Category Archives: Graduate Courses

Maymester Course: The Teaching Life in Fact and Fiction, Dr. Burmester

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Please see the attached flyer for the MAYMESTER 2016 course English 8900: The Teaching Life in Fact and Fiction, taught by Dr. Beth Burmester from 1:45 to 4:00pm (CRN 54120).

This class is designed for all the concentrations in English (Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric and Composition) and for students in the TEEMS program. The focus will be on investigating the representations and identity of secondary and post-secondary teachers through genres including scholarly writing, memoir, and fiction, and through filters of gender, race, sexuality, class and cultural studies.

The aims are to provide students inquiry and meta-reflection into what it means to teach, to be a teacher, and to create a teaching persona and philosophy. We will explore pedagogies (queer, feminist, student-centered, and others), as well as the scholarship of learning, teacher ethnography, memoir-writing, the extracurricular aspects of a teaching life, including tutoring, off-campus, and teachers as practicing writers.

Assignments may include: short reading responses, in-class writing exercises, written observations of fictional teachers, a book review; memoir essay.

Excellent Visual Culture Theory Course offered this spring

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Critical Visual Culture Theory

COMM 8385/6910

 Wed. 4:30-7:00pm

Alessandra Raengo, PhD

araengo@gsu.edu

The field of Visual Culture Studies has taken shape over the past three decades as a theoretical and methodological shift occurring in a variety of disciplines, such as art history, film and media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and material culture studies, among others. The specific focus of this seminar is the relationship between Visual Culture Studies and Critical Theory and, in particular, the methods of research that can be derived from it. Thus, more than a survey of the field, the class approaches selected moments in Critical Theory that have framed some influential methodological choices within Visual Culture Studies: for example, the idea of metapictures; the proximity between visual and material culture; the investment in the desires and social lives of pictures, and so on.

The first part of the semester will be devoted to a close reading of some “classical” Critical Theory texts (for example, Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas or René Magritte’s This is not a Pipe; Marx’s theorization of the commodity form, Heidegger’s concept of the “age of the world picture” or the “question concerning technology”), while the second part will offer a series of concrete examples of a visual culture studies approach to the idea and practice of photography, before and after the digital turn.

Given the multidisciplinarity of Visual Culture Studies as a field, the class may appeal to students from any one of its feeding disciplines. The class is open to a variety of projects and it encourages theoretical and methodological experimentation.

CVCT 2015 flyer