Center for Writing Studies Course Offerings Spring Spring 2008

The Center for Writing Studies, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

For the current semester's schedule of course offerings, please see the UIUC course information page. For Writing Studies courses offered through the English Department, see the English Department course description index. Information about course schedules may also be available in the Writing Studies office in 288 English Building.

ANTH 515 PERFORMANCE STUDIES, Desmond, J. T 2-4:50

Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, literary theory, film studies, dance and theater studies, and Marxist, feminist, and post structural modes of analysis, this course will provide a framework for thinking about the ways in which cultural meanings are constructed, negotiated, and contested through embodied performative acts of representation. This seminar will introduce students to a wide variety of writings in this area and provide them an opportunity to reflect on the current issues and methodologies animating this emerging field through the production of their own research project.

As an emergent area of specialization, “performance studies” focuses on the cultural analysis of live events, and can include the activities of daily life, community practices, sports, theater, music, rituals, festivals, religious practices, dance performance art, political rallies, the conduct of war, and even extend to practices like cooking, shopping, tourism, medical protocols, torture, labor, the imposition of colonial modes of the use of space, and modes of self-presentation including movement style and vocalization.

An emphasis on the body and enactment will ground our discussions. Specific attention will be paid to the historical and community specificity of semiotic production and reception in these arenas, and the ways that these elements resonate with intersecting categories of social differentiation including those of gender, racial or ethnic identity, national identity, sexuality, age, social class, and perceptions of bodily ability/disability. In addition to a final research paper, students will conduct observation exercises and attend live events outside of class, and be responsible for leading some discussions. Readings will be augmented with film and video clips.

ANTH 523 DYNAMIC EMBODIMENT, Farnell, T 5-7:50
The focus of the seminar this semester will be “Performance and Performativity.” The course is unique in that it offers students an opportunity to explore and acquire new knowledge in both theoretical and experiential, performed modes of understanding. The course will be co-taught by Visiting Professor, Robert Wood, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Robert Wood Dance - New York Inc. Combining discussion with active studio work, we will focus on embodied action, process and practice as being analytically creative, moving towards a precision of interpretive meaning and a refining of personal power/agency through insight, intuition and sensory awareness.

"Performativity" has been hailed as a new critical idiom, with enquiries ranging from language philosophy, ritual and theater, to gender matters, marketing economics, the management of professional identities and a 'somatics of resistance'. We will systematically examine the work of theorists such as Austin, Butler, Bauman, Goffman, Schechner, and Turner, as well as artists such as Cage, Cunningham, Suzuki, and Gomez-Peña, to examine the value of these concepts to embodied critical inquiry in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology and related interdisciplines, including Theater, Dance, Music, Film, Media Studies, Communications, Performance Studies and Cultural Studies.

Students will have the opportunity to develop innovative multi-media and performance projects related to their own research interests in ways that interrogate potential relationships between the “ethnography of performance” and the “performance of ethnography.”

ARTH 550 Between high and low: defining "art" in late 19th-century U.S. culture, Greenhill, W, 9-11:40am
This course considers art as a concept under construction in the U.S. after the Civil War, when nationalistic interests, insecurity and money conspired to legislate taste and codify hierarchies of aesthetic expression. As the U.S. began to build institutions that would attest to its cultural advancement and the outlets for mass culture expanded, artists and critics had to continually renegotiate the terms of "art." What media and modes of expression would be
worthy of that designation? How did chromolithography, plaster casts, pottery,and natural history specimens, for example, inform (and/or challenge) developing attitudes toward the "high" and the "low"? What was the relationship between art and entertainment, education and spectacle? What, exactly, would the new museums like the Metropolitan house and how did they conceive of
their audiences?

Our topics for discussion will include: the class dynamics of space in New York's Central Park, the classificatory challenge posed by P. T. Barnum's "non-descripts," Japonaiserie at the Centennial exposition, the seductions of marble sculpture, and scatological pottery. Leading art critics of the day will provide away into this dynamic period, while more contemporary theorists will help us to
tie the nineteenth century to our own time.

ARTS 591 WRITING WITH VIDEO
Squier, T 1-3:40
writingwithvideo.net

CI 590 ANALYZING AND WRITING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH, Dressman, M 5-7:50

CI 590 EQUITY AND EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY (online course), Tettegah.

CI 590 EARLY WRITTEN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, DYSON, M 5-7:50

CI 590 INTRO. TO LANGUAGE STUDY IN EDUCATION, DYSON, TH 4-6:50

CWL 581 Photography and Memory, Kaplan, T 11:30-1:20
This course explores diverse aspects of photography and memory from a variety of literary, artistic, and theoretical perspectives. Students will be invited to write on themes broadly arrayed within the rubric of the course. Readings include: Barthes, Camera Lucida; Sontag, On Photography; Proust, Swann's Way (excerpt); Pinney (ed.), Photography's Other Histories; Nabokov, Speak, Memory. Books on reserve include: Batchen, Burning with Desire; Elkins (ed), Photography Theory; Harris and Ruggles (ed), Sites Unseen; and other works.

I invite students from a range of disciplines who are interested in visual culture, history, memory, painting, and photography to join the course.If you have questions please email me: bakaplan@uiuc.edu

ENGL 500 MODERN CRITICAL THEORY: AN ADVANCED INTRODUCTION, Hansen, T 7-8:50, TH 1-2:50
This course will provide a historical survey of the foundational thinkers, texts, and schools that orient contemporary work in the humanities, from Kant and Hegel to Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory. As an “advanced introduction,” the course is intended primarily for first year graduate students and for those who feel they have not covered the development of critical theory in a systematic way. The course will include significant discussion of figures such as: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Williams, Hall, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Zizek, and Butler. Among the topics we will certainly address are: history, the subject, value, power, language, ideology, materiality, gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. The purpose of this course is to ensure that graduate students receive a rigorous introduction to critical theories and methodologies central to a variety of fields in the humanities and to provide the basis for interdisciplinary conversation and intellectual community among graduate students and faculty members from across the university. Modern Critical Theory will have an unusual format. The course will meet twice a week, once a week in a public session that will include graduate students from Robert Rushing’s Comparative Literature 501 course and once a week in a closed session limited to registered students.

ENGL 505 R WRITING STUDIES I, Mortensen, TU 1-2:50
Same as CI 563
This course introduces you to Writing Studies and allied fields, with the aim of enabling scholarly inquiry that advances your graduate career. Throughout the semester, you will evaluate claims to disciplinarity that draw variously on ancient traditions (e.g., rhetoric, reaching back some 2,500 years), established institutional practices (e.g., U.S. college composition instruction, dating from the nineteenth century), and contemporary academic activity (e.g., scholarly exchange emergent in twentieth-century studies of rhetoric, composition, communication, information, literacy, language, reading, and writing). You will learn to navigate the print and electronic resources that document knowledge in Writing Studies and allied fields; in doing so, you will gain a sense of the fields’ most pressing questions and the best methods for pursuing answers to them. Seminar discussions, grounded in careful reading of relevant texts, will survey the breadth and depth of scholarship in Writing Studies and allied fields. Your final portfolio will include writing that demonstrates your familiarity with scholarship in Writing Studies and allied fields, and that positions you to make significant contributions to that scholarship.

ENGL 582 E1 TOPICS RESEARCH AND WRITING, Prior, W 1-2:50
Same as CI 565
TOPIC: Flat CHAT Studies of Literate Activity
This seminar addresses a central issue in Writing Studies, how to connect individual discourse practices, and the learning of them, to social contexts. One approach that offers a potential to bridge the gap between micro and macro or local and global is a convergence of cultural historical activity theories (e.g., Vygotsky, Engestrom, Moll, Rogoff, Cole, Voloshinov) with flat approaches to the social arising from phenomenological, rhizomatic and actor-network theories (e.g., Schutz, Latour, Deleuze & Guattari, Holland, Scollon, Hanks, Irvine, Goodwin, Suchman). This flat CHAT convergence could allow for an open-ended tracing of relationships among functional activity systems, genre systems, and literate activity. In this seminar, we will examine in depth some key examples of theoretical and empirical work in these areas. The examples will be drawn from a variety of research areas, not only Writing Studies. To examine how to implement these approaches in studies of writing and literate activity, we will engage in a number of inquiry activities (practicing in effect how to plan, conduct and analyze research).
Finally, students will explore the application of flat CHAT approaches to their current or projected research projects.

ENGL 582 G TOPICS RESEARACH AND WRITING, Hawhee, W 3-4:50
Same as CI 565
TOPIC: Spawn of the Dead: Aristotle and Rhetorical Studies
This graduate seminar will devote an entire semester to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, arguably the most resilient and proliferating single work in rhetorical studies. Such a sustained study assumes 1) that The Rhetoric should not be read quickly, and 2) that it cannot be read in isolation, so we will read the treatise chapter by chapter and alongside other texts—Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian, ancient and contemporary. The aim of the course is to investigate the historical, cultural, and disciplinary conditions that have given Aristotle such a prominent place in rhetorical studies; how Aristotle’s notions of rhetoric formed in relation to other theories of rhetoric in play during and prior to the classical period; and how Aristotelian arguments and concepts have served to delimit and produce what scholars of rhetoric study and teach these days.

EPSY 562 LITERACY ACROSS CULTURES, Packard & Anderson, W 10-12:50
Combines anthropological and psychological approaches to literacy in theory and practice, using case studies of cultural meanings and uses of literacy in worldwide array of traditional, historical, and modern settings; topics include origins and definitions of writing systems, psychology of scripts and math notations, issues of cultural cognitive consequences, out-of-school acquisition and uses, autonomous vs. ideological meanings of texts, hegemony and writing, roles of readers, and interpretive communities.

GWS 550 FEMINIST THEORIES HUMANITIES, FROST, S, TH 1-3:50
Interdisciplinary graduate-level course in feminist theory, with an emphasis on the humanities. Explores current debates in feminist theory as they pertain to humanities disciplines.

SOC 580 ADVANCED INTERPRETIVE METHODS, DENZIN, W 12-2:50
Analysis of social interaction based on the social psychology of C. H. Cooley, G. H. Mead, and W. I. Thomas; presentation of problems of theory, concepts, and method.

SOC 521 SOCIOLOGY OF RACE AND RACISM, JUNG, M 3-5:20
Examination of the social construction of race and racism, in various cultural contexts and historical moments and in relation to various groups and research problems.

SPCM 416 EARLY MODERN RHETORICS, CONLEY, MWF 9-9:50
Significant developments in European rhetorical theory from 1500 to the 20th Century.

SPCM 529 THEORIES OF COMMUNICATION IN CONTEXT, MILLER, TH 2-4:50

SPCM 529 UNORTHODOX RESEARCH METHODS, SANDVIG, TH 2-4:50