Week One 8/20

Literature: liberal hope and Marxist critique

Course Introduction,

Stephen Greenblatt, “If You Prick Us” (er) and Eagleton, “The Rise of English” (er).

Week Two 8/27

Literature: the master tropes and world-making

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultra-Moral Sense” (er); Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, 147-175; and Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture 1-17.

Summary Series 1 due

Week Three 9/3

Labor Day

Week Four 9/10

Literature: formalism and interpretation

Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture, Rivkin and Ryan, 3-7; 7-14 (er); Shklovsky “Art as Technique” 15-21 (er); Brooks “The Formalist Critics” and “The Language of Paradox” 22-39 (er); and Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture 17-85.

Week Five 9/17

Literature: structuralism and meaning

Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, 1-93; Rivkin and Ryan 53-56 (er); Saussure from The Course in General Linguistics59-71 (er); Propp, from The Morphology of the Folktale 72-76 (er); Eco, “Narrative Structures in Fleming” (er); and Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture 86-149.

Summary Series 2 due

Week Six 9/24

Literature: deconstruction and the problem of meaning

Derrida, “Differance” 278-299, from Of Grammatology, 300-331, Semiology and Grammatology 332-340 (all er). and Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture 150-285.

Week Seven 10/1

Cultural Studies: psychoanalysis and the antagonisms of culture.

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Summary Series 3 due

Week Eight 10/8

Cultural Studies: Marxism, interpretation, and the force of history

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto. Rivkin and Ryan, 643-47; Marx from Capital: “Wage Labor and Capital” 659-72;

Week Nine 10/15

Cultural Studies: Marxism and applied criticism

Marx, from Capital, 665-672; Rivkin and Ryan, 389-97; Said, “Jane Austen and Empire” 1112-1126; and Ohmann and Ohmann, “Reviewers, Critics, and 'The Catcher in the Rye.'”

Summary Series 4 due

Week Ten 10/22

Cultural Studies: meaning, history, and race

Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa" (er); bell hoooks, "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" (er); Dyer, “Coloured White, Not Coloured” (er).

15th Annual EGO / ΣΤΔ Conference Friday and Saturday.

Week Eleven 10/29

The roots and rise of Writing Studies in English

Faculty Interview Due

Scholes, “The Rise of English in Two American Colleges,”(er) and Susan Miller, from Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition.

Week Twelve 11/5

Writing Studies: The genealogy of discourse analysis

Foucault from The Archeology of Knowledge (er) and “Discipline and Punish,” 549-566; Paul Gee, from An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (er).

Final Project Topics Due

Week Thirteen 11/12

Writing Studies: rhetorics and concepts of mediation

McLuhan, from The Gutenburg Galaxy (er) and Prior, Solberg, and Berry, “Re-situating and Re-mediating the Canons: A Cultural-historical Remapping of Rhetorical Activity.”

Week Fourteen 11/19

Thanksgiving Break

Week Fifteen 11/26

Writing Studies: bodies, images, and the future of rhetoric

Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture 286-328 and “Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of the Posthuman”(er).

Week Sixteen

12/3

Final Project Presentations

Week Seventeen

12/10

Final Project Presentations