Fall 2021 Courses

Fall 2021 - Undergraduate English Courses

ENG 201 001 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: Prof. Jonathan Walker
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies:

In this course we will read and discuss four Shakespearean plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Richard II, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Titus Andronicus is perhaps Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, which was first printed in 1594 with no authorial attribution on its title page. Classified as a chronicle history play in the 1623 Folio—the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays, from which this course takes its title—Richard II recounts historical events in England’s recent past. Instead of being called a “history” play, however, the first printed edition was titled The Tragedie of King Richard the second (1597). Pericles didn’t appear in a Shakespeare Folio collection until 1663/4, and is now usually called a “romance,” which is a modern label for a group of only four Shakespearean plays. Finally, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s premier early comedies, featuring romance, magic, and mistaken identities.

Our guiding questions in this class will center on the generic or formal identities of these plays. In other words, we will discuss what it is that makes these plays either comical, historical, or tragical, while at the same time considering the possibility that such classifications are themselves forms of mistaken identity. We will examine how the literary forms of comedy, history, and tragedy predispose us as readers and playgoers to interpret dramatic action in certain ways, and, in turn, how the plays’ disruption or frustration of our formal expectations transforms the possibilities of our interpretations. We will likewise give attention to questions of social class, race, nationality, sexuality, and gender (among other issues) as they are posed by these four plays and by the larger English Renaissance culture from which they come.

Most of our in-class time will involve discussing such questions in these four texts, along with four short critical readings. There will be very few lectures. The course will therefore require you to have read the plays carefully and to be prepared to discuss and ask questions about them during class meetings. Because of the course’s discussion-based format, its success will depend upon everyone’s active participation as we seek to answer these various questions together.

ENG 205 001 SURVEY OF BRITISH LIT II

Instructor: Perrin Kerns
Instructional Method: Online

In this course, we will read and discuss literary works by Neo-Classical, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist and Contemporary British Writers. We will be reading essays, novels, plays, and poems that explore issues of identity, race, class, sexuality, and gender. We will read Mary Wollstonecraft and Olaudah Equiano, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own, and more. Coursework will include weekly reading responses and some essays. No prior background in the subject matter is required, but be ready to read! This term, we will be using the new Canvas Learning Management System, an intuitive and user-friendly platform.

ENG 254 001 SURVEY OF AMERICAN LIT II

Instructor: Hildy Miller
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

In this course we’ll sample a variety of pieces of American literature from the late 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries and examine them from a variety of critical perspectives with attention to the literary movements of the day. However, throughout the course we will especially focus on how recent sociopolitical issues—such as the 1619 Project, controversies around women’s reproduction, the Me Too movement, questions of cultural appropriation of Native American identities, generational reverberations of the Holocaust, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the re-articulation of LGBTQI identities, among many issues,—suggest timely re-readings of some American literature staples. In addition to short stories and poems, we’ll read and discuss two novels, Richard Wright’s novel The Man Who Lived Underground, finally published in 2021 after being rejected in the 1940s, which reveals realities of being a Black man in America that many are saying could have been expressed today. Also, Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale, a story which, even though it was initially published several decades ago, seems to be speaking powerfully to a new generation.

ENG 300 001 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

Instructor: Michael Clark
Instructional Method: Online

ENG 300 002 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

Instructor: M. Hines
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

What is literature? How have we determined what is "great" literature? Do we need to know "what the author intended"? Is there more than one way to find "meaning" in a story? "Aren't we reading too much into it?" Questions like these will guide us throughout this course, which is designed as an introduction to literary theory. Rather than surveying particular schools or movements, we will focus on central questions and problems. This is a “crash course” in interpretive strategies—the goal is introduction, not mastery. Our primary texts will be ghost stories, from a genre that foregrounds interpretive acts and moves toward revelation of things “hidden.”

ENG 300 003 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

Instructor: Prof. Jonathan Walker
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

As the title for English 300 should suggest, our course of study will concentrate on the major forms that English literature takes, including lyric poetry, drama, the short story, and the novel. Although we will not discuss other prominent forms such as the epic and the essay, we will screen and discuss a film adaptation of a piece of drama. We will also analyze both premodern and modern literature originating from England and the United States, ranging from William Shakespeare to Jeanette Winterson.

Without thinking much about it, most of us could differentiate a poem from a short story and a play from a novel, but when we examine literary “form,” what is it exactly that we’re looking at? One way of thinking about form is essentially the physical or material shape that a piece of literature takes. By “shape” I mean, at the most basic of levels, the disposition of the text upon the page and the mode or process by which a piece of literature creates its imaginative world. Another word for “form” is “structure,” which involves both the various parts that make up the whole as well as the relationship between those parts. Our job during this class will be to learn the formal characteristics of the literature we read and to analyze it in order to produce and formulate coherent literary meanings.

You will be expected to have read each day’s material carefully, to have ideas and questions prepared when you come to class, and to participate actively in class discussions.

ENG 304 001 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA

Instructor: Josh Epstein
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

“Critical theory”—a term that has gained a lot of unexpected visibility over the past year or so—is a set of tools that helps us to ask complex questions about how films generate meaning in the world—and then, to question the questions. Our course will be broken into four sets of questions related to film theory:

Genre and authorship. How do preconceived assumptions about genre shape film production and reception? What does it change if we do or don’t understand films as “authored” texts?
History, ideology, and realism. To what extent does a film present a vision of the “real world”; to what extent is that idea of “realism” bound up with ideological and historical assumptions; how can films not only represent or narrate the world, but act on it?
Gender, desire, and “the subject.” How does the film apparatus speak to the mind and body of the spectator? How do films’ manipulations of a “gaze” or a narrative structure our desires and identifications? What power dynamics do these “gazes” reproduce or critique?
Race, nation, and empire. How can film offer possibilities for resistant or “oppositional” modes of spectatorship that challenge stereotypes or conventional attitudes toward race and nation? How do genre and spectatorship work differently in global or postcolonial contexts?

I’ve been teaching Critical Theory of Cinema for a number of years, and I never thought the phrase “critical theory” would be so prominent in the public debate—albeit in a very tendentious and anti-intellectual way. Critical film theory hasn’t been the center of these discussions yet, so far as I know, but there are certainly overlaps with our course topics. You will, I hope, leave the course with a robust understanding of “critical theory” generally, and a broad and lively range of conversations you can have, and questions you can ask, about movies—as works of art, modes of entertainment, and interventions into their social and historical landscapes. We can start with the very basic question: why is going to see movies such a pleasurable activity? Why have we missed it so much over the past year? We will find this question much harder—but also, perhaps, much more necessary—than it initially appears.

There is one required textbook: Understanding Film Theory, ed. Doughty and Etherington-Wright (2nd ed.; ISBN 978-1137528230). This textbook will be a general guide to our primary "theory" readings, which will be distributed via Canvas. You should, however, budget for printing costs. Films are still TBD but will likely include some (not all) of the following directors: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Sirk, Fassbinder, Disney, Hammer, Pontecorvo, De Sica, Dash, Reichardt, or Peele.

ENG 305U 001 TOP IN FLM: HITCHCOCK

Instructor: Michael Clark
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 305U 002 TOP: TOPICS IN FILM

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Online

ENG 306U 001 TOP: LIT AND POP CULTURE

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 307U 001 SCIENCE FICTION

Instructor: Bill Knight
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course will survey and theorize about the field of science fiction through one of its most powerful narrative modes: contact.

Contact often means real crisis in SF narratives, a powerful and unrepeatable moment that throws everything into a new light—often a light determined by violence and conflict. It divides the present from the past, naming the emergence of a new moment that can never return to identity with the old. Contact is a paradigmatic narrative event, an eruption or arrival that creates crisis out of what will have been a mundane normalcy, a revolutionary present from what becomes tagged as an ancient regime or a lost innocence. These stories of periodization reveal humanity suddenly faced with a radical redefinition of itself in the light of contact, and they represent a sublime testimony of the power of the vision and thinking possible in science fiction narrative.

Science fiction allows us imaginative access to the most unexpected and transformative experiences of contact as well as to the various, all-too predictable fantasies of autonomy, power, and domination that lurk behind many contact narratives. Together we will have a chance to wonder, among other things, why narratives of contact tend in their way towards masculine (as well as Eurocentric or American) norms and perspectives, or why so many stories of contact are wrapped in paranoia, suspicion, or conspiracy theory. What’s more, first contact in SF allows—or requires—us to address the role and question of the other in a fundamental form: the “alien,” the stranger, the outsider who arrives at our door, the unidentifiable force that acts on us without our expectation or understanding. What possibilities do these encounters with others unleash or bring to light? We’ll uncover and examine the crises that accompany contact in these novels, working together to consider contact as crisis or event for narrative and the implications that these SF stories reveal. Above all, we’ll do this by reading some really exemplary SF novels and looking through your presentations outward to other works (films, tv, games, or other novels) that tell further tales of SF contact, other stories of encounters with the unanticipated and unknown that create crises of meaning and identity.

Students will write two papers, participate in a group presentation, and engage actively in class discussion.

Texts:

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness. ISBN: 978-0441007318
Stanislaw Lem. Solaris. ISBN: 978-0156027601
Naomi Mitchison. Memoirs of a Spacewoman. ISBN: 978-1849210355
Nnedi Okorafor. Lagoon. ISBN: 978-1481440882
Carl Sagan. Contact. ISBN: 978-0671004101
Peter Watts. Blindsight. ISBN: 978-0765319647

ENG 309U 001 INDIGENOUS NATIONS LITERATURE

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 326 001 LIT, COMMUNITY, DIFFERENCE

Instructor: Prof. Anoop Mirpuri
Instructional Method: Online
This course is low-cost.

What is the relation between a literary text and its author? How did our society come to share the assumption that a work of literature is the “expression” of an author’s “voice”? What historical processes have enabled us to assume that works of literature represent the “experience” of the identity group (i.e., “community”) to which an author belongs? And what can be gained (as readers, as social beings, and as political subjects) by questioning these assumptions?

This course will address these questions through a close study of a small but critical selection of literary theory. We will also test out some of their theories, insights, and interpretive strategies through a reading of Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1855), and Jordan Peele’s film, Get Out (2017). Ultimately, the aim of this course is to develop a critical understanding of: a) the kinds of “work” that literature does in shaping or challenging our notions of “community,” and b) the role that reading can play in expanding the living potential and itinerary of literary texts.

This course fulfills the “Culture, Difference, and Representation” component of the PSU English Major.

Required Texts:

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

ENG 327 001 CULTURE, IMPER, GLOBALIZATION

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 330U 001 JEWISH & ISRAELI LITERATURE

Instructor: Michael Weingrad
Instructional Method: Online

ENG 331U 001 INTRO RHETORIC & COMP

Instructor: Dan DeWeese
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition Studies offers students an opportunity to discuss contemporary issues in writing instruction, persuasion in a multimedia world, and the interplay of traditional and visual literacies. The course touches upon the rhetorical traditions argued in ancient Greece, challenges to those traditions, the rise of “process-oriented” writing instruction in American universities, and visual elements of rhetoric that began with professional typography and now extend into film, television, and the Internet. Although history provides the course’s structure, the focus is on such perennial issues as the relationship of writing to speech and reading, the teaching of writing (and the role of audience in composing), the relationship between writing and “the self,” and the political implications bound up in differing representations of thought and methods of argument.

Required Texts:

On Rhetoric, Aristotle, translated by George A. Kennedy (Oxford)
Ways of Seeing, John Berger (Penguin)
Gorgias, Plato, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford)

ENG 332U 001 HST CINEMA & NARRATIVE MEDIA I

Instructor: Wendy Collins
Instructional Method: Online

This course is asynchronous and fully online through Canvas and examines the history of cinema from its early beginnings through the decline of the studio system (around 1948). The main focus will be on films from the silent era.

ENG 335U 001 TOP: AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY

Instructor: Elizabeth Brown
Instructional Method: Remote Synchronous

This course introduces the study of literature and film by focusing on treatments of slavery across various modalities, genres, and forms. Of particular concern will be an analysis of how literature and film engage what scholars have termed the “afterlife of slavery,” which cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman defines as a persistent “measure of man and a ranking of life and worth” or a “racial calculus and political arithmetic” forged within transatlantic slavery. As part of our consideration of how authors and filmmakers have treated slavery and its afterlife, we will attend to how such treatments illuminate forms of bondage and practices of freedom in the past and present. To carry out our investigation, we will practice critical methods to analyze literature and film and, importantly, develop strategies to think across these aesthetic modes. That is, what questions and insights emerge when we examine literature through the lens of film studies or film through the lens of literary studies? How does examining the afterlife of slavery in literature and film illuminate questions about bondage, resistance, and freedom within specific historical contexts, including our own? What political implications arise out of how filmmakers have adapted literature for the screen or how writers have thematized spectatorship and visuality? Over the term, we will explore these and other questions by engaging three pairs of literary and filmic texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) alongside Steve McQueen’s period drama 12 Years a Slave (2013), Octavia Butler’s speculative novel Kindred (1979) alongside Julie Dash’s experimental film Daughters of the Dust (1991), and Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996) alongside Boots Riley’s satirical film Sorry to Bother You (2018).

ENG 340U 001 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Instructor: Keri Behre
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Early English literature echoes all around us. In this course, we will undertake a close study of literary works by medieval women and men, paying close attention to both genre and historical context. Our text will be The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages, 10th Edition. Course work will include class participation, short response papers, and multiple drafts of a final interpretive essay. This particular version of the course has grown out of my enjoyment of teaching the material through the lens of a variety of digital adaptations and reflections. We’ll incorporate short clips of these and other media to engage questions of relevance, theme, and critical issues of adaption and relevance for many of our texts. This course is a good fit for anyone who needs or wants to understand more about English literature in the Middle Ages; no prior background in the subject matter or language is required.

ENG 342U 001 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

Instructor: Bill Knight
Instructional Method: Online

Eighteenth-century British literature is a remarkable crucible for new combinations in genre, new ideas about subjectivity, morality, and politics, new representations of what it means to be *modern* and of how we might imagine a critical or interpretive stance occasioned by that modernity. The British eighteenth century was but a brief period; in it, however, the ideologies of capitalism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism were brewing. In the midst of these new “modern” ways of being, the role of writing and print blossomed or exploded, an unruly outpouring of a diverse multiplicity of efforts to make sense of and to define the shifting values and the broad transformations that were beginning to make themselves felt at every level of the social hierarchy.

This course will outline the ways in which—intimately related to these broader developments—aspects of the modern notion of the individual self emerged in 18th-century writing, with particular emphasis on developments in autonomy, responsibility, sympathy & empathy, psychology, sexuality, political rights, and the sublime. We’ll trace the features of selves across their expression in gendered and raced bodies, and we’ll work to articulate the values of selfhood within the wider context of literary history, politics, and social change across the period.

Works:

Aphra Behn. Oroonoko. ISBN: 978-0140439885
Daniel Defoe. Roxana. ISBN: 978-0199536740
William Earle. Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack. ISBN: 978-1551116693
Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. ISBN: 978-0142437162
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels. ISBN: 978-0553212327
Unca Eliza Winkfield. The Female American. ISBN: 978-1554810963
Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. ISBN: 978-0140424621

ENG 343U 001 ROMANTICISM

Instructor: Alastair Hunt
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course introduces students to the greatest hits and one-hit wonders of the literature produced in Britain in the decades between the 1780s and the 1830s. The romantic period witnessed some of the major events in modern history, such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the abolition of slavery in the British empire. We will examine how the writers of the time, responding to such events, developed literary forms for exploring such distinctly modern concerns as social and political change, the complex nature of the self, and our relation with the nonhuman environment. Taking in a capacious range of their accomplishments, this course offers students a chance not just to read some pretty cool poems, but also to see how romanticism makes claims on us to think—and re-think—our common-sense explanations and expectations of the world.

Course Goals:

To understand the defining characteristics of British romanticism as a period of literary history and scholarly debates about these characteristics.
To gain familiarity with literary works by a range of romantic writers.
To appreciate the lessons romantic literary texts have to teach us about the promises and predicaments of our times.
To develop skills at closely reading the signifying elements of language, including formal elements, and to articulate this reading in evidence-based, reasoned, interpretative written arguments.

Required Texts:

Manning, Peter, and Susan Wolfson, editors. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. 5th ed., Pearson, 2012. (ISBN 9780205223169)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Text, edited by D. L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf, 3rd ed., Broadview, 2012. (ISBN: 9781554811038)

ENG 351U 001 AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT I

Instructor: Prof. Anoop Mirpuri
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

“Now to talk to me about black studies as if it’s something that concerned black people is utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization. I can’t see it otherwise.” – C.L.R. James

“It does not follow that if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better treated.” – Alain Locke

This course is the first part of a three-course survey of African American literature. Whereas parts two and three cover the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this course covers the emergence of the black literary tradition in the nineteenth century in relation to the world-making force of slavery in the Americas. We will read a selection of writing by, and about, people of African descent during the period of slavery and abolition. Our specific focus will be the genre of the slave narrative.

It’s tempting to read slave narratives as simple “testimony” to the experience of enslavement by formerly enslaved people. While it’s true that slave narratives provide important and valuable testimony, in this class we will examine the slave narrative as a genre—a form of writing—that was shaped by the historical context in which it emerged. In other words, rather than reading slave narratives as “authentic” expressions of black “voices” or documentations of the “black experience,” we will read slave narratives as complex literary texts whose form and content were shaped by the ideological struggles of the nineteenth century world that brought them into being. The following questions will guide our study: What were the political, economic, and ideological conditions that gave rise to the slave narrative as a form of writing? What were the intentions of the editors and publishers who sponsored these narratives, and how did they relate to the intentions of the authors? What were the assumptions and expectations of their audience, and how did authors navigate them in the act of writing? How did audience expectations and assumptions shape what it was possible to write and the form in which it was possible to write it? Were slave narratives successful in accomplishing their intended goals? Why did the slave narrative become the paradigmatic form of abolitionist expression in the nineteenth century?

This course challenges the commonly held assumption that the study of “African American literature” is the study of a specific people, race, culture, or history. Following the claim made by C.L.R. James in the epigraph above, this course approaches the study of the slave narrative as the study of western civilization itself.

Required Texts:

Henry Louis Gates, ed. The Classic Slave Narratives

ENG 360U 001 AMERICAN LIT AND CULTURE I

Instructor: Prof. Elisabeth Ceppi
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Course Overview:

This course surveys major genres and writers of the Anglo-American tradition, from settler colonialism in New England through the antebellum period. Our authors and texts provide diverse perspectives from which to examine how the literary history of the period intersects with the histories of race, gender, class, religion, and nationalism. We will focus on close and careful readings of a variety of genres to illuminate the central role of narrative, literature, and publication in constructing and contesting the meanings of American ideals of freedom, democracy, justice, social mobility, and self-making. By considering how the writers on our syllabus both represent and dramatize their own historical moment and actively engage with and critique the texts and events of the past, the course will help students develop their own skills at reading the past and understanding the social, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the ways our present is shaped by and responds to it. This course fills the Historical Literacy requirement for the BA/BS in English (and the pre-1800 [Group C] requirement under the old major) and the American Identities and Interpreting the Past cluster requirement for non-majors.

Learning Outcomes:

In the course, students will:

develop their ability to interpret literary texts in their historical contexts and as primary evidence of how historical narratives about America have been constructed and contested
be introduced to a range of significant authors and texts that convey the diversity and richness of American literary culture as it develops from the 17th century through the antebellum period
develop skills for framing critical questions and making persuasive, evidence-based arguments about historical literature

Required Books: available at PSU Bookstore; all except Rowlandson are available as books or Ebooks (no Rowlandson Ebook is available; I strongly recommend buying the Bedford edition I ordered for its excellent introductory essay, but a free electronic copy is also available on Project Gutenberg)

Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Bedford/St. Martin’s 1997)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa (Dover)
Herman Melville, Bartleby and Benito Cereno (Dover)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover)

ENG 368U 001 LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY

Instructor: Bill Knight
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Science Fiction and Ecology:

This course will consider literature's entanglements with ecology through a science fiction lens. We'll examine the various ways literary science fiction represents and figures the natural world and the role of humans in ecological processes. We’ll look at novels, stories, and films that tell SF tales focusing on utopia, wilderness, ecological disaster, permaculture and sustainability, and trans-species contact. We’ll consider the ethical, political, and social theories that emerge from these works and compare them to recent trends in writing and thought about climate, ecology, sustainability, and eco-capitalism. And we'll encounter, evaluate, and critique the persistence of romanticism as a literary phenomenon.

The novels we’ll read will likely include:

Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Ursula K. Le Guin. The Word for World is Forest (1972)
Ernest Callenbach. Ecotopia (1975)
Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower (1993)
Sue Burke. Semiosis (2018)

We’ll consider a number of shorter works and secondary readings from a diverse group of contemporary global authors. In groups, students will present on works of their choice *not covered* in the course syllabus—these will expand and complicate our sense of the many innovative ways that global science- and speculative fiction engage with ecological concepts, theories, and potentialities.

ENG 385U 001 CONTEMPORARY LIT

Instructor: Susan Reese
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 413 001 TEACHING & TUTORING WRITING

Instructor: Hildy Miller
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

Are you planning on teaching writing at either the college or secondary level? Most English grads who teach actually spend the majority of their time teaching writing. This course introduces you to the theory and practice of teaching and tutoring writing. We’ll focus on writing processes (invention, revision, editing, formal and informal writing, and writing groups); teaching strategies (responding to writing, developing your teaching ethos, working with ESL students, handling plagiarism, teaching critical reading, and developing a teaching philosophy); and look at specific issues (how tutorial sessions work, what writing in the disciplines means, how to create such teaching staples as a syllabus, a writing assignment, a unit plan, and a lesson plan). If possible given the state of the pandemic conditions, you’ll also get actual teaching experience by spending at least 3 hours a week in a tutoring or teaching practicum of your choice beginning the about the third week. So, in short, this won’t be your average lecture class. Instead, you’ll be reading and researching materials, working in small groups, doing practice teaching and tutoring sessions, producing formal and informal writing, and applying all you’re learning to your practicum. At the end of the course you should possess both the tools and the confidence to teach writing in any context.

Required for students applying to the GTEP program; recommended for anyone entering other Masters of Education/Teaching programs or planning to teach at college level.

ENG 497 001 COMICS HISTORY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Hybrid

This class is an overview of the bizarre, delightful history of American periodical comic books, in the context of the cultural and aesthetic currents that have shaped the form. We'll read and discuss a wide variety of comics spanning the past 80-plus years, from their newsprint origins to the "ten-cent plague" of the mid-20th century; the mainstream, underground and art-comics movements that warily circled each other for decades; and the spectacular creative boom of recent years. Students will also look at how comics' commercial and artistic histories have intertwined, and learn from each other's research into specific topics.

Fall 2021 - Graduate English Courses

ENG 500 001 PROBLEMS AND METHODS

Instructor: Alastair Hunt
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course is a general introduction to advanced, graduate-level scholarship in English studies, and it aims to help you cultivate your mastery of the fundamental methodology employed by every researcher in the field.
Our approach to learning this set of knowledge and skills will be both theoretical and practical. We will read and discuss important reflections on and examples of each aspect of methodology by scholars within the field. And we will spend time repeatedly practicing scholarly methodology through an intentional sequence of assignments.
This is a lot to cover in just ten weeks, and our course of study necessarily will be selective. However, by the end of the term you will be a better close reader, be able to analyze elements of literary form, be able to productively engage existing scholarship, be a better writer of scholarly essays, and feel comfortable engaging literary theory.

Course Objectives:

To develop and expand close reading skills as an entryway into larger questions of interpretation.
To understand and appreciate the significance of formal elements and rhetorical devices, including genre and generic conventions;
To understand critical arguments and scholarly conversations, including the ability to identify and summarize critical positions and use secondary material strategically;
To refine writing skills: constructing interpretive questions, crafting arguments, organizing paragraphs, using appropriate evidence, developing style, assessing rhetorical situations, addressing specific audiences, and writing with purpose;
To engage with theoretical essays and approaches.

Required Books: (probable)

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011. ISBN: 0199691347.
Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook. 8th ed. Modern Language Association of America, 2016. ISBN: 9781603292627.
M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Wadsworth, 2015. ISBN: 9781285465067.
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 4th ed. W. W. Norton & Co., 2019. ISBN: 9780393631678.
Gregory Colón Semenza. Graduate Study for the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave, 2010. ISBN: 9780230105805. (recommended)

These books will be available at the PSU bookstore. All other readings will be made available on the course Canvas website or accessible in electronic form via the PSU library.

ENG 500 002 PROBLEMS AND METHODS

Instructor: Alastair Hunt
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

To develop and expand close reading skills as an entryway into larger questions of interpretation.
To understand and appreciate the significance of formal elements and rhetorical devices, including genre and generic conventions;
To understand critical arguments and scholarly conversations, including the ability to identify and summarize critical positions and use secondary material strategically;
To refine writing skills: constructing interpretive questions, crafting arguments, organizing paragraphs, using appropriate evidence, developing style, assessing rhetorical situations, addressing specific audiences, and writing with purpose;
To engage with theoretical essays and approaches.

Required Books: (probable)

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011. ISBN: 0199691347.
Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook. 8th ed. Modern Language Association of America, 2016. ISBN: 9781603292627.
M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Wadsworth, 2015. ISBN: 9781285465067.
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 4th ed. W. W. Norton & Co., 2019. ISBN: 9780393631678.
Gregory Colón Semenza. Graduate Study for the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave, 2010. ISBN: 9780230105805. (recommended)

These books will be available at the PSU bookstore. All other readings will be made available on the course Canvas website or accessible in electronic form via the PSU library.

ENG 507 001 SEM: EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Instructor: Prof. Elisabeth Ceppi
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course surveys the literary and cultural history of the geographical terrain that became the U.S. from 16th century settler colonialism through the Early National period. We will interpret representative primary texts of this period in the context of histories of imperialism, war, enslavement, and capitalism. Close and careful readings of a diverse array of genres, and engagement with recent and classic scholarship, will allow us to examine the central role of literature in constructing and contesting the meanings of American ideals of freedom, democracy, justice, social mobility, and self-making. Our authors provide rich evidence of the cultural histories of race, gender, class, religion, and nationalism. By dramatizing, representing, exemplifying, and critiquing their historical moments, these texts allow present-day readers to develop nuanced understandings of the past and how our world has been shaped by it. This course fills the pre-1800 and seminar requirements for the MA in English.

Required Books:

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Arte Público)
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Bedford/St. Martin’s 1997)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa (Dover)
Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (Dover)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Penguin)

Additional required readings will be available in PDF and full-text formats.

ENG 507 002 SEM: LITERATURE & HUMAN RIGHTS

Instructor: Bishupal Limbu
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Human rights offer a vision of a more just world and they have become increasingly a part of our moral imagination and vocabulary. This seminar will examine the intersection of human rights and literature, focusing on the role literary representation plays in both affirming and questioning our ethical instincts and evaluations. The questions we will ask include: What types of stories are most effective as human rights stories? Effective in what way? How do human rights concerns influence or shape literary form and vice versa? How is the human in human rights constructed? Who or what counts as human? What are the limits of the language of rights? What are our responsibilities and how are we implicated as readers, witnesses, citizens, and humans? We will approach these questions by studying a stimulating mix of novels, films, cultural criticism, history, and philosophy, including texts by J. M. Coetzee, Jenny Erpenbeck, Valeria Luiselli, Lynn Hunt, Samuel Moyn, Michael Rothberg, and a few others.

ENG 507 003 SEM: THE ROMANTHROPOCENE

Instructor: Tracy Dillon
Instructional Method: Online

Arising from contemporary scientific discourse on geologic time, the Anthropocene can be taken as the term that scientists have assigned to their invention of our contemporary geologic epoch. It means (apologies for the gendered language, but, hey, nobody asked me) “the recent age of man.” More specifically, it spotlights the newfangled effects on Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and carbon-depleted soil that have brought the contested term “climate change” to the forefront of humanity’s collective terror about species extinction. It seems that “the recent age of man,” which some scientists peg to 1950!, means that man (no need to apologize for the gendered language there) has killed the planet, and that we are past the tipping point of return to health. We are beyond achieving ameliorating effects by invoking mantras of sustainability. “Who killed the world?” they ask in a recent iteration of the Mad Max franchise, Fury Road. The Anthropocenic answer to that question is: Greedy white men killed the world.

Sabine Wilke writes, “What is absent from the scientific discourse on the Anthropocene is a postcolonial perspective that points out the fact that we are not talking about generalizable social, economic, and cultural structures and belief systems, but that instead we are describing very specific political, economic, and discursive regimes of power. Humanity as a whole did not get us to this point, but rather Western civilization, and not all humans are affected equally by the consequences of environmental degradation. The continued existence of these regimes in the Anthropocene necessitates the critique of their basic ideological underpinnings and beliefs.”

Punctuating that overview with a laser-focus on the experiences of Indigenous peoples under Euro-Western technologically enabled colonization, Jessica L. Horton points out that “a number of scholars have criticized the colonial parameters of ecological discourses still struggling to break free from European Enlightenment legacies that spurred the conquest of Natives and ‘Nature’ alike… such inheritances are maintained in the universalizing rhetoric of the Anthropocene. The specter of human-wide culpability for climate change is produced in ‘white public space’—space in which Indigenous ideas and experiences are appropriated, or obscured, by non-Native practitioners.’”

To sum simplistically, we’ve got white Euro-Western science observing (but from many perspectives taking little responsibility for) the death of the species via the effects of climate change and a whole host of “others” saying, “Hold up there, Big Fella! We didn’t have anything to do with western scientific technology’s contribution to global suicide, but you expect us to lie down and die too because, oops, that’s just the way things turned out?”

Cultural and culturally-specific scientific responses to the Anthropocene range from building rocket ships that will blast off probably-mostly-white-humans on missions to colonize other planets to death, to renewing Indigenous stewardship practices such as localized permaculture farming that replenishes carbon in the dying soils of our Mother Earth. We won’t have time to review the politics and passion of these debates fully. This is an “English literature” class, after all, and THE PROFESSOR likes poems. But we’ll do enough to understand the intellectual climate complementing our contemporary geologic one in preparation for hunting down the origins of Anthropocenic Anxiety in Romantic literature. You will have room to explore Romantic themes related to the Anthropocene—what I’m calling the Romanthropocene—in other genres and even periods of your choice. Participants also will have a chance to exercise their personal scholarly preferences. If you are enrolled in our BA or MFA in creative writing, for example, you will be given the chance to write in your preferred genre. Alternatively, if you are a geologist taking the course as an elective, you will be encouraged to explore 18th- and 19th-century science writing, some of which inspired seminal Romantic works like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

Specifically, the class will explore Romanthropocenic works including (but not limited to) Byron’s “Darkness” and Manfred, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man on Earth, P.B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Prometheus Unbound. And the hits keep coming. We’ll distinguish between features of “Apocalyptic” vision and Romanthropocenic vision, examining how end-time meditations become even more “Romantic” when the imagination apprehends the extinction of the entire human species and the death of Nature as we have known it, vs. lamenting personal mortality or the end of a privileged culture or way of life.

We should note here that, although this is an “Advanced Topics” course, you don’t need expertise in Romanticism to catch on and do well. Readings both scholarly and literary, along with examples of Romantic art and music, will be provided so that you can save money on textbooks. Weekly readings will provide touchstones for class discussions, and these exercises will lead to short papers at term’s end.

By then, you will have had ample opportunity to earn superfluous extra credit by convincing THE PROFESSOR that everything’s going to be all right. Yes. Everything’s going to be just fine.

Questions? Write to me at dillont@pdx.edu.

ENG 518 001 TEACHING COLLEGE COMPOSITION

Instructor: Kate Comer
Instructional Method: Hybrid

ENG 519 001 ADV TEACHING COLLEGE COMP

Instructor: Kate Comer
Instructional Method: Hybrid

ENG 531 001 TOP: THE FIELD OF ENGLISH

Instructor: Josh Epstein
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

ENG 531 002 COLLOQUIUM

Instructor: Josh Epstein
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Fall 2021 - Undergraduate Writing Courses

WR 115 001 INTRO TO COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of college-level writing and reading, with focus on developing strategies for academic writing. Designed for students wanting preparation for WR 121 or Freshman Inquiry.

WR 115 002 INTRO TO COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of college-level writing and reading, with focus on developing strategies for academic writing. Designed for students wanting preparation for WR 121 or Freshman Inquiry.

WR 121 001 COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of critical writing, with focus on analyzing and adapting to different contexts. Designed as a foundation for college-level writing.

WR 121 002 COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of critical writing, with focus on analyzing and adapting to different contexts. Designed as a foundation for college-level writing.

WR 121 003 COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of critical writing, with focus on analyzing and adapting to different contexts. Designed as a foundation for college-level writing.

WR 121 004 COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of critical writing, with focus on analyzing and adapting to different contexts. Designed as a foundation for college-level writing.

WR 121 005 COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of critical writing, with focus on analyzing and adapting to different contexts. Designed as a foundation for college-level writing.

WR 200 001 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

Instructor: Elle Wilder
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 200: “Writing About Literature” uses writing as a way to engage with literature personally and academically. We will:

Examine how and why different people write about literature
Write as a way to enjoy and analyze literature
Practice writing as a form of “academic discourse.”

Students will read nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the purpose of literary analysis as well as writings on the texts to evaluate their form. This section will have a modern Gothic focus because Gothic texts are rich in recognizable yet provocative narratives, symbols, and themes. This gives students an advantage in literary analysis without sacrificing the thrill of a juicy story. Students will be able to individualize writing assignments to explore areas of interest and work on personal writing goals. Assessment is based on practicing the writing process: research, drafting, revision, and peer review not on creating a finished product.

WR 212 001 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Gabriel Urza
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This class is an introduction to the practice of fiction writing. We will be reading and discussing several short stories that illustrate basic conventions of fiction such as Point of View, Psychic Distance, Forms, Setting and Place, Characterization, Voice, Structure, and Dialogue. We will also be completing several writing exercises intended to engage with these conventions and to inspire new approaches to your writing. As an introduction to the creative writing workshop, these writing exercises will be read and discussed in small groups.

WR 212 002 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Leni Zumas
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

WR 212 003 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 213 001 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

The primary objective of this course is to increase our sensitivity as writers and readers of poetry. We will read extensively from the great well of human poetic output from the earliest surviving verse to contemporary work as well as prose essays on poetics. Weekly writing prompts, in-class exercises, and peer reviews will afford us the opportunity to practice what we learn. We will compose at least six original poems over the course of the term and make substantial revisions to two of these works. Along the way we will gain an understanding of key craft concepts such as form, tone, diction, meter, and lineation. Finally, we will grapple with notions of what it means to be a poet in the world and gain an appreciation for meaningful literary citizenship.

WR 213 002 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Georg Sperle
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

In this class, we will explore poetry and the writing of poetry as the act of using language to convey thoughts and emotions, tell stories, teach, and experience the world. This course will focus on the creative freedom in poetry, providing a welcoming space for students to experiment and play with language, form, and content. The work we do will be guided by readings of a diverse variety of poets, writing exercises and constraints, discussions of craft, and workshops. We will read and discuss student work. This term, we will explore trusting your ability and experiences as a poet, having power over your work as an artist, what it means to translate experience to language, and seeing the world through the lens of a poet.

WR 214 001 INTRO NONFICTION WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

An introduction to writing creative nonfiction, with a focus on the informal essay. Students will complete two short essays, one long essay, and will practice giving and receiving peer feedback in small group workshops. Weekly readings selected from across the creative nonfiction genre will be provided in electronic and/or paper form. In-class discussions will examine craft techniques, establishing a productive writing process, and ethical issues inherent in nonfiction.

WR 222 001 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Online

WR 222 002 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

How do you write a research paper without waiting until the last minute?

This course offers a process and progress approach to writing research papers: selecting topics, evaluating sources, and analyzing media. We will look at applying and expanding your research skills in new contexts, as well as pushing boundaries of what is "appropriate" for academic writing. We will explore the conversation around how audience, bias, and argument shape writing. Student interests will drive our research agendas, but we will develop transferable practical strategies for research and writing across fields of study. Course grading is based on practice and collaboration, not focused on a letter grade on one final writing assignment.

WR 222 003 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 222 004 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 227 001 INTRO TO TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 227 002 INTRO TO TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Online

WR 227 004 INTRO TO TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: Mary Sylwester
Instructional Method: Online

This course covers a variety of technical writing modes, such as correspondence, reports, summaries, proposals, and user instructions. Students will write every week and should plan to spend at least 12 hours/week on reading and writing for the course.

WR 228 001 MEDIA WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

In this course, students learn to create interesting, informative, and accurate news articles. Doing so demands engaging in the most fundamental aspect of journalism: reporting. This might involve, for example, interviewing a policy expert or government official—or even witnessing a heated public protest. Course readings include contemporaneous news articles from both local and national outlets.

WR 301 001 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

Instructor: Kate Comer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Consider WR 301 your formal introduction to English Studies. While you no doubt have a variety of experiences studying “English”—and your enrollment in this class demonstrates your interest in that subject—the odds are that you’re relatively new to the disciplinary conversation. In this class, we will hone your critical writing skills while considering these questions: What is English Studies?

What do we do? How do we do it? and, of course, Why? Class readings and projects reflect the diversity of our discipline(s); they will help you enrich your textual analysis through contextual research. This process will foster your ability to read carefully, think creatively, and write well within and beyond English Studies.

WR 301 002 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

WR 301 003 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 312 001 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Diana Abu-Jaber
Instructional Method: Online

WR 312 002 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Mark Cunningham
Instructional Method: Remote Synchronous

In this course we will review and build upon key principles of vivid fiction and other forms of creative writing. We will also look to works of art in other disciplines as we explore the creative process itself. We will strive to hone our perceptive powers as writers and reach a fuller understanding of creative writing as an exploration and expression of consciousness. Through reading and discussion, writing experiments, analysis of published texts and student work, we’ll broaden the ways we think about fiction, its main principles, and its permutations. Note: Rather than using this course to polish their pre-existing work, students will be expected to create new writing in response to explorative prompts.

WR 312 003 INTERMED FICTION WR

Instructor: Sean Hennessey
Instructional Method: Remote Synchronous

WR 312: Intermediate Fiction Writing, “Digging,” is a discussion-orientated class that seeks to open up the process of fiction writing by building upon the topics discussed in WR 212: Intro to Fiction and other introductory writing classes. The course uses writing and explorations into the elements of story to help the students see their own work differently and to empower them with the language used to discuss their writing in a workshop environment. Students will be asked to read and respond to short stories, respond creatively to a number of writing prompts, and to submit two full stories for in-class workshop, one of which will be revised and submitted as part of the final project.

WR 313 001 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 323 001 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Keri Behre
Instructional Method: Online
This course is low-cost.

WR 323 002 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Keri Behre
Instructional Method: Online
This course is low-cost.

WR 323 003 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Susan Kirtley
Instructional Method: Online

WR 323 004 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Susan Kirtley
Instructional Method: Online

WR 323 005 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Susan Reese
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 323 006 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

A writing course for upper-division students, which offers sophisticated approaches to writing and reading. Students enhance critical thinking abilities by reading and writing challenging material, refine their rhetorical strategies, practice writing processes with special attention to revision and style, and write and read in a variety of genres. Includes formal and informal writing, sharing writing with other students, and writing multiple revisions of their work.

In this course, we will practice critical inquiry in personal, academic, and professional writing. This is a process-oriented class, which means we will be studying and practicing writing techniques to develop insight into how we function best as writers. We will develop skills in critical reading, thinking and writing. Students will be given some reign to choose their own topics within the assignment structures, so our work can encompass personal writing goals. There is no required textbook; all readings will be provided. Required course work will constitute multiple drafts of three essays, peer-review workshops, weekly low-stakes writing assignments, participation in class discussions, and a final self-reflective essay.

WR 323 007 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 323 008 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 323 009 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Amy Harper Russell
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

In this course, we will learn how to write a proposal, how to discern bias in research, and how to research, synthesize, and cite information in the process of writing a research paper. In addition, we will write and share personal narratives as well as learn how to analyze components of fiction in literary critique. To round out the course, we will focus on translating writing to the real world by writing Resumes and Cover Letters. Be ready to collaborate with others in workshops that involve critical peer reviews.

WR 323 011 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Online

WR 323 012 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Online

WR 327 001 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: Tracy Dillon
Instructional Method: Online

This course prepares students for writing as professionals in engineering, scientific and other technical disciplines. Topics covered include technical and workplace genres of writing, such as proposals and reports, oral presentation, writing about and with data, effective language practices, writing collaboratively and ethics. Emphasis (and the ultimate end-product) will be a short but formal technical report based on your own personal interests and experience. The report will propose a solution to a problem to decision makers who have the authority to act on your recommendations. Should be fun!

WR 327 002 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 327 004 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: Dr. Julie Kares
Instructional Method: Online

Sharing your ideas can be challenging! When those ideas convey complex, technical information, it can seem overwhelming! Building skills that allow you to speak to varied audiences on any number of technical topics will ensure that you successfully express your great concepts! In WR 327, we’ll explore technical writing across career fields, exploring the “how” of technical writing versus the “what.” While we will focus on particular kinds of reports to familiarize you with the possibilities, the emphasis will be on the process. Using the core skills you learn in this class, you will be able to recognize and apply the effective components of report writing to create strong

WR 331 001 BOOK PUBLISHING FOR WRITERS

Instructor: Brian W. Parker
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

The landscape of publishing has changed significantly in the last ten years. In this course, we will be exploring the elements of publishing from the manuscript’s creation, editing, design and layout, and eventually to marketing and distribution. Learning the terminology, traditional publishing roles, and the ins and outs of self-publishing will give authors the tools for success.

WR 333 001 ADVANCED ESSAY WRITING

Instructor: Caroline Hayes
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Study and practice of the essay genre across creative and critical contexts.

In this class we will examine the genre of the essay and its various uses and forms through reading, reflection, discussion, and practice. Throughout the term we will read a variety of essays that both discuss and exemplify the genre and we will discuss the ways that these different readings fit into the genre of the essay in order to form a more complete understanding of this vast and varied form of writing. We will cultivate this understanding through several writing practices, including personal writing in the form of a journal, written discussion on the Canvas discussion boards, and formal essays. The term will culminate in writing a final essay in a style and on a topic of your choice, using the methods and styles demonstrated throughout the term.

WR 398 001 WRITING COMICS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 399 001 SPST: INTERMED NONFIC WRITING

Instructor: Paul Collins
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 399 (Intermediate Nonfiction Writing) continues the study of creative nonfiction and media writing introduced in WR 214 or WR 228. Students in this writing seminar will explore works by contemporary nonfiction authors and will draft, workshop, and revise original pieces of creative nonfiction.

Texts:

Kitchen, Judith & Dinah Lenney. Brief Encounters (978-0393350999)
McPhee, John. The John McPhee Reader (978-0374517199)
Moore, Wayétu. The Dragons, the Giant, The Women (978-1644450567)
Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster (978-0316013321)
Wang, Esmé Weijun. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (978-1555978273)

WR 410 001 TOP: LITERARY MAGAZINES

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

This course introduces students to the local and national world of literary magazines. By analyzing common submission, editing, and publishing processes, this class will promote critical thinking and ethical insight regarding the practices of literary magazines. Students will also gain industry experience by reading and discussing Portland Review’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and mixed-genre submissions, as well as write reviews and essays with the goal of publication.

Founded in 1956, Portland Review publishes prose, poetry, art, and translations reflecting a wide spectrum of aesthetic styles and voices. Produced by the graduate students in Portland State University’s Department of English, Portland Review is proud to publish both established and emerging writers, as well as showcase a diverse spectrum of literary and artistic engagement across genres and disciplines. To learn more, visit portlandreview.org.

WR 410 002 TOP: MANGMNT SKILLS IN PBLSHNG

Instructor: Robyn Crummer-Olson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course provides students with a broad overview of management skills to prepare them for a career in book publishing. Both Ooligan managers and other students currently working in or hoping to work in a management position in publishing will benefit from the discussion-based, skills-based approach of this course. Topics covered include personal strengths assessment, emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication, leadership, teamwork, and negotiation. All topics will be addressed with awareness and conversation about personal biases and with the goal of co-creating more inclusive teams and equitable workplace environments.

WR 410 003 TOP: BESTSELLERS IN US BOOKS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Few readers have heard of Maria Cummins, Phillis Wheatley, Susan Warner, Eden Southworth, Laura Jean Libbey, William Wells Brown, Timothy Shay Arthur, George Lippard, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, or Harold Bell Wright. But just a century ago, their works were beloved, debated, and popular. We know modern publishing houses such as Random House, Little Brown, and Simon and Schuster, but what of the publishers that once populated the booksellers’ shelves, such as Matthew Carey, Street and Smith, and Porter and Coates? Most American literature survey courses introduce students to the great literature from our past, yet many of the great writers were not popular in their lifetime. In this class, the student will be challenged to unlearn all they have been taught about “great literature” and explore books often ignored by scholars, but devoured by American readers, and to investigate the factors that determine the likelihood of a book being a bestseller. While designed for those wishing to pursue a career in acquisitions editing, the course will also prove interesting to students of popular culture and the history of the book in America.

This course will provide you with an essential base of knowledge of American popular writers. You will also get experience with developmental editing and theory. You will gain insights into what kinds of books Americans love to read. While there are few tests and assignments, considerable reading is required for class discussion.

WR 410 004 TOP: LITERARY AGENTS & ACQUISI

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

An in-depth examination of how a book gets selected for publication by those in the traditional role of gatekeeper: literary agents and acquisitions editors. Also examines the labor performed by literary agents and acquisitions editors after they acquire a manuscript, as well as the act of commissioning a book.

WR 412 001 ADVANCED FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Janice Lee
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

In this class, students will engage with topics related to craft (point of view, character, narrative, setting, etc.), look more closely at their own relationship with language, and aim to produce one complete draft of original fiction. Students will also participate in workshops and provide written critical engagements of the works of their peers. Our work will be guided by various writing & revision exercises, as well as readings by diverse contemporary authors. This term, we’ll focus on rethinking the cultural values of craft alongside the core text for the class this term: Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses.

WR 413 001 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Michele Glazer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 416 001 SCREENWRITING

Instructor: Thom Bray
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

One Hour TV, SitCom and Traditional Three Act Screenplay Forms

WR 425 001 ADVANCED TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: Sarah Read
Instructional Method: Attend Anywhere

Study and practice of foundational ways of thinking and professional skills for students planning to pursue a role or a career as a technical writer across a variety of industries and disciplines, including technology, health, engineering, science, manufacturing and non-profits. Course topics include audience analysis, writing and editing in plain language for diverse audiences, common genres, ethics, collaborative writing, and project management. Students author individual and collaborative projects for a personal or program professional portfolio.

WR 426 001 DOCUMENT DESIGN

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Attend Anywhere

From simple brochures to formally bound manuals, corporate slide decks to database-driven websites, documents are pervasive in our lives. As technical and professional communicators, it is critical that we not only understand our relationships with documents (both as consumers and creators), but reflect upon how these relationships continue to evolve and recognize how they shape our work and our users' perceptions of the documents we create.

Over the course of the term, we will take a balanced approach to documents and their design, exploring theoretical frameworks that inform our understanding of documents, as well as applying practical concepts to develop students' professional portfolios. Although all students will be expected to use digital tools in their day-to-day coursework, no software purchase will be required for this course.

Course topics will include:

Identifying a document's goals and audience through theoretical lenses such as genre, literacies, and multimodality
Creating effective layouts to unify varied elements (such as text, graphics, charts, and forms) into a cohesive whole
Using readily available tools (such as G Suite or Microsoft Office) to produce successful, usable documents

WR 431 001 ADV TOP TECH WRITING TECHNLOGY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Attend Anywhere

We will look at how translation empowers technical communicators. Historically translation providers have been in total control of the translation workflow. But with the maturity of open standards like XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format), TMX (Translation Memory eXchange), and TBX (Term Base eXchange), and others, and with the proliferation of commercial and open source tools, customers of translations (writers, managers, etc.) are more in control. This class will show how technical communicators, writers, and managers can work more efficiently with translation providers in a way that everybody wins. The framework of this class will be based on Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, and Translation (GILT).

WR 457 001 PERSONAL ESSAY WRITING

Instructor: Justin Hocking
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

The word "essay" derives from the French "essai," meaning "to attempt, try, or experiment." In this workshop we will subvert formulaic approaches to writing, and instead embrace the personal essay as a dynamic art form that allows us to meditate on a subject without necessarily arriving at any pat conclusions. We will explore various purposes for "essaying," from attempting to heal past traumas, to enacting political or cultural change, to simply making a reader laugh. We will also experiment with lyrical flights of fancy, poetic moves, and fictional technique—all of which are all admissible within the bounds of a single essay. Students will also learn to choreograph various levels of narrative intimacy and distance by engaging with works that dive deep into personal and emotionally charged material, while also expanding outward, well beyond the self, to weave in news from the wider world.

WR 460 001 INTRO TO BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

Provides a detailed overview of the publishing process, organized around the division of labor, including introductions to contemporary American publishing, issues of intellectual commerce, copyright law, publishing contracts, book editing, book design and production, book marketing and distribution, and bookselling. Based on work in mock publishing companies, students prepare portfolios of written documents, i.e., book proposals, editorial guidelines, design and production standards, and marketing plans. Guest speakers from the publishing industry and field trips provide exposure to the industry.

WR 460 002 INTRO TO BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

WR 461 001 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Rachel Noorda
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

WR 461 002 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Sarah Currin
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

Provides a comprehensive course in professional book editing, including editorial management, acquisitions editing, substantive/developmental editing, and copyediting. Issues specific to both fiction and nonfiction books will be covered. After learning about the many roles an editor plays, students will gain hands-on experience analyzing and editing current authors' works in progress, ultimately performing a developmental edit of a full novel.

WR 462 001 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Kelley Dodd
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Book Design Software is a hands-on exploration of the Adobe Creative Suite, focusing on InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. The course begins with common tools, menus, techniques, and keyboard commands. In Illustrator, we cover drawing techniques, live trace, and editing and transforming vector-based artwork. In Photoshop, we look at color correction, retouching and repairing photos, selecting and combining images, and clipping paths. And in InDesign, we study document set up, typography, styles, and working with images and graphic assets. Students perform a series of in-class exercises to build skills in each application and use those skills to produce design projects.

Textbooks:

InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign by Nigel French (978-0321966957)
Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design by Chip Kidd (978-0761172192)

WR 474 001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Robyn Crummer-Olson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Perform the work of a real publishing house, from acquiring manuscripts to selling books. Gain publishing experience by participating in the various departments of a student-staffed publishing house, Ooligan Press. May be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 475 001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Robyn Crummer-Olson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Fall 2021 - Graduate Writing Courses

WR 507 001 SEM: NONFICTION

Instructor: Justin Hocking
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Rivers, Rhizomes and Baskets: Essaying With and Against Form:

In Native American writer Elissa Washuta's poly-formal essay collection White Magic, she chronicles the historical shaping of Seattle's waterways into forms beneficial to the twin forces of colonization and industry. Washuta juxtaposes this history with meditations on the powerful machinery of conventional literary forms with which we are often compelled to shape our own writing. Following Washuta's lead, in this seminar we'll examine the following questions (among others): When do inherited literary forms and structures succeed or fail to render our lived experiences, memories and reflections? What possibilities exist for breaking and remaking literary forms, and what part might this play in (re)authoring our individual and collective identities? How might the adoption (or appropriation) of certain non-literary forms/structures liberate our work? Can we employ a borrowed form as a kind of protective shell to help us safely process trauma (personal and/or ancestral/communal)? Might we locate formal inspiration in rhizomes, rivers, artisanal making practices, and hybrids of all sorts? Along with close reading and craft conversations, we'll engage in generative exercises, collaborative writing, formal experiments, and lyrical meanders.

Tentative Reading List:

White Magic: Essays by Elissa Washuta
Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers Edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton
A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Feliz Guattari
Instrument by Dao Strom
In The Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado

WR 507 002 SEM: POETRY

Instructor: John Beer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

What is it that makes poetry poetry? Sample answers: different relationship to the margins; striking, fresh, original language; being about feelings; not making sense. Here we try a different tack: poetry as intimately bound up with patterns of stress and accentuation.

We’ll be running three lines of inquiry simultaneously. First, and foremost, this is a course in the practice of poetry. The overriding aim of our scrutinizing iambs, trochees and the rest is to make better poems, poems that sound better and more effectively marshal their sonic resources toward intellectual and affective ends. At the same time, and in line with an inescapable dialectic pattern in artistic development, we’ll aim to become more sensitive readers of poems through acoustic training: developing the ability to appreciate both the self standing pleasures of poetic rhythm and syncopation and its contributions to the larger effect of literary creations. Finally, we’ll be reflecting at a greater remove on the very possibility of prosodic analysis, looking into historical and contemporary debates carried on within literary studies and linguistics over the relationship between lines of poetry and their more abstract representation as prosodic objects.

Texts:

Paradise Lost, John Milton
Harlem Gallery, Melvin Tolson
Selected Poems, Denise Levertov

WR 507 003 SEM: FICTION

Instructor: Gabriel Urza
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

The work of the writer is not limited to those better-known practices of composition and revision. Research allows writers to consider new or hidden storylines, to better understand and convey the complex world of our stories, and to more accurately portray subject matter and settings. Through experiential, academic, and historical approaches to research, we can strengthen authority in our narrative voices and uncover surprising details and nuances that complicate conflict and character.

This class will use secondary source material (such as craft essays) as well as close readings of published work to examine how and why research is incorporated into published writing, and how we can use research to advance our own work. Borrowing techniques from traditionally research-heavy genres such as Literary Journalism and Historical Fiction, assignments for this course will incorporate guided research projects—including immersive, experience-based research—intended to defamiliarize us and deepen our writing processes.

This is intended to be a class about process. As such, much of our time together will be spent in discussion of our research processes and the way that this research changes our writing. Ultimately, it will be up to you to determine how and how much research makes its way into your work; my hope is only that this course opens new avenues of possibility.

WR 509 001 PRAC: TEACHING TECH & PRO WRTN

Instructor: Sarah Read
Instructional Method: Online

This 1-credit course introduces students to the theory and practice of teaching introductory technical writing. This course is required for GTAs teaching WR 227. It is also open to all graduate students interested in gaining a foundation for teaching technical writing in the future.

WR 510 001 TOP: PORTLAND REVIEW EDITING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Online

WR 510 002 TOP: MANGMNT SKILLS IN PBLSHNG

Instructor: Robyn Crummer-Olson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 510 003 TOP: BESTSELLERS IN US BOOKS

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 510 004 TOP: LITERARY AGENTS & ACQUISI

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 521 001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP FICTION

Instructor: Leni Zumas
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

WR 521 002 MFA CORE WORKSHOP FICTION

Instructor: Janice Lee
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

In this workshop we will examine the entire spectrum of the writing process, and use revision as a way to rewrite, rebuild, and “re-see” a work of fiction. We will read various essays on craft, writing, language, and ways of engaging with the world, and also work on our own definitions & reconceptions of major craft terms. Students will apply a variety of revision procedures to their work and work on re-envisioning the structural frameworks that shape not only their individual stories and chapters, but also their collections or novels as a whole, think more critically about writing as a unique process of becoming, and engage in critical analyses and discussions of their peers’ work. (Note: This workshop section will be geared towards incoming 1st year MFA students.)

WR 522 001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP POETRY

Instructor: Michele Glazer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 523 001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP NONFICTION

Instructor: Paul Collins
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This fall's core workshop in nonfiction will be themed around Locality. We'll develop and workshop writing that focuses on the use of setting and community, with readings that explore the interplay of residents and unusual and little-noticed urban, domestic, and wild spaces.

Texts:

Frazier, Ian. Gone to New York (978-0312425043)
Kincaid, Jamaica. Talk Stories (978-0374527914)
Lee, Jessica. Two Trees Make a Forest (978-1646220007)
Palmer, Hannah. Flight Path (978-1938235283)

WR 525 001 ADVANCED TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: Sarah Read
Instructional Method: Attend Anywhere

WR 526 001 DOCUMENT DESIGN

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Attend Anywhere

Course topics will include:

Identifying a document's goals and audience through theoretical lenses such as genre, literacies, and multimodality
Creating effective layouts to unify varied elements (such as text, graphics, charts, and forms) into a cohesive whole
Using readily available tools (such as G Suite or Microsoft Office) to produce successful, usable documents

WR 531 001 ADV TOP TECH WRITING TECHNLOGY

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Attend Anywhere

WR 560 001 INTRO TO BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

WR 560 002 INTRO TO BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

WR 561 001 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Rachel Noorda
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

WR 561 002 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Sarah Currin
Instructional Method: Remote - Scheduled Meetings

WR 562 001 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Kelley Dodd
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Textbooks:

InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign by Nigel French (978-0321966957)
Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design by Chip Kidd (978-0761172192)

WR 574 001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Robyn Crummer-Olson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

WR 575 001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Robyn Crummer-Olson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

WR 579 001 RESEARCHING BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Rachel Noorda
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting
This course is low-cost.

Students will learn about book publishing research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) and work through various stages of their final research paper for the culmination of the Book Publishing Master’s Program. Students will emerge from the course with a measurable and right-sized research question that is valuable to the industry and addresses gaps in the literature, a methodology plan, and sample paper outlines that refine their critical thinking skills. There will also be an industry-based research project that students develop and carry out.

Fall 2021 Courses

On This Page

Fall 2021 - Undergraduate English Courses

ENG 201 001 INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE

ENG 205 001 SURVEY OF BRITISH LIT II

ENG 254 001 SURVEY OF AMERICAN LIT II

ENG 300 001 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

ENG 300 002 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

ENG 300 003 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

ENG 304 001 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA

ENG 305U 001 TOP IN FLM: HITCHCOCK

ENG 305U 002 TOP: TOPICS IN FILM

ENG 306U 001 TOP: LIT AND POP CULTURE

ENG 307U 001 SCIENCE FICTION

ENG 309U 001 INDIGENOUS NATIONS LITERATURE

ENG 326 001 LIT, COMMUNITY, DIFFERENCE

ENG 327 001 CULTURE, IMPER, GLOBALIZATION

ENG 330U 001 JEWISH & ISRAELI LITERATURE

ENG 331U 001 INTRO RHETORIC & COMP

ENG 332U 001 HST CINEMA & NARRATIVE MEDIA I

ENG 335U 001 TOP: AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY

ENG 340U 001 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

ENG 342U 001 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

ENG 343U 001 ROMANTICISM

ENG 351U 001 AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT I

ENG 360U 001 AMERICAN LIT AND CULTURE I

ENG 368U 001 LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY

ENG 385U 001 CONTEMPORARY LIT

ENG 413 001 TEACHING & TUTORING WRITING

ENG 497 001 COMICS HISTORY

Fall 2021 - Graduate English Courses

ENG 500 001 PROBLEMS AND METHODS

ENG 500 002 PROBLEMS AND METHODS

ENG 507 001 SEM: EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE

ENG 507 002 SEM: LITERATURE & HUMAN RIGHTS

ENG 507 003 SEM: THE ROMANTHROPOCENE

ENG 518 001 TEACHING COLLEGE COMPOSITION

ENG 519 001 ADV TEACHING COLLEGE COMP

ENG 531 001 TOP: THE FIELD OF ENGLISH

ENG 531 002 COLLOQUIUM

Fall 2021 - Undergraduate Writing Courses

WR 115 001 INTRO TO COLLEGE WRITING

WR 115 002 INTRO TO COLLEGE WRITING

WR 121 001 COLLEGE WRITING

WR 121 002 COLLEGE WRITING

WR 121 003 COLLEGE WRITING

WR 121 004 COLLEGE WRITING

WR 121 005 COLLEGE WRITING

WR 200 001 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

WR 212 001 INTRO FICTION WRITING

WR 212 002 INTRO FICTION WRITING

WR 212 003 INTRO FICTION WRITING

WR 213 001 INTRO POETRY WRITING

WR 213 002 INTRO POETRY WRITING

WR 214 001 INTRO NONFICTION WRITING

WR 222 001 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

WR 222 002 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

WR 222 003 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

WR 222 004 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

WR 227 001 INTRO TO TECHNICAL WRITING

WR 227 002 INTRO TO TECHNICAL WRITING

WR 227 004 INTRO TO TECHNICAL WRITING

WR 228 001 MEDIA WRITING

WR 301 001 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

WR 301 002 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

WR 301 003 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

WR 312 001 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING

WR 312 002 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING

WR 312 003 INTERMED FICTION WR

WR 313 001 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING

WR 323 001 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 002 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 003 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 004 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 005 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 006 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 007 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 008 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 009 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

WR 323 011 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY