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Kenneth Baake
Department of English
Texas Tech University
Box 43091
Lubbock, Texas 79409-3091
Email: ken.baake@ttu.edu
Office: English 363B
Phone: 742-2501, ext. 250
Fax: 806-742-0989
Future Courses
Past Courses
Research
Resume
Contact
Info.
El Paso Herald-Post
Reunion Website (newspaper where I worked until it folded in 1997)
Baake_ICASALS 2006
May 2007 online PhD seminar
presentations:
Qualifying Exam
Dissertation Defenses
Fragments of Rationality
World War I Course Talk
Future Courses
Past Courses
Research
Resume
Contact
Info.
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Spring 2009
I taught English 5389
Field Methods of Research. Here is the syllabus:
5389
Fall 2008
I
taught
Foundations of Technical Communication (English 5371) onsite and team
teaching, with Dr. Rickly, Composition Theory (English 5060) onsite. Links
to the syllabi with schedules are below:
5371
5060
What I
Taught
in 2007
-
Fall 2007 online course,
Research Methods in
Composition and Technical Communication:
English 5363
-
Spring 2007 online course, Technical
Reports: 5372_Spr_07
-
Summer 2007 online course,
English
5380--270: Advanced Problems in Literary Studies:
Writing the Trenches: Literary,
Rhetorical, and Technical Texts about World War I
(Co taught with
Literature professor Jen Shelton)
Summer 2007 syllabus
Description follows:
Human society has been unable to escape war even in the
nearly 100 years since the Great War erupted across Europe, ostensibly as a “war
to end all war.” Much has been written in all genres about the war during and
since its outbreak. Our team-taught course will
conduct a survey of the written word as it encircles this event—looking at
everything from the mundane technical manuals that soldiers read or reports that
commanders wrote to novels, poems, and histories that those soldiers and later
authors produced in order to try to come to terms with the war’s horrors and the
modern era it helped to usher in. Our primary goal is to study how different
types of writing are used to know a particular reality. Rather than follow the
approach that looks in detail at one genre as it addresses general issues, we
want to look at many genres as they converge on one issue—The Great War.
Our underlying assumption is that humans use writing in all forms to make sense
of their world and its challenges. Our class will meet weekly online in the
Texas Tech English Department MOO. In preparation for class, students will read
and analyze various texts dealing with World War I. They will write short
responses critiquing those texts, considering how texts from different genres
covering the same topic both overlap and diverge. Students will conduct research
and write a term paper on some aspect of World War I writing. The term paper
assignment could be tailored to address specific student areas of interest in
either technical communication or literature.
Finally, the course will reveal the power and limitations of different types of
writing for dealing with profound realities of the human condition, especially
with the persistent tendency of cultures to interact through war.
Texts
required (subject
to change)
In addition to an electronic course pack, we will read the
following texts over a 10-week summer session:
- Howard, Michael: The First World War
- Crowley, Robert editor: The Great War: Perspectives
on the First World War
- Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western
Front
- Silkin, Jon, editor: The Penguin Book of First
World War Poetry
- Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
- Barker, Pat: Regeneration
- World War I Field Manuals (CD ROM available for
$10 from http://www.paperlessarchives.com/wwi_fms.html)
What I
Taught
in 2006 and Spring 2008
Fall 2006 I taught graduate and undergraduate
style courses:
English 5377
(online) and
English 3366.
http://www.faculty.english.ttu.edu/carter/5377/
Fall 2005 Courses: English 5384
Here is the
5384-270 syllabus for the Spring 2004
version of this course.
If you have visited the doctor and been told you are suffering from an illness
for which you should be treated, you might assume that the illness has always
been clearly defined, an absolute fact. Or, if you have read newspaper reports
about discoveries in deep space, you might think that those nebulae were out
there waiting to be found and described. But medicine, cosmology—every kind of
science—involves choices of language that help to constitute those “facts.” Some
diseases that are routinely diagnosed today did not exist 100 years ago—not
because people didn’t get them—but because we had no terms to describe them. A
distant galaxy would have made no sense to earlier generations who had no
language to conceive of a universe much beyond the earth and sun.
English 5384 is for anyone who has been curious about the language that
scientists and writers of science use to develop and spread scientific
knowledge. Technical communicators who make daily decisions about language will
find this course useful. Others who would benefit include scholars of rhetoric,
writing teachers, and scientists interested in unraveling the role of language
in what they do.
Since Aristotle, a picture has emerged of science as a method of inquiry leading
to certain objective truth about reality. On the other hand, rhetoric is seen as
the art of arguing to secure judgment or a course of activity in an uncertain
world. This split has continued through the 20th century, with
science and language arts said to be occupying separate realms of
understanding—a world that C.P. Snow described as “two cultures.”
After World War II, scholars in the humanities attempted to reverse their
marginal status, blurring the line between rhetoric and science. Taking its cue
from contemporary work in philosophy, a new field of inquiry has arisen in
English departments that goes by the name “the rhetoric of science.” In this
course we will ask how science is rhetorical. The course will involve reading
and responding to each other’s short essays, class MOO discussions and
activities, and a final project. The course will sharpen your analytical skills
and ability to integrate theories of rhetoric and technical communication into
your understanding of the scientific world.
We will begin by considering several key works in science and examining the ways
in which language makes them work as scientific arguments. We may read passages
from Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he called “one long argument.”
Other possible books include Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, Latour and Woolgar’s, Laboratory Life: The
Construction of Scientific Facts, and Randy Allen Harris’s (Editor)
Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science. We will read the instructor’s book,
Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science, which presents
his experiences as a writer at the Santa Fe Institute—a multi disciplinary
science think tank. Articles may explore special topics such as scientific
rhetoric and feminism, which looks at the ways in which gender influences what
counts as scientific knowledge.
What I
Taught
in Fall 2004
English 5372: Technical Reports
This course focuses on
the work place documents that create knowledge and support decision-making—proposals and reports. Proposals seek approval or funding for
a plan or activity. Reports provide information on the feasibility or progress
of such activities, or on the status of scientific research. Proposals and
reports emerge from real rhetorical situations or exigencies. They are examples
of rhetorical genres, or strategies available for social action.
As
is typical in any graduate technical writing class, we will approach this topic
from a theoretical and applied perspective. We will analyze existing documents
using rhetorical theory and we will produce reports and proposals based on
primary and secondary research. At the end of the course each of you should be
able to 1) display skills in writing and reading reports and proposals; 2)
display understanding of the theoretical choices we make as practitioners of
this kind of writing; 3) display an understanding of how reports and proposals
contribute to the discourse of a region; 4) contribute to the body of knowledge
about reports and proposals.
5372 syllabus
Other Past Courses: What I Have
Done Before
Research Interests: What I Always Enjoy Doing
Research interests include the rhetoric of science, particularly
the way that science uses language to create knowledge and also to deliver it.
The distinction between knowledge-creation and delivery is blurry and the
subject of much philosophical debate. In any question of knowledge, or
epistemology, we are asking both what is knowledge intrinsically and how do we
come to know it. I have focused my research on the way language, particularly
metaphor, is used to instantiate knowledge in the field of complexity science. I
have spent time studying this at the Santa Fe Institute, a think-tank that
brings together scientists from various disciplines to explore how systems
self-organize and evolve in complexity. For a good overview of complexity
science, check out the Santa Fe Institute Web page. Please go to http://www.santafe.edu.
If you type my name into the Institute's search engine found at this home page,
you will find several of my writing projects, including one called "Inside
SFI" that summarizes my early dissertation findings.
I am also increasingly interested in the rhetoric of technical reports,
especially reports that relate to the American Southwest and Great
Plains. Also, I have a keen interest in the notion of fusion in English
departments, that is, how students at all levels can benefit from taking courses
in the the different sub-disciplines (i.e., literature, composition, creative
writing, linguistics, technical communication). The course I co-taught with a
literature professor on World War I texts (highlighted above) is an example.
I wrote the ATTW Mock Dialogue for
a conference in spring 2002 to prompt discussion on the need to balance theory
and practice in technical communication courses for master's students.
I wrote advice
for research proposals to help Ph.D. students in rhetoric and
technical communication plan a path of dissertation research.
These are some conference presentations:
Karlsruhe, Germany Lectures
Water talk (Wasserbau) Karlsruhe, Germany 2006
Abstract
Ways of Knowing Water (Power
Point Show)
Harmonics html presentation
Does metaphor produce
knowledge or simply decorate and deliver it?(Excerpts from Baake book)
Drought Narrative Presentation
2005 Arid Lands Presentation
May Folk Songs and Arid Lands 2005 Presentation
Fall 2005 Hell in Texas
Fall 2005 Hell in Texas:
Short
Literature Review Presentation TTU
Librarians
A few odds (very odd) and ends to wind up
the page.
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How in the world
are you going to see, laughing at fools like me. Who on earth do you think
you are--a superstar. Well, all right, you are. But we all shine on, like
the moon, and the stars, and the sun. (John Lennon, Instant Karma).
"Entropy
is the logarithm of
probability."*
Ludwig
Boltzmann
*
This means that anything not
random is pretty rare and special. Noise is common and random; music is rare.
Loose inert matter is common; life is rare.
"I say, I say
it's a joke son. It's a joke."
Foghorn Leghorn
"Your only enemy is panic. Your only
chance is to start making sense."
Canadian Rock
Group, The Tragically Hip
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This is my first art work, fall 2000, using Adobe Photoshop. I hope it
will be rock-blues album cover.
I just need the songs.
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