ENG 326: Women's Bodies, Writing and Rhetoric
ENG 326: Women's Bodies, Writing and
Rhetoric
| Instructor: Christina Fisanick | Office: 219 Hinkle |
| E-mail: clfisanick@aol.com | Office: 745-3511 |
| AOLIM: clfisanick | Office Hours: MW 12:30-2:30 |
Welcome to the course site for
ENG 326: Women's Bodies, Writing and Rhetoric at Xavier University.
Scroll down the page to find information about the course and click on the
following links for the daily
syllabus, weekly discussion board,
understand body image, and
philanthropy worksite.
Class will be held
today, Wednesday, March 24. See you there!
Your classmates' thoughts on the readings for 2/16.
We have brand new proposals as of 2/20!!
Grading Criteria for Pink Think Presentations
Required Materials:
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One Journal...your choice of style and dimension. |
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A stapler (no paper clips). |
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Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons. Lynn Peril. Norton, 2002. |
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Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. Ed. Patricia Foster. Anchor, 1995. |
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The Vagina Monologues. V-Day Edition. Eve Ensler. Villard, 2000. |
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Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. Expand and Updated edition. Seal, 2002. |
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Body Outlaws: Young
Women Write About Body Image and Identity. Ed. Ophira Edut. |
Course Description:
This course seeks to interrogate the rhetorical dimensions of women's
bodies. Students taking this
course can expect an introduction to body theory and an examination of current
body writing by women.
The reading assignments will cover a broad range of bodily experience. The
writing assignments will
require students to investigate their own body rhetorics, to carry out research
on historical and
contemporary body theory, and to rigorously critique the tests that we will be
reading in class.
Course Goals:
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To introduce students to contemporary feminist
body theory and have them apply that theory to texts with which we will be working, including their own writing |
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To interrogate the body in popular culture by
looking at major body movements and their ideologies, such as Love Your Body! rhetoric, Oprah’s body politics, and real women, real bodies rhetoric |
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To reflect on their own embodiment and how the
above issues impact how they feel about their bodies |
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To critique and create personal essays that
focus on female embodiment from a broad range of women |
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To conduct research in an area of body studies
in which they are interested and apply it to one or more of the texts that we will be reading |
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To critically analyze the representation of
women’s body in popular culture, the texts we read and write, and contemporary feminist body theory |
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To expand students’ knowledge of feminist theory and the different feminist movements |
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To help students understand philanthropy and how it works in today’s culture |
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To integrate and synthesize our work with body studies and philanthropy |
Expectations:
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You will come to class on time. |
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You will participate fully in class discussions. |
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You will respect your classmates and me. |
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You will bring your books and necessary
materials, such as your dialogue journal, to class each day. |
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You have access to e-mail and the Internet. |
Attendance and Late Assignments:
I expect to see you in class
everyday, but I understand that sometimes things prevent you (and me)
from being here; therefore, you may miss three classes during the course of the
semester. Please use
them wisely! After your third absence, your final course grade will be lowered
by a third. For example,
if you have a 94 at the end of the term, at four absences, your final course
grade will become an 89. If
you miss five classes, it becomes an 86. Note: It does not matter why you
miss class, so please use
your absences wisely.
You must be present the day on which an assignment is due. No exceptions!
I DO NOT accept late
assignments unless I am informed of problematic circumstances beforehand.
Please turn all assignments in the day they are due.
Assignments and Grading:
Dialogue Journals and
Discussion Board 20%
Although you will be keeping a
dialogue journal all semester, it will not be formally graded. I will ask you
at mid-term and then again during finals to submit a photocopy of three entries
that you feel represent
your best journaling work. If I get the sense either by your lack of writing
during class time or that you
obviously do not have your journal in class on several occasions, it will lower
your grade.
The point of the dialogue journal in this course is to give you a forum on which
to reflect about what we
are reading and discussing in class and to share those thoughts with at least
another classmate. For
each class meeting, you will prepare a journal entry in which you write about
your thoughts on the
readings due and on other issues being discussed in class. During the first
fifteen minutes of class,
you will exchange your journal with another class member or with me and he or
she will respond to
what you have written. In this way, we can avoid boring reading quizzes and
really get to the heart of
the material due for that day. These journals will also serve as a spring board
for conversation.
Each week you will also be
required to post messages to the class message board. You will have
from Noon Wednesday until 2:00 pm on Friday to make your weekly posts. Any
time/day before or
after this allotted period will not count. The subject of these messages will
be more of a reflection on
the material that we discussed in class that week as a whole. How does it all
fit together? How does
the reading we discussed in week two work with/against the material we discussed
in week five?
I will assign your grade for these two components based on the following criteria:
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Were the journal entries and discussion board posts thoughtful and interesting? |
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Did the journal entries and discussion board
posts clearly indicate that the student read and understood the material assigned for that day/week? |
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Did the student take the time to respond to others’ posts at least half of the time? |
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Did the student make his or her posts on time? |
Autobiography of Your
Body—First Draft and Redux 20%
At the beginning of the
semester your will write an autobiography of your body (TBA in class). Then,
at the end of the course you will revisit that autobiography and see how much
has changed since the
first draft…about your body attitudes, your writing, your understanding of the
body in culture.
Pink
Think Paper and Presentation 20%
After reading and discussing
Pink Think, you will investigate the “pink think” phenomenon in
contemporary culture. More details TBA in class.
Vagina Monologues
and Cunt Analysis Paper 20%
The point of this paper is for
you to compare and contrasts The Vagina Monologues and Cunt.
This analysis will come in many forms. See the assignment sheet for more
details.
Philanthropic
Project and Involvement 20%
Your grade for this portion of
the course will come from a variety of different sources:
participation in the philanthropic project, including in-class discussions,
online discussion board
posts, on-site assessment, and making decisions. I will determine your grade
for this involvement
based on your commitment and interest in the project and your completion of
various writing tasks.
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Graduate Students Only: In addition to the above assignments, you will be required to complete an additional project, which you will present to the class during the scheduled final exam. Choose one of the following assignments: Classroom Implementation—Create a proposal for how you will implement what you have learned in this class into your own classrooms. You might develop a unit on body image or an activity that uses some of the concepts from Pink Think. It is up to you and your knowledge of the students you are or will be teaching. In your proposal, you need to define the age group of your students, the course in which you will be implementing your project, and a detailed overview of the project, including readings, writing assignments, activities, etc. You must also define the learning objectivities of your project. This assignment has no specific length. Conference Paper—Graduate students in all fields need to present conference papers to help them learn how to write and speak about their own ideas, to meet other professionals in their fields, and to build up their vitas. For this assignment, you must use what you have learned in this course to write a paper that you could present at a conference in your field. Your paper should be eight to ten pages in length, which is around the length of a 20-minute conference session. If you want to actually submit your paper to a conference and you are in English studies, check out the call for papers site at Penn State: Your grade break down is as follows: Dialogue Journals and
Discussion Board…10%
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