Writing About Literacy and Culture: Women and the History of Literacy

Course Description: This advanced composition course focuses on the history of 19th-century U.S. women's literacy, inquiring into past cultures and contexts, voices and practices of reading and writing by women. The readings begin after the American Revolution and examine historians' portrayals of women's experiences with literacy and education through the Progressive Era. Reading- and discussion-based, students will produce a variety of texts, defining and proposing their own projects in collaboration with the instructor and their classmates.

Evaluation: Two portfolios of writing, two oral reports, attendance, and participation in groups discussion and activities will be the basis for grading.

Television: Rhetoric/Orality/Video will study television from rhetorical points of view. The class will regard television as a textual and rhetorical issue that relates to the ways we speak and think. To help us think critically in new ways, we will consider high-art and low-art and why television has usually been placed in the low-art category. Toward this end, we will study an excerpt of Homer's Odyssey to see the verbal similarities between the high-art epic poem and a low-art television text.

We will look at ordinary, 3-minute video clips and analyze them according to a number of rhetorical theories to unveil the languages (visual and verbal) that make television what it is.

The class will also investigate the ways that television culture has influenced the ways in which we think.

EVALUATION PROCEDURE:
2 short essays
active class discussion
final examination
access to broadcast television (but not cable)

READING LIST: (required)
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Rieu
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Robert Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, 2nd ed.
John Fiske, Television Culture
anon., random, 3-minute video clips

recommended:
John Fiske & John Hartley, Reading Television
Walter Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, & Technology
Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender

Prerequisite: graduate standing. An overview of contemporary research and theory in the study of written composition, with emphasis on rhetorical theory, the interrelationship of writing and reading, and the politics of defining literacy.

The complexity of the overview provided by this course compelled graduate students to develop a possible topography of the field. The following list, developed by Jana Moring and Dianne Juby in collaboration with Professor Catherine Hobbs, offers subsets that can be explored independently or as interrelationships (for example, computers and composition can be intersected with gender and composition).

• Advanced Composition
• Assessment
• Computers and Composition
• Cultural Studies and Composition/Rhetoric/Literacy
• First-Year Composition/Developmental
• Gender and Composition/Rhetoric/Literacy
• History of Rhetoric and Composition
• Literature and Composition
• Literacy Studies
• Linguistic Studies
• Professional and Technical Writing
• Research: Qualitative and Quantitative
• Technology and Composition/Rhetoric/Literacy
• Writing Across the Curriculum
• Writing Centers

This experimental course is scheduled to be taught simultaneously by Professor Andrea Lunsford at Ohio State University and by Professor Kathleen Welch at the University of Oklahoma, with participation by Professor Cheryl Glenn at Pennsylvania State University. As conceived in discussions held during meetings of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, the course has several key aims: to further a new paradigm of the scholar/teacher whose research and pedagogy merge; to improve the profession of English with recent feminist theories of rhetoric and writing by providing a course model for other scholar/teachers to use or adapt; and to enact multiple technologies that increase student access to scholar/teachers at other universities. In addition, this seminar aims to integrate women's rhetoric and writing practices into traditional receptions of historical rhetoric, not only by reading women's work into this history but also by exploring how various constructions of gender, race, and technology have worked to make women and all people of color invisible within the tradition. Our explorations will proceed chronologically, in three major leaps: we will begin with ancient Greece, focusing on the figures of Sappho, Aspasia, and Diotima; then move to nineteenth-century African American and White American women's writing, focusing on Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Margaret Fuller. We will conclude with contemporary women's rhetorics/writing, focusing here on Donna Haraway and related work on the woman/writer as cyborg; on the Barbara Biesecker-Karlyn Kohrs Campbell debate (on attempts to write women into the history of rhetoric); and on careful analysis of the issues raised in Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig's Feminine Principles and Women's Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. These core readings will be supplemented by electronic and print selections in a course packet that will make central the contributions of women rhetoricians and writers in these three Western historical periods. We will work throughout to serve as appropriate and responsive audiences to those whose voices have long been ignored or lost.

EVALUATION PROCEDURES:
1 longer written piece (that could be print text, multi- or hyper-media, or collaborative); active participation in class listserv between campus sites as well as in all spoken class discussions; and one or two major class reports (or presentations).

Online Writing labs