Graduate courses

The systematic study of effective composition, argument, and persuasion—the art of rhetoric—dates back at least to the epics of Homer and flourishes today in countless academic disciplines and spheres of social life. In fact, the historical “empire” of rhetoric is so vast that it “digests regimes, religions, and civilizations” (Roland Barthes). This seminar seeks to introduce students to some of the essential concepts, issues, and controversies in the history and theory of rhetoric by analyzing selections from key texts from antiquity and the twentieth century. In addition to demonstrating the relevance of rhetorical theory and criticism to a variety of social, intellectual, and cultural fields (politics, feminism, critical race theory, etc.), the seminar also explores emerging forms of rhetorical practice made possible by new media technologies, such as digital advertising and information warfare. Ideally, students will leave the seminar with a firm grasp of basic concepts of rhetorical theory and a deeper appreciation for rhetoric as an inventive, critical, and multidisciplinary enterprise. 

This course introduces students to both the theory and practice of “Critical Design,” broadly construed. Critical Design is not a field of its own, but a mode of design thinking that is informed by critical theories and research methods from the arts and humanities. Critical Design can intersect with and draw on established fields of design from graphic and UX design to industrial and urban design. The course begins with an overview of the history of design as critique, before examining the recent emergence of research-creation practices such as speculative design, critical making, discursive design, and applied media theory. The positionality of designers and audiences will be considered in readings and assignments that focus on gender, disability, race, and class. Special attention will be paid to the design of media technologies and the infrastructures that support them, which involves methods in UX design, sustainable hardware design, and digital urban design. Students will demonstrate their knowledge of course materials through writing, design, and light fabrication.

This course is an introduction to research methods used in rhetoric and writing studies. Students will become familiar with a range of methods, including methods in technical and professional communication, mixed methods, and rhetorical field methods, among others. This course allows students to map a variety of methods while understanding the relationship between practices (methods) and theoretical frameworks (methodologies), allowing students to pair appropriate methods to their own research questions. Outcomes of this course are an understanding of how to design a research project and how to support it with methods that are appropriate, feasible, flexible, and ethical.

“Modernism and Gender” will introduce graduate students to the diverse ways in which American modernist literature and modernist literary studies engage with issues related to gender. Our semester’s inquiry will be divided into three (in many ways overlapping/intersecting) areas of focus: (1) Modernism and Feminism—how do women modernists use literary genres to engage with femininity and feminism? (2) Modernism and Masculinity—how do male modernists write in ways that expose the fraught ideals that characterize early twentieth-century masculinity? (3) Queer Modernisms—how to authors mobilize experimental literary form to challenge heteronormative conceptions of gender?

While the gothic has often been understood as mining deep, uncanny psychologies, an equally important tradition in gothic studies emphasizes its investment in surfaces rather than depths—in externalized feelings or moods often described as “atmospheric.” This course will examine that gothic interest in atmospheres and recent theoretical work on the atmospheric from three perspectives: theories of affect and extra-personal feeling; theories of the sonic environment and ecoacoustics; and new approaches to the “ecogothic.” Object texts will range from the eighteenth-century “gothic revival” to more recent music, film, and digital media.

Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy discusses the nature of culture itself in the context of British class structure, warning of trends toward anarchy.

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is a seminal defense of the liberty of thought and discussion, leading directly into his defense of the emancipation of women, and then into his analysis of the strengths yet dangers of socialism.

John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University, together with The Rise and Progress of Universities, sketches the history, the subjects and the teaching of the university (which as a recent scholar has noted, is one of the greatest creations of Western civilization); this volume has been said to be second only to Aristotle's Poetics as a study of education. Newman's A Grammar of Assent argues that the scientific standards of evidence and assent are too narrow and are inapplicable in concrete life, that logic and its conclusions are not transferable to real life decision-making.

Finally, John Ruskin writes on architecture, painting and economics. His chapter "The Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of Venice explains the seven moral traits characteristic of Gothic cathedral architecture. Modern Painters elaborates the artistic characteristics of the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, greatest of British landscape painters. His Unto This Last addresses political and social issues in economic life: this little volume was Mahatma Gandi's inspiration for his own social and economic ideas, influencing millions.

“I love the wild not less than the good,” wrote Thoreau, distinguishing, and conjoining, two important values. In this course we will read (mostly) American literature in several genres (sermon, poetry, fiction, essay, children’s literature, journalism) tracing an essential dialectic between the wild and the moral good, where the wild appears sometimes in opposition (the wild is bad, or indifferent), sometimes in a complementary role (we need both: “the wild not less than the good”), sometimes as a more fundamental “good” (the received moral good is bad, or untrue). Along the way we will read relevant cultural theory and test our thinking against writings in moral philosophy, including recent work on “moral abolitionism."

Ecocriticism began as an attempt to read literature for its connections to the biophysical world. The “classic” ecocritical canon consisted of works such as Walden, anything by Wendell Berry, and The Prelude, all of which were prized for their palpable and heartfelt natural realism. In effect, the goal of ecocritics was to remind mainstream critics that the inclusion of natural settings, animals, and plants in texts wasn’t accidental: some authors were actually interested in nature qua nature, not simply “nature” as a metaphor for aesthetic or social concerns. In recent years, ecocritics have sharpened the critique, no doubt in tandem with the imminence of global environmental catastrophe, and ecocriticism has moved away from its exclusive fixation on nature writing and fellow-traveling literary modes. Second-wave ecocritical approaches (drawing on feminism, post-structuralism, rhetoric, Marxism, affect theory, indigenous studies, systems theory), along with work from the allied discipline of environmental communication (drawing on rhetoric, communication and media studies, linguistics) instead seek more comprehensive understandings of the culture-environment dynamic; indeed, some ecocritics boldly aspire to detect an “environmental unconscious” in any piece of literature. Moreover, this growing theorization has inspired ecocriticism to extend its reach to other areas of cultural endeavor: art, film, new media, political discourse, religious and philosophical texts, and so on. This course will provide students of literature and rhetoric with an advanced introduction to ecocriticism and environmental communication. Tutor texts will be drawn from poetry, fiction, journalism, non-fiction, and other media. Students final project may take traditional (written article) or digital (video, visual essay) form.

This course is dedicated to the problems of analyzing narrative. By reading a  range of works on narrative theory and narrative analysis next to selected short stories, films, and videogames, we will gain a sophisticated sense of how narrative works and how it can be effectively dissected. The literary, cinematic and game narratives studied cover a range from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, ensuring students learn to appreciate the historical development of kinds of narrative over time. The narrative  theories covered include the classic Formalist studies of the 1920s; French structuralist narratology; and Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to the study of narrative.

This course explores the ways that digital media are being used for feminist resistance to consider how networked activism, community-building, and digital tool-sharing contribute to current and future feminist world-making. Reflecting on the motivation, conceptualization, and operationalization of various media activisms, including hashtag movements, social media campaigns, TikTok activisms, and other digital events, we will work together to identify, negotiate, and challenge existing norms around technologies, digital culture, and mediated communication. In carefully considering how race, gender, sexuality, class/caste, and ability, as well as agency, culture, and power, mutually construct other within what Patricia Hill Collins (1990) calls the “matrix of domination,” we will work together to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of networked feminist activism in order to cultivate digital toolkits, visions, and rhetorics for more equitable and sustainable futures that are rooted in community building and hope. As a result, you will gain a familiarity with theories and vocabularies associated with intersectionality, feminist theory, and media studies; reflect on and examine your own and others’ communication and digital technology practices; and critically and creatively engage with and analyze the (digital) representation of and discourses around bodies, community practices, and justice.

“In the plays of Shakespeare,” Coleridge wrote, “every man sees himself” (and, we may add, every woman herself). For most of the twentieth century Shakespeare was celebrated as a secular writer par excellence, one whose skepticism in matters of religion miraculously mirrored that of many of his modern Western readers. In the twenty-first century, however, as religious extremism has changed the conversation in a post-9/11 world, religion has emerged as a central interest of Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare has been reinvented as a writer marked by both the knowledge of religion and a religious sensibility – though exactly what constitutes the latter remains the subject of lively debate. In this class we will join in this debate, asking what religion in Shakespeare meant then, and what it means now.

This course studies J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings from the standpoint of adaptation theory and literary/film semiotics, exploring in detail the three-part film adaptation by Peter Jackson (2001-3), the BBC radio adaptation (1981), and at least two game adaptations, one of which will be The Lord of the Rings Online (2007-current).

Algorithms are both rhetorical, in the sense that they shape action and belief through the ways in which they route symbolic amalgams (ads, music, 'news,' images, ...) to audiences), and rhetoricized, in the sense that their 'beliefs' and actions are shaped through the data that sponsors them (biometric, demographic, behavioural), data which is necessarily biased economically and ideologically. We will critically probe the convergence of suasion and algorithms, particularly in the context of Machine Learning.