Rhetoric and Composition @ WSU

The program faculty are offering three graduate seminars this Fall:

ENG 7007 (Composition Theory)
Interpretation and Production: The Questions of Critique
James Brown
Description: At various historical moments, the tools of rhetorical theory and composition theory have been discussed as a shifting ration–oscillating betwee the polls of production and interpretation. This course traces contemporary debates about the productive and interpretive dimensions of rhetoric and composition, debates that continue to define the various theoretical agendas of the discipline. In order to understand these debates, we will begin with contemporary texts and then work backwards to their foundations. The contemporary debates of rhetoric and composition are founded in canonical texts from within the discipline and outside of it, adn we will “drill down” to such texts after reading some of the contemporary scholarship on a range of topics: ideology critique, cultural studies pedagogy, hermeneutics, posthermenutics, and invention. A tenative list of texts includes works by David Bartholomae, James Berlin, Maurice Blanchot, Diane D. Davis, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Steven Mailloux, John Muckelbauer, Thomas J. Rickert, Geoff Sirc, and Gregory Ulmer.

ENG 7065 (Writing Technologies)
Writing Machines: Techne, Technology, Technologics
Jeff Pruchnic
Description: The formal division between logos (discourse, reason, and “true” representation) and tekhne (technical skills and objects as well as “cunning” and “wile”) in Greek Antiquity, and various attempts to realign the boundaries between these domains up to the present, will provide a broad framework for this year’s course. We will pay particular attention to rhetoric as a discipline that has been historically located somewhere between these two categories, as well as how the relationship between tekhne and logos has been engaged in contemporary critical and cultural theory about technology and its subjective, social, and political effects. A tenative list of texts is available here.

ENG 7770/LIN 7770 (Discourse Analysis)
Ellen Barton
Description: Discourse analysis is the investigation of language in context; more specifically, discourse analysis describes the organization of oral and/or written language above the level of the sentence in interactional and institutional contexts, from friendly conversation to formal testimony in courts of law. In this class, we will first review the approaches, concepts, and methods in the discourse analysis of conversational language (using Deborah Cameron’s Working with Spoken Discourse) and the discourse analysis of conversational language (using Heidi Hamilton’s A Guide to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines). In the second part of the class, we will develop single and group research projects following student interests–e.g.., academic discourse, medical discourse, narratives, sports commentary, etc.