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CCR 712 schedule, Syracuse University, Spring 2008

(Dates that have passed are at the end of this document)

14. May 6

1. January 17

In class

1. Syllabus overview
2. Marxist economics
   
3. Choose the class period whose discussion you will lead
   
4. Choose the text (from the list of recommended texts) that you will present to the class
5. Set dates for book presentations
   
6. Choose which reading you will summarize for Jan. 31
   
7. Setting up an aggregator for the class blog

To prepare for class

2. January 24

We will begin the semester with economic issues that have become established in composition publications: the unequal distribution of capital to those who teach composition; and the debate over the culpability of the writing program administrator or the requirement of first-year composition in that distribution.

To prepare for class

• Bousquet, Marc. "Composition as Management Science." Writing Instruction in the Managed University: Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers. Ed. Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. 11-35. 
• Crowley, Sharon. "How the Professional Lives of WPAs Would Change If FYC Were Elective." The Writing Program Administrator's Handbook: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Change and Practice. Ed. Stuart C. Brown, Theresa Enos, and Catherine Chaput. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. 219-232.
  
• Schell, Eileen. "What's the Bottom-Line? Literacy and Quality Education in the Twenty-First Century." Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education. Ed. Patricia Lambert Stock and Eileen E. Schell. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. 324-340.
  
• Strickland, Donna. "How to Compose a Capitalist: The Predicament of Required Writing in a Free Market Curriculum." Composition Forum 9.1 (Spring 1998): 25-38.
  

In class

1. Reading strategies
2. Discussion of Bousquet, Crowley, Schell, Strickland: What are their major claims, and what evidence do they give for those claims? For you, what is important or enlightening in these texts, and why?
3. Methods for summarizing
4. Collaborative summary of Bousquet, Crowley, Schell, or Strickland
5. Personalizing the syllabus
6. Hofstra conference
   

3. January 31

We turn to U.S. copyright law, which compositionists are finding they must scrutinize, because it is the material artifact of what is assumed to be the economic basis of all worthwhile writing.

 

To prepare for class

• Butler, Paul. "Copyright, Plagiarism, and the Law." Authorship in Composition Studies. Ed. Tracy Hamler Carrick and Rebecca Moore Howard. New York: Wadsworth, 2006. 13-27.
• Constable, Giles. "Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages." Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel-und Wappenkunde 29 (1983): 1-41. (J, Trish will summarize)
• Lunsford, Andrea Abernethy. "Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Textual Ownership." College English 61.5 (May 1999): 529-44. (Tanya will summarize)
• Lunsford, Andrea A., and Susan West. "Intellectual Property and Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 47.3 (Oct. 1996): 383-411. (Candace will summarize)
• Rose, Mark."Nine-Tenths of the Law: The English Copyright Debates and the Rhetoric of the Public Domain." Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter-Spring 2003): 78-87. (Laura will summarize)
• Stearns, Laurie. "Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law." Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World Ed. Alice Roy and Lise Buranen. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1999. 5-18.

In class

1. Book raffle: Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. U Chicago P, 2006. Yes, I do have an extra copy, and I'm giving it away in a classroom raffle. The price of a ticket is a promise that if you win the free co.py of the book, you bring some really tasty snacks to class one day. For everybody.
   
2. Discussion of copyright, monopoly, and public domain and their importance for the teaching of writing. What roles do the cultural values of originality and individualism play in the government- and corporately-regulated economy of writing? To what extent should composition teachers resist this economy, and why?
3. How bright is the line between plagiarism and copyright violation, and how much does it matter?
   
4. In the face of today's zealous regulation of writing, will the interplay of authorship and proprietorship continue to be historically contingent?
5. How do you respond to this proposal from Lunsford? "[W]orking together, feminist rhetoricians can create, enact, and promote alternative forms of agency and ways of owning that would shift the focus from owning to owning up; from rights and entitlements to responsibilities (the ability to respond) and answerability; from a sense of the self as radically individual to the self as always in relation; and from a view of agency as invested in and gained through the exchange of tidy knowledge packages to a view of agency as residing in what Susan West defines as the 'unfolding action of a discourse; in the knowing and telling of the attentive rhetor/responder rather than in static original ideas'" (535).
   
6. How much public domain do we need, and why?
7. Review of summaries
8. Discussion of Butler, Constable, Lunsford(s), Rose, Stearns: What are their major claims, and what evidence do they give for those claims? For you, what is important or enlightening in these texts, and why?
9. Gift economies and exchange economies: Guess, Andy. "Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones." Inside Higher Ed 31 Jan. 2008. The Valve, Crooked Timber, del.icio.us, Furl, CiteULike
10. What it means to "lead class discussion"
    

4. February 7

To prepare for class

In class (discussion leader = Tanya) 2

1. Watch Alternative Freedom. Dir. Twila and Shaun. Project Free Zarathustra, 2006.
2. Discuss Lessig
3. Discuss summarizing techniques
4. Show & tell (Becky): Berg, Brook. When Marion Copied. Fort Atkinson, WI: Upstart, 2006.
   

5. February 14

To prepare for class

Post to your CiteULike. Can you post a CiteULike entry to del.icio.us?

Read the following:

In class

1. DISCUSS THE DAMN SUMMARIES
2. Discuss Logie: We'll look closely at his methodology (see pp. 20-21, for example) as well as his findings.
   
3. Discuss Bourdieu
4. Revisit Lessig?

6. February 21

To prepare for class

In class

1. Discuss Horner
2. Unpack Logie's methods statement (and methods)
3. Divide up the Lanham chapters
4. Review book report choices & dates
   

7. February 28

To prepare for class

In class

1. Breakfast! Dang!
2. Discussion of Lanham
3. Review of Lanham
4. Discussion of Logie's methods--bring the book, SVP
   

8. March 6

To prepare for class

Read Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. 1989. Trans. Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996.

In class

Class will end early today to enable people to attend the technology miniseminar.

1. Choose which reading you will summarize for Mar. 27
2. Discuss Bourdieu

Karl Marx, 1818-1883

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937

Michel Foucault, 1926-1984

Louis Althusser, 1918-1990

Pierre Bourdieu, 1930-2002

Ernesto Laclau, b. 1935

Chantal Mouffe, b. 1943

• Althusser and Gramsci differ in that in Althusser's Marxist-Leninist model of state and revolution, hegemony derives from ideological state apparatuses, which are in turn the result of political dominance, whereas for Gramsci, political dominance derives from ideological state apparatuses. Althusser recommends smashing state apparatuses; Gramsci, rearticulating them (Torfing, Jacob. New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 26).
• Even though Bourdieu argues against deterministic social models, his is +deterministic in that it doesn't offer possibilities for change and doesn't acknowledge the role of language in the construction of social realities (Pennycook, Alastair. Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001. 126).
• In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault suggests that history is teleological, whereas genealogy is concerned with origins. Both Butler and Bourdieu offer revisions of the idea:
  • "A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin" (Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. viii-ix).
    
  • Like Foucault, Bourdieu uses "genealogical inquiry." The two differ in that "Bourdieu's reflections are always placed within a sociological field that focuses on the relation of knowledge and the social position of actors" (Jóhannesson, Ingólfur Ásgeir, and Thomas S. Popkewitz. "Pierre Bourdieu, 1930-." Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present. Ed. Joy A. Palmer. New York: Routledge, 2001. 229-233).
    
• Susan Miller credits British cultural studies with repairing the Althusserean rupture between "structuralist analyses of institutions and accounts that privilege the experience of individuals" (Miller, Susan. "Composition as a Cultural Artifact: Rethinking History as Theory." Writing Theory and Critical Theory. Ed. John Clifford and John Schilb. New York: Modern Language Association, 1994. 22).
• Habitus/false consciousness/ressentiment/interpellation
  • False consciousness = acting against one's own class interests because of a failure to perceive the source(s) of oppression
    

• Ressentiment = negative pressure built up when people are denied what they want; they experience general dissatisfaction without knowing why. The ascetic priest recognizes ressentiment and uses it to control the herd.
  

• Interpellation = Althusser's theory "of ideology in terms of the interpellation (hailing) of individuals as subjects" is a development from the Marxist theory of false consciousness (25-26): false consciousness attributes the error to the individual, whereas interpellation blames ideology, which is itself a product of economic interests. Ideological state apparatuses are not "terrain of struggles for hegemony" but "instruments of the dominant class"—a view that Gramsci shares (Torfing 26).
  
• Habitus = structure that naturalizes intimidation and undergoes constant change. It inclines agents to an anticipation of market forces affecting discourse, which results in self-censorship. The habitus interacts with the market to determine what is acceptable speech.
• Double consciousness (W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk)
  

9. March 20

To prepare for class

1. Read Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. 1989. Trans. Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996.
2. Read Liukkonen, Petri. "Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002." Books and Writers. 2002.
3. Read David Graham, "A Nation of Cheaters," Toronto Star 6 Mar. 2008.
   

In class

1. J's book report: Bourdieu, Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power
2. Tanya's book report: Hayles, Writing Machines
   

10. March 27

To prepare for class

In class

J = discussion leader

1. Laura's book report (The Control Revolution)
2. Trish's book report (Miller, Textual Carnivals)    
   
3. Tanya's book report (Hayles, Writing Machines)
4. J's book report (Bourdieu, Academic Discourse)
   

11. April 10

To prepare for class

In class

Candace = discussion leader

1. Candace's book report (Schell & Stock, Moving a Mountain)
2. Everybody's explanation of how their book extends or connects to the work of this course.  
   
3. Strategies for CCCC proposals: (a) Name your issue (not just your topic); (b) Say why the issue matters to anybody besides you; (c) Say who else is talking about it--somebody that most proposal readers will probably recognize; (d) Say what your argument will be.                                                                                                   
   

12. April 17

To prepare for class

In class

1. Discuss Bousquet
2. Workshop C's proposals
3. Email filters workshop
   

13. April 24

To prepare for class

In class

1. Discussion of Gibson-Graham
2. Discussion of final writing for the course
3. Course evaluations