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Ken at the American Cemetery, near Verdun, France
Dr. Ken Baake 742-2500, ext. 250
English 363B
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Dr. Jen Shelton 742-2500, ext. 263
English 486
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World War I Websites |
English
5380--270: Advanced Problems in Literary Studies
Writing the Trenches:
Literary, Rhetorical, and Technical Texts about World War I
Course Syllabus
and Home Page
Class meeting: Tuesday 6:00 p.m. - 7:50 p.m. English MOO
June 5 – August 7
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Ken at the American Cemetery, near Verdun, France
Dr. Ken Baake 742-2500, ext. 250
English 363B
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Dr. Jen Shelton 742-2500, ext. 263
English 486
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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 an abbreviated term paper on some aspect of World War I writing. The paper 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.
Course Goals
By the end of the semester, students should have accomplished the following:
The electronic coursepack is available by article at Ereserve. In the search field type "Baake" and you will get a listing of articles reserved by Ken and Jen. The ones for our class are listed by our Course No. (ENGL5380). Or you can purchase a bound printed copy from Copy Tech at Texas Tech. Call 806-742-2321, tell them the course number, and you can pay by credit card and have it mailed to you if you are out of town, or go by West Hall if you are in Lubbock to pick it up.
In addition to an electronic course pack, we will read the following texts over a 10-week summer session. Included are the Amazon.com links where appropriate, but of course you can buy these anywhere you like:
Summary of grade percentages. Details follow the table.
Details of content and grade percentages
Your grade will be determined
by the following criteria and assignments. § Attendance and Participation: Includes MOO attendance and Web Board participation, class activities, personal writing progress (30 percent of grade).
Attendance in the MOO
Attendance in the MOO
discussions is required. More than one absence would cause you to lose
attendance points, except in unusual circumstances that you have
discussed with an instructor in advance. MOO sessions will include full
class discussions and group discussions and activities that could be
held in separate rooms.
You should also make weekly
postings to the class Web Board. These are due not later
than the Sunday after each class. These typically will
be about five paragraphs of thoughtful comments on the readings
and the MOO discussions. You might comment on all the readings
collectively, or pick out one or two to comment on in more detail. These
posts can also be
responses to other students' posts. Instructor lecture notes for each
week's class will have some prompt questions that can help shape Web
Board responses and class discussion. Instructors will not assign a grade to these, but will enter into the Web Board discussion.
How well you write determines your success in turning out good research papers in the academy or reports in the workplace. A portion of this 30 percent attendance and participation grade will be our subjective evaluation on how well you have progressed by the end of the course as a writer.
We will consider your MOO participation, Web Board postings, and writing progress together in helping to derive your attendance and participation grade, so you should make sure to have a strong presence in the class.
§
MOO Summary report
on one of the MOO sessions
(10 percent). [Before the second week, sign up for a MOO summary week at Web Board. Choose any week that is open and claim it by posting your intent to summarize the MOO for that week.]
§
Final Exam (25
percent) Final exam due by email: Thursday, August 9, by 8:30 p.m.
This
exam will involve a summary essay on a question that ties together the
course material. In addition, you will read a classmate's
research project that has been posted to Web Board and
respond to it.
§ Final Exploratory Paper in two stages (35 percent total). You must complete all written parts of the project in order to pass the course.
You will propose a research paper and do some initial research about text and World War I, thus writing the beginning of a significant research project. Because the semester is short (10 weeks) we do not expect you produce a typical 20 page semester term paper with dozens of sources. Instead, we want you to write a more condensed paper (about 10 pages double spaced or 5 pages singled spaced) in which you have refined a probing research question related to texts and World War I. You also will have done enough exploratory research to report in your paper on how viable your chosen question would be for a major research project. It is our hope that you would continue with the project either in a subsequent class or on your own for an academic conference or journal.
Thus, we do not expect your paper to resolve the research question (which rarely happens even in completed research projects). Instead, we want your paper to function as an informed discussion about the question and its significance to literary, rhetorical, and/or technical communication analysis. Your paper will report on enough initial research (at least 10 sources--articles or book chapters, several of which can come from our course readings) to convince us that the question is important to your specific field (literature, rhetoric, technical communication) and that it can be successfully researched.
Your research question could be theoretical and sweeping, such as the following::
1) Consider the typical debates about past wars such as World War I as found in written texts from authors of contrasting opinions. For example, historians still debate whether World War I was necessary. What patterns emerge in these debates that recur in debates about current wars, such as the Iraq War?
2) Who "owns" the history of World War I. Is it literary historians, military historians, cultural historians, etc.?
3) Is the literature of war as evidenced by World War I literature thematically and aesthetically impoverished because it is dominated by a totalizing historical event?
4) What rhetorical commonplaces are common in the memoirs of World War I officers, and how do they compare to the commonplaces found in soldiers' memoirs?
5) Does a comparison of technical manuals from World War I with literary texts support the assumption that technical writing is technology-centered while literary writing is human-centered?
Your research question could be focused and specific, such as the following:
1) What evidence can you see in the poetry of Wilfred Owen for the assertion that modernism represented a marriage of pastoral romanticism with a new awe and reverence for the power of technology?
2) What are the essential elements of style that link modernist literature, music, and art? That is, what devices of style are necessary and sufficient to constitute modernist aesthetics?
3) How are manuals about making war (e.g., a soldier's field manual) similar to and different from manuals about saving lives on the battlefield (e.g., medical manuals)?
4) Trace the history of diary-keeping among officers in War to address this question: Why did everyone of importance seem to keep a diary in World War I? Was it something to do with the era, the war, or the Western cultural heritage of all the belligerents?
5) Examine the life cycle of a myth of the World War I battlefield (e.g.. soldiers from previous wars rising from the dead to aid the soldiers in the trenches, etc.) to address the question, what is the function of myths in war time?
6) Compare any aspect of World War I writing with writing in the same genre in a subsequent war. For example, WW poetry could be compared with poetry from the Iraq war, found at http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/iraq_war_03.htm.
In some cases it may be appropriate to team up with another classmate on this project, especially if the research is long and involved. In your proposal memo you would justify why the project merits two class members.
§ Submit all written work in MS Word (or Word compatible) or PDF format via an email attachment. § Late papers may lose one letter grade per day unless you clear a late submission with the instructors in advance. § Email address - We need everyone’s email address by the end of the first week if it is different from the normal firstname.lastname@ttu.edu format. § Special Needs Any student who, because of a disability, may require some special arrangements in order to meet course requirements should contact the instructors as soon as possible to make necessary arrangements. Students should present appropriate verification from Student Disability Services, 806-742-2405. § Observance of a Religious Holy Day. A student will be excused from attending classes or other required activities, including examinations, for the observance of a religious holy day and the time necessary to travel for this observance. The student will not be penalized for the absence and will be permitted to take an exam or complete an assignment missed during the excused absence. The policy applies only to the official holy days of tax-exempt religious institutions. No prior notification of the instructors is required.
Links to Websites
we may visit during the semester
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