Course Description
This seminar has two main objectives. The first of these is to familiarize students with current methods and theories integral to literary studies, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, and cultural studies in Asian and the Pacific. Visits from English department faculty to discuss their own scholarship approaches will facilitate this aim. The second is to introduce and develop skills and strategies necessary to succeed in graduate school and beyond, while thinking critically about the professional ideologies from which those strategies emerge. These skills include undertaking primary and secondary research; producing, assessing, and revising writing across a number of academic genres, such as abstracts, bibliographies, and conference papers; submitting work to conferences and journals; providing and interpreting feedback; and mapping disciplinary landscapes. Students will learn and practice these skills via a number of short assignments, as well as in the culminating paper due at the end of the semester. By the end of this class, students should not only be more prepared to succeed in coursework and public speaking, but they also should be ready to design, craft and revise a research-based writing project as the end point of their graduate studies.
Possible Readings
Readings will introduce students to a variety of critical methods, including texts by: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Noenoe Silva, as well as texts authored by and selected by our visiting department faculty.
Students will also be assigned selections from Gregory Semenza’s Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century and Eric Hayot’s Elements of Academic Style.
All readings will be made available via Lamakū.
Student Learning Outcomes:
In this course, students will:
- Strengthen their skills in a range of genres typical to academic writing like conference paper proposals, conference papers, and a research paper
- Acquire familiarity with central research questions and methods in each of the English department graduate program’s concentrations: Literary Studies in English, Composition and Rhetoric, Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies of Asia and the Pacific
- Be introduced to a range of faculty in the English department and their research
- Improve their skills in research and in incorporating and documenting secondary scholarship when crafting an argumentative essay
- Develop their capacity as public speakers