English 605
Professional Writing Theory and Research
Professor Brian Ballentine

This course examines the theories and ideas that inform and validate the practices of academics and professionals working in the broad field of professional communication. Professional communication has emerged as an umbrella term to cover what we know of as “business” communication and “technical” communication. While maintaining a neat and clean binary between the two is difficult if not impossible, part of this course will include the exploration of their similarities and differences and how those qualities are reflected in our own ENGL 304 Business and Professional Writing and ENGL 305 Technical Writing.

Course topics will include:
An introduction to rhetorical theory for professional communication
Critical approaches to technology
Visual rhetoric and document design
An introduction to many of the current debates from the field such as how to integrate complex subjects like ethics and law into the classroom

This course also serves as a credentialing mechanism for graduate students who wish to teach ENGL 304 and ENGL 305 by providing the necessary pedagogical training in and scholarly context for professional communication. Teaching these courses is a great way to expand your CV and your future professional or academic opportunities. Some texts will include: Dubinsky’s Teaching Technical Communication, Lipson and Day’s Technical Communication and the World Wide Web, and Peeples’ Professional Writing and Rhetoric.

English 609 introduces students to theories, practices, and methods in contemporary composition instruction. Students will read theorists in the teaching of writing, focusing on how theory and practice in writing and writing pedagogy inform each other. We will consider critically and at length the writing process movement. Students will write in the class and theorize their own writing processes. We will consider emerging electronic technologies and consider in detail their relationship to writing and teaching writing. We will also deal with the theory and practice of language teaching (“grammar” and ESL concerns). Students will write short, informal responses to readings, engage in a limited empirical inquiry in which they observe a writing situation (for example, a classroom, writing center, computer lab, grant-writing business, community literacy setting) and write an ethnographic report that relates their observations, compose their teaching philosophies, and participate in an inquiry project that ends in the creation of a composition anthology.

GRADUATE WRITING WORKSHOP IN POETRY
English 618 Fall, 2008
Jim Harms
Wednesday, 4-6:50, Armstrong 403
Office: 235 Colson Hall, 293-9720; 296-3545 (home)
jharms@wvu.edu

Course Description and Requirements

The primary text for this class is your work. We will focus on your poems and spend the bulk of our time workshopping. That said, each week?s class will begin with a brief discussion of an essay by a contemporary poet, or a collection of poems published within the last few years, or a journal discovered by a student in the class. At least once during the semester I?ll assign a particular sort of poem for you to write; the rest of the time we?ll be discussing what you?re writing week to week. Preparing for a workshop is very labor intensive, and I expect everyone to commit fully to that process.

Each of you will submit one poem a week (you may skip two weeks over the course of the semester). I would like to see revisions of these poems in conference. Each student will meet with me for an extended discussion of his or her work. At the end of the semester, students will turn in a short critical paper that discusses in depth one poem they?ve written and revised during the semester, a poem that, for whatever reason, seems particularly important: a breakthrough poem, a problem poem, an unusually successful poem, etc. In many ways, this paper prepares you for the critical introduction you?ll write for your thesis.

As I suggest above, we will read and discuss several books, including one volume of essays written by a poet (I?m interested in looking at how poets talk about poetry in ways that might suggest new possibilities for critical engagement). You?ll write a short response for each of these books, due the day the book is discussed (more on that later). The class will be broken into groups; each group will take responsibility for leading the discussion of one particular book.

We will also discuss the poetry publishing industry and, as a group, make a study of the literary magazine market; this will involve submitting poetry to various journals and reporting on one particular journal in depth to the rest of the class. Each student will introduce a literary journal to the rest of the workshop at some point during the semester.

At some point in the semester, each student will memorize and recite for the class an important poem (of his or her choice).

Required Books
Time and Materials by Robert Hass, Lilies Without by Laura Kasischke, Usable Field by Jane Mead, Hoops by Major Jackson, Modern Life by Matthea Harvey, Avenue of Vanishing by William Olsen, Proofs and Theories (Essays) by Louise Gluck.

English 618A
Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction
Professor: Mark Brazaitis
Tuesdays 4-6:50 p.m.
Armstrong 121

Write, Revise, Write, Revise, Write

In this class, you will share your best fiction writing in a workshop of your peers. You will receive careful, thoughtful commentary on your work from your peers and your professor.

Depending on the size of the class, you will be writing two to four stories. (Novelists are also welcome. Be prepared to submit chapters as well as an outline of your book.) Submitting revisions of work you’ve put forward early in the workshop is encouraged.

In addition to your own writing, we will be looking at three contemporary short story collections and a contemporary novel or two, both as a way to discuss technique and to examine what’s currently being published in the field of literary fiction.

Finally, we will have a discussion about literary markets and approaches to getting published.

Authors whose work we may read: Andrea Lee, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Amy Bloom, Stuart Dybek, Richard Ford, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Janet Peery, Jose Saramago, Mary Gaitskill

Author whose work we’ll certainly read: You.

Professor Ethel Morgan Smith
English 618B-Graduate Nonfiction Workshop
Fall 2008

Memoir Writing

This workshop is literary nonfiction with emphasis on the memoir. The course is designed for MFA and other advance graduate students. This course will also offer students an opportunity to develop and build on skills they’ve already acquired. Writing well, as you know, is difficult and demanding. It must be given your fill attention. I hope this course will provide ideas to help you to further your dream of becoming a writer. We all have stories to tell. The instinct of telling stories is an intrinsic characteristic for human beings. It is also a way we organize our lives, give shape to our days or create containers for our experiences. Our ambition will be to help the author see those works through to their fruition with an eye toward publication.

The basic assumption is that students will be working in such forms as the personal essay and/or memoir writing. We will follow a straightforward workshop format in which most of the time will be devoted to a review of student work. Each student is expected to have two manuscripts each, 10-15 pages in length, reviewed during the semester.

We will also explore texts of memoirs (films and books) to explore further the genre of creative nonfiction.

Required Texts:

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Russian Journal by Andrea Lee
Ace of Spades by David Matthews

Gwen Bergner
Fall 2008
Tue. 4:00-6:50
Eng. 648—American Literature/AmericanDreams

If the Declaration of Independence declares our right to pursue happiness, then the goal of that pursuit has come to be known as the “American Dream”—the idea that through hard work, courage, and determination, anyone can achieve prosperity. Classic American literature represents the American Dream by depicting poor individuals who overcome diversity to join the ranks of middle class America or even to achieve vast wealth. We might think of “rags to riches” success stories such as Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick series from the 1860s or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby from 1925. Ostensibly, the American Dream serves as the mechanism by which immigrants and minorities assimilate to mainstream America. So the American Dream is part of our national narrative and reinforces the conception of America as a land of equal opportunity.

But is the American Dream a reality or is it a myth? Is it individual freedom or economic success, opportunity or guarantee, right or privilege? Can everyone have it? Can everyone even pursue it? History shows that even if we aspire to equal opportunity for all, our track record is rather uneven. So there’s a tension between our national mythology and our national history.

We will read contemporary ethnic American novels that incorporate dreams as a literary device to disrupt our powerful myth-making narratives, recover lost histories of minority groups, and depict a complex relationship between ethnic identities and national belonging. We will contextualize these literary re-visions with readings, including primary documents, on relevant historical events such as the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Indian Removal Act. Finally, we will consider the place of these novels within the American literary tradition by examining recent debates on the politics and aesthetics of ethnic literature, transnationalism, and postmodernism.

Primary Texts
Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
Rudolpho Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
Frank Chin, Donald Duk
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters
Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World
John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange

Assignments: Weekly discussion questions/paragraph, short paper (4-5 pp.) and discussion point-person, annotated bibliog. and abstract, conference-length paper (8-10 pp.).

ENGL 661
Wed. 4:00-6:50
Prof. Lara Farina

Although romance is one of the oldest genres of European literature, many of its legacies are still current today. This influence extends far beyond the knights, monsters, and magic that we may think of as the genre’s identifying elements. From its beginnings, romance forced its writers and readers to think about the meaning and place of secular story-telling; indeed the history of the genre is inseparable from the history of social debate. Simply translated, the medieval term “mettre en romanz” means “worded in the vernacular,” an indication of how the genre made questions—about the nature of experience, the uses of authority, and the organization of society—accessible to the laity. Some of questions asked by early romances will even seem shockingly “postmodern” to readers. The texts for this course debate, for example, whether gender is inherent or socially constructed, whether historiography is always inescapably biased, and whether we can tell reality from simulation.

This course will survey romance in its most formative period, from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, particularly as it intersects with two other narrative modes: dream vision and allegory. We will begin by looking at both Classic and Celtic influences; we will read key romances from France and Britain; we will examine the influence of romances on supposedly “nonfiction” genres like hagiography and travel literature; and, finally, we will consider the trajectories of romance after the Middle Ages. This course is intended to be an introduction to the genre and to medieval literature; no prior knowledge of these subjects is necessary. Our readings will be Modern English translations.

Probable Texts:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Arts of Love
The Mabinogi
Chaucer’s Dream Visions
Beroul’s Romance of Tristan
Christine de Pizan’s Duke of True Lovers
Marie de France’s Lais
Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur
The Romance of the Rose
Marco Polo’s Travels
The Romance of Silence
Anne Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

English 682: Recent Literary Criticism

Instructor: Dennis Allen

Course Purpose: This course is intended to acquaint you with a variety of contemporary critical methodologies.

Course Requirements:
Course grades will be based on a final exam (30%), a 10-12 page typed paper (40%), and your choice of either reading responses OR a take-home midterm (30%).

The Paper: You may write on any literary or cultural text (e.g. film). Your paper must employ one of the methodologies analyzed in the course and should demonstrate a firm grasp of that critical approach. Your paper should also reflect a mastery of the current secondary materials on the text you have chosen to analyze.

The Reading Responses (Optional): Reading responses should consist of a two page typed analysis of one of the essays from each week’s reading assignments. Your responses should not summarize the reading but should engage it intellectually. In other words, your response on a particular essay should do one or more of the following: critique the essay, apply it to a literary or cultural text, or relate it to previous reading in the course. Also, if an essay proves exceptionally difficult, your response on that essay could present some focused, specific questions on points that you did not understand. Responses will be collected during the 2nd through the 9th weeks of the semester.

Attendance: Ideally, you will attend all class sessions. If you miss more than one class, you will fail the course. This policy also applies to auditors.

Text (available at the bookstore):
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004)

English 693 (Special Topics)
Tuesday, 7:00-9:50 p.m.
Professor Cari M. Carpenter

The installation of the reservation in the nineteenth century altered the national and cultural geographies and cultures of American Indians. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native writers are still responding to and negotiating the impact of the reservation and post-reservation era on tribal cultures and identity. This course will be guided by the unique legal (“domestic dependent nations”) and “post” colonial histories of U.S. indigenous peoples and will examine how those histories fashioned a distinct literary tradition within the literatures of America. Our readings will draw from many genres (such as the novel, autobiography, and poetry) and will address the evolution of pan-tribalism, the production and reception of native texts, racial performance, and gender. The texts will take us from early performances of American Indianness to the global vision of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.

Texts:
P. Deloria, Playing Indian
Hoxie, _A Final Promise
V. Deloria, The Nations Within
Zitkala-Sa, _American Indian Stories
Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes
McNickle, The Surrounded
Silko, Gardens in the Dunes
Erdrich, Tracks
Coursepack (e-reserves)

Requirements:
Discussion leading
Critical responses to readings
Conference presentation
Final paper

ENGL: 741
Professor John Ernest
Wednesday, 7:00-9:50pm
223 Colson Hall

Seminar: Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiography

In this course, we’ll consider the challenges of representing African American lives in the nineteenth century and the challenges of reading them in the twentieth-first century. Drawing on relevant scholarship and race theory, we will explore the shifting instabilities of racial identity and cultural performance in the nineteenth century, and we will examine the ways in which African American autobiographies produced throughout that century reveal various pressures that have directed the guiding currents of U.S. history. We’ll explore a variety of (auto)biographical African American writing in the nineteenth century, though we’ll limit our attention to those works included under the broad heading of “slave narratives.” Along the way, we will encounter (1) multiple versions of autobiographical narratives; (2) biographies by white authors on black subjects; (3) (auto)biographies written by a white amanuensis; (4) hybrid narratives of fiction and autobiography; and (5) geographically-specific autobiographies—that is, those associated with especially significant or unusual historical sites. In all of these forms and contexts, African American writers faced the challenge of representing a life defined by race, resisting that definition while also cultivating community, negotiating the cultural politics of readership and of occasions for publication, and redirecting the trajectory of possibilities of and settings for African American identity. Indeed, because they were, of necessity, so directly, consistently, and profoundly engaged in the multifarious contradictions of American history and culture, African American autobiographiers developed approaches to life-writing capable of explaining a nation that often appears profoundly inexplicable.

The basic requirement for the course is a sturdy appetite for autobiography, since we will read twenty-three narratives—some of them rather short, some of them not. Expect an assortment of informal writing assignments in addition to the seminar essay, along with a couple of oral presentations.

Fall 2008 Graduate Class:
English 794
Theories of Selfhood
Professor Donald E. Hall
Tuesdays 4-6:50pm

This class will examine diverse approaches to the vexed question of how modern identity is constructed, contested, and socially deployed. We will explore “subjectivity” and possibilities for agency over the self through the lens of theories of race, gender, class, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, sexuality, and social science. This will be a theory-intensive course with readings in fiction for application purposes. The reading load is very heavy—one novel or book-length theory text per week.

Course texts will include Sources of the Self (Taylor), Modernity and Self-Identity (Giddens), Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), Oneself As Another (Ricoeur), Giving An Account of Oneself (Butler), Little Dorrit (Dickens), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), My Secret Life (ed. Kincaid), Orlando (Woolf), Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin), and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde).

For students wanting a preliminary introduction to the field, Subjectivity (Donald E. Hall) is useful as background reading for the class.

Course Requirements include an 8-9 page conference paper, a 3-4 page response paper, and a 20-25 page final research paper.

Contact me at donald.hall@mail.wvu.edu for more information