar is correct? Is language ever really broken?

In this course we follow Clem & Cheek’s Inclusive Editing Paradigm (2022) to exam what it means to be an “editor” and to “edit” another’s work. We will consider differential positionality, privilege, and power (p. 135) as we examine the relationships embedded in editor/author and organizational/editor dichotomies, and work to unpack how editors might become ethical advocates for multiply marginalized voices.

Over the course of the semester, we will consider the many roles of editors in document creation and production. Along the way, we’ll consider styles of editing and levels of edit, editing conventions, writing styles and style guides, and the ethical burdens (and challenges) of doing editing.

During the semester, the class will form two unique publication teams (i.e., two different journal organizations). Assignments will be based on the work you do for those organizations, such as writing submission guidelines, style guides, ethics and mission statements, and process documents for editing and review. As we create these publications, we will study existing organizations and processes. Finally, we will be submitting work to each other’s publications for review. The class will culminate with a final paper on the process of editing shaped by your professional intent (industry, academia, or something else entirely).

Clem, S., & Cheek, R. (2022). Unjust revisions: A social justice framework for technical editing. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 65(1), 135–150.

Readings

Our readings will include Cunningham, Malone, & Rothchild’s Technical Editing, along with academic articles.

Course Description

What are the rhetorical principles, professional practices, and research skills vital to workplace communication? You will learn about them by interrogating what technical and professional communication means, building an understanding of professional communication as ethical action, and discovering the meaning and value of core concepts such as culture, community, and technology.  Given the nature of technical and professional communication, you will engage in both individual and collaborative work.   

Requirements

Tentative assignments: An individual research report, a collaborative research project, an annotated bibliography

Readings

• Johnson-Eilola, Johndan & Selber, Stuart A., eds. Central Works in Technical Communication.  Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Spilka, Rachel, ed. Digital Literacy for Technical Communication. Routledge, 2010.
• Barnum, Carol M. Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set . . . Test. Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.

Course Description

Do you plan to teach at the college level after you complete your degree? Do you plan to go on to a PhD program in English? Do you plan to teach secondary English Language Arts? Then Pedagogy in Writing Studies is the course for you! Pedagogy remains the beating heart of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies and a site of theorizing and enacting social justice in both that field and Technical and Professional Communication. This seminar features major foundational and contemporary pedagogical currents: critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, linguistic justice, threshold concepts, teaching for transfer, and writing with generative AI. You will gain a solid foundation in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies pedagogies that will inform your teaching across a variety of courses and contexts. Further, since research typically has a pedagogical dimension in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, you’ll also gain insight into potential research projects that could grow from your pedagogical commitments.

Course Description

The goal of English 7080 is to introduce students to the theory and practice of document design.  To accomplish this, the course will introduce design theories and design tools and teach students how to use these theories and tools to produce visually compelling and effective documents in a variety of print and online genres.

Course Description

The best “weird” writing isn’t just weird for the sake of being weird, but rather, it uses weirdness to make us see the truth about our own worlds. In this course, we will take a look at a variety of fiction that makes the familiar strange, leading us to see love, family, growing up, societal injustice, and more in a new light. We will read a range of novels and short fiction that fall outside the category of realism which includes magical realism, science-fiction, zombie stories, communing with long-dead relatives, and more. Students will be invited to write one story that leans heavily on “the weird” and one story of their choosing, one of which they will revise in a final portfolio. They can also expect to complete short writing assignments and to participate in hearty workshop discussions along the way. 

Course Description

This poetry workshop’s text and activities will center on ekphrasis, which has traditionally been defined as the poetic description of visual works of art. We, like the contemporary poets whose work we study, will go beyond description to  more imaginative and subversive conversations with art, looking beyond frames to consider larger contexts; creating narratives and connecting personal experiences to paintings and sculpture; and re-telling stories in famous images by, for example, giving voice to women who are positioned as the silent objects of male gazes or examining constructions of race and use of color.

Whether or not you think you are particularly interested in art, ekphrasis can teach you to be a better observer, compose stronger images, and approach your pages’ text and white space as visual media. Also, ekphrastic poetry’s content is broad enough that it can also be categorized as poetry of witness, elegy, writing about family, and more. Our ekphrastic theme will lead us to investigations of the subject matter you wish to write about and collections you choose to read

Requirements

Class-time will be divided between critical discussion of published poetry, writing exercises and activities, and workshop of student drafts. Activities will include required attendance of Thursday evening poetry readings and talks (outside of regular class hours), field trips to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art, and student presentations.

Readings

Our central texts will be books by Diane Seuss, Paisley Rekdal, Derek Austin, Mary Syzbist, and Victoria Chang, with additional readings by Natasha Trethewey, Arthur Sze, Robert Hass, Mark Doty, Chelsea Rathburn, and others.

Course Description

Many of the challenges of literary adaptation and historical representation now playing out in big-budget, mass media film and television screens, in fandom and enthusiast organizations, have been playing out for much longer in the world of smaller-budget, niche video, roleplaying, and board games. 

This seminar will ground students in the current scholarly debates in eighteenth-century studies through groupings of primary literary and cultural works from the long eighteenth-century, recent peer-reviewed and public-facing scholarship, and modern games that draw upon the period for inspiration. 

Requirements

The course will also include out-of-class and in-class play from Dr. Friedman's library of games, with required play session reports and reviews. Students will also be responsible for weekly reflections and scaffolded assignments leading to a final project of their devising according to their larger research and/or career goals.

Readings

Primary texts will likely include Haywood's The Adventures of Eovaii (1741), Burney's Evelina (1778), at least one Austen novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), and games such as Marrying Mr. Darcy (2014), The Lady's Choice (2016-23), Obsession (2018), Herald (2017), The Page I Didn't Write (2019), Thousand Year Old Vampire (2020), Truths Untold (2020-), and TEETH (2023). Secondary readings will draw from game studies, adaptation studies, cultural studies, and eighteenth-century studies. Guest speakers may include games studies scholars, professional games journalists and critics, and game designers and performers.

Course Description

When votes for women were described as “unnatural” in 1894, Mona Caird replied succinctly: “whatever is natural is certain to be wrong.”  Digging into Caird’s claim, this course will examine how and why nineteenth-century women writers, subjects of or subject to the rule of Britain, wrestled with the idea of nature. Authors will include familiar figures such as Mary Prince, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, the Brontë Sisters, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliot, and less familiar writers such as poet Michael Allen (a pseudonym for the creative team of Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper), and L.T. Meade, a popular woman author of detective fiction and contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle. We will consider these authors and more from the perspective of women’s and gender studies, eco-criticism, and cultural studies. By the end of the course, we will inquire into why, despite their lively inquiry into the idea of nature, nineteenth-century women writers have historically been excluded from the genre of “nature writing.” And, we will address that gap by studying how their work might be reclaimed through traditional scholarship and new work in digital humanities.

Requirements

One presentation on a nineteenth-century writing, one on a critical perspective, several short writings. Final project includes the option of  a traditional research paper or digital project.

Course Description

This course focuses on American poetry in the first quarter of the 21^st century and on poetry’s curious place in contemporary culture. That the two most talked-about books on poetry published in the last few years are The Hatred of Poetry (Ben Lerner) and Don’t Read Poetry (Stephanie Burt) is a curiosity. The writers of those books are poets and scholars themselves and the books’ titles are meant to suggest the cultural ambivalence and misunderstandings associated with the whole idea of poetry; neither writer actually wishes you to stop reading it, but still. Another curiosity is that poetry continues to play small but weirdly central part in ongoing discussions of what generative AI can do. It can write “poetry,” that much is known, and better all the time by some accounts. But is it “good” poetry? Is it “authentic”? If not, can AI learn to supply the missing human elements—"understanding,” “inner experience,” “consciousness,” “emotional urgency,” fill in the blank? “Poetry might be the canary in the coal mine,” one cognitive psychologist wrote not long ago, “an early indicator of the extent to which AI promises (threatens?) to challenge humans as artistic creators.” We are not going to follow that canary down.

Instead, we will turn our attention to the human work of poetry in our time. Focusing on nine volumes, published between 2002 and 2024, and a modest selection of critical and theoretical writing, we will consider how (and of what) poems are made, what they do, and how they matter. The books we will read reflect the remarkable diversity and vitality of 21^st century poetry but they have in common an interest in the pressing and deeply human question of how to live in times like these (Adrienne Rich).

Requirements

Attendance and well-prepared participation; 6 brief discussions; a presentation; and a 20-25 page seminar paper.

Readings

The volumes we will read include Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins; Jorie Graham, [To] the Last [Be] Human; Robert Hass, Time and Materials; Maurice Manning, One Man’s Dark; Carl Phillips, Then The War; Jericho Brown, The Tradition; Layli Long Soldier, Whereas; Nikky Finney, Head Off and Split; Rose McLarney, Colorfast.

Course Description

Ancient Greek accounts describe encounters between travelers and hairy, savage men and women. One such source named them “Gorillae,” and in the nineteenth century Western scientists would borrow this name for a newly “discovered” great ape (the local people were of course already familiar with these uncannily human-like beings). Coinciding as it did with the revolution in natural history catalyzed by the work of Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, this scientific encounter prompted a radical rethinking of the relationships between humans and their nonhuman primate relatives. This paradigm shift in natural history overlapped both with accelerating European colonial occupations of Africa and elsewhere and with the enslavement and emancipation of African-descended people in the United States and throughout the Americas.

In turn, literary and cinematic engagements with encounters between men, women, and non-human or quasi-human animals became ubiquitous in twentieth-century popular culture. Why do such literary and filmic representations of encounters between humans and other animals maintain such cultural currency and fascination? This course will investigate the cultural history of such representations, situating them in an intellectual and narrative lineage that encompasses scientific discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, narratives of colonialism, and these narratives’ anxious engagements with race, gender, and sexuality. The course’s first section will focus on five key narratives: Paul du Chaillu’s non-fiction Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861); Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1914); Merian C. Cooper’s film, King Kong (1933); Harry Essex’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); and Pierre Boulle’s novel, La Planète des singes (Planet of the Apes) (1963). Each of these narratives has also been remade, adapted, and retold countless times, from R.M. Ballantyne’s fictional The Gorilla Hunters (published immediately after du Chaillu’s narrative) to the first film adaptation of Tarzan in 1918 to Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 The Shape of Water to the myriad adaptations of Kong and Planet of the Apes. The course will then turn to literary revisions of these narratives whose representations of their female protagonists’ psychological interiority challenge and counter these earlier male-centered narratives. Key examples include Rachel Ingalls’s novel, Mrs. Caliban (1986), Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014), Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman (2016), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau (2022).

These texts and films provide screens through which readers and viewers encounter questions concerning race, sex, gender, and what it means to be human. In working through them, students will engage with and bring together conversations from cinema and media studies, animal studies, gender studies, and the critical study of race and racism.

Course Description

THIS COURSE FULFILLS THE LITERARY THEORY COURS REQUIREMENT. This course will introduce you to the work of several of the most significant literary theorists who have articulated the concerns, issues and problems with the slippery concept of “ideology.” Ideology has proved to be one of the most flexible, supple, powerful and important concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse. Although “ideology” has a common, “everyday” meaning roughly corresponding to a worldview (as in, if you subscribe to leftist progressivism you support Bernie Sanders; if you subscribe to “alt-right” conservatism you support Donald Trump), the theoretical senses (since it is not a monolithic term) of ideology are rather different is not a way of viewing the world that we freely choose and can freely discard as autonomous beings and it is not a set of ideas located in the immateriality of consciousness. Indeed, despite their differences, theories of ideology tend to agree that we ourselves are to some degree the effects of ideology, which inscribes itself within material actions and practices performed within what Louis Althusser (whom we shall be reading) termed Ideological State Apparatuses, eg., the family, the school, the church, the nation-state, etc.—actions and practices stemming from the unconscious which, as literary critic Fredric Jameson reminds us, is always a “political unconscious.” Contemporary ideology theory has its roots in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (and they are the theorists with whom we’ll begin), who used it to discuss the social construction of class identity. After undergoing elaborations throughout the 20^th century by prominent Marxists theorists, feminists have found the basic outlines of the theory adaptable for use in their examination of the cultural production of gender. The concept of ideology has proved indispensable to race and ethnicity studies, queer theory—that is, to theories that concern themselves with the actions and discursive practices through which subjectivity is produced, especially the subjectivity of those marked as “the Other.” We will :refinements to its migration to literary critical (and social) movements like gender studies, critical race studies and queer studies. In the process, you will learn to position yourself—no matter what your critical methodology—so that you may practice ideology critique within your textual analyses.

Requirements

20-25 page essay (60%), weekly 2-page reading responses (20%), a 15-minute oral presentation based on the reading response (15%), lively, consistent and courteous participation    

Readings

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race; Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society; Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology

Course Description

The Practicum will provide guidance, support, and, most of all, space to experiment and explore for the new Graduate Teaching Assistants (first-year MAs & MTPCs in English). I invite you to think of the Practicum as a Studio-Lab. This will be, first and foremost, a safe space to share, ask questions, and look for answers. It will be a Studio because teaching is an art, and it will be a Lab because teaching also has elements of science. Of course, you need some knowledge about pedagogy and the subject you teach, but you also must never lose the ability to be surprised, to be creative, and even to be confused. Undoubtedly, as novice teachers, you need the substances, ideas, and research findings developed in the field, as well as the equipment and tools with which to experiment. In our Studio-Lab, we will roll up our sleeves and learn both through art and science, through theory and practice, through trial and error.

Requirements

Requirements will likely include faithful attendance, lively participation, keeping a reflective teaching journal, designing partial and full lesson plans, conducting a teaching observation, developing a Teaching Philosophy, and creating a teaching ePortfolio.