English courses for fall 2024
1000 level
ENG 1010 - Basic Writing
All sections
English 1010 prepares students for English 1020 by building upon their diverse skills to help them become critical readers and effective writers at the college level. The main goals of the course are (1) to teach students to integrate reading and writing in basic academic genres; (2) to use a writing process that incorporates drafting, revising and editing for grammar and mechanics; and (3) to write according to the conventions of college writing, including documentation.
To achieve these goals, the course encourages students to read carefully; respond analytically and critically; and write in a variety of academic genres, including summary, response, analysis and argument for an academic audience.
ENG 1020 - (BC) Introductory College Writing
All sections
In ENG 1020 you'll apply the Wayne State writing curriculum's core emphases of discourse community, genre, rhetorical situation and metacognition/reflection to written and multimedia works focused on specific audiences, such as your classmates, academic and professional audiences of various types or civic communities you might belong to or wish to influence in a particular way. While, as with all of the courses in the Wayne State required writing sequence, mechanical correctness and appropriate academic writing styles are key concerns, in ENG 1020 you'll also concentrate specifically on rhetoric (or persuasion) and argument as major objectives of many important kinds of writing you may be asked to produce. By focusing on rhetoric and on audience, assignments in ENG 1020 will require you to do two major types of work. In one type, you'll analyze a particular piece of argumentative discourse to determine how it succeeds (or fails) to appropriately impact its audience. In another type, you'll choose a particular issue and a relevant audience for that issue and then argue for a certain point or for a certain action to be taken by that audience. Work in 1020 often takes place through the following key writing tasks, several of which might serve as long-term projects in your 1020 course: genre and subgenre analyses, genre critiques, researched position arguments, rhetorical analyses, definition analyses and arguments, proposal arguments and reflective argument and portfolio.
ENG 1020 - (BC) Introductory College Writing
Adrienne Jankens
Building upon students’ diverse skills, English 1020 prepares students for reading, research and writing in college classes. As members of an ENG 1020 section of the Composition Learning Community (CLC), students in this section will regularly participate in peer group conversations with each other and with peer mentors regarding research and writing. Drawing from their research work and multimodal projects, students will develop presentations for and/or attend the CLC Writing Showcase in December.
2000 level
2250: (CI) British Literature: Writing About Texts
Ken Jackson
Self-conscious? Wondering all the time how to read people and how they read you? Anxious about all that? Maybe exhausted? You should be. The whole course of Anglo-American culture has worked for a long time to make you this way. A fast and fun look at Brit lit from some of its earliest moments to the modern day should give you a better sense of how you got how you are - and how you can manage it better. Briefly, we spend a lot of time watching other people (and they spend time watching us), often imitating and shaping our manners and habits to suit the norm or what seems to be the top of the social pyramid (you will recall the agony of jr. high or high school). Who we "are" is often a performative version of our more "inner" selves and we perform or act to compete in society (this makes us all slightly nuts, disconnected from our inner being). We do that, I will try to show, because European aristocracy did that and our sharpest artists recorded it. We learned our manners from them. So we will read some Chaucer, Castiglione, Shakespeare, Austen, Wilde, Shaw, Maugham, John Cleese (Monty Python), Ricky Gervais (the English *Office*). Short writing assignments (short so I can attend to helping you with sentence-level writing !) and a final project of your choosing. I talk or lecture a lot early on and you talk a lot later as you get the hang of it. Since we meet at 4 o'clock you can probably gain extra credit by bringing me coffee or cookies or something.
ENG 2390: (IC, DEI) Introduction to African American Literature: Writing about Texts
All sections
Introduction to major themes and some major writers of African-American literature, emphasizing modern works. Reading and writing about representative poetry, fiction, essays and plays.
English 2395: (DEI, CI) Stories of Detroit: Writing about Texts
Laval Duncan
Focused on New York, a popular television series of the late 1950s, the "Naked City," regularly reminded its audience that the city held millions of untold stories, and closed each episode with the reminder that “this has been one of them.” Detroit, too, has untold stories. Located among the greatest freshwater lakes in the world (“Fresh Water Seas”) this was once a nexus of trade for indigenous peoples. Given a French name (“between the straits”), it appears on the map as a fortification in the colonial wars determining who will dominate the continent. From a small frontier town that burns to the ground in the early 1800s and is then rebuilt, it emerges as a metropolis in the 20th century, one of America’s great cities.
Detroit has seen war, slavery, immigration, migration; commerce, industry, intersections of culture—and social struggle. All have helped define the nation and the world. It is a place of powerful events and everyday lives, ordinary and extraordinary lives lived. Yet many of us know little of this and few of its stories. This course allows us to discover and explore some of these in a variety of texts. Our job will be to read each text carefully so that we can appreciate how the language is shaping that text and how contexts can help us understand what we are reading—and then to write about that.
ENG 2430: (CI) Digital Literacies: Writing about Texts
Ruth Boeder
Misinformation. Filter Bubbles. Hyperconsumerism. Doxxing. There are a lot of examples of communication gone wrong on the Internet. This class will apply ancient rhetorical theory to help us understand why and when communication breaks down and explore how those ideas and principles can still help us to communicate effectively today. Assignments will include weekly reading summaries or quizzes, three digital/multimodal compositions (such as webpages/sites, podcasts, educational videos or other media of the student’s choosing) and a final summative presentation. In keeping with the best traditions of web publications, at least one project will require collaboration and at least one project must be public-facing.
ENG 2540: (GL) Global Literatures: Writing about Texts
Sarika Chandra
Race, gender, migration, the environment and more. This course focuses on how contemporary global literature relates to major issues for our current moment. Our discussions will focus on how these concepts have been understood by writers from around the world and how these topics connect to ideas of nations, borders, globalization, disease and health along with struggles for antiracism and social justice more broadly. We will examine a variety of texts including film and other media. Readings may include works by writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Laila Lalami and Thea Doelwijt.
ENG 2570: (CI, DEI) Women Writers: Writing about Texts
Elizabeth Evans
In this course we will read and analyze powerful stories written in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries by diverse women. Reading literature written by women from a variety of backgrounds reminds us that gender intersects with other constituents of identity, including race, class, sexuality and religion. We will pay special attention to this intersectionality in our discussion of these books as we consider to what extent women’s writing constitutes a distinct literary subculture forged out of what women may have in common, despite obvious and important differences. We will ask: How have women writers negotiated their relationships with language and literary history when patriarchal systems have so often limited women’s access to literacy and sociopolitical agency? How does their writing challenge literary conventions and reimagine history, tradition and resistance? Our texts are likely to include novels and short stories by Alison Bechdel, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Zitkala Šu and Virginia Woolf. This course has a hybrid format that provides the face-to-face meeting, collaborative learning and engagement with peers of the traditional classroom combined with the convenience of remote learning. It will meet in person about one Tuesday a month (tentatively, 8/27, 9/24, 10/22, 11/19, 12/10). On all other class days, we will meet synchronously on Zoom using our cameras, speakers and microphones to facilitate class and small group discussion.
ENG 2800: (CI) Foundations of Creative Writing (Writing Detroit)
M.L. Liebler
This course fulfills a Gen Ed in "CULTURAL INQUIRY," and it is designed to offer you a unique learning experience through The Motown Creative Writing Learning Community. This English 2800 class is based on all things Detroit. It is essentially an introduction to creative writing, creative thinking and overall creativity using fiction, poetry, flash nonfiction and some drama/dialogue writing exercises - all with a Motown twist. Its purpose is to expose you to your creativity while sampling Detroit culture and listening to some live oral histories by well-known artists from Detroit. A Learning Community at WSU is meant to better connect you to the university and to help you establish yourselves as successful college students. We meet in a friendly environment and we will have peer mentors with us in each session. There is no prescribed method for teaching creativity, just bring an open mind. Books are inexpensive This class is designed for both creative enjoyment and academic learning.
ENG 2800: (CI) Foundations of Creative Writing
Chris Tysh
Whether prose or poetry, imaginative writing is removed from ordinary channels of communication. This space is what we call the “poetic.” The present course should be viewed as an introduction to some of the most innovative writing in English. Emphasis will be laid upon various conventions governing literary production. The goal is to develop a certain competency in the reading and writing of an imaginative text. The class will read short stories, poems and memoirs, which will be the basis for students’ own writing. The format of the class will be a combination of lecture and discussion. Requirements: attendance, preparedness, participation, ten weekly assignments (approx. 1 page) and a final manuscript of original work (15 pages minimum), representative of the genres studied.
3000 level
ENG 3010: (IC) Intermediate Writing
All sections
Building on students' diverse skills, ENG 3010 prepares students for reading, research and writing in the disciplines and professions, particularly for writing intensive courses in the majors. To do so, it asks students to consider how research and writing are fundamentally shaped by the disciplinary and professional communities using them. Students analyze the kinds of texts, evidence and writing conventions used in their own disciplinary or professional communities and consider how these items differ across communities. Thus students achieve key composition objectives: (1) learn how the goals and expectations of specific communities shape texts and their functions; (2) learn how writing constructs knowledge in the disciplines and professions and (3) develop a sustained research project that analyzes or undertakes writing in a discipline or profession.
ENG 3010: (IC) Intermediate Writing
Ruth Boeder
As a student in this course, you will work toward three core goals. The first of these is to develop a basic understanding of the discourse within a specific scholarly or professional community you intend to join. Secondly, you will practice researching and reading deeply into a focused research question developed around a contemporary topic from your discourse community. Finally, you will analyze and approximate genres of writing that synthesize your research and eventually lead you to develop a valuable area of inquiry that can serve as a foundation for future work within your field or discipline.
ENG 3010: (IC) Intermediate Writing
Jule Thomas
Building on students’ diverse skills, writing in the professions prepares students for reading, research and writing in a variety of professional situations and for the writing intensive courses in their majors. To do this, the course asks students to consider how research and writing are fundamentally shaped by the disciplinary, professional and public communities using them. Students analyze the kinds of texts, evidence and writing conventions used in their professional communities and consider how these differ based on the audience of the communications. Thus, students achieve key composition objectives: 1) learn how the goals and expectations of specific communities shape texts and their functions; 2) learn how writing constructs knowledge in nursing disciplines and professions; 3) develop a sustained research project that analyzes or undertakes writing in a discipline or profession and 4) use collaboration and reflection for completion of assignments and course. To achieve these goals, the course places considerable emphasis on analytical reading and writing and developing research skills. Key projects are a genre analysis of writing in your field of study, research exploration and the research proposal. Writing in the professions follows a writing in the discipline (WID) approach to teaching where students are guided and supported during their exploration of their profession’s goals, needed level of participation and expertise and genres of writing. This curriculum supports students' movement from understanding professional discourse to initiating their own research project to exploring the communications necessary for entering the profession.
ENG 3020: (IC) Writing and Community
All sections
ENG 3020 satisfies the intermediate composition (IC) requirement. It combines advanced research writing techniques with community-based activities with local community organizations. In addition to coursework, the course requires community-based work outside of normal class time distributed across the semester. Satisfies the honors college service-learning requirement.
English 3020: (IC) Writing and Community: Centering Black Feminist & Womanist Rhetoric
Jessica Ridgeway
Black Feminist-Womanist Rhetoric will be a hybrid-online/face-to-face class centralized in Black feminist thought and womanist theories that articulate and argue for alternative methods for understanding Black women’s subjectivities. More specifically, this course will analyze Black women as rhetorical subjects, along with their rhetorical traditions, literacy practices, experiential knowledge(s), language, digital spaces/places, histories, music, activism and other methods of making and communicating knowledge. Students will also learn how to write and develop multimodal projects in collaboration with community organizations all while developing their skills as critical writers and thinkers and future scholars. This course is structured as hybrid format, which will meet primarily online synchronously on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 2:15 p.m. and once a month in person due to outside community service component and the instructor’s limited access to campus.
ENG 3020: (IC) Writing and Community
Thomas Trimble
ENG 3020 prepares students for reading, research and writing in the disciplines and professions. Along with traditional coursework, students in this section will perform 20 hours of volunteer service tutoring school-aged children in an after-school program administered by the St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center in Detroit.
English 3130: American Literature to 1865
Laval Duncan
English 3130 is a survey of how American Literature developed up to and through the Civil War. The first phase of our survey begins before the European settlements of North America and continues that development with the formation of the Nation and early 19th-century writers, like Irving and Cooper, who experimented with the idea of an American Literature. The second phase takes up the Transcendentalists and anti-slavery writers, as well as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville—and others who powerfully define the idea of a National Literature from the mid-19th century through the Civil War: notably Whitman and Dickinson. At various times, as we proceed, we will pay some attention to various recent treatments of this early American Literature. There will be almost weekly quizzes, a midterm and a final—and both a short research presentation and a leadership role in discussing one of our assigned readings.
ENG 3250: Professional Editing
Kathy Elrick
ENG 3250 introduces students to technical and professional editing practices used in the workplace. In this course, students gain an overview of copy editing and comprehensive editing practices including managing document production, analyzing editorial tasks within broader contexts and working with clients to design appropriate editing goals and timelines for productions. Students will also engage with emerging concerns related to ethics and globalized practices from the field. In addition to being an editor, there is consistent demand for writers who have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of editing and who understand how to implement editing practices within a professional setting. Technical editing experience can help writers both learn to develop and fine-tune their own written products as well as gain a deeper knowledge of the production cycle of a document.
ENG 3820: Introduction to Writing Fiction
Natalie Bakopoulos
English 3820 is an introductory creative writing course focused on the art and craft of writing fiction. No previous experience writing fiction is required, but an interest in close reading and thoughtful, imaginative writing and revision is key. We’ll closely examine the elements of fiction with the goal of becoming better at its craft, looking closely at how a story is made and the choices writers make as they imagine and draft. What makes a strong scene or a compelling character or a good sentence? How do you decide between first-person and third-person narration, between past and present tense, between a story that takes place over the span of five minutes versus five weeks versus five years? How might we transform our own memories and experiences and the places we know into fiction? How do you capture a moment on the page? We’ll study various elements of fiction, from the art of good dialogue to creating subtext to the power of the image; from crafting a strong opening paragraph to strategies for endings. And more. Students should be prepared to participate in the weekly in-class discussions and small-group workshops (where students will discuss their own work in progress), to read and respond to the assigned readings and to produce both thoughtful responses to the readings and new, original, creative work. This is a hybrid course. Though the majority of our meetings will be in-person, expect several asynchronous classes* that will allow for different ways of engaging with the material and contributing to our ongoing conversation. They will involve listening to and responding to short craft lectures, working on writing prompts and/or participating in online group discussions. *Asynchronous meetings are scheduled on Sept. 12, Oct. 3, Oct. 31, Nov. 26 and Dec. 10.
5000 level
ENG 5030 Topics in Women's Studies: CAMP
Peter Marra
Despite its common linguistic use and perhaps overuse, the aesthetic category “camp” remains a nebulous category for understanding literature, art and performance. So much so that the statement “It’s camp!” and reciprocal question “Is it camp?” have both proliferated in contemporary internet slang and meme culture. CAMP, the course, will explore conceptualizations of the camp from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” and Esther Newton’s Mother Camp through to contemporary investigations and renegotiations of the term and its uses. We will consider a range of cultural objects through which to better understand (or not understand) camp. This includes poetry, literature, film, television, drag, popular music and more. At the end of the course, we will probably still not know what camp truly means. Which is, in fact, camp.
ENG 5080: Topics in Global and Transnational Studies: Borders, Rac, and Capitalism
Sarika Chandra
The changing forms of power relations encompass border struggles over global, regional and national geographies. We will examine how writers, critics and filmmakers from different parts of the world have sought to understand and define a historically shifting integrated world that generates social divisions such as race, gender and sexuality. How do narrative arcs reimagine global spaces about major questions such as those of capitalism, food/water, health, disease, urban spaces, labor, nation, imperialism and social justice? How do texts attempt to capture cross-border flows across different boundaries? Readings may include texts by authors such as Laila Lalami, Grace Ogot and Orhan Pamuk. This is a discussion-based course, therefore attendance is required.
ENG 5080/GLS 5700: Topics in Global and Transnational Studies: Climate, Media, and Environment
Elena Past
This course considers major environmental challenges, foremost among these climate change, through the interdisciplinary lenses of Environmental Media Studies and the Environmental Humanities. How do different media seek to tell the story of climate change, a massive problem that can be hard to visualize? How do the media tackle problems of disaster fatigue, environmental grief, and distraction, in order to continue to focus attention on one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century? How do they navigate the global scale of the problem while being mindful of local realities? What environmental impact do media themselves have? We will study an array of climate media from around the world, including feature films, documentary series, podcasts, and digital humanities projects, to analyze and critique genres and mediatic forms of climate protest, resistance, and activism.
ENG/LIN 5700: Introduction to Linguistic Theory
Walter Edwards
Language is a human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals such as voice sounds, gestures and/or written symbols. Language is unique to humans. This course is an introduction to linguistics, the scientific discipline that studies the nature and use of human Language and languages. Linguistics investigates language acquisition, language competence and language performance by seeking answers to such questions as what constitutes knowledge of language, how knowledge of language is acquired and how knowledge of language is used. Linguistic theories seek to characterize the general principles inherent in all human languages. Linguistics has at least twelve branches, too many to be covered in one semester. Thus, only the core areas of the subject will be covered in this course. To that end, we will study the rule-governed ways that languages organize sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), social usage (sociolinguistics) and change (language change). The linguistic concepts to be discussed in the class will be illustrated mainly with English examples so that most students can use their own native language competence in the discussions and analyses.
ENG 5740/LIN 5300: Syntax
Ljiljana Progovac
The course examines the structure of phrases and sentences using the framework of one of the most recent approaches to syntax, the Minimalist Program. The goal of the theory is not only to discover various subconscious principles and rules that make up grammars of all human languages but also to express these rules in the most economical terms possible. Instead of just observing the grammatical phenomena on the surface, this approach tries to understand the inner workings of language, at a deeper, more abstract level. The requirements include participation, homework assignments, two midterm exams and a final paper/presentation. This class is required of all Linguistics majors, minors and M.A. students and should also appeal to anyone interested in a deeper understanding of how human languages are structured.
ENG 5830: Writing in the Workplace: Narrative Medicine
Nicole Varty
The work of medical professionals is tightly interwoven with the stories of those they treat and with whom they practice. This class explores the act of writing within narrative medicine, a discipline at the intersection of health care and the humanities, as a means to improve equity and efficacy in clinical practice through increased understanding of patients’ lived experiences. In this course, students will explore literacy practices including reading and writing stories, along with rhetorical listening, mapping and reflecting. At the end of the course students should have a deeper understanding of themselves as writers and how the act of writing can be used meaningfully in clinical contexts. Prerequisites: AFS 2390, with a minimum grade of C, ENG 2390 with a minimum grade of C, ENG 3010 with a minimum grade of C, ENG 3020 with a minimum grade of C or ENG 3050 with a minimum grade of C.
ENG 5860 Topics in Creative Writing: "I is Another": Personhood and the Creative Act
Chris Tysh
This course will focus on the construct of the self as it is inscribed in literature. By reading fiction, poetry and a cross-genre text, we will probe the complex question of being in its relation to the other(s) and the world. If the I is always already plural, as Roland Barthes claims, how does the literary act negotiate the multiple selves within us? What happens to the notion of personhood once it enters the creative field? How to read its dreams, desires and memories; its rifts and dissolutions; its mirrors and ghosts? How is self-creation anchored culturally and ideologically? How does language give voice to the unknown and nomadic inside the fictional and lyric I? In the final analysis, this course is a site of permission to read works that attend to the interface of self and other, word and world, writing and desire. The reading list will encompass a 1936 modernist novel, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes; Tristessa, a novella by Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac; a postmodern novel, Margery Kempe by Robert Glück; and a genre-bending collection, Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In addition, we will study the poetry of Peter Gizzi, Harryette Mullen and Martha Ronk. A few theoretical essays will extend our discussion. The class will be a seminar-style discussion. Requirements: attendance, preparedness, participation, journals, one oral presentation, weekly assignments and a final manuscript of original works (25 pages minimum) or an analytical paper (ten pages minimum and three secondary sources). NB. Students will be given the opportunity to write either (or both) discursive and creative works. Grading: Participation/preparedness: 10%; oral presentation:10%; weekly assignments: 30%; journals: 20%; final project: 30%
ENG 5880: Fiction Writing Workshop
Michael Okpanachi
What happens when two different peoples, civilizations, and cultures meet? What kind of space and tension emerge within such an encounter? How does this meeting reveal the history, fears, and faith of the other? In what ways has fiction been used to tell (and show) the underlying suspicion that occasion such an encounter? What possibilities? Then what is the typical outcome and transformation that follow such contact? This course seeks to create a classroom that critically and creatively engages these questions. We will read and discuss selected writers whose books portray this type of encounter. For example: an Arab encounters a French man in Algeria; Zulu, Indians, and the colored people share space and land with white and Jewish South Africans; an Igbo chief priest meets a British man in colonial Nigeria; an English seaman's travel to the Belgian Congo reveals something about the relationship between black natives and Europeans; a Pakistani man meets an American in Lahore; a French girl in love with a Chinese-Vietnamese man in the backdrop of French Indochina. The class will also give focus to the art and practice of short fiction writing. Students will be required to compose original short stories for a writing workshop. The class will be structured around intensive reading, discussion, and workshop. Authors we will read include Marguerite Duras, Nadine Gordimer, Michael Ondaatje, Albert Camus, Kamel Daoud, Mohsin Hamid, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Michel Houellebecq.
ENG 5992/4991: Senior/Honors Seminar: Anglophone Female Voices
renée hoogland
This class concentrates on the (problematically defined) field of Global Anglophone literature, which analyses texts produced both at the center and the peripheries of Britain’s imperial ventures, including Canada, Kenya, Jamaica, Nigeria, South Africa, South Asia and Great Britain itself. Alongside critical readings on the art of the short story and the relationship between life and literature, we will read a wide selection of female-authored 20th- and 21st-century texts from the greater Anglophone world, including “multiracial” voices in the USA and explore how these fictional works illuminate the forces that have and continue to shape the globalized yet unequal world we inhabit today. Special attention will be paid to global histories of gender, race and sexuality. Primary works include writings by Arundhati Roy, Bharati Mukherjee, Nadine Gordimer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michele Cliff, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Amy Tan and Jamaica Kincaid. Coursework comprises (thorough) readings of fictional and non-fictional texts, active participation in class discussions, weekly low-stake writing assignments, monthly reader responses, a short reflection essay (non-graded) and a final take-home exam.
6000 level
ENG/LIN 6720: Pidgin and Creole Languages
Walter Edwards
Over 10 million people across the world speak pidgins and creoles either as first languages or as lingua franca. These languages are spoken in large areas in Africa, South America, North America, the Caribbean, Asia, Australia and on several Pacific islands. These are languages that are born because of contact between culturally and linguistically diverse groups of people, but because these languages are of mixed linguistic pedigrees they are often
incorrectly considered inferior languages. Pidgins are structurally simplified languages that serve as communication vehicles between groups of people who speak mutually unintelligible languages. Although the simplified structures of pidgins allow students to examine their linguistic properties relatively easily, students will be able to see them as real languages that function very efficiently in their social contexts. Creoles languages uniquely focus linguistic characteristics from two or more donor languages into new languages that are native to their speakers. They provide students with the opportunity to see how linguistic principles from different languages intertwine to form new syntheses. Creoles have also attracted the attention of biologists and geneticists through the now famous Bioprogram Hypothesis proposed by Derek Bickerton (1981). This hypothesis claims that human minds have evolved in such a way that, if left unimpeded by cultural languages, children living in social groups would create and speak Creole-like languages. Creoles thus provide a laboratory on the human mind and its evolutionary progress.
In this course, we will first consider the phenomenon of contact linguistics which leads to various linguistic outcomes, including pidgins and creoles. Then, we will consider some general linguistic properties of pidgins and creoles and discuss the issue of their uniqueness as linguistic systems. We will also discuss the history and development of pidgin and creole languages. In this regard, we will discuss various versions of the monogenetic and polygenetic theories of the origin of these languages and compare them to the bioprogram hypothesis and to universal grammar as formulations that attempt to explain the similarities among creoles across the world. Students will also analyze linguistic data from specific creole languages and describe their linguistic features, including their tense, aspect, number and case systems. Students will also consider theories that see Creole Genesis as second language acquisition (SLA).
ENG 6800: Advanced Creative Writing
Donovan Hohn
This is an advanced, multi-genre, creative writing workshop open to M.A. and Ph.D. students in English. With permission of the instructor, it is also open to graduate students from other disciplinary areas and to qualified undergraduates who have excelled in at least one 5000-level creative writing workshop. Writers of fiction and creative nonfiction will be required to write and revise between twenty-five and fifty pages of prose. Poets will write and revise a sequence or collection comprising at least ten poems. Students may, with the instructor’s permission, write in more than one genre. Readings will include selections of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction to be chosen by students from one of three anthologies and craft essays about the art of poetry and prose to be chosen by the instructor. Most of our time will be devoted to workshop. Every week we will read student manuscripts and respond to them in discussion and in writing.
7000 level
ENG 7001: Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English
Chera Kee
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the critical theoretical frameworks and issues of interest in different areas of English studies and to provide professionalization for entering Ph.D. students. As such, students in the course can expect to read an array of works in critical theory as well as receive an orientation into the Ph.D. program in English. Throughout the semester, assignments will work on familiarizing graduate students with forms of writing that they will be called upon to produce throughout their graduate careers, including abstracts, book reviews, reading lists, proposals and the forms of writing expected in qualifying exams, the prospectus and the dissertation. Students will be encouraged to focus their work in the course on the particular methodologies and intellectual traditions of most interest to them.
ENG 7064: Teaching of Writing
Jeff Pruchnic
ENG 7064 provides an extensive overview of pedagogical theories relevant to writing instruction. The class balances attention to the history of higher education writing scholarship with a focus on best practices for teaching writing in the present. The class will be organized thematically around scholarly discussion of specific aspects of composing. Major deliverables include weekly responses to readings as well as a capstone research essay on writing pedagogy.
ENG/LIN 7710: Advanced Studies in Linguistic Structure: Topics in Syntax/Semantics Interface
Ljiljana Progovac
This course examines a selection of prominent linguistic topics that straddle the boundary between syntax and semantics. The topics include: (i) gradable adjectives, including comparison and suppletion; (ii) the nature of coordination/conjunction across languages; (iii) the expression of negation in natural language, including pleonastic (semantically vacuous) negation and negative concord; (iv) negative polarity and entailment; (v) logophora and perspective/point of view; (vi) conditionals and correlatives across languages; (vii) quantification and verbal aspect across languages; (viii) ellipsis. The goal is to expose the students to the richness of data and analysis in these domains, as well as to guide them in finding their own voice as they work on their presentation and paper. Requirements for the class include participation in class discussion, reading reports, a midterm exam and a final paper and presentation.
ENG 7850: Pedagogical Practicum I
Adrienne Jankens
This in-person (Tuesday, 2:30-4:10) course engages new graduate teaching assistants in building skills in teaching composition at a university level generally and teaching Wayne State’s English 1020 course specifically. Teacher-learners will engage both the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching first-year composition through several strategies: reading pedagogical scholarship; familiarizing themselves with the challenges and controversies of the profession; composing lesson plans and teaching strategies throughout the semester; and reflecting on their teaching practices and identity. Most classes will be devoted to discussion of class readings and strategizing and reflecting on teaching ENG 1020.
8000 level
ENG 8008: Regarding Others: Perspective, Narrative, Empathy
Elizabeth Evans
Narrative perspective is a crucial issue in the interdisciplinary study of narrative and in literary, cultural and media studies broadly. To understand any story, we must ask from whose point of view the story is told and to what extent other viewpoints (and which!) are imagined. Writers use multiple perspectives, collective perspectives and unreliable narrators to raise ontological and epistemological questions. Readers raise their own questions (and objections) when an author’s identity and experiences don’t match those they represent. And texts of all sorts often evoke empathy and ethical response. In this course we will delve into theory, criticism and creative texts that investigate what it means to regard (to look at but also to consider) others. What are the ethics of representation? Our theory and criticism will come from the fields of narratology, cognitive psychology, philosophy, anthropology and especially literary and cultural studies. Our creative texts will primarily be twentieth-century fiction, with some forays into the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Our authors are likely to include Jane Austen, Teju Cole, Henry James, Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf. This course has a hybrid format that provides the face-to-face meeting, collaborative learning and engagement with peers of the traditional classroom combined with the convenience of remote learning. About one third of the meetings will be in person (tentatively, 8/27, 9/24, 10/22, 11/19, 12/10). On all other class days, we will meet synchronously on Zoom using our cameras, speakers and microphones to facilitate class discussion.