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  • 76 373: Topics in Rhetoric: Argument

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of argument. The session begins with an overview of major theories of (and approaches to) argument, along with short assignments to critically assess their value and relevance to the types of argument about which you, the student, are encouraged to investigate. You will choose a type or genre of argument upon which to focus your research. The argument type can be academic, practical, professional, and so forth, so long as it is understandable using terms and concepts covered by the course. During the second part of the session we will refine our understanding of argument, and you will develop your own approach to argument analysis. The last third of the session will be devoted to producing an original argument of the type you are researching.
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  • 76 375: Magazine Writing

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    In this course we'll be reading lots of great non-fiction, some of which has appeared in magazines during the past few years. We'll look at how excellent non-fiction for magazines has to employ a strong narrative voice, and the techniques of story telling. Students will be asked to research and write their own articles, based on a variety of assignments. The class will be conducted as a discussion, and demands participation from each class member.
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  • 76 376: Genre Studies

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    This is a companion class to Major Works of Modern Fiction in that it focuses on those writers one needs to know about in order to understand the literature of our time. The class deals with about half a dozen signal writers who best express the writing of their time, and have most influenced writers who came after them. The term ?modern? is flexible in its range, sometimes including everything from Shakespeare or Gutenberg on. Our range will be more defined, starting roughly with Thomas Hardy and ending with Wallace Stevens, or the period roughly from 1890 to 1925. We shall read the essential selections from poets like Hardy, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, T.S.Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, and samples from a couple of others like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. Our concern will be to become familiar with an important body of work, and also to develop or abilities to read, understand and comment on poetry.
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  • 76 377: Rhetoric of Fiction

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    Wayne Booth's book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, is one of the classic discussions of the ways in which fiction communicates, moves, or motivates us. It is a commonplace to assume that literature has a message, but it is still not at all clear just how an imaginative representation of the world does, or can, communicate. Booth had particular difficulty understanding how fiction could communicate a felt sense of life and value when there was doubt about narrative authority, or the 'reliability' of the author. So, postmodern fiction (from Joyce on) caused him problems. In an attempt to develop a postmodern rhetoric of fiction we shall be looking at texts that deal directly with issues of persuasion, or texts that seem directly to address the reader. Of particular interest will be texts that indirectly implicate the reader, and achieve a kind of implicit rhetoric even when they apparently frustrate normal expectations of communicative language (e.g. the apparent fact that the reader is also a character in Calvino's 'novel' if on a winters' night?). We'll consider the kinds of problems (and solutions to those problems) caused by excessive irony, by 'showing' rather than 'telling' and by the 'absent author,' in texts like Madame Bovary, Notes From Underground, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, etc.
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  • 76 378: Literacy: Educational Theory and Community Practice

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    Literacy has been called the engine of economic development, the road to social advancement, and the prerequisite for critical abstract thought. But is it? And what should count as literacy: using the discourse of an educated elite or laying down a rap? Competing theories of what counts as "literacy"?and how to teach it'shape educational policy and workplace training. However, they may ignore some remarkable ways literacy is also used by people in non-elite communities to speak and act for themselves. In this introduction to the interdisciplinary study of literacy?its history, theory, and problems?we will first explore competing theories of what literacy allows you to do, how people learn to carry off different literate practices, and what schools should teach. Then we will turn ideas into action in a hands-on, community literacy project, helping urban students use writing to take literate action for themselves. As mentors, we meet on campus for 8 weeks with teenagers from Pittsburgh's inner city neighborhoods who are working on the challenging transition from school to work. They earn the opportunity to come to CMU as part of Start On Success (SOS), an innovative internship that helps urban teenagers with hidden learning disabilities negotiate the new demands of work or college. We mentor them through Decision Makers (a CMU computer-supported learning project that uses writing as a tool for reflective decision making.) As your SOS Scholar creates a personal Decision Maker's Journey Book and learns new strategies for writing, planning and decision making, you will see literacy in action and develop your own skills in intercultural collaboration and inquiry. (See http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/courses/courses.html for full description)
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  • 76 385: Introduction to Discourse Analysis

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    Discourse analysis places a primary focus on how things are said; and this close attention to the details of ?language in use? can offer insight into a variety of questions posed by researchers across the humanities and social sciences. In this course, we will examine the way discourse is itself a form of social action that plays a fundamental role in organizing social, cultural, and political life. In addition to becoming familiar with a variety of approaches and topics in the study of discourse, a major aim of the course is for you to develop the tools and skills needed to analyze actual discourse data. This will involve learning how to read transcripts and transcribe data at different levels of detail, learning how to ask questions about the data based on different analytic interests, and developing a vocabulary of scholarly terms and concepts that will allow you to comment on discourse features as you formulate interesting and persuasive claims. The first part of the course will involve assignments with shared data to develop fundamental skills. In addition, seminar participants will be responsible for selecting pieces of discourse for mini data sessions throughout the semester. For the final assignment, you will choose and analyze a piece of spoken or written discourse of interest to you. In the end, you should come away from the course with an ability to think critically about the way discourse operates in the world.
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  • 76 386: Language & Culture

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    In this course, we will take an ethnographic approach to examine language as a form of action through which social, cultural and political relations are constituted. Topics will explore language as it intersects with thought, ideology, identity, race and racism, ethnicity, gender, power, and linguistic diversity. In addition to articles, we will read several full-length ethnographies that focus on language practices within particular communities. The goals of the course are to (1) provide an introduction to key ideas in the study of language and culture, including the concepts of ideology, dialogism, identity, and indexicality; (2) equip students with a critical awareness of the role language plays in social, cultural and political interaction across a variety of cultures; and (3) explore the potential of ethnography for informing analyses of language and discourse.
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  • 76 390: Style

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    In classical rhetoric, 'style? is a term that refers not to what we write but how we write. Yet considerations about how we write ? coherence, emphasis, concision, shape, diction, and elegance ? can never be fully separated from an understanding of what, why, and for whom we are writing. Ideally, then, far from being an exercise in expressing personal idiosyncrasies, revising style means understanding a set of strategic choices and always weighing these choices in relation to questions such as, ?Who is my audience?? and ?What is my purpose?? This course will have two main objectives: (1) to help you develop a repertoire of stylistic options and a critical vocabulary for discussing those options, and (2) to give you the opportunity to put this knowledge into practice when revising your own writing and the writing of others. Two recurring questions for us will be the following: if style depends on both the rhetorical situation of a text and knowledge of specific guidelines, how can we ever say that we have achieved ?good? style? Should stylistic rules or practical experience carry more weight in the decisions we make as writers?
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  • 76 391: Document Design

    12.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    Today, many professionals are responsible for the visual design of documents. This course provides students who have already learned the foundation of written communication with an opportunity to develop the ability to analyze and create visual-verbal synergy in printed documents. Students will be introduced to the basic concepts and vocabulary, as well as the practical issues of visual communication design through a series of hands-on projects in various rhetorical situations. Assigned readings will complement the projects in exploring document design from historical, theoretical, and technological perspectives. Class discussions and critiquing are an essential part of this course. Adobe Creative Studio (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator) will be taught in class, and used to create the assigned projects.
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  • 76 394: Research in English

    9.00 Credits
    Carnegie Mellon University

    Advising Note: 76-394 is offered in the fall only. EBA majors should take 76-394 in the fall of their junior year to prepare for EBA 400-level seminar courses, for which 76-394 is a prerequisite. This course offers training in gathering information systematically and building arguments based on that information. Students will hone their skills in choosing a topic, addressing it with the help of relevant research resources, reading and interpreting texts, doing critical commentary, and ethnographic fieldwork techniques such as observation and interview. Students will also learn how to situate their work in the context of research in the field, by testing their hypotheses against alternatives and presenting their research to audiences in English studies. Course content and student research will be organized around a genealogical approach to two of Shakespeare's plays, Othello and The Merchant of Venice. We will investigate how performances of these two texts signify race, class, and gender, and other cultural differences in the very recent past and in the early period of British Shakespearian adaptation, 1660-1760. Although we will read scholarly editions of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, our research will focus on the cultural contexts for how these two plays have been performed and interpreted, rather than on the original play texts or on Shakespeare as an author. (See dept. for full description)
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