This course introduces students to composition and rhetoric as a field of research and study. This field of inquiry involves analyzing theory, historicizing composition and rhetoric, studying literacy and culture, and teaching writing. English 6000 is primarily a reading course. Students will do extensive reading in contemporary composition theory and in theoretical work that has been influential in composition studies. Most of what will be read and discussed has been written since 1963, the date many scholars use to identify the birth of contemporary composition as an academic field, but students will also review rhetorical theory dating to Plato and Aristotle in order to glean principles of rhetoric and composition from these thinkers.

Prerequisite: Graduate status, or permission of department head.