English Graduate Program
Course Offerings for Spring 2008

ENGL 4901. 351 - Tutor Training / Damron
W 8:30-9:20. CID  12792 This course provides graduate students with tools to become effective writing tutors/teachers through seminar presentations and discussion of current writing center theory and practice. Journals chart progress as each tutor conducts face-to-face conferences with writing students, based on model conferences and mentoring by experienced tutors. Required of all new first-semester writing center tutors.

ENGL 5013. 001 - Intro to Graduate Studies / Walker
MWF 1:30-2:20. CID  12828 Methods of research from bibliography, to book reviewing, to textual editing.

ENGL 5120. 351 - Studies in TESL / Halleck
T 4:30-7:10. CID  12829 We will explore the routinized patterns and the strategies that ESL/EFL learners use in the production of such Speech Acts as apologies, requests, refusals, greetings, invitations, compliments and complaints. We will also examine the moves that native speakers use in accomplishing these same speech acts and try to determine the relevant cultural norms associated with the different functions of communication that these speech acts represent.

ENGL 5123. 001 - Social & Psychological Aspects of Language / Damron
TR 9:00-10:15. CID  12830 This course is an overview of the psychological and sociological factors that affect the organization and processing of language. Topics include child language acquisition, animal language, deafness, language and the brain, multilingual speech communities, women's language, and language variation and change. Students will familiarize themselves with the various approaches to these issues and the relevant supporting evidence.

ENGL 5123. 801 - Social & Psychological Aspects of Language ( Tulsa) / Schick
R 4:30-7:10. CID  18354 This course provides students with a basic understanding of the issues, theories and methodologies currently associated with the study of social and psychological aspects of language, including an examination of social, psychological and neurological influences on language acquisition and use.

ENGL 5130. 001 - Studies in English Grammar / Sheorey
W 6:45-9:30. CID  12831 The course will provide a descriptive review of the fundamentals of English grammar and related aspects, examine "grammar trouble spots" typically experienced by ESL students and how they may be remedied, and discuss ways of explaining the complexities of English grammar to the students. Current issues in teaching grammar in the ESL classroom will also be discussed.

ENGL 5140. 001 - Seminar in Linguistics: Language Use in Multilingual Communities / Garzon
M 4:30-7:10. CID  18094 We will examine multilingual groups, including indigenous people living within a dominant society, immigrants, long-term visitors, and residents of other multiethnic areas. Saville-Troike’s book, The Ethnography of Communication, 3rd edition, will provide theoretical and methodological frameworks. Students will choose a bilingual or multilingual group. They will write an ethnographic sketch of their group and carry out a small focused study on some aspect of the group’s language behavior.

ENGL 5293. 001 - Interdisciplinary Uses of English: Writing for Publications / Cheng
TR 2:00-3:15. CID  12868 Students in this course will analyze the generic features and the underlying disciplinary practices in journal articles (JAs) in their respective fields in order to develop a keener awareness of how language is used to create meaning and significance in scholarly writings in their disciplines. They will engage in contextualized language activities to link appropriate textual forms with the contextual values of these forms. Apart from analyzing texts, the students will also read expert accounts on scholarly publication and interview disciplinary insiders in their respective fields to understand discipline-specific textual practices. They will also gather appropriate sources, organize information, and compose various sections of JAs.

ENGL 5480. 351 - Seminar in Modern Lit: Ulysses in Context / Walkiewicz
TR 12:30-1:45. CID  18095 The seminar will focus on one "primary" work: James Joyce's Ulysses. We will read Ulysses as a product of early twentieth-century European culture and/or as an epitome of the modernist aesthetic and/or as a post-colonialist text, etc. We will also investigate the ways in which what we learn reading Ulysses can be applied to other texts. At the same time, we will use the reception/interpretation of Ulysses as a means of attempting to track the courses of twentieth-century literary/critical history. Seminar presentation/paper, term paper, midterm, final.

ENGL 5503. 001 - Technical Document Production / Warren
M 4:30-7:10. CID  12870 Managing technical publications-whether they are paper-based, web-based, or any of many electronic forms-requires skills in scheduling, budgeting, managing people, and the like. To that end, the core of the course will prepare the students to assume documentation management roles in various businesses, industries, or governmental agencies. Production processes, project management plan and oral report based on it, panel discussion, literature review, final examination.

ENGL 5520. 351 - Internship: Technical Writing / Warren
TBA . CID  12871 (6 hours credit required) Generally speaking, you are not likely to be qualified for a graduate internship before you have completed at least 17 hours of credit, including the following required courses (MA): English 5513, English 5503, English 5593; (Ph.D.): English 5013 and 9 more hours of technical writing courses. Students seeking an internship in technical writing should download the document package at http://fp.okstate.edu/twarren/materials5.htm.

ENGL 5553. 001 - Information Design / Warren
T 4:30-7:10. CID  18096 An in-depth study of information design that provides a theoretical foundation for designing, developing, testing, and producing information systems. Students will develop projects that require them to apply design theories and principles to all levels of information design-from selecting appropriate media and genres to designing the page layout or computer interface to creating navigational tools and typographical cues to creating graphic displays of information. Develop an information system, book report, literature review, analysis of two information systems, oral presentation, final examination.

ENGL 5593. 001 - Technical Style & Editing / Cheng
R 4:30-7:10. CID  12873 This course is a close study of the theories and principles of technical editing and style that will prepare you for the substantive editing and design of complex documents such as technical manuals, proposals, and research reports. You will study the practice of editing as it applies to invention, arrangement, style, and delivery and examine style from the sentence level up to the levels of the genres of technical communication. You will also explore the theoretical justifications for your editing decisions. Projects include in-class editing activities, editing project with oral presentation, book review, research paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 5630. 001 - Seminar in Early American Lit: Crime & Narrative in Early American Culture / Frohock
MWF 10:30-11:20. CID  18097 In this seminar we will study a wide variety of crime and crime narratives, from the beginning of the colonial era to the emergence of crime fiction in the early 19th century. Topics we will cover may be as diverse as the New England witch trials, Caribbean piracy, religious “crimes” of dissent (figures like Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson), “crimes” of sexual conduct, infanticide, and cannibalism. Readings will include venerable classics (sections from Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation to stories of Edgar Allen Poe) as well as some less familiar examples of the early criminal biography. In addition to primary material, we will work through theories of criminality, such as those articulated by Durkheim and Foucault, and samples of contemporary literary criticism to aid us in our study of legally and culturally transgressive acts.

ENGL 5730. 001 - Seminar in Fiction Writing / Billman, J.
TR 10:30-11:45. CID  12875 A workshop approach to the craft of story and novel writing. Outside readings will be assigned.

ENGL 6140. 001 - Studies in Poetry Writing / Ai
TR 2:00-3:15. CID  12900 This will be a poetry workshop with some readings in contemporary poetry and essays about poetry by poets, but creative work will be the central focus of the course.

ENGL 6220. 351 - Seminar in Genre: History and the Novel from Defoe to DeLillo. / Mayer
T 4:30-7:10. CID  12935 The class will treat major works from the British and the American traditions that focus in one way or another on the nexus of fiction and history in the novel. Writers will include: Defoe, Scott, Cooper, Conrad, Dos Passos, Woolf, Doctorow, and DeLillo. We will also spend several weeks discussing theoretical considerations of the fiction-history link by such writers as Lukacs, Ricoeur, and Hutcheon. Reports, weekly short papers, discussion, seminar paper.

ENGL 6250. 001 - Seminar in Race, Region & Gender: White & Right in Oklahoma / Mason
W 6:45-9:30. CID  12937 Seminar in Race, Region & Gender: White & Right in Oklahoma is a graduate-level introduction to critical studies of whiteness in the context of three episodes of Oklahoma history: the Tulsa race riot of 1921, the mid-century rise and fall of the Tulsa-based Christian Crusade, and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. In addition to films (eg.Birth of a Nation, Blackboard Jungle) and fiction (eg. The Turner Diaries), we will consider scholarship that theorizes race, gender, sexuality, narrative, American literature, right-wing movements, and millennialism. Contingent upon logistics, we will visit sites in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, as well as the Wilcox Collection of Political Movements in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas.

ENGL 6360. 001 - Seminar in Film and Society: Reading Sound / Manon
R 4:30-7:10. CID  18098 The study of sound as a component of film and television is for most students a radical departure. For instance, whereas it is possible to pause a moving image in order to analyze it in closer detail, sound cannot be frozen in this way. Similarly, because most of us are not musicologists, we may tend to avoid discussing film scores altogether, assuming we lack the terminology to say anything very precise or meaningful. Complicating things further, theorists such as Mladen Dolar and Michel Chion insist that the voice must not be equated with speech; the former is the vehicle, whereas the latter is the signifying message it carries. A speaker may communicate a concept by uttering the signifier “dog,” but the speaker’s voice qua voice is indifferent to sense-making. It is this non-signifying sonic remainder—in speech, as well as in music and noise—with which this course is primarily concerned. The seminar provides not only a primer in various sonic characteristics and recording techniques, but also a multi-faceted theorization of sound as a primary channel for meaning “in” motion pictures. Of particular concern will be the late twentieth century transition from analog to digital recording, and the ways in which the failures of analog production (crosstalk, distortion, asynchronization, “tape hiss,” etc.) remain seductive despite the precise synchronization and noiseless clarity offered by digital. Weekly screenings and short response essays will address a series of themes, including: Immersion, Abatement, Echo, Dubbing, the Sonic Uncanny, Poptones, Lo-Fi, Blast, Drone, and Silence.

ENGL 6410. 801 - Topics in Linguistics ( Tulsa) / Schick
M 4:30-7:10. CID  19803 This course gives an overview of theories and research methods associated with studying language socialization. Topics include perspectives on linguistic and interactional resources used in socialization practices and the socialization of socio-culturally valued cognitive, behavioral, and linguistic competencies. A semester project will include the collection and analysis of socialization data.

English Department
College of Arts & Sciences
Oklahoma State University
205 Morrill Hall
Stillwater, OK 74078
Phone: 405-744-9474
For Information about English Programs: english.information@okstate.edu
Webmaster: engweb@okstate.edu