ENG 4815 Spring 2018 Graban

Building on what you have learned in HoTT, WEPO, and Rhetoric (among other courses), ENG 4815 is an investigation into the nature of textuality and its relationship to various media and technologies. For the purposes of this class, we will assume that the experience of texts is not reducible to mere forms or phenomena -- i.e., books, words, media, screens, structures, symbols, or codes -- but is actually a "coming-into-being" of a combination of institutions, principles, and beliefs that need to be actively explored. The course's guiding question, then, is, How do texts come to mean?

In this particular section of the course, we will extend that question to the production and reception of cross-cultural spectacles and human rights events in a variety of modes and forms -- including essays, archives, memorials, community discourses, graphic novels, and bodies. Rather than approach these modes as "things" or "objects," we will treat them as manifestations of a critical process -- as lenses or methodologies for asking questions about individuals, nations, and discourses from both local and global points of view. We will draw from comparative and transnational rhetorical studies, as well as from literature of human rights.

Our required readings include a Harris’s Rewriting: How To Do Things with Texts, and a digitally secured Course Packet of articles and essays available for downloading and/or printing prior to the start of the term, as well as online and web-based texts -- sometimes read as case studies themselves, and sometimes read as critical lenses onto other cases. Class projects will include a series of short assignments and/or blog posts, a midterm critical essay, a presentation, and a final multi-genre project that will be scaffolded throughout the course.