DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH COURSE DESCRIPTION 

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

 

NEW COURSE NEW COURSE NEW COURSE NEW COURSE NEW COURSE

 

HISTORIES OF FEMINIST RHETORICS AND WRITING PRACTICES

 

ENGLISH 5453, SEC. 001. FALL 1997.

KATHLEEN WELCH, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH. FEATURING INTERACTION WITH THE SAME NEW COURSE TAUGHT BY ANDREA LUNSFORD, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, AND CHERYL GLENN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

Day & Time: Tuesdays/Thursdays 3-4:15 p.m. Gittinger Hall, University of Oklahoma

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

 

This experimental course is scheduled to be taught simultaneously by the current and former presidents of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition: Professor Andrea Lunsford at Ohio State University, Professor Cheryl Glenn at Pennsylvania State University, and Professor Kathleen Welch at the University of Oklahoma. 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 and students

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: 1) we will begin with ancient Greece, focusing on the figures of Sappho, Aspasia, and Diotima; 2) we will then move to nineteenth-century African American and White American women's writing, focusing on Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Margaret Fuller; and 3) 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 print selections in a course packet and electronic conversation among the three campuses that will make central the contributions of women rhetoricians and writers in these three Western historical periods. This course does not aim, however, at field coverage. We will work throughout to serve as appropriate and responsive audiences to those whose voices have long been ignored or lost.

 

REQUIRED PRINT TEXTS (AT THE UNIVERSITY BOOK STORE):

 

Sappho, Sappho, selections, trans. Mary Barnard

"Aspasia," Plato, Menexenus

"Diotima," Plato, Symposium

Andrea Lunsford, ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition

Jacqueline Jones Royster, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900.

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dickenson

Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig, eds. Feminine Principles and Women's Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric (excerpts)

Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, & Women

Anson, Chris, et al. Teaching On-Line: Internet Research, Conversation, and Composition

 

OPTIONAL PRINT TEXTS (AT THE UNIVERSITY BOOK STORE):

 

Hobbs, Catherine, ed. Nineteenth Century Women Learn to Write

Logan, Shirley, ed. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women

Williamson, Margaret, Sappho's Immortal Daughters

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, Eloquence in an Electronic Age

 

COURSE PACKET (see separate handout) from Ava's Copies, including optional readings in the Coure Packet

 

REQUIRED ELECTRONIC MATERIAL:

 

All students must have e-mail addresses and be able to access the course Listserv and the course Internet Relay Chat (IRC). On the listserv, each student must post one listing at least once every two weeks and respond to one listing at least once every two weeks. On the IRC, students among the three campuses will be divided and required to find a time to "meet" on the IRC. (Since an IRC is by definition synchronous, we will have to locate a time, probably at night, when the group can meet. We will schedule this the first day of class). This work will replace the traditional report.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

 

1 longer written piece (that could be print text, multi- or hyper-media, or collaborative); attendance and active participation in class listserv among campus sites as well as in all spoken class discussions; participation on the IRC. Two two-page papers (one for the first segment of the course and one for the second segment of the course) and one meta-analysis (two pages) of online exchanges.