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English 853-001
Seminar in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

Instr: Lu, Min Z.
Office: CRT 394
e-mail: mlu@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: Nov. 19, 9:00am-12:00pm, 2:00pm-5:00pm and Dec. 16, 2:00pm-5:00pm; CRT 286

Course Description

English 853 is a graduate level seminar consisting of three one-credit courses on a topic outside the expertise of existing Plan B faculty. The topic of the 2005-6 academic year is Visual Literacy-Digital Technology. Each one-credit course will involve six face-to-face contact hours with the visiting professor on a Saturday at UWM and a series of writing and on-line discussions (with the visiting scholar) as well as group work (written and seminar discussion) conducted by the local professor organizing the series. This series of one-credit courses will be offered three times during the academic year on a common topic: tentatively, once in November, once at the beginning of the Spring term, and once towards the end of the Spring term.

The one-credit course would involve the following:

  1. A member of the Plan B faculty will act as the instructor of record for each one-credit course.
  2. Students will compose a position paper in response to a list of works identified by a visiting scholar. Students will be given the list a month before the scholar's on-campus visit. Position papers will be due a week before the visit. The purpose of the position papers is to help students and the visiting scholar establish a common ground for a seminar discussion during the Saturday it is offered.
  3. The scholar will give a public talk and conduct one three-hour seminar discussion with the students on the Saturday of her or his visit.
  4. After the visit, students will write a 10-page paper on a topic related to the reading list and the seminar discussion. This paper is due three weeks after the seminar and made available to the instructor of record and all other students.
  5. The instructor of record will read and comment on the papers and conduct a meeting with all students to share their responses to each others' papers.

Prof. Diana George of Virginia Tech University is our first visitor. She has been scheduled to conduct her seminar-talk during the fall of 2005, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Prof. Cynthia Selfe of The Ohio State University has been scheduled to visit UWM on the last Saturday of April 2006. Professor Min-Zhan Lu, the instructor of record for this course, is still in the process of contacting Marguerite Helmers of the University of Wisconsin for her potential visit on the last Saturday of Feb. 2006.