Graduate Seminars
6205 Study in Language/Linguistics: Language and Social Identity
101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Steve Keiser
Course Number ENGL 6205
Course Title & Subtitle (if needed). Language with an attitude: Sociolinguistics in the USA
Course Description
We will examine language use and attitudes toward language in the USA past and present. In particular, we will investigate the relationship between language and such social parameters as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, and gender. Case studies will draw on language varieties in Wisconsin and Milwaukee such as Great Lakes English, African American Vernacular English, Spanish, Ojibwa, American Sign Language, and Pennsylvania German. We will develop a critical (self-)awareness of the myriad ways in which each of us uses and interprets language as a marker of personal and social identity, and we will explore the range of speakers’ motivations and agentivity in identity construction via language use. Finally, we will critically analyze the need for and cultural consequences of legislated language use
Readings. American English. Selected journal articles and other readings.
Assignments. Lead class discussions on readings. Written responses to readings. Class presentation. Research project on language attitudes and/or language data.
6220 Study in Shakespeare: Shakespeare, his Contemporaries and Greatness
101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor John Curran
6400 Study in 19th Century British Literature: Gothic Ideology
101 TTH 2:00-3:15 Professor Diane Hoeveler
6700 Study in 20th Century American Literature: Revolutionizing 20/21st C Amer
Literary Studies
101 TTH 11:00-12:15 Professor Jodi Melamed
Course Description:This seminar investigates new scholarship in American literary studies that self-consciously seeks to foster revolutionary thinking toward the generation of new rationalities, imaginaries, politics, socialities, and cultural practices. Such scholarship unites around dissatisfaction with the rubrics of ‘nationalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’, which previously inspired literary scholarship, revealing the hidden violences and pitfalls limiting these frameworks. We will follow five lines of inquiry emerging out of the challenge to revolutionize American literary studies: 1) interrogating professionalization and praxis within the university and beyond it; 2) intersecting queer theory and post-national American literary scholarship; 3) analyzing expressly neoliberal and racial capitalist modes of globalization and empire and their repertoires of signification;
4) using American Indian and Indigenous studies paradigms to rethink American literary studies; and 5) embedding literary, performative, aesthetic and scholarly modes of knowledge in contemporary social movements and activism. In addition, we will examine works of fiction, film, poetry, performance, and experimental writing that inspire the call to revolutionize American literary studies.
Readings might include selections from The ReOrder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Roderick Ferguson), A Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (Chandan Reddy), The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Jodi Byrd), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (Rosaura Sanchez et.al.) , “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Benh Zeitlan) and The Electronic Disturbance Theater (Ricardo Dominguez et.al.).
Requirements
Leading class discussion. Short critical reflection essays. Research paper. Class presentation. Active participation.
6840 Rhetoric Composition Theory
101 TTH 3:30-4:45 Professor Beth Godbee
Thematic Title:
Teaching Writing: Theory, Research, and Practice
Description:
English 6840 is designed to help new teachers as well as teachers new to college-level writing instruction develop historically informed, theory-based, data-driven approaches to first-year English (FYE) and other writing-focused courses. Our twice-weekly meetings will emphasize discussion of readings, writing assignments, and teaching-related research. Everyone will have opportunities to complete scholarly projects that include (if desired) creative and/or digital components, and the class will host an end-semester pedagogy conference in collaboration with UWM graduate students and faculty.
8282 Literary Criticism (Ph.D)
101 TTH 12:30-1:50 Professor Heather Hathaway