Bio

Professor. B.A.,  English, Middlebury College; M.F.A., Poetry and Fiction, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; M.A., English (Rhetoric and Composition), Carnegie Mellon University; Ph.D., English (Rhetoric and Composition), Ohio State University.

Professor Sloane teaches courses in writing studies, including composition theory, creative nonfiction, and questions of writing and ownership. She does scholarly work on  narratives written in new media (such as augmented realities), plagiarism, and 18th-century Scottish rhetoric. She is the author of book chapters and journal articles  about writing theory, experimental stories and poems, social justice in Guatemala, Wilhelm Reich, and aleatory writing techniques.  Her first book, Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World, was published in 2000. Her second book, The I Ching for Writers, was published in 2005. Professor Sloane has completed a third book, a co-authored work of nonfiction about the life of a Guatemalan guerrilla, based on more than 100 interviews. Her fourth book, just underway, will be a creative nonfiction text about edges. In her book prospectus, she writes, “An edge is a brink or a verge, the line at which a surface terminates, the place where two surfaces come together and end. Cliff, the deckle edge of a page, adze. When we think of an edge, we can think of it metaphorically, too: the edge of sanity, an edge of sadness, an edgy person. In any case, the literal and metaphorical uses of ‘edge’ invite us to look at moments of disjunction, the crepuscular and the liminal, the places where a person looks inside or out and sees the brink or the verge.” She has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook and ART342, been the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, won distinguished teaching awards at University of Massachusetts and University of Puget Sound, and been nominated for the alumni teaching award at Colorado State University.

Professor Sloane has also authored or coauthored essays and reviews in Composition Chronicle, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Reading Research Quarterly, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Western American Literature, Educators’ Tech Exchange, Education of the Visually Handicapped, Parabola: Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning, and other journals. She has served on the CCCC Executive Committee, as a Special Delegate in Rhetoric and Composition to the Modern Language Association, and has recently been invited to be a Visiting Academic at University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in their augmented reality laboratory. She will be teaching in Semester at Sea in Fall 2013.

Current Classes

• E 334 Gay and Lesbian Literature – download syllabus
  This course in gay and lesbian literature is simply described on the English Department website: “Literature by gay and lesbian authors on gay and lesbian themes.” While that description captures the main intent of the course, its reductiveness does not capture the rich and vibrant literature that originates from people who explore their oppositional status to the mainstream, those who explore their “queerness” in their writings and their lives. In this section of E334 we are going to read historically and thematically as we consider questions of sexuality, gender, and sex as they are understood in important works of American and British literature of the last hundred years. We will read poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and a graphic novel, watch films, and substantively discuss what it means to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, bi-gendered, or intersex in the terms of these texts, within their historical contexts. Moving chronologically from The Well of Loneliness and Tender Buttons to Cunningham’s The Hours, Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (published just months ago), the course will seek to understand these works in their historical contexts, as well as chart the shifting attitudes towards GLBTQI people and issues within literature—and in our lives. To some extent, the course itself will move into uncharted waters as we compose ourselves and our readings within the contexts of a presidential election, heated debates about gay rights, and the class’s own shifting questions and arguments as the semester unfolds. Respect for each other and for ourselves as we discuss the issues raised in these works is essential.
• E 633 (Variable Topics) Writing and Ownership: Pirates, Plagiarists, Imposters – download syllabus
  Why is some plagiarism art, and other plagiarism is a crime? What does it mean to take someone else’s identity and write her story as your own? What is the relationship between Kathy Acker’s literary experiments and the original Don Quixote? How do we decide what is intellectual property; how do we know when to cite someone else’s words or ideas? E633 Writing and Ownership takes an historical view of patterns of plagiarism, notions of intellectual property, and conventions of authorial attribution and borrowings since the passage of the first copyright statute to the new Access to Knowledge Movement (A2K). Grounded in contemporary theories of rhetoric and composition, the course will explore the legal nature of authorship, evolving ideas of intellectual (particularly literary) property and ownership, the detachment of authorial name from authorial composition, patterns of textual appropriation, and even forgery. Starting with literary examples of borrowings, appropriations, and meditations on authorship and ownership, we will then move to Stewart’s discussion of authorial practices we might call plagiarism today. We will follow up with rhetoric and composition’s views of pluralizing plagiarism, and we will whisk forward to the twenty-first century’s amalgams and pastiches of online texts, music piracies, fabricated memoirs, plagiarized images, verbal thefts, poetic reworkings of existing texts, and storytelling chicanery in online fiction generators. A rich and unfolding topic for a course, Writing and Ownership is itself constructed within a cultural moment that questions paper-based conventions of authorial attribution, and studies the anonyms, allonyms, pseudonyms and copyright violations committed by lads of the Edinburgh literati to platforms from Flickr to Facebook.