English 854-001
Writing Class: The Information Age
Instr: Lu, Min Z.
Office: CRT 394
e-mail: mlu@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: M; 3:30-6:15; CRT 466
Course Description
This seminar has been designed to explore the following questions:
How have issues of class been represented in recent scholarship (1980-) on the use of reading-writing in courses housed in English departments across the US?
What might be the overlapping and divergent definitions of "class" and approaches to reading-writing "class" emerging from this body of scholarship?
From the perspectives of various critical theories on the relation between language, power, and identity, how might we best examine the strengths and limitations of each of the definitions of the term "class" and approaches to reading-writing "class"?
From the perspectives of various representations of changes in the U.S. economy, society, and culture since the late 1970s to what critics have variously termed the emergence of "the information age," "fast capitalism," or "post-modernity," how might we best articulate the challenges teachers and students face if they are interested in using acts of reading-writing to grasp the ways in which competing notions of "class" mediate our lives within and outside U.S. higher education and in using reading-writing as a site for advancing social justice from a global perspective?
This course is designed for students from all Plans interested in using reading-writing to acknowledge the ways in which differences along lines of class (in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc.) mediate our lives. Course materials include work by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Antonio Negri, Andrew Ross, and Anthony Giddens, as well as material from journals such as Profession, College English, JAC, and CCC. The final project for the course involves a paper in which students discuss their evolving sense of how to best go about engaging students in reading-writing issues of class from a global perspective and in the interest of social justice and to do so in an introductory-level undergraduate course housed in the English department of an institution of U.S. higher education.
