Wednesday, April 15, 2009
"The Centrality of Argument"
Gerald Graff,
Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and 2008 President of the Modern Language Association
4:00p.m. - 6:00 p.m., Dampeer Room, Kelvin Smith Library
Graff will expand on the case he made in his 2003 book, Clueless in Academe, for why argument (and persuasive writing generally) needs to become the organizing principle of all school and college curricula.
Gerald Graff, Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of his generation's most influential commentators on higher education. His many books include Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987) and Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992). With the publication of Clueless in Academe in 2003, Graff's work has focused particularly on (in the book's subtitle) "How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind," and how schools and colleges can demystify academic intellectual culture for all students, not just the high-achieving few. This book helped inspire his recent basic writing textbook, "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2006), co-authored with Cathy Birkenstein. Graff was President of the Modern Language Association in 2008.
This event has been co-sponsored by the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship (SAGES) Program.
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Thursday, April 16, 2009
"Rules for Writers: Who Writes these Rules Anyway?"
Anne Curzan,
Professor of English at the University of Michigan
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m., Wolstein Research Building Auditorium
Directions & parking information for the Wolstein Research Building
In English classrooms, where critical inquiry is viewed as foundational, both instructors and students often fairly unquestioningly accept the rules for “good English” and “good writing.” Dictionaries and style guides are trusted references rather than objects of critical scrutiny and questioning. But who writes the dictionaries and style guides on which we rely? And why do we believe them? Who first said not to start a sentence with And or But anyway? This talk addresses various sources of language authority and explores what can happen in any classroom when we open up “the rules” of English for serious examination.
Anne Curzan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she also holds appointments in Linguistics and the School of Education. She received the University’s Henry Russel Award for 2007, as well as an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship for undergraduate teaching. Her research interests include the history of the English language, language and gender, sociolinguistics, and pedagogy. She is currently director of the English Department Writing Program and co-editor of the Journal of English Linguistics.
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Friday, April 17, 2009
The Edward S. & Melinda Melton Sadar
Lecture in
Writing in the Disciplines
“Legible Bodies — Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians
and the Rhetoric of Dissection”
Susan Wells,
Professor of English, Temple University
5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m., Powell Room, Allen Memorial Medical Library
Women entered medicine in relatively large numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in the United States. Like other medical students, women had to come to terms with the process of dissection, a task that was complicated by the gendered economy of vision that made it transgressive for them to see the interior of the body. I explore the surprising ways in which women medical students found dissection attractive. Their practices suggest the need for revision of current understandings of the objectifying scientific gaze.
Susan Wells received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and taught at the University of Louisville and Wayne State University before coming to Temple in 1985. Her interests include rhetoric and composition, critical theory, theories of the public sphere, and feminist studies of science. Wells's book on nineteenth-century women physicians and scientific writing, Out of the Dead House, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2001, and won the 2002 W. Ross Winterowd Award for the most outstanding book in composition theory. She has also published Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity (Chicago, 1996) and The Dialectics of Representation (Johns Hopkins University, 1985). Wells is currently finishing Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing, forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2010. She served as chair of the Temple English department from 2003-2006 and is currently Director of First Year Writing.
This event has been co-sponsored by the Dittrick Medical History Center.
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