King, Joshua
MWF 1 :50 PM
MLC 0368
What happens when we write? Are we momentarily possessed by a muse who animates our hands and produces symbolic language through us? Do we open a mental sluice and pour our thoughts into sentence-shaped pitchers? Do we channel the legions of linguistic ghosts that trick us into thinking we have a self? Do we run linguistic programs through layers of organized bio-circuitry? And, even assuming we know how writing works, how do we manage to teach others to do it?
In short, this is a course about how we write and how we teach others to write.
In this course, we’ll study historical and critical perspectives on writing, from classical rhetoricians like Aristotle and Plato (though, as we’ll find out, Plato would protest being called a rhetorician) through generations of more contemporary rhetoricians who thought writing was, at various times, a way of learning deep truths about yourself (the Expressivists), a technique for compressing your ideas into easy packets of meaning (the Current Traditionalists), a means of operating within discourse communities (the Social Epistemic Rhetoricians), and even calculations within human word-computers (a particular generation of cognitive theorists).
Each week, you’ll read scholarship from the fields of composition and rhetorical theory and engage in deep and challenging discussions about the nature of writing, communication, and learning. Alongside your reading and class work, you’ll create models of the composition process, learn productive approaches to real-world academic research, and create and analyze writing instructional tools of your own.
Whether you plan to work in an English or writing classroom, you’re curious about the social and psychological frameworks around human creativity, or you just want to improve your writing, research, and design abilities, this course has something to offer you.
Required Course Text:
Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, A Reader, Third Edition. Ed. Victor Villanueva and Kristin Arola.