Spring 2012 Course Descriptions

517.022 Editing

CRN 41432
Stephen Benz

This course focuses on editing as a professional skill. Along with practicing advanced copyediting skills, you will learn about "information design": the creation of documents that are complete, accurate, correct, comprehensible, usable, and appropriate for readers. Because editors must often be responsible for a document from its inception to its presentation as a finished product, you will also learn about layout and document design, as well as contemporary production processes. Successful completion of this course will provide you with the foundation necessary for a future career in the field.

518.001 Proposal and Grant Writing

MWF 1:00 - 1:50
Kyle Fiore

In this  course you will learn how to write effective  grant proposals and understand how to locate and evaluate requests for proposals to ensure the proposals you write are able to persuade a client or funder to fund your project. You will also analyze existing proposals to understand the persuasive moves they make.
Because proposal writing is not a solitary task, but rather a process of working with others to identify needs, locate opportunities, and develop a persuasive solution, it is helpful to understand how the process works in the real world. To accomplish this need for real world experience, the major project for the course will be to write a real proposal by working with a local organization in a service learning experience. As you write the proposal, you will draw off the principles of rhetorical analysis, learning how to

• Develop a clear description of the problem, 
•  Offer achievable objectives, 
•  Design a logical solution, 
•  Create specific and accurate budgets, and 
•  Present your organization powerfully.

You will also learn methods of writing persuasively that are both ethical and effective as well as study how to use document design to enhance readability.

518.002 Proposal and Grant Writing

TR 11:00 - 12:15
Valerie Thomas

In this course you will learn how to write effective business and grant proposals and understand how to locate and evaluate requests for proposals to ensure the proposals you write are able to persuade a client or funder to fund your project. You will also analyze existing proposals to understand the persuasive moves they make.
Because proposal writing is not a solitary task, but rather a process of working with others to identify needs, locate opportunities, and develop a persuasive solution, it is helpful to understand how the process works in the real world. To accomplish this need for real world experience, the major project for the course will be to write a real proposal by working with a local organization in a service learning experience. As you write the proposal, you will draw off the principles of rhetorical analysis, learning how to

• Develop a clear description of the problem, 
•  Offer achievable objectives, 
•  Design a logical solution, 
•  Create specific and accurate budgets, and 
•  Present your organization powerfully.

You will also learn methods of writing persuasively that are both ethical and effective as well as study how to use document design to enhance readability.

520.001 Blue Mesa Review

CRN 39827
Justin St Germain

520.002 Stylistics Analysis

TR 9:30 - 10:45
Jerry Shea

Stylistic Analysis (aka “Prose Style”) is unlike any writing course you have ever taken.  We get down and dirty at the sentence level; my aim, as in all my courses, is to rub your nose in the prose.  What makes for good prose?  What makes for wretched prose?  We shall try to find out.  Do you know the difference between noun style and verb style?  Between hypotaxis and parataxis?  Have you ever thought about the different assumptions we bring to poetry and to prose?  Has it ever occurred to you that sometimes we look AT prose and sometimes we look THROUGH prose?  Take this course and revel in these questions.  Six or seven short assignments.  No midterm or final.

520.011 Information Architecture

Online
Jonathan Price

521.001 Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

R 5:30 - 7:00
Dan Mueller

The primary text of the Graduate Fiction Workshop is the fiction written by the members of it. If every piece of fiction has contained within it the seed, or blueprint, of what it ultimately wants to become, it is the responsibility of the workshop members to articulate this, orally and in writing, to the writer. In this way, the workshop helps the writer to see what he or she has written more clearly. The instructor will assign one published story and one craft essay each week. Members should expect several writing exercises sprinkled throughout the semester. Each member must submit to the instructor a final portfolio of revised fiction and to a literary journal at least one finished piece of fiction for publication.

522.001 Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry

M 4:00 - 6:30
Diane Thiel

523.001 Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction

W 4:00 - 6:30
Greg Martin

This is a graduate writing workshop focused on revision.  Each student will write two new pieces of creative nonfiction, and the class will workshop each of these pieces three times.  The goal of the course is to push you to produce more than you thought you could, to break down what Jane Smiley calls “evasion strategies.” 

Most often in a graduate creative writing workshop, craft (plot, characterization, persona, etc) receives primary emphasis, and there are good reasons for this.  But less often is discipline, itself, emphasized.  The problem with too much emphasis on craft is that it may lead the apprentice writer to believe that their most important writing problems are craft problems.  They aren't.  Craft can be taught and learned but it cannot be assiduously applied.  One might argue that the inner discipline it takes to endure and produce as an artist is itself a kind of craft knowledge.  Wynton Marsalis says, "Practice is the first sign of morality in a musician."  What does practice have to do with ethics?  Lots of things, especially if you define ethics as: obedience to the unenforceable.  No one is forcing you to write anything, much less write well.  The particular subgenre of creative nonfiction you may turn in to the workshop is wide open:  Memoir, Personal Essay, Lyric Meditation;  Travel Writing; Literary Journalism, a hybrid of more than one subgenre.  It's all fair game. 

 Because of the structure of the class, my assumption is that you have some grounding in creative nonfiction, and so most readings for discussion in class will be limited to essays on craft.  At the same time, each student will pursue their own “Underground Reading Project” throughout the semester.  My hope is that the course will push you stylistically and technically, and encourage you to take risks, to raise your standards for what you consider good writing, and then to meet those standards through the development of the habit of art. 

535.001 Teaching Creative Writing

ARR
Diane Thiel

Catalog Description:  Provides theory and practice in teaching creative writing at the university level.

This course will be taught in conjunction with English 224.006, Introduction to Creative Writing, also taught by Professor Warner.  Students enrolled in English 535 will observe and participate in the instruction of English 224 and make visits to other creative writing classes being taught in the spring semester.  Enrolled students should expect to participate in arranged small group discussions and to read excerpts from the following texts:  The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 by D. G. Myers; The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl; Conversations on Writing Fiction: Interviews with 13 Distinguished Teachers of Fiction Writing in America, edited by Alexander Neubauer.

538.001 Writing Theory for Teachers

T 5:30 - 7:00
Jill Jefferies

This course examines a range of composition theories and their evolution, with an emphasis on sociocultural approaches and their bases in theories of mind, language, and society. Students will inquire into how their own implicit theoretical assumptions influence their practice, as well as how the composition frameworks we explore might inform writing pedagogy. In addition to this reflective work, students will design a composition curriculum and construct a rationale for its application grounded in their interpretations of course readings.

540.001 Language & Diversity

TR 2:00 - 3:15
Michelle Hall Kells

ENGL 440/540 will provide intensive study in language and literacy for teachers of  college writing (as well as K-12).   This course will bring three intellectual operating spaces into conversation: Sociolinguistics, Composition Studies, and Second-Language Literacy Education. The aim of this course is to guide the examination of current theoretical and applied approaches to teaching ethnolinguistically-diverse populations.  Selected readings will center on the nature of human language, the processes of discourse acquisition, and the multiple dimensions of communicative competence. 

Special focus will be given to the teaching of Composition informed by sociolinguistic theory and research.  We will attend to issues of: ethnolinguistic identity, social stratification, linguistic racialization, language attitudes, institutionalized discrimination and non-standard language varieties as well as the ethical and social implications of hate-speech.

This syllabus extends beyond the study of language structure and use (grammar and function) and moves toward applications of effective literacy practices as intellectual/critical acts of social participation.  The core objective of this syllabus is to cultivate theoretical and pedagogical approaches to literacy education (informed by linguistics) that enhance student access and success.

543.002 Contemporary Texts in Rhetoric

M 4:00 - 6:30
Charles Paine

The goal of this course is to help prepare you to work as a practicing rhetor and to work with the ideas from rhetorical theory (scholarship during graduate school, doctorate exams, and afterward). To do this, we’ll take a cue from the Sophists, who said that preparing to be a rhetor required principles, practice, and talent. We can’t do much about the last of these, but we will focus on the principles (including theories) of rhetoric provided by 20th- and 21st-century rhetoricians, and you’ll get practice working with those principles, applying them to rhetorical analysis and working with them. While this course is a continuation of English 542 (Rhetorical Texts from Ancient Times through the Nineteenth Century), English 542 is not a prerequisite. We’ll spend the first three sessions making sure that everyone appreciates the complexity of the pre-20th-century rhetorical tradition (e.g., the Sophists and the Athenian revolution in consciousness, the contributions of Protagoras, what Aristotle meant and did not mean by “rhetoric,” Enlightenment rhetoric, the language and epistemological theories of  Emerson, Nietzsche, and other proto-postmodern thinkers). NB: You will need to have read several articles for the first day of class; please see the WebCT page or email me for the pdfs of those readings (cpaine@unm.edu).  In the rest of the semester, we’ll read more than we can talk about in class and will basically cover the big names in the Bizzell and Herzberg anthology. Throughout the semester, we’ll apply our theory by doing rhetorical analyses of actual rhetorical acts. In the final four weeks of the course, we’ll move to composition history, visual rhetoric and a book-length study of 21st-century applied rhetoric (tbd by us in the firs weeks of class).

Assignments will include reading, responding to reading with informal writing, two in-class exams (for which you will collectively supply the questions), two five-page reflections, conference proposal, and a final portfolio with reflections.

The books are available at the bookstore. Details are available on WebCT.

548.001 Beowulf

T 4:00 - 6:30
Helen Damico

This is the introductory course to Beowulf, and as such it is primarily a linguistic and literary study of the first vernacular English poetic epic. It is meant to lay the groundwork for an intermediate and advanced seminar. The student will continue studying Old English grammar and syntax. Over half of the poem will be translated from the original in class, although students are required to know the entire poem. Yet, this is not a course that focuses only on translation. After mid-semester, students will engage in short, introductory paleographical and metrical exercises on selected portions of the poem. This will allow students to become closely acquainted with the manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv and to begin to arrive at an understanding about the making of a secular epic in the vernacular. Topics discussed in the course will include: Old English poetic language and form; formula and formulaic systems; Old English versification; the history of the manuscript; the dating of the poem; problems of translations; structure and unity; methods of narration; relationship of fantasy and "reality".

Course requirements: Midterm, short exercises in metrics, final, and individual and class final projects. PRE-REQUISITE: 447/547 Old English, or the equivalent. This course challenges the student, and applies toward the IMS Minor in Medieval Studies and the MA and Ph.D. Concentrations in Medieval Studies in English. Required Texts: Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed., edited by R.D.Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, University of Toronto Press; Orchard, Andy. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Cambridge, 2001. pb; A Beowulf Handbook. Edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles. Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, pb; Orchard, Andy, Pride and Prodigies: The Monsters in the Beowulf Manuscript.

551.001 Medieval Studies

W 4:00 -6:30
Timothy Graham

This course will offer intensive training in the research and bibliographic skills necessary for the study of the Middle Ages while also introducing students to the history of medieval scholarship from the sixteenth century onwards. A key aspect of the course will be a detailed orientation to the major published resources available to medievalists, including the volumes of the Patrologia Latina, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and the Early English Text Society, as well as the important series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile. Participants in the course will learn about the techniques used by scholarly editors when preparing a medieval text for use by a modern readership; they will also be introduced to the conventions of the modern apparatus criticus. Students will learn how to read and analyze charters and other types of medieval document and will receive instruction in the basics of such important ancillary disciplines as medieval chronology, sigillography, and prosopography. The section of the course devoted to the history of medieval scholarship will include a special focus on the origins and development of Anglo-Saxon studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

557.001 Victorian Studies

TR 2:00 - 3:15
Aeron Hunt

This course is intended to give graduate students a broad introduction to key intellectual, social, political, and aesthetic questions that shaped British literature and culture of the Victorian period (1832–1901).  The course will examine five important topics writers engaged: the Condition of England question (centering on the transformations produced by capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of class society); Faith/Science); the Woman Question (centering on gender roles and ideologies); Empire (including questions of race and national identity); and Culture. We will discuss these topics individually but also consider how they interrelate. We will read a wide selection of Victorian fiction, prose, and poetry, along with historical and critical selections.

Authors may include Matthew Arnold; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Browning; Thomas Carlyle; Charles Darwin; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; Thomas Hardy; Christina Rossetti; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Algernon Charles Swinburne; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Oscar Wilde.

Among our selections of texts, we will be reading Dickens’s novel Bleak House, and George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch. These are wonderful and crucial novels—but they are long. Students are advised that it might be helpful to get started reading over the break. We will use the Penguin editions of both novels.

Assignments will include presentations, an annotated bibliography, short response papers, and an article-length final paper (approx 18-25 pages).

564.001 Advanced Studies in Native American Literature

T 4:00 - 6:30
Kathleen Washburn

BIA reform are just some aspects of the so-called “Indian problem” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the first half of this course, we will focus on texts from the turn of the century, a period in which a new generation of indigenous writers found new markets for their work. We will investigate the range of literary strategies that writers employ in order to represent modern Native communities and contest the American mythology of a noble but vanishing race. In the second half of the course, we will turn to more recent texts that invoke and reimagine this earlier period for contemporary audiences. In doing so, we will address the ways in which debates from the so-called “assimilation era” continue to shape Native American literature and film today as well as critical debates about cultural translation, literary history, and interdisciplinary methodologies.  Texts will include Charles Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Zitkala-a’s American Indian Stories and Other Writings, Luther Standing Bear’s My People The Sioux, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. Course requirements include short response papers, a book review, and a conference-length essay.

568.001 The 19th Century Novel

TR 11:00 -12:15
Jesse Alemán

This course is an advanced introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel understood in historical context. We’ll examine novels as literary works and as cultural artifacts shaped by wider social, political, and economic pressures. We’ll focus on the role of the novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the movement from antebellum romanticism to post-war realist and naturalist modes, and on the cultural significance of the novel as a genre. We’ll study the way key American novels respond to or reproduce contemporaneous conflicts occurring around market culture; family, sexuality, and gender; and race and nationhood. In the end, we’ll come to understand the complex relationship between the rise of the American novel and the rise of the nation in the nineteenth century. Selection of texts will be based on narratives that were formative for defining and re-defining the novel as a genre in the nineteenth century.

Titles most like to include: Charlotte Temple; Edgar Huntly; The Last of the Mohicans; Hope Leslie; The Scarlet Letter; Ruth Hall; Moby-Dick; Dead Wood Dick; Huckleberry Finn; Ramona; McTeague; and Iola Leroy.

587.001 Genre Studies

R 4:00 - :30
Amy Beeder

640.001 Seminar: Ideologies of Literacy

W 4:00 - 7:30
Michelle Hall Kells

This seminar will examine the historical, cultural, economic, political, and educational dimensions of “literacy.”  The conceptualization, mythology, and practice of “literacy” (reading and writing) has become integral to social access in our 21st century cosmopolitan universe (full civic,  economic,  and cultural participation—locally, nationally, and globally).  As teachers (of English Studies and  Education), we need to apply a critical lens to the metaphors and models of literacy we adopt and promote.

We will examine the question of literacy as a key social value in the national imaginary. Literacy is not only a practice (and outcome of public K-16 education) but a core value of both American Constitutional culture and the Western tradition of higher learning.

650.001 Seminar: Milton
R 4:00 - 7:30
Marissa Greenberg

“Milton’s Epics and Literary Radicalism: From Paradise Lost to Samson Agonistes”

In Is Shakespeare Better than Milton? Nigel Smith argues that, just as Shakespeare profoundly changed drama in England and elsewhere, Milton “remade Western poetry in his grand epic and its two sequel works”—namely, Paradise Lost;his brief epic,Paradise Regained; and his tragedy, Samson Agonistes. In this course we will closely read these three works for Milton’s place in English literature, history, and thought, which scholars have interpreted both as essentially conservative and as radically liberal. In both his theory and practice of epic, Milton drew on ancient and Renaissance precedent, often revolutionizing this tradition. In particular, epic became for Milton a means of lamenting the failure of the English Commonwealth and critiquing the restoration of the monarchy. Milton’s thinking on matters of controversy in seventeenth-century England, including free will, liberty, divorce, and censorship, are as evident in his poetry as in his prose. Reading Milton’s epics and other poetry alongside his prose and with attention to current critical issues, we will grapple with his legacy to poetry and politics. Requirements will include generous participation, a presentation on current scholarship, and an article-length final essay.

650.002 Seminar: Fiction 1600-1650 in Theory and Practice

T 4:00 - 7:30
Carolyn Woodward

This seminar takes the practice of fiction from 1600 through 1850 and subjects it to critical scrutiny that itself is a course of study in theory.  Readings in the novel begin with Cervantes and end with Charlotte Brontë, and represent a range of national literary traditions (for example, writers include Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, Chodorlos de Laclos, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne).  Theory of the novel offers a number of advantages to the student of fiction. Unlike many areas of literary theory, it does not rule out of bounds discussions of aesthetic value and it views literary creativity as part of the historical world rather than separating literary products from the world that produces and consumes them. Our study of the field of novel theory will focus on three areas: genre, literary-cultural history, and character.  Theorists include Benedict Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michael Davitt Bell, Jonathan Culler, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukács, Michael McKeon, and Marthe Robert.

One seminar report, one 15-20 page publishable seminar paper and presentation.

660.001 Seminar: Avant Garde in America

MW 4:00 - 7:30
Scarlett Higgins

If the historical avant garde died in the trenches of World War I, unable to accept the real world consequences of the shock that its members often celebrated and even promoted in their forward-oriented aesthetics, its death obviously did not extend to the experimental impulse in whole, nor to the fundamental urge to link art and politics. This seminar, which takes as its point of departure the so-called “death of the avant garde,” will assess how the engaged aesthetics of the Old World were re-cast in the New World. In it we will seek to discover what it can mean to be avant garde in a post-avant garde era. From the 1950s onward, how has the spirit of the avant garde been amplified, extended, or complicated in the work of individuals as well as groups? What forms and ideals does their radically innovative practice assume? What constitutes the persistence of the avant garde in America? Who gets to adopt or adapt this title—and to what ends?

Together we will discuss the most significant and influential work associated with what has come to be called the New American Poetries, including Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York school, and the Beats, as well as the “last” avant garde in America, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers. However, the work that we will consider includes not only literary material but also visual art, films, and musical compositions.

Students will be evaluated on their in class contributions (including formal presentations) and an article-length essay due at the end of the term.