Phone: 828-280-2718
Email: novateller@aol.com
Office hours: as needed
Course Schedule: Th, 12:15 pm - 3:00 pm; Jan 14 - Apr 30, 2010
Room: Warf-Pickel Hall 403
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Rowe, Bruce M. and Levine, Diane P. “A Concise Introduction to Linguistics.” Pearson, 2006.
Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
ADDITIONAL READINGS (much of the following will be included in a Course reading pack, to be available at the start of class):
1. Boyd, Brian. “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature: The Delight We Get from
Detecting Patterns in Books, and in Life, Can Be Measured and Understood.”
2. Bryson, Bill. “Becoming Americans” from Made In America, pp. 13-29.Perennial, 1995.
3. Chafe, Wallace.. “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing, and Oral Literature,” Spoken and Written Language, Deborah Tannen, ed. NJ: Ablex, 1982, 35-53.
4. Dissanayake, Ellen. “Making Special”: An Undescribed Human universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art.
5. Fine, Elizabeth. “An Illustration of a Performance-Centered Text.” From The Folklore Text. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
6. Hymes, Dell. “The Lost Boy.” From “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, pp. 143-183. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981
7. Leguin, Ursula. “She Unnames Them.”
8. Locke, John L. “Social Work” from Why we Don't Talk To Each Other Anymore, pp. 67-102. Simon & Schuster, 1998.
9. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale.
10. Sobol, Joseph D. “Innervison and Innertext: Oral Traditional and Oral Interpretive Modes of Storytelling Performance,” in Carol Birch and Melissa Heckler, Who Says: Essays on Contemporary Storytelling.
11. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Folkstories of Children, pp. 1-43. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
12. Tannen, Deborah. “The Oral/Literate Continuum in Discourse.” Spoken and Written Language. NJ: Ablex, 1982, 1-16.
13. Tannen, Deborah. “Involvement in Discourse,” pp. 9-35. Talking Voices. Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge University Press. 1989
* other readings TBD.
CATALOG DESCRIPTION: Relationships of local dialects to reading; alphabets; phonology; morphology; syntax, and semantics as related to reading; aspects of psycholinguistics which are primarily linguistic.
ADDITIONAL COURSE INFORMATION:
This section of Linguistics of Reading/Storytelling will be especially geared to the needs and interests of storytellers, focusing on discourse analysis.
Relationship of Course to College Philosophy and Goals:
COE Conceptual Framework Standards:
This course gives students an opportunity to assimilate five dimensions of leadership: concern for diversity, reflective practice, lifelong learning, caring, and critical thinking. General knowledge, content knowledge, and professional knowledge requirements are also met.
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
1. To explore the linguistics of storytelling, in its conversational, performance, and literary contexts.
2. To understand the linguistic and rhetorical strategies which signal the emergence of narrative from the matrix of everyday conversational and informational speech and writing.
3. To inventory the specific linguistic techniques that foster teller-listener involvement in storytelling performance.
4. To help storytelling majors to understand how to better use these techniques to raise the level of their own performance, teaching, and communication.
COURSE TOPICS:
1. Basic tools of linguistic analysis: linguistic levels; analysis at the levels of morphology, phonetics, phonology, grammar/syntax, semantics, stylistics, and higher levels of structure, especially including narrative.
2. Discourse analysis: the methods which sociolinguists, anthropologists, and folklorists have devised to represent spoken language and oral narrative in print, and how these methods reflect on and refract the oral language process.
3. Dialect, and its roles in storytelling and literature.
4. Linguistic and paralinguistic involvement strategies.
5. Defining and exploring the grammar of storytelling: the transactional dynamics of conversational performance; the construction of meaning in spoken discourse; linguistic behaviors that establish and maintain social structure; qualities of style and “voice” in storytelling performance.
GRADED ASSIGNMENTS:
Writing assignments:
1. Record and transcribe a story told in a conversational setting. Notate all conversational turns, interactive responses, and as many of the paralinguistic elements such as pauses, expression, inflection, dynamics, laughter, etc. as can be reconstructed. Write an analysis of the event, considering the setting, participants, context, stylistics, and interactional dynamics as revealed in the language of the performance. 10-20 pp. double-spaced total.
2 Record and transcribe a storytelling performance in a more formal solo performance setting. This can be from one of the class members, a member of another storytelling class on campus, one of the storytelling professors, or any other professional or avocational storytelling performer on campus or elsewhere (it is fine to record the performance in the student’s home region before the beginning of the course). It is acceptable to use a recording of one of your own performances, but it will need to be in a live setting, and will also need to be recorded within one month of the beginning of class. Write a sociolinguistic analysis of this performance. Compare and contrast the linguistic strategies, paralinguistic aspects, and interactional elements of this performance with the conversational performance analyzed earlier. Analyze the narrative structure according to the models covered in readings and in class. 10-20 pp. double-spaced total.
3. Language Journal (100 pts.): Journal entries are to be posted to the blog in an ongoing basis for the benefit of the entire class and are to be completed by April 30. Students will keep a language journal during the course, consisting of word etymologies, neologisms, and “telling” uses of language collected in the field.
A) Word etymologies should be selected for their relevance to the art of storytelling. Collect at least twenty five word etymologies.
B) Neologisms are to be of newly coined words currently in use. Collect twenty five neologisms
C) “Telling” Uses of Language. Find and analyze language samples that reveal the base assumptions, world view, or beliefs of the speaker. The language samples can come from encounters with spoken, written, or electronically transmitted language—from conversation, overheard or reported speech, published or unpublished writing, or from language on radio, television, film, or the internet. Each sample should be at least the length of a complete utterance (depending on the context an utterance may or may not conform to the grammatical confinements of a complete sentence—i.e., a proverb (“Waste not, want not”), and exclamation (“Phat!”), or an advertising slogan), but no longer than a paragraph or a conversational turn or two. You will document the context in which you encountered the sample, the date, time, place, speakers, and media involved. You will then write a paragraph analyzing and commenting on precisely what is revealing and distinctive about it. Examples recorded without commentary or analysis will not be credited. Nor will more than three examples from any single source, unless you apply for and receive a special exemption. The purpose of this exercise is to hone your sensitivity to the subtleties and creative uses of language in many different forms and contexts. Collect twenty five entries of examples of language collected in the field.
Other assignments and quizzes TBD
GRADING
Paper #1 300 pts.
Paper #2 300 pts.
Language Journal 100 pts.
Quiz: 100 pts.
Attendance and Participation: 200 pts.
Total Points: 1000
ATTENDANCE
Students are required to be in class on time for each meeting. Three late arrivals or early departures will be counted equivalent to one absence on your record. A second absence will result in a drop of 50 points. Each subsequent absence will result in a drop of 100 points. Arriving more than 30 minutes late or leaving more than 30 minutes early will count as an absence
FINAL GRADING
A: 926-1000
A-: 900-925
B+: 875-899
B: 825-874
B-: 800-824
C+: 775-799
C: 700-774
Grades lower than a C in a graduate class are considered failing.
NOTE:
For more information on courses and the masters program, go to www.etsu.edu/stories/.
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