Instructor-Provided Class Descriptions for Spring 2010
Please click on the following selections or scroll down to view descriptions.
Undergraduate Classes | Writing Programs Classes | Graduate Classes
Undergraduate Classes
English 200
Title: Critical Reading and Writing about Literature
Instructor: Dr. Julianne White
Section Line Number: 10228; 19748
Time: T 4:40-7:30 pm; T-Th 3:00-4:15
Crosslisted: Required for English majors
Description:
This course is designed to introduce undergraduate English majors and minors to the terminology, methods and objectives of the critical study of literature. We will read, interpret and evaluate a wide selection of short stories, poems and plays.
The literature for this class is both British and American; it is fairly traditional, or “canonical,” as those of us in the field call it. You will also be exposed to the major schools of critical thought; in fact, the literature is so familiar, the main task of this class would be to see how this literature is read through the “lens” of a particular theory. While this is not a theory class, it is intended to introduce you to the major theorists’ ideas about literature and how to read literature using those ideas.
Required Texts
· Gardner, Janet, et al., eds. Literature: A Portable Anthology. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford-St.Martin’s Press, 2009.
· Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester: U of Manchester P, 2002.
3 in-class short essay exams
3 outside-of-class essays
2 informal oral presentations on assigned scholarly articles
ENG213
Title: Introduction to the Study of Language
Instructor: Lupco Spasovski
Section Line Number: 22536
Time: 9:00-10:15 TTH
Description: Eng 213 is a general introduction to linguistics. It includes an overview of basic concepts and methods for the study of language in all major areas of linguistics research: language acquisition, phonetics and phonology (the sound system), morphology (the structure of words and word-formation processes), syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences), semantics (how words relate to meaning), pragmatics (how meaning is created in context), and sociolinguistics (the varieties of language). By learning how language works, you will better understand the interrelatedness of language, its acquisition and structure, and the social setting. Also, you will gain insight into the relationship between language form and function and develop a scientific perspective on some common misconceptions about language.
English 287
Title: Introduction to Writing Poetry
Instructor: Sally Ball
Section Line Number: 22571
Time: 10:30-11:45 T
Description: This is the lecture part of the 287 introduction to writing poetry; you'll also meet weekly in a smaller group. In lecture, we will discuss many elements of writing poems: what they are (?!), how and why we read and make them, what kinds of choices are available and what the implications of those choices are. Form and meter? What happens at the end of the line? Who is speaking here? What about image, metaphor, diction, syntax? We'll work from two handbooks, two (manageable) anthologies and some handouts.
Required texts:
Robert Pinsky's THE SOUNDS OF POETRY: A BRIEF GUIDE
Steve Kowit's IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND
THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2009 (edited by David Lehman & David Waggoner)
TAKE THREE: 3 (edited by Askold Melnyczuk, featuring 20 poems each by new poets Jenny Barber, Mark Bibbins, and Maggie Nelson.)
English 287: Introduction to Poetry Writing
Tuesday 12:00-1:15
Instructor: Terry Hummer
Office Hours: LL 302A; Tues.10-12, Wed. 2-4. Others times by appointment.
Email: thummer@asu.edu
Textbooks: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy
The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy
Additional material will be made available via Blackboard
Description & Objectives: This class is a workshop for students who have taken no previous creative writing/poetry courses at the college level (or perhaps at any level), and who wish to carry forward their development in writing, revising, reading, and critiquing poetry.
The following will be required of all participants:
• Weekly reading and writing assignments;
• Class participation, which includes adherence to the submission schedule, willingness to have one’s work critiqued in class, and contributing to peer feedback; and
• A final portfolio containing writing projects (see Grading) in advanced stages of completion.
General Course Description: This course, as an introduction, is precisely divided between the study of the craft of poetry and the practice of poetry writing. The main burden of in-class work will divide more or less evenly between discussions of work from textbooks and handouts and general exploration of craft and writing-oriented issues on the one hand, and open discussions of student writing on the other (for our purposes this division is enforced by the division between large group gatherings on Tuesdays and smaller breakout sessions on Thursdays). Outside of class, students will have two responsibilities: writing and reading. Writing will be turned in (either to the instructor or to the workshop generally, as assigned in class) according to a regular schedule; outside reading will be done on a weekly basis, as assigned.
ENG 294
Title: Sex, Death and Snow: An Introduction to Canadian Literature
Instructor: Rosalynn Voaden
Section Line Number: 16847
Time: MW 2-3:15
Description: So you think Canada is boring, eh? How can the country that legalized gay marriage and marijuana be boring?
It’s also produced some of the most exciting literature in the world today. This course, the only course in Canadian literature ever to be offered at ASU, is going to change your mind about Canada. Yes, Canadian authors write about sex, death and snow - but also about life, love, families, making money, making out, growing up, growing old, and surviving in the wilderness, on the prairie, in small towns, and in sophisticated cities. It’s all there, in some of the best writing you will ever read.
The course will include works from the early nineteenth century to the present. It will begin with a brief introduction to Canada, its geography, history and culture. We will then read novels, short stories, and poetry, and discuss these literary creations in relation to their cultural context. During the semester, four Canadian writers will visit the class, to read from and discuss their work. Much of the class time will be devoted to discussion, so come prepared to think, talk - and discover the vital, fascinating literature of that not-so-frozen land to the north.
Works to be studied include:
Frederick Philip Grove, Settlers of the Marsh
Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Jane Urquhart, Away
Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce
Note: Some of these works include descriptions of explicit sexuality and/or strong language. If you are not comfortable reading and discussing such material, please do not take this course.
Assignments may include: a short paper, an oral presentation, a long paper, a mid-term and final exam.
This course fulfills the curriculum requirement for Literature and Culture post-1800 and/or for Transnational, Postcolonial and Global Literatures.
ENG 315
Title: Medieval Literature in Translation: Sins and Sinners in Western Culture
Instructor: Newhauser, Richard
Section Line Number: 22554
Time: 2:00 - 3:15 MW
Description: A recent book series at Oxford University Press, a series of articles by contemporary novelists in the New York Times Book Review, and an hour-long special on MTV, all devoted to the deadly sins, demonstrate the lasting impact of this systematization of morality on western thought within both elite and popular culture for the last millennium and a half. This interdisciplinary class will investigate the origins of the idea of a systematized list of chief vices which emerged in the ethical writings of monks in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century; the medieval developments of this idea in literature and the arts in monastic, courtly, and university environments; its transmission in late-medieval popular and vernacular forms, especially in England, and in the literature of the English Renaissance; and its adaptations in modern literature, art, and music.
ENG 321
Title: Intro. to Shakespeare: Shakespearean Genres
Instructor: Bradley D. Ryner
Section Line Number: 10700 + 22544, 22545, or 22546
Time: M-W-F 9:40-10:30
Description: This course introduces students to fundamental strategies for reading and analyzing Shakespearean drama by focusing on genre. Shakespeare’s plays are generally grouped into at least three genres: comedies, histories and tragedies. Sometimes, they are grouped into more specific genres, such as romantic comedies, problem plays, tragicomedies, late plays and romances. Generic designations can do more than simply let us group similar plays. They can help us understand what expectations audience members, publishers and critics from the sixteenth century to today have had about Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, by considering how Shakespeare’s plays fulfill or thwart these expectations, we can better understand the structure of individual plays. In the first half of the course, we will examine the conventions of Shakespeare’s three major genres. In the second half, we will turn our attention to plays in which Shakespeare exaggerates, complicates or departs from these conventions. Questions we will raise during this course include: What rationale do we use to group plays? How have these groupings changed over time? How do audience members’ understanding of genre affect their enjoyment of a play? To what degree is a play’s genre dependant on production choices—could a director stage a tragedy as a comedy or vice versa?
English 352
Short Story
Rhodes
18895
6:30-7:45pm MW
This course explores and celebrates the development of the American Short Story. Students will read stories, stories, and more stories, write literary analysis papers, and be required to contribute to in-class discussions.
English 364: The Novels of Toni Morrison
Deborah Clarke
This course will examine Toni Morrison, probably America’s premier living novelist. We’ll read six novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and Love—and possibly a couple of short pieces as well. You’ll find her work beautiful, tragic, funny, and breathtaking. Because Morrison’s range is so vast, the topics of discussion will be many and varied: race, gender, family, history, memory, economics, popular culture, politics, language. Among the many questions posed will be what is it that makes her great? Why is she so revered? Reading a significant body of Morrsion’s fiction together should help us to approach these issues. Requirements include two papers, a midterm, a final, possibly a group presentation, and spirited participation in the discussion. Non-majors are very welcome.
Eng 394
Title: Videogame Theory
Instructor: Z. Waggoner
Section Line Number: 18187
Time: 1:30-2:45 TTh
Crosslisted: N/A
Description: This course targets students who want to better understand the social, cultural, and historical forces implicit in the rapid rise of video and computer gaming. Relying on cultural, rhetorical, and critical videogame theory, the course will examine the aesthetic and technological development of videogame avatars and agents and the role they play in the construction of virtual identity. We will take videogames seriously in this course, carefully studying what makes videogames compelling for millions of people. Through reading about, discussing, writing about, and playing videogames, we will seek to gain a better understanding of the history, present, and future of videogame rhetoric and identity.
ENG 394
Title: Literature and the Environment - Maritime Fictions
Instructor: Bryan VanGinhoven
Section Line Number: 21496
Time: MW 2:00-3:15
Description: Why read maritime literature? Why is it important to modern literary and environmental studies? And what exactly is maritime literature, anyway?
This course will attempt to answer these questions, demonstrating along the way that maritime literature – the subject of an emerging focus in literary scholarship based in the field of environmental studies and in interdisciplinary maritime studies programs around the country – has, in fact, had a foundational role not only for the way we understand the oceans, their ecological environments, and our roles within those environments, but also for our views on commerce, gender roles, race relations, the military, and sexuality. We will accomplish this by analyzing several works of literature, primarily from nineteenth century England and America, which take maritime enterprises as their primary focus, using their perspectives to inform our contemporary views on what happens when humans venture out onto the sea.
ENG 415
Title: Topics in Medieval Literature and Culture: Sin and Social Revolt in Middle English Literature
Instructor: Newhauser, Richard
Section Line Number: 22557
Time: 3:00 - 4:15 T-Th
Description: The ideal of society in the Middle Ages can be defined by the theory of the three estates, a model in which the aristocracy, the members of the church, and the peasantry each fulfill a mutually satisfying function. In England by the mid-fourteenth century, however, this ideal was little more than a literary commonplace, unable to express a social reality that was shaped by the loss of population in the Black Plague, a changing economic situation and the effects of the Peasants' Revolt, and the development of radical theologies that challenged the Church's hegemony on dogma. The literature of late-medieval England articulated its critique of those in positions of power using the language of politics and theology, but above all a moral idiom. This ethical discourse can be found in allegories, lyrics, and Lollard sermons and treatises that will serve as the corpus of our readings for the semester to help us understand the connection between sin, dissent, heresy, and social revolt in late-medieval England.
ENG 421
Title: Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Social Context
Instructor: Bradley D. Ryner
Section Line Number: 22559
Time: M-W 2:00-3:15
Description: Readers and audience members unfamiliar with English social history often imagine that the world Shakespeare depicted on the stage was the same as the world in which he lived. However, we miss the full complexity of some of the most engaging moments in Shakespeare’s plays if we uncritically assume that “that’s just how things were back then.” For example, when reading plays in which a father forces his teenaged daughter to marry against her will, a gentleman beats his servant, and a character casts a magical spell, we might assume that, “back then,” everyone married young; women had no choice in marriage; servant-beating wasn’t morally objectionable, and everyone believed in magic. But how do we interpret these plays when we realize that each of these statements is false? Students in this course will learn about the changing structures of social life in Renaissance England and examine the relationship between real life and its representation on the stage. Questions we will address during this course include: How did Shakespeare’s lived experience influence his writing? How do the social structures that Shakespeare depicts in his plays differ from those of early modern England, and what are the ideological implications of these differences? How might an original audience member’s age, social status, and gender have affected how s/he responded to the plays?
ENG 428 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
Julie Codell
SLN: 22617
ONLINE COURSE
This course will take a broad interpretation of Pre-Raphaelite culture from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood through Aestheticism and up to late-nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelitism. The central theme is the interaction between images and texts: PR artists illustrated literature, wrote narratives and poems, and collaborated with Victorian writers. We will examine paintings and photographs, poems, essays, illustrations, the PR journal The Germ, Victorian criticism of PR culture, and relevant secondary scholarship. Pre-Raphaelite subjects examined will include women, gender, class, material culture, empire, nationalism, representations of history (Arthurian legends, medievalism, classicism), avant-gardism, craft production, and conflicts between realism and fantasy. Course work will include class website assignments, three quizzes, and short written assignments. Graduate students will be expected to write a research paper (12-15 pp). All students should have taken a pre-requisite of at least one course in literature, art history, or history of the period.
ENG 452
Title: Studies in the Novel: Transatlantic Perspectives on the 19th Century Novel
Instructor: Holbo
Section Line Number: 25559
Time: 12:00-1:15 TTh
Description: In the nineteenth century, the French novel above all others set the standard for the genre as high art and social critique. This course examines American writers’ self-definition in relation to the French novel, asking how Americans developed a novel of their own and what they learned from the naughty, refined, imperial, revolutionary, ironic and moralistic French. How did the French novel teach lessons in luxury and misery, social ambition and social solidarity to their sister republic? How did American writers translate the landscape of French provincial and metropolitan life onto the spaces of American possibility—those of the frontier, the salon, the bedroom, the ocean voyage, and the newspaper? Comparing three classic French novels to three classic American novels, we will discuss the ways American writers imitated, challenged, recast or rejected the themes and narratives of the French tradition. We will also consider the ways French writers imagined their own national experience in relation to America and other “foreign” spaces. Our readings will include work by Honoré de Balzac, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Émile Zola, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
English 474 Review Writing
Instructor: Sarah Duerden
Schedule Line Number: 24209
Time: MWF 11:50 a.m.—12:40 p.m.
English 474 is designed to introduce students to professional review writing, a genre which approaches creative writing more closely than other professional writing genres. The course is based on a firm foundation of rhetorical concerns including purpose, audience, situation, style, arrangement, delivery and content as well as ethical, logical and emotional appeals. Students will read general theory of review writing as well as sample reviews from various venues. The most common reviews are film, restaurant and book reviews. However, reviews also address the areas of art, architecture, resorts and hotels, television, theater, dance, music, videogames, radio, television, photography and sculpture. Students will focus on the primary areas but will be encouraged to explore additional areas and to specialize in one particular area by the end of the semester.
For more information, contact Prof. Sarah Duerden: Sarah.Duerden@asu.edu.
ENG 476
Title: Studies in Folklore and Oral Traditions
Instructor: Heather Maring
Section Line Number: 18898
Time: T, Th 10:30-11:45 AM
Description: What is oral art? How does it convey meaning? We attempt to interpret oral-traditional poetry and prose on its own terms by reading and listening to verbal art and by surveying the major approaches to studying oral traditions. Because we examine ethnopoetics, performance theory, oral-formulaic theory, immanent art theory, and other approaches, this class fulfills the theory requirement for English literature majors. The primary works for this class span a variety of media: from oral traditions recorded in writing and on video to oral-literary hybrids. The readings represent many periods—from the ancient to the medieval to the present-day—and many cultures —ancient Greek, South Slavic, English, Finnish, Indian, Native American, Tibetan, and others.
There are 3 exams, 2 papers, and weekly Blackboard postings. For English majors with a concentration in literature this course fulfills the literary theory and interdisciplinary studies requirement and the transnational, postcolonial, and global literatures requirement.
ENG 494/598 Special Topics
Title: Digital Teaching and Tools
Instructor: Laura Turchi
Section Line Number: 25756/22549
Time: Tuesdays 4:40P-7:30P
Description: “Digital Teaching and Tools” is for English teachers who are intrigued by new media methods for creating and sharing information and art. This is not strictly a “how to” class, although we will address many practical classroom matters, and course members will gain a broadened knowledge of Web 2.0 opportunities for teaching and learning. We will create a detailed inventory of the digital tools familiar to secondary students, and we will compare these to what a clever English teacher can access in a public school classroom. We will imagine, study, and design at least one way – if not a dozen – where digital tools can enhance student achievement. We will consider how tapping into our Digital Age can increase student access to history and culture, and may encourage individuals to find and articulate their voices, as well as open avenues for their creativity. Our goal will be to empower the English language arts classroom with critical understandings of media, culture, and public relations (digital information manipulation), and so develop secondary students from passive consumers to literate participants in democracy.
ENG 494: SOUTH ASIAN FILM
Julie Codell
SLN is 18693
TTH 12-1:30 CDN 68, SCREENINGS (optional): THURSDAYS, 4:30-7:30 PM, Art Building 220
This course is designed to explore South Asian cinema in three areas:
1-“classic” cinema with a focus on Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy
2-Bollywood and popular cinema by Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Yash Chopra,and Mehboob Khan
3- diasporic South Asian films by Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta and Hanif Kureishi.
Films will be studied in chronological order to map a history of South Asian cinema from 1950 to the present. Students will explore selected websites, watch one film each week, and read assigned texts that analyze topics including history, religion, gender, narrative, visual content, identity politics of region and caste, relation of South Asian films to other national films, and music.
English 498
Title: Poetry Capstone
Instructor: Sally Ball
Section Line Number: 21791
Time: 12:00P-1:15P TTH
Description: This is the final workshop in the sequence for the undergraduate concentration in Creative Writing/Poetry. Students must have already completed 287, 387, 487, and 490 (Forms).
Carl Phillips points out that in relationship to myth and fable, we are both the inheritors of a long tradition and also the living version of those stories--and, in our retelling, we determine not only whether they will survive but how, in what version. In this class, we will read poems based on myths and we will write some. These new poems (your poems!) may be narrative, or they may not, or they may be dramatic monologues, or lyric poems, or meditative poems. We'll read a few whole collections that depend on ancient stories for inspiration, for contrast, for a veil. We'll look at a range of poems that approach the same myths differently….. We'll also read two collections in which historical figures function as mythic figures do. Each student will write a new poem every week, in addition to working on a final manuscript (including revisions of these poems), and reading and discussing the assigned texts. Additional reading will include poems by other authors and essays on writing by practicing poets.
Required texts:
Craig Arnold, MADE FLESH
Frank Bidart, DESIRE
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, THE LAST TIME I SAW AMELIA EARHART
Louise Gluck, MEADOWLANDS
Rachel Zucker, EATING IN THE UNDERWORLD
Writing Programs Classes
Please click on the following Writing Programs courses to view their description page:
Stretch Program Courses:
WAC 101, WAC 107 (first-year writing)
400-level courses:
ENG 474 Review Writing
ENG 494 (rhetorical theory and criticism)
Graduate Classes
English 531
Title: Oral and Literary Poetics in Old English Literature
Instructor: Heather Maring
Section Line Number: 18337
Time: T, Th 4:30-5:45 PM
Description: We will investigate hybrid oral and literary poetic strategies in Old English poetry, using John Foley’s *How to Read an Oral Poem*, Mark Amodio’s *Writing the Oral Tradition*, and related essays. We will translate Old English poems that are often anthologized, while exploring fresh interpretations -- interpretations that would be overlooked by reading these well-known poems solely through the traditional interpretive lenses of literary studies. The syllabus includes “The Battle of Maldon,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” “The Wife’s Lament,” “The Husband’s Message,” “The Ruin,” “Widsith,” “Deor,” *Elene*, the *Advent Lyrics* ("Christ I"), and a handful of riddles and charms. Requirements: class participation, an oral presentation, and a 20- to 25-page paper.
English 538: 20th Century American Literature
Clarke
This will be a graduate-level survey of 20th century American literature. We’ll read primarily the greatest hits—though that, as we’ll discuss, is a very fraught construction. Is it possible to determine a 20th century canon? What might it look like? What are the underlying assumptions that go into such a task? Authors may include Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, Stevens, Williams, O’Neill, Ellison, Pynchon, Miller, Silko, Plath, Rich, Baraka, and Morrison. Because we can’t possibly read everyone who should be included, student oral reports on some of the omitted authors will supplement the reading list. While we’ll certainly spend time on the individual texts, we’ll also be concerned with putting things together to compile as complete a picture of the century as possible. There may be a couple of short writing assignments during the term and the final project will be to create—and defend—a syllabus for a survey course. Spirited participation is a must.
Eng 539
Title: Studies in Mod/Postmod Lit/Theory
Instructor: Professor Melissa Pritchard
Section Line Number: 22550
Time: 4:40-7:30 p.m. Tuesdays
Description:
Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, author of over 20 acclaimed books of literary criticism, is the recipient of the Academy of American Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. In his NOVELISTS AND NOVELS, we will read and discuss select critical essays on modern and postmodernist fiction writers.
In January 2010, Dalkey Archive Press will release the much-awaited, inaugural volume, BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2010, edited by Bosnian novelist and recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Awards, Aleksandar Hemon, with a preface by novelist and critic Zadie Smith. "At the heart of the project," writes Hemon, "is a profound, non-negotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be. The same need is at the heart of the project of literature." This anthology includes stories from over 35 countries, from Spain and France to Croatia, Iceland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, featuring known names as well as writers published in English for the first time.
These two seminal works will be our touchstone for this course. As we read, discuss and debate our responses to NOVELISTS AND NOVELS and BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2010, you will simultaneously be working on and critiquing your own fiction.
"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."
- Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilych
"So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a
form from which life had parted."
- Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
ENG 552
Title: Composition Studies: The Public Turn
Instructor: Elenore Long
Section Line Number: 26605
Time: Mondays from 4:40-7:30
Description: The "public turn" has been recognized as the most significant development in rhetoric and composition studies in the past several decades. This change in orientation shifted the gaze of rhetorical research to include not only the academy and workplace, but also public life. In some ways this shift in orienation returned rhetorical study to its ancient roots. At the same time, however, it is a new day for public rhetorics, for culture and technology have transformed public life in ways that ancient rhetoricians could never have imagined. Drawing upon a wide range of modes and methods, the public turn in rhetoric and composition studies asks how ordinary people—not only the cultural critical, celebrity, or politician, but down-on-the-ground ordinary folk—go public.
This course focuses primarily on college writers to ask, How do college students go public? And, as educators trained in rhetorical theories and practices, how can we best support them? To address these questions, this course will map the intellectual terrain that prompted scholars of rhetoric to address the problems and possibilities of contemporary public life. It will also attend to the concepts and categories that make this area of inquiry at once dynamic and perplexing—distinctions that will help us to consider thoughtfully the claims of specific service-learning initiatives, the purposes of various everyday rhetorics, and the terms of given community-university partnerships. Most of all, the class will focus on discrete public pedagogies designed to help students go public—pedagogies, for instance, that adapt interpretative literacies to community settings; that celebrate tactical literacies of resistance and surprise; and that enact public performance for the purposes of joint inquiry, discovery, and change.
ENG 556
Theories of Literacy
Instructor: Peter Goggin
Section Line Number: 22995
Time: 4:40-7:30 Wednesday
"Literacy does not require or inexorably lead to any particular development, but it is a powerful tool available for organizing, extending, providing resources for, and transforming all of our social endeavors."--Charles Bazerman
"To be truly literate, a person must be conversant with a specific body of knowledge known to educated people, or, more precisely, the cultural knowledge of the dominant society."--E.D. Hirsch Jr.
"Literacy is a system of oppression that works against entire societies as well as against certain groups within given populations and against individual people."--Elspeth Stuckey
"There is no thing, literacy, only constellations of forms and degrees of literacy, shifting and turning as history rearranges the social formations in which they are embedded. Pieties of literacy with a capital L ought to be scrutinized: Which literacy? Whose literacy? Literacy for what? How?"--Andrew Sledd
"More and more, we are divided into two nations: One that reads and one that can't, and, therefore, one that dreams and one that doesn't. Reading is the basics for all learning, and it must be the foundation for all other education reforms."--George W. Bush
While theories of literacy have, for the most part, been determined by the primacy of reading and writing script, more recent scholarship in literacy theory and history has served to challenge such limitations. Many contemporary perspectives on literacy view scripted text as one component of complex acts and practices of written communication that occur in social contexts. Anthropological ethnographic studies that examine such communicative acts in their local contexts reveal that literate practices and the texts that are produced are imbued with social and cultural values and traditions, and the needs and desires of individuals. As the statements above illustrate, theories of literacy themselves are embedded within the values and assumptions of individuals, institutions, and academic specialization. In this course, we will examine some of these theories, their influences on academic scholarship and pedagogy, the ideological assumptions that inform them, and how we might view these theories within broader socio-cultural landscapes.
ENG 591
Title: Death & Transfiguration
Instructor: Prof. Jeannine Savard
Section Line Number: 19784
Time: Wed. 4:40-7:30pm
Description:
This is Graduate Creative Writing Poetry Workshop. Emphasis is on the writing . The graduate student must be able to read critically, and write poems (6-8 poems) or short fiction (approx. 30-40pgs) in response to the readings and/or personal experience regarding the subjects of death and transfiguration.
The central subject of this writing will involve the subject of dying (physical,
psychological, emotional), grief, and change. Change will involve the speaker, the reader, the other, object/subject referred to in the poem, or a combination of those. Thus the change must go beyond surface appearances and that process of change within the character is referred to as a Transfiguration. The form may be an elegy, a dramatic persona/ monologue, a dramatic narrative or dramatic dialogue.
The student, of course, will be expected to actively participate in group discussion; that is, offer a fair and balanced criticism of the texts and of the poems written for the workshop.
ENG 591 
Title: Ecocriticism in the Age of Globalization
Instructor: Joni Adamson, Associate Professor
Section Line Number: 23173
Time: TH 4:40-7:30
This is a course in critical theory. We will study ecocriticism, exploring the development of the field from postmodernism to critical environmental justice theory. We’ll contextualize our discussion by looking back to the abolition movement and forward to the Earth Charter and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We will examine Moby Dickas anticipation of contemporary literary “whole-earth ecoglobalism.” We’ll ask: “Why has interest in environmental literary and cultural studies gained so much traction since the 1990s?” and “What is the role of the imagination in protecting biological diversity, minimizing human health risks, and using resources sustainably?”
Required Texts, Films, Criticism:
Herman Melville Moby Dick / Richard Powers The Echomaker / Karen Tai Yamashita, The Tropic of Orange / Linda Hogan, People of the Whale / Uzma Aslam Khan Trespassing / Alejandro González Iñárritu Babel/ Narrator Leonardo di Caprio The 11thHour / Joni Adamson, et. al. eds. The Environmental Justice Reader / Lawrence Buell The Future of Environmental Criticism / William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature / Mitchell Thomashow Bringing the Biosphere Home
English 598
Title: Old English Wisdom and Lyric Poetry
Instructor: Bjork
Section Line Number: 22618
Time: TTH 9:00-10:15
Description: This course will focus on a range of short Old English poems in the original language that are not normally covered in other courses even in translation. "The Gifts of Men," "Precepts," "Vainglory," "The Fortunes of Men," "Maxims I, II," "The Order of the World," "The Riming Poem," "Resignation B," "Pharaoh," "Durham," "The Rune Poem," "Solomon & Saturn," "A Proverb from Winfrid's Time," "Aldhelm," "Bede's Death Song," as well as Latin-English proverbs and assorted "Metrical Charms" give insights into Anglo-Saxon life and culture that go beyond those derived from poems such as _Beowulf_. We will read all the poems aloud in class, translate them, and discuss them from literary, linguistic, and cultural points of view. Required texts: R. Liuzz, ed., _Old English Literature_ (2002) and Clark-Hall, _A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary_, 4th ed. (1984). Requirements: class participation and a 25- to 30-page term paper.
Eng 598
23802
ST: Gateway to Global Engagement
8:00 - 9:15 pm MW
Jewell Parker Rhodes
For MFA Creative Writing students, this course helps to prepare them for global fellowships abroad. This course is reading-intensive and research-intensive, and allows for students to pursue, in a focused way, preparations for cross-cultural interaction and global creative writing.
ENG 494/598 Special Topics
Title: Digital Teaching and Tools
Instructor: Laura Turchi
Section Line Number: 25756/22549
Time: Tuesdays 4:40P-7:30P
Description: “Digital Teaching and Tools” is for English teachers who are intrigued by new media methods for creating and sharing information and art. This is not strictly a “how to” class, although we will address many practical classroom matters, and course members will gain a broadened knowledge of Web 2.0 opportunities for teaching and learning. We will create a detailed inventory of the digital tools familiar to secondary students, and we will compare these to what a clever English teacher can access in a public school classroom. We will imagine, study, and design at least one way – if not a dozen – where digital tools can enhance student achievement. We will consider how tapping into our Digital Age can increase student access to history and culture, and may encourage individuals to find and articulate their voices, as well as open avenues for their creativity. Our goal will be to empower the English language arts classroom with critical understandings of media, culture, and public relations (digital information manipulation), and so develop secondary students from passive consumers to literate participants in democracy.
English 632
Title: Piers Plowman and Late-Fourteenth Century England
Instructor: Rosalynn Voaden
Section Line Number: 22551
Time: M. 4.40-6.30
Crosslisted: RelSt
Description: The major focus of this seminar will be William Langland’s -Piers Plowman-, arguably the most complex piece of medieval English literature. The work will be studied both as an outstanding example of late-medieval dream vision poetry and as a work inextricably involved with some of the principal theological and secular conflicts of the time; indeed, a work which set out to expose these conflicts. A wide variety of contemporaneous texts will also be studied in order to increase understanding of the context in which Langland was writing - and rewriting - and rewriting - his great poem. These texts will include chronicles of the heresy trials of Walter Brut and William Thorpe, Wycliffite sermons, mystical and visionary writing, chronicles of the Peasants’ Uprising of 1381, and anti-mendicant satires.
Students must have taken previous courses in some aspect of medieval studies and must be able to read Middle English.
Required texts include:
Derek Pearsall, ed. Piers Plowman by William Langland: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text
John A. Alford, ed. A Companion to Piers Plowman
John M. Bowers. Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition
ENG 635
Title: Victorian Sexuality
Instructor: Bivona
Section Line Number: 26371
Time: M 6-9
Description: Although the twentieth century has smugly labeled the nineteenth century as the age the age of repression, the Victorians in England had, if anything, a culture-wide obsession with sex. The marital theme in Victorian fiction, the invention of the new field of "sexology," debates about gender roles and their relationship to biological "instincts," assertions linking poor women with “immoral sexuality,” considerations of masculinity and femininity, speculations about sex in the afterlife or whether masturbation caused blindness or insanity, or the preoccupation with the nocturnal adventures of vampires and other unwholesome creatures: all these things indirectly testify to the fact that men and women in Britain found sex to be an endlessly fascinating -- if ofttimes indelicate -- topic. In this course, we will cover this topic as broadly as possible within the constraints of a one-semester course. Our approach will be interdisciplinary. Readings will include passages from Freud and other Victorian sexologists, contemporary theory (Foucault and Butler), novels and poetry of the period. Requirements include regular participation in in-class and Blackboard discussions, 4 brief seminar papers, and 1 critical research paper.
ENG 636
Title: Advanced Studies in American Lit: Realists & Radicals - Social Crisis and the American Novel, 1865-1920
Instructor: Holbo
Section Line Number: 15526
Time: 5:40P-8:30P T
Description: The twentieth century has often looked back at the late nineteenth century as an “age of innocence”: a gilded age, in which free-market economics and rigid social codes reinforced each other to create an era of high Victorian gentility and refinement. But gentility and refinement were not the dominant American experiences of the era. From the 1870s to the early 20th century, as a series of panics rocked the global economy, Americans struggled to make sense of a world in which nothing seemed certain but ever-accelerating change. Confronted with the disorienting realization that the Civil War had not only swept away the institution of slavery, but transformed virtually every United States institution, Americans of the late nineteenth century responded to an age of unbridled economic speculation by indulging in free-wheeling intellectual speculation. Novelists joined with journalists, economists, sociologists, reformers and dreamers in revising all the ideas and ideals Americans had inherited from the first hundred years of U.S. history—ideas about democracy, rights, virtue, economy, duty, culture, beauty, education, and literary achievement.
This course explores the way American writers addressed the perpetual crisis of the late nineteenth century. Surveying American literature from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, and from early attempts to make sense of Reconstruction to nostalgic evocations of the premodernist era, we will discuss such topics as:
• the quest to write the “great American novel”
• the confrontation with modernity and the beginnings of “modernism”
• the realist and naturalist movements in literature
• radical economists and economic literatures
• the struggle over the historical and cultural meaning of the Civil War
• the influence of photography, cinema and new technologies of illustration on novelistic representation
Eng 652
Title: Evaluating Writing: Testing, Assessment, Response
Instructors: Professors Keith Miller and Shirley Rose
Section Line Number: 22720
Time: 1:30-2:45 Tuesdays and Thursdays
Description:
Mechanically sound, but says nothing. Brilliant ideas, interrupted by a hundred comma splices. Student writing often confounds our hopes and expectations.
What are the best ways to assess student writing?
What are the best ways to learn what students know about writing?
This course will include readings on writing assessment and response theory, some examination of specific model assessment/evaluation designs and programs, and an introduction to important resources for assessment projects.
Students will choose one or more assessment design projects for writing programs as well as engage in assessment scenario exercises such as a holistic scoring session of student writing.
In addition to the texts listed below, course readings will include materials made available on the course Blackboard site.
Required Texts:
O’Neill, Peggy, Cindy Moore, and Brain Huot. Guide to College Writing Assessment. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009.
Broad, Bob. What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003.
Huot, Brian, and Peggy O’Neill. Assessing Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009.
Zak, Frances and Christopher C. Weaver. The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities. Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998.
See faculty for additional recommended texts and other questions: keith.miller@asu.edu and Shirley.rose@asu.edu
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English 654
Title: Advanced Studies in Rhetoric, Writing, Technology, and Culture- Social Media
Instructor: Alice Robison
Section Line Number: 25369
Time: 4:40P-7:30P Tuesday
Description:
How does meaning-making happen in and around the contexts of contemporary social media? In what ways are affinities and fan communities enabling us to think differently about what media literacy means? This course moves beyond thinking about consumption and production of social media: instead, we will address participation.
This course is a fair split between both thinking about and using social and digital media. Our in-class work will involve traditional discussion and analysis, but out-of-class work will require students gain fluency in the discourse of a virtual community of their choice-an activity that may or may not involve the use of specific tools for media production. What’s important is that students learn how to be apprenticed into a community of fans, producers, thinkers, and meaning-makers.
It should be noted that this class does not involve in-class tutorials. In other words, we will not be spending class time teaching each other how to produce and share materials. Instead, we will investigate what it means to be members of various media-making and media-consuming communities (e.g., microbloggers, political parties, meetups, hobbyists, virtual worlds, videogames, television, and film fans). This class is based on the assertion that (for example) it is not enough to know how to edit an entry on Wikipedia; we need to learn about and understand the Wikipedia community and what our edits mean within that context.
This semester, we will trace the trajectory of digital cultures and social media over the course of the past 20+ years, focusing especially on the intersections between several areas of thought, research, and production. These include: human-computer interaction, communication studies, media studies, literacy studies, rhetoric, sociology, business, learning sciences, and journalism. Most readings for the course are already published online but a handful of them will need to be accessed through the university libraries.
Keywords: wiki; blog; Twitter; Flickr; file-sharing; Creative Commons; free culture; fans; participatory culture; SMS; tagging; virtual worlds; videogames; grassroots media; play; identity; networks; smart mobs; LOLcats; xkcd; 4chan;Facebook; MySpace; del.icio.us; memes; YouTube; RSS; collaborative learning; social capital; Facebook; social media; aggregators.
Potential students may visit the professor's website for a more detailed description and potential reading list- http://alicerobison.org/syllabi/teaching-now/
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