Spring 2016 Courses

Undergraduate English Courses
Graduate English Courses
Undergraduate Writing Courses
Graduate Writing Courses

Undergraduate English Courses

ENG 104-001 INTRO TO FICTION

Instructor: Susan Reese

Please join me as we travel through time via some of the best short fiction ever written as found in The Story and Its Writer, Ninth Edition and in one of my favorite novels, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Our primary text includes critical pieces written about the authors and works under study, some by the writers themselves. We will utilize all of this as we work toward becoming more engaged and thoughtful readers and writers. I love this course, so please come and find out why.

This class counts towards PSU’s general Humanities requirement.

ENG 201-001 SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: Jessie Herrada Nance

MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES

In this course we will read and discuss four Shakespearean plays: Measure for Measure, 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 titledThe Tragedie of King Richard the second (1597). Pericles didn’t appear in a Shakespeare Folio until 1663/4, and is now usually called a “romance,” which is a modern label for a group of only four Shakespearean plays. Finally,Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s later comedies, featuring romance, intrigue, 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, 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 other 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 204-001 SURVEY ENGLISH LIT

From Beowulf to Milton. This is the first course in a sequence of two: Eng 204 and Eng 205.

ENG 300-002 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

This course gives students a foundation in the discipline of English, which includes an introduction to the central interpretive and research methods in the field of literary studies. The course will emphasize a cultural studies approach, which seeks to understand the relation between literary texts, other forms of non-literary cultural production, and the social/political/economic context from which they emerge. We will pay special attention to the way literary texts represent racial, gender, sexual, and class identities.

Required texts:

Nella Larsen, Passing (Norton Critical Edition)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

ENG 300-001 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Maude Hines

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. Our primary texts will be ghost stories, from a genre that foregrounds interpretive acts and moves toward revelation of things “hidden.”

Required books:

James, The Turn of the Screw (Norton Critical Edition)
Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Morrison, Beloved

This is a Writing-Intensive Course (WIC). For more information on WIC courses at PSU, go to http://www.pdx.edu/english/wic. This course also fulfills part of the Group A requirement for the English major.

ENG 304-001 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

In ENGL 304, we will survey some of the major interpretive theories and approaches to cinema--feminism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, materialisms old and new--by focusing on the figure of the spectator.

Though many film histories and theories center on the figure of the artist (the auteur, the studio, etc.), nothing happens with a film without a spectator (ideally, more than one!) experiencing and reacting to the film. Yet what it means to be ""a spectator"" isn't self-explanatory. The status of the spectator has changed radically since the birth of the art form in the late 19th century. Even before that ""birth,"" spectators had been trained in ways of looking at visual images, moving and still. (Vision itself is a complex mediating process, thanks to the neural networks of our brains, the operations of our other senses, the social environments in which we learn to see.) The contours of class, race, gender, and sexuality that influence who goes to see a film; the marketing and consumption of films as commodities; the expectations for spectator behavior; our expectations about genre (consider the word ""spectacle""); conscious and unconscious assumptions about film form; our perceptual, intellectual, emotional, psychological, and ideological relationships to the film image--all of these continue to evolve. New digital media make possible approaches to consumption and production, and fragment our categories of genre in so doing; postcolonial and global cinemas continue to produce new markets and to call into question the monolithic experience of The Spectator.

The problems of spectatorship and reception, then, will give us inroads into many of the crucial questions that motivate film theory.

As wedges into these questions, we will watch a range of films to be chosen from Hitchcock's Rear Window, Marker's Sans Soleil, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Denis's Beau Travail, Bezançon'sZarafa, and--just for the pleasure of seeing them eviscerated by Theodor Adorno--some Walt Disney cartoons.

ENG 305U-001 TOP FILM/HITCHCOCK

Instructor: Michael Clark

Study of film as text, including auteur, formalist, historical, and cultural perspectives. Course may be repeated for credit with different topics.

ENG 305U-002 TOP FILM: UTOPIA/DISTOPIA

Instructor: William Bohnaker

When writers, film makers, and theorists imagine the society of the future, they are actually judging the world of the present and how it seems destined to evolve in the future. Increasingly in the modern era the representations of society, factual or fictional, are more critical than congratulatory, portrayed not only as utopias but as dystopias. Student will examine selected examples of these works, literary and cinematic, not only to understand their critique of society and culture but also to discern possibilities for social change.

ENG 305U-003 TOP IN FLM: THE DAEMONIC IN FILM

Instructor: William Bohnaker

By reputation evil lies on the opposite shore from good. Yet, life itself is an inextricable and poignant mixture of both evil and good. The birth in spring and the death in winter find a multitude of avatars in mortal existence. The human soul itself is a ragbag of the best and the worst, trundled along within the same body. But what is the nature of their cohabitation? Shakespeare said there is some soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly distill it out. The toad. he wrote, wears a precious jewel in its head. But it is still an ugly and venemous toad.

This course is an exploration of these inflections of the “daemonic” in film and of some of the discourses that presume to analyze them. Bring your shadow.

ENG 305U-004 TOP IN FLM: CLASSICS OF GOTHIC

Instructor: Hildy Miller

Gothic film, like Gothic literature, is a genre positioned right on the boundaries between reason and madness, mind and spirit, self and Other, natural and supernatural. Always, it reflects what haunts us in some way and, always, it is transgressive. Often it deals with subject matter that is dramatic, eerie, dark, and gloomy. Something is always haunting America, with the anxieties of a particular era reflected in our Gothic imagination. For example, in early American Gothic texts, there was fear of the wilderness with its lawlessness and unpredictability; since 9/11 we’ve been inundated with zombies, a seeming reaction to the fear of terrorism. In this course we will watch classics of Gothic film starting with the great silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and tracking through the 20th and 21st centuries with films such as Dracula, Rebecca, The Night of the Hunter, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Others, and more. Through both films and critical examinations of the Gothic, we will explore its conventions and try to arrive at a sense of why this genre endures—and even flourishes—though always responding to changes in prevailing styles of film over time.

ENG 306U-001 TOP: THE SIXTIES

Instructor: William Bohnaker

The 1960s is without doubt a watershed decade in American life in the twentieth century, not only dividing eras but pitting Americans against each other. Historical revisionism likes to recast the 60s as a time of ludicrous, even dangerous, infantilism. In fact, it engendered a revolution in spirit and imagination that changed culture, politics, aesthetics, minds and hearts, and the vision of the possible. Join us in our own magical mystery tour to discover what really happened in the last American revolution.

ENG 306U-002 TOP: POP CULT/YOUNG ADULT LIT

Instructor: Maude Hines

Study of literary issues in popular culture. Courses taught under this number may examine literature as a popular form (such as detective or romance fiction) and the relationship between literature and popular genres (such as comics or music), or use techniques of literary/textual analysis to analyze forms of popular culture (blogs, music videos, etc.). Course may be repeated for credit with different topics.

ENG 306U-003 TOP: LIT POP CULT/KEROUAC/BEAT

Instructor: A. B. Paulson

A survey of Beat literature in the 1950s. Includes Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums, poetry and essays by Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, McClure, Snyder, etc. We’ll examine, texts, photos, jazz, movies. You’ll take some quizzes to keep up with the readings, and write an essay or construct a final creative project. Also a final exam.

ENG 306U-004 TOP: POP CULT/OVID & GAIMAN

Instructor: Katya Amato

I woke with this marble head in my hands;

it exhausts my elbows and I don't know where to put it down.

It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream

so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.

I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed

I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak

I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin.

That's all I'm able to do.

My hands disappear and come towards me mutilated.

---George Seferis, MYTHISTOREMA

We'll read Ovid's METAMORPHOSES and Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN over the course of a term and explore their great storytelling machines to see how they do it, what their contexts are, where their influence lies, and what it means to invade the worlds of myth, dream, and story. Along the way, we'll look at related texts, both classical and post-modern.

Course requirements are regular attendance and various/varied writing assignments. Our 12 texts will be on reserve (one copy) at the PSU Library as well as for sale at the PSU Bookstore.

Required texts (ISBN numbers available at the PSU Bookstore website):

Ovid, METAMORPHOSES, translated by Rolfe Humphries
Gaiman, THE SANDMAN: OVERTURE (we will read this last)
PRELUDES AND NOCTURNES
DOLL'S HOUSE
DREAM COUNTRY
SEASON OF MISTS
A GAME OF YOU
FABLES AND REFLECTIONS
BRIEF LIVES
WORLD'S END
THE KINDLY ONES
THE WAKE

ENG 309U-002 AMERICAN INDIAN LIT

Instructor: Maria Depriest

ENG 309U is a hybrid course. We will meet in-class on M/W. On Friday's we will meet online on Canvas.

Course Description: English 309U seeks to interpret assumptions about history that emerge from the writings on our syllabus and to engage in literary analysis about these contemporary art works. The stories we will read rely on traditions that take us back—historically and culturally--and tease us forward imaginatively, by demanding our creative participation in making meaning. Indeed, the contemporary readings on our syllabus are a kind of combat against what Daniel Heath Justice argues is at “the heart of the decolonization imperative of indigenous literatures: the storied expression of continuity that encompasses resistance while moving beyond it to an active expression of the living relationship between the People and the world” (“Kinship Criticism” 150).

Probable Texts:

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Louise Erdrich, Tracks
LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker
Thomas King, Medicine River
Susan Power, Roofwalker
John L. Purdy, ed., Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature

Grading: Response Papers and Canvas assignments: 25% each

Midterm and Final Exams 25% each

ENG 312-001 COMEDY & SATIRE

Instructor: Katya Amato

We trace the history of comedy and satire from Aristophanes to Beckett, including Old and New Comedy, comic archetypes, the language of the body, fabliaux, carnival, the grotesque, the absurd, and named forms of comedy and satire (Rabelaisian, Horatian, Juvenalian, Menippean). Don't let the unfamiliar names intimidate you: the ancients were wilder than Wilder, medieval body parts can be lopped off or multiplied to everyone's great hilarity, and twins come sweetly from the sea and after much confusion pair off with the elite of Illyria. In addition, instead of writing a long essay for the final, those who want to can perform a comic scene, including the one with Oscar's famous cucumber sandwiches (the class gets to eat the sandwiches). Below are the books ordered, all available at the PSU Bookstore; ISBN numbers are listed at its website.

FOUR PLAYS BY ARISTOPHANES, translated by Wm Arrowsmith et al. (LYSISTRATA and FROGS only)
Menander, THE PLAYS AND FRAGMENTS, tr. Maurice Balme
FIVE COMEDIES BY PLAUTUS AND TERENCE, tr. Deena Berg and Douglass Parker
Shakespeare, TWELFTH NIGHT
Voltaire, CANDIDE AND RELATED TEXTS, tr. David Wootton
Moliere, TARTUFFE, tr. Richard Wilbur
Wilde, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
Beckett, WAITING FOR GODOT

Requirements: Regular attendance and the usual exams. A comic performance usually is, to everyone's delight, substituted for the long essay of the final exam.

For further information, write to me at amatok@pdx.edu.

ENG 313U-001 AMERICAN SHORT STORY

Instructor: Susan Reese

We will consider some earlier American writers in the form and then focus upon Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy and Drowning by Junot Diaz, bringing in a few very contemporary pieces as well. We will consider form and relationship between writers and works over the decades. As this is a long class session, but only once a week, I will do my best to incorporate variation and enthusiasm while providing ample breaks. It’s going to be fun, so please join me!

This course can count in sections B, C (if you have your two 400 level courses) or E of the English Major requirements.

ENG 330U-001 JEWISH & ISRAELI LITERATURE

Instructor: Michael Weingrad

Introduction to modern Jewish literature in its diasporic and national contexts. Emphasis on the transition from sacred to secular literature; reflection of historical and social realities; development of literatures in Europe and the Middle East.

ENG 331U-001 INTRO RHETORIC & COMP STUDIES

Instructor: Daniel DeWeese

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 tradition of Greece, 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. In addition to a variety of texts covering rhetoric and composition and the teaching of writing, we will also look at Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. 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)
Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton (Princeton Architectural Press)
Gorgias, Plato, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford)

ENG 340U-001 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Instructor: Christine Rose

Explore Medieval Literature beyond the basic anthologies and the 200-level survey course. We will read a variety of medieval works from a range of genres. Through these texts you will notice both what is “medieval” and what medieval minds considered “literature.” We will also examine how one discusses medieval literature critically, and why. While there is no particular unifying theme to this course, some of the readings focus on relationships between secular men and women (gender, romance, love and its complications), and the individual’s relationship with his/her God—since religious writing was an integral part of what is both Medieval and Literature during the period 800-1500. From the literature of England, France, Iceland and medieval Europe we will study poetry and prose; plays, saints’ lives and courtly love; didactic conduct literature for women; a romance about a cross-dressing knight; and a political/revenge saga. You may be closer to defining “medieval”or “literature” at the end of the class, and you will have discovered why the wealth of compelling material makes the period so rewarding to study. Texts in Mod. English translations, excepting the Middle English play texts.

Fulfills the Pre-1800 requirement for ENG major; counts towards Medieval Studies minor (see History Dept. website)

Texts: [only the editions below are to be used]

Silence, A 13th Century Romance, Roche-Mahdi, ed. (Michigan State U. Press), ISBN: 0-87013-543-0
The Good Wife's Guide, Greco and Rose, eds. (Cornell, 2009) ISBN: 978801474743
The Lais of Marie de France, eds. Ferrante and Hanning (Baker Academic) ISBN: 080102031X
St. Benedict, Rule (Anchor-Doubleday) ISBN: 0385009488
The Death of King Arthur: The Alliterative Morte Arthur, trans. Simon Armitage (Norton) ISBN: 0393073971
The Letters of Heloise and Abelard (Penguin) ISBN: 0140442979
Njal’s Saga (Penguin) ISBN: 0140447695
The Life of Christina of Markyate, eds. Fanous, Leyser, Talbot (Oxford UP) 0199556059

ENG 342U-001 RESTORATION & 18TH C LIT

Instructor: William Knight

Eighteenth-century British literature is a smoldering 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 stance opposed to that modernity. The British eighteenth century was but a brief period; in it, however, the modern 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 survey a wide and diverse array of eighteenth-century literary works, a ramble through some of the most prominent genres and some of the most compelling examples of literary writing over the period 1660-1800. We’ll read and consider dramatic comedy, journalistic and scientific writing, satire, the novel, moral philosophy, poetry of sentiment, nature poetry, abolitionist writing, and other modes in which aesthetic form was imagined as a response or engagement with a period of grand transformation or with an emerging modernity.

This course satisfies the Group C: Period Studies in British and American Literature requirement as well as counting for University Studies cluster credit.

Major Works:

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, the Rover, and Other Works. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. ISBN: 978-0140433388
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN: 978-0140437850
Gay, John. The Beggar’s Opera. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. ISBN: 978-0140432206
Burney, Frances. Evelina. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0199536931
Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0199538621
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. ISBN: 978-0192810892
Wordsworth, William and S. T. Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0140424621

ENG 344U-001 VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Instructor: Sara Atwood

Selected works of Victorian literature; introduction to themes, genres, history and culture of the Victorian Era

ENG 345U-001 MODERN BRITISH LIT

Instructor: John Smyth

An introduction to some of the wittiest and most arresting literature in various genres, including film, to come out of the British Isles, including now independent (Southern) Ireland, since the end of the nineteenth century:

Essays

Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” “The Critic as Artist,” “Pen, Pencil, Poison,” and other essays

Fiction:

James Joyce, Gerty MacDowell & Bloom section of Ulysses
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Samuel Beckett, Three Novellas, and “First Love” and Other Shorts
Ian McEwan, “Dead as They Come” from In Between the Sheets
James Lasdun, “Ate, Menos” from Three Evenings
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Poetry:

W.H. Auden, Selected Poems
W.B. Yeats, Crazy Jane Poems
Plus others

Film:

Peter Greenaway, The Draughtman’s Contract and The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover.
James Lasdun & Jonathan Rossiter, Sunday.

Cultural Theory:

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

The major requirements for the class will be two substantial essays and an in-class presentation.

ENG 353U-001 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

This courses covers recent and contemporary African American Literature. You can expect to read a selection of contemporary writing in a wide variety of fictional and non-fictional genres, while situating these works within the larger social, political, and economic context of the contemporary U.S. social formation. Such context includes the following: 1) transformations in legal regulation of race and racism following civil rights legislation (post-1965); 2) the hegemony of an officially anti-racist U.S. culture combined with the proliferation of racially disparate social inequalities and outcomes; 3) the post-1970s extension and crisis of free market capitalism; 4) and the rise of the prison industrial complex.

ENG 364-001 AMERICAN FICTION I

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi

This course will survey novels and short stories from the early National period through the Civil War, when U.S. writers sought to establish a distinctively American literary history. We will examine the generic conventions associated with sentimentalism, the gothic, the historical romance, and realism as they dramatize and shape American nationalism. We will track shifting concepts of the relationships between author, reader, text, and nation. We will also consider how complex issues of gender, race, and class emerge from the basic elements of fiction: plot, character, point-of-view, and setting. By attending carefully to questions of form, we will work to develop the skills for critical approaches to fiction.

Authors will include Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine M. Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, William Wells Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

ENG 372U-001 TOP: CONTEMP AMER WM WRITERS

Instructor: Maria Depriest

Study of representations of gender and sexuality in literature and related cultural forms. May be repeated for credit with different topics. This is the same course as WS 372 and may be taken only once for credit.

ENG 410-001 TOP: THE IDEA OF GARDENING

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

Gardens have long been a key site of colonial power. From the establishment of the Company Gardens in Cape Town in 1652, to the taxonomic work undertaken by botanists in the service of racial science, the colonial garden represents a microcosm—and training ground—for cultural, scientific, military and economic domination by the West of its others. In this class, we will consider literary treatments of postcolonial gardening to think about how colonial subjects articulate resistance, refusal, and sustainable alternatives to the violence of imperial land politics through the contingent work of cultivation. If colonial agriculture and formal gardening express a logic of security, permanence, and mastery, sustainable gardening represents an ethical and aesthetic practice based on temporary, provisional, and mutually precarious relationships between the self and nature—a form of what we might call palliative care. Readings of historical documents and philosophical considerations, along with literary works from African, Caribbean, African-American, and Native writers outline the influence of gardening practices and principles on narrative form and style, while also revealing literature itself as a kind of philosophy of gardening.

Along with working through these texts and topics via intensive class discussion, a keyword journal, one or two papers, and a presentation, we may also take some field trips to gardening sites around Portland, and perhaps even work a plot of our own.

Required books:

J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (978-0140074482)
Athol Fugard, A Lesson from Aloes (978-1559360012)
Bessie Head, A Question of Power (978-0435907204)
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (978-0374527761)
Olive Senior, Gardening in the Tropics (978-1897178003)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes (978-0684863320)

ENG 413-001 TCHG & TUTORING WR

Instructor: Hildy Miller

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). And you’ll 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.

ENG 426-001 ADV TOP MEDIEVAL-LATE MED. LIT

Instructor: Christine Rose

This course focusses on Middle English literature of the 14th and 15th centuries, except for The City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan. We will study the important medieval genre of the dream-vision in works by Langland (Piers Plowman) and De Pizan. Central to many of our texts is the emergence of English as the prestige literary language, the Wycliffite religious controversy, and the debate over Englishing the Bible. Among the works which were produced during this enormously creative literary era in England are: The Scale of Perfection, which shows the way to mystical union with God; The Book of Margery Kempe, a female mystic’s account of her struggles to be accepted as a visionary; the allegorical play of Mankind—the most theatrically effective of the medieval dramas; The Travels of John Mandeville, where the armchair traveller confronts the strange foreign Other; and Caxton’s The Book of the Knight of the Tower, a conduct book for women. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. The format will be both lecture and discussion, with students taking active responsibility for interpreting the texts. We will be concerned not only with “literary” issues such as imagery, pattern, audience, poetics, sources and structure, but also with issues of how history, class, gender, or ideology inform the works, and we will read literary criticism that illuminates these matters. Mid-term and final include take-home papers.

*** Course fulfills pre-1800 lit. requirement for undergraduates and grads. It can also be used for the Medieval Studies Minor

Texts:

Wm. Langland. Piers Plowman (Norton) ISBN 0393975592
Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection (Paulist Press) ISBN 0809131943
Mandeville, John. The Travels of John Mandeville (Penguin). ISBN 9780141441436
Caxton, Wm.; M.Y. Offord, ed. and trans. The Book of the Knight of the Tower (EETS) ISBN 0197224024
Ashley, K. ed. Mankind (TEAMS) ISBN 1580441408
Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies, ed. E. J. Richards (Persea) ISBN 0892552301
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. L. Staley (Norton) ISBN: 978-0-393-97639-7
The Death of Arthur, a New Verse Translation (2011) trans. S. Armitage (Norton) ISBN 0393073971. Paperback is OK.
Boroff, Marie (trans.) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl: Verse Translations (Norton) ISBN 0393976580 (only Patience is needed)

ENG 447-001 MAJ FORCES/VIOLENCE & FICT

Instructor: John Smyth

Main texts:

Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales
Isak Dinesen, Ehrengard
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony, The Hunger Artist, A Country Doctor, Jackals and Arabs, Investigations of a Dog,Josephine the Singer or the Mouse-Folk
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, and selected stories (First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End).
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Sex Sideways Reflections
Peter Greenaway, The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover (film)

Primary requirements: Mid term and final essay on topic of your choice related to the texts; in-class presentation during the term.

Basic idea for the course: To explore not only violence and symbolic violence as themes in the above texts, but also their relation to the problem of ""fiction"" as such. Books by Girard (1972) and Zizek (2008) provide provocative guides. Greenaway’s film ditto.

ENG 460-001 ADV TOP: AM LIT TO 1800

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi

This course surveys major authors and genres of the Anglo-American tradition from the period of first contact between the indigenous peoples of North America and the English through the Early National period (1780’s and 90’s). The first half of the course will focus on the literature of Puritan New England: conversion narratives, devotional poetry, histories of war, captivity narratives, travel narratives, and sermons. As we move into the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, our readings will include autobiography, drama, and some of the earliest novels written in the U.S. Throughout the course, we will link issues of genre and authorship to the social and political history of this volatile period, considering questions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion. This course fills the pre-1800 requirement for the B.A. and M.A. in English.

ENG 484-001 MODERN DRAMA

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

Topic: From Stage to Radio: Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard

This course will examine three playwrights of the 20th century--Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard--who experimented both with stage plays and with radio plays. We will read one or two stage plays by each writer, followed by two or three radio texts.

In so doing we will examine both continuities and discontinuities among these three major figures. Each is concerned both with abstract philosophical problems and with deeply material and political ones; both with the rarefied air of the intellect and with the violent experiences of politics and embodiment; both with the absurd and with the real; both with theater's propensity for emotional absorption and with its capacity for alienation and shock. Accordingly, all of these playwrights find the radio an intriguing complement to the possibilities/limitations of the stage: as a space where disembodied voices and invisible noises can create deeply uncanny and ghostly effects, where instructive, pedagogical, or propagandistic messages can be dictated to a mass, or where the immersive, intimate interiorities of sound can be explored.

Though our main focus will be on the work of these playwrights, we may also look at criticism and theory that reflects on the historical, conceptual, physical, aesthetic, or ideological possibilities of the stage and the radio. Such readings may include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Marjorie Perloff, Michel Chion, Martin Esslin, Neil Verma, Jeffrey Sconce, Kate Lacey, Joy Calico, Hugh Chignell, or Louis Niebur.

Plays, still TBD, will include some of the following:

Brecht: The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny; Man Equals Man; The Lindbergh Flight; The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent; Round Heads and Pointed Heads
Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, All that Fall, Embers, Nacht und Träume
Stoppard: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Artist Descending a Staircase, If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Darkside

ENG 490-001 ADV TOP R&C: VISUAL RHETORIC

Instructor: Susan Kirtley

"When the visual and verbal dance in step, the power of each is magnified.” Kathleen Jamieson

In recent years visual rhetoric has blossomed as an area of scholarly inquiry, particularly as academics turn their attention to understanding an increasingly image-based culture, and this course will explore the emerging field of visual rhetoric through a variety of genres including art, architecture, comic art, film, and television. We will develop our own definition of visual rhetoric and employ multi-modal composition practices. Along the way we will read works from folks like David Blakesly, W.J.T. Mitchell, Roland Barthes, Gunther Kress, John Trimbur, and Walter Ong and ask interesting questions about the power and persuasion of visual images. What is the significance of lolcats? Do tattoos represent a rhetoric of opposition? What about fashion? Architecture? Powerpoint? Together we’ll study the cultural semiotics of various image/texts, which is decidedly more entertaining (not to mention enlightening) than you might imagine.

ENG 494-002 TOP: THEORY/THEORY OF THE EVNT

Instructor: William Knight

Crossing lines marked out by aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and politics, the theory of the event is the most vital and pressing of theoretical questions, the kind of inquiry that determines how we proceed with literary analysis, historical interpretation, encounters with the other, and political engagements. It marks how we ourselves understand the temporal categories of past, present, and future, just as it marks how we understand the divisions between individual selves and the worldly abstractions that surround them. What is an event, that kind of occurrence that inspires narration, the type of eruption into life that we bear witness to or that acts on us in irreversible ways? Is an event in narrative merely an outgrowth of narrative genre, each genre staking claim to its own type of event? Or are there philosophical problems of the event that exceed or transcend genre? Do events have subjects? Or do they create subjects? What is the relation between events and time? How do events relate to historiography and to the operations of history? Can or in what cases or genres do events gesture towards a future? Do events make knowledge possible, or do they offer an abyss into which our gaze and our desire for control disappear, reflecting back to us only mute uncertainty? What is the relation between fact and event? Is there a difference between mental and physical events? What, above all, can we begin to say about the nature of narrative’s various complex and diverse relations to events-- ?

In this class, we’ll examine how a largely continental theoretical tradition has asked and responded to the questions of the event, tracing the trends and allegiances in this history of debate. Above all we will consider how the question of the nature of the event has been at the center of literary debates about the function and effects of narration: what kinds of events serve as the basis for literary narrative? What kinds of knowledges about the eruption of events do literary genres and modes allow us to produce? What has literature understood as its special relation to the event, distinct from other approaches to these persistent questions of theory?

The class will operate as a survey that treats a number of historical highlights in the theory of the event in four main modes: the event of subjectivity, the event of trauma, the event as simulacrum, and the event of everyday life.

Required texts:

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London; New York: Verso, 2012. ISBN: 978-1781680186
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. ISBN: 978-0942299793
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Print. ISBN: 978-0143105985
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. ISBN: 978-1400033416
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Group, 1998. ISBN: 978-0451526922
Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009. ISBN: 978-1416578796
Zizek, Slavoj. Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept. New York: Melville House, 2014. ISBN: 978-1612194110

Graduate English Courses

ENG 507-001 SEM: POSTCOLONIAL ECOLOGY

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

Despite the longstanding interest of writers, poets and filmmakers from postcolonial sites in ecological and environmental issues, critics in these fields (postcolonialism and ecocriticism) have only recently begun talking to each other. We will make our own contributions to this conversation by reading, discussing and critically responding to a range of literary works from these “underdeveloped” or otherwise peripheral regions of the world, works that specifically address questions of sustainability, waste, human interactions with their environment, and the lives of animals in a postcolonial context. We will begin by considering the relationship between colonialism and nature, empire and the environment, before turning to some literary and non-fictional responses to three postcolonial ecological disasters: the gas leak at Bhopal, India in 1984; the ongoing devastation of the oil-producing regions of the Niger Delta; and the effects of global climate change on the peoples of the “third world.” These events cast light on the limits and consequences of unrestrained “development,” helping us think further about the ecological effects of “globalization,” “modernization” and other progress narratives. The remainder of the term will be taken up with works that explore alternative ways of living, doing and being in the world, from eco-tourism to “Creole” ecologies, human-animal hybridity, “affirmative precarity,” recycling, and sustainable gardening.

Required texts:

JM Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K. (978-0140074482)
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (061871166X)
Helon Habila, Oil on Water (978-0393339642)
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (978-0374527761)
Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (978-1416578796)

ENG 513-001 TCHG & TUTORING WR

Instructor: Hildy Miller

ENG 518-001 COLLEGE COMP TEACHING

Instructor: Susan Kirtley

Introduces and develops the theoretical and practical expertise of the graduate teaching assistant in the area of college composition teaching. May be taken up to three times for credit.

ENG 519-001 ADV COLLEGE COMP TEACHING

Instructor: Susan Kirtley

Continues the development of the theoretical and practical expertise of the graduate teaching assistant in advanced areas of college composition teaching. May be repeated up to three times for credit. Required prerequisite: appointment to 2nd year teaching assistantship in English Department.

ENG 526-001 ADV. TOP MEDIEVAL-LATE MED LIT

Instructor: Christine Rose

*** Course fulfills pre-1800 lit. requirement for undergraduates and grads. It can also be used for the Medieval Studies Minor

Texts:

Wm. Langland. Piers Plowman (Norton) ISBN 0393975592
Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection (Paulist Press) ISBN 0809131943
Mandeville, John. The Travels of John Mandeville (Penguin). ISBN 9780141441436
Caxton, Wm.; M.Y. Offord, ed. and trans. The Book of the Knight of the Tower (EETS) ISBN 0197224024
Ashley, K. ed. Mankind (TEAMS) ISBN 1580441408
Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies, ed. E. J. Richards (Persea) ISBN 0892552301
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. L. Staley (Norton) ISBN: 978-0-393-97639-7
The Death of Arthur, a New Verse Translation (2011) trans. S. Armitage (Norton) ISBN 0393073971. Paperback is OK.
Boroff, Marie (trans.) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl: Verse Translations (Norton) ISBN 0393976580 (only Patience is needed)

ENG 531-001 RHET COMP DISC. GROUP

Instructor: Kendall Leon

The spring quarter 2016 section of ENG 531: Topics in English Studies/Rhetoric will be devoted to learning basic principles of developing professional materials to apply for writing jobs. Our focus will be on creating an online professional presence, including a portfolio with a job application letter and sample materials. To do this, each week will be devoted to a different topic related to portfolio and job material design, with readings, activities, out of class work assigned. Like last quarter, you will be responsible to be the project leader for a week. What this means is you will locate relevant examples and resources, and coordinate the team our team’s work for the week. This course will be especially useful to students who are close to graduating and are gearing up to apply for jobs or internships, or for students who want to get a head start on their professional portfolio.

The course meets every other Friday from 9:00-10:50 am.

ENG 560-001 ADV TOP: AM LIT TO 1800

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi

ENG 590-001 ADV TOP: VISUAL RHETORIC

Instructor: Susan Kirtley

"When the visual and verbal dance in step, the power of each is magnified.” Kathleen Jamieson

ENG 594-001 TOP: THEORY/THEORY OF THE EVNT

Instructor: William Knight

Required texts:

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London; New York: Verso, 2012. ISBN: 978-1781680186
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. ISBN: 978-0942299793
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Print. ISBN: 978-0143105985
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. ISBN: 978-1400033416
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. New York, N.Y.: Penguin Group, 1998. ISBN: 978-0451526922
Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009. ISBN: 978-1416578796
Zizek, Slavoj. Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept. New York: Melville House, 2014. ISBN: 978-1612194110

Undergraduate Writing Courses

WR 115-002 INTRO TO COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: TBD

A writing course for first-year students to help prepare them for Freshman Inquiry or Wr 121. Introduces college-level writing and reading, along with general study skills. Provides practice at formal and informal writing, responding to a variety of readings, learning textual conventions, and building confidence.

WR 121-001 COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: TBD

A writing course for lower-division students, in which they develop critical thinking abilities by reading and writing, increase their rhetorical strategies, practice writing processes, and learn textual conventions. Includes formal and informal writing, responding to a variety of readings, sharing writing with other students, and revising individual pieces for a final portfolio of work.

WR 199-001 SPST: WRITING FOR COLLEGE

Instructor: Daniel DeWeese

WR 200-001 WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

Instructor: TBD

Introduction to various approaches for writing about literature. Focuses on ways of responding to literature, ways of explicating literature, ways of analyzing literature through writing, and ways of integrating formal research into a written analysis of literature. Special attention will be paid to the writing process, including multiple drafting and revision.

WR 210-001 GRAMMAR REFRESHER

Instructor: TBD

A writing course for students who wish to refresh their grammar skills. Using informal and formal writing, it focuses on parts of speech, sentence construction, and punctuation; tracking particular grammar problems; and learning to edit.

WR 212-001 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Alexander Dannemiller

Introduces the beginning fiction writer to basic techniques of developing character, point of view, plot, and story idea in fiction. Includes discussion of student work. Recommended: Freshman Inquiry.

WR 212-002 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: John Griffith

WR 212-003 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Sean Warren

WR 213-003 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Erin Perry

Introduces the beginning writer of poetry to basic techniques for developing a sense of language, meter, sound, imagery, and structure. Includes discussion of professional examples and student work. Recommended: Freshman Inquiry.

WR 214-001 INTRO NONFICTION WRITING

Instructor: Mackenzie Myers

An introduction to writing with the major forms and techniques of literary nonfiction. Beginning with exercises in foundational skills such as description, reportage and the crafting of personal narrative, students will write and respond to short works of creative nonfiction. May be repeated once for a total of 8 credits. Expected preparation: Freshman Inquiry or equivalent.

WR 222-001 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: TBD

An elective course. The techniques for compiling and writing research papers. Attention to available reference materials, use of library, taking notes, critical evaluation of evidence, and conventions for documenting academic papers. Practice in organizing and writing a long expository essay based on use of library resources. Recommended: Wr 121 or Freshman Inquiry. May not be used to fulfill English major requirements.

WR 227-002 INTRO TECHNICAL WRTG

Instructor: Garret Romaine

Practical experience in forms of technical communication, emphasizing basic organization and presentation of technical information. Focuses on strategies for analyzing the audience and its information needs. Recommended: Wr 121 or Freshman Inquiry.

WR 227-001 INTRO TECHNICAL WRTG

Instructor: Christine Mitchell

WR 312-003 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING

Instructor: A.B. Paulson

Continues the study of fictional techniques introduced in Wr 212. Includes such advanced instruction as variations on the classic plot, complex points of view, conventions of genre, and development of ideas for future use. Emphasizes discussion of student work. Recommended: B or above in Wr 212. May be repeated once for credit. Consent of instructor required.

WR 312-002 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Matthew Robinson

In this course we will work to develop a writing practice that welcomes experimentation and risk; questions assumptions of craft and habit; and consistently generates drafts and revisions. We will read challenging fiction, both short story and novel length. Our workshops will be rigorous discussions of the opportunities inherent in each piece. And we’re going to write. A lot. Recommended: B or above in WR 212. May be repeated once for credit. Consent of instructor required.

WR 313-002 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING

Instructor: John Beer

Continues the study of poetry writing techniques introduced in Wr 213. Includes additional instruction in poetic forms, variations on traditional forms, and experimental forms. Emphasizes discussion of student work. Recommended: B or above in Wr 213. May be repeated once for credit. Consent of instructor required.

WR 323 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Loretta Rosenberg

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.” Wendell Berry

Students in this course will read American environmental writing in the form of essays, poetry and fiction.

Students will keep a response journal to write in class assignments based on the week's readings. Each week one of those short assignments will be revised and turned in as a 2-4 page essay. Of those essays, students will develop a final 6-8 page essay based on their interests.

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, ed Bill McKibben, Library of America, 2008

WR 327-001 TECHNICAL REPORT WR

Instructor: Arlene Krasner

Strategies for presenting technical information from the technician, management, and lay person's perspectives; rhetorical theory and techniques for adapting technical prose to nontechnical audiences; and techniques for emphasizing and de-emphasizing information. Recommended: Wr 323.

WR 327-327 TECHNICAL REPORT WR

Instructor: Maralee Sautter

WR 327-004 TECHNICAL REPORT WR

Instructor: Jeffrey Gunderson

WR 328-001 MEDIA EDITING

Instructor: Kjerstin Johnson

When we read media online or in print, we take for granted the work that went into the editing behind it. This course will be an introduction to the behind-the-scenes of writing for publication, including the preparation that goes into news and feature stories. Emphasis is on line editing, copy editing, editorial troubleshooting, headline writing, layout, and integration with multimedia and with social media. Recommended for writing students and those interested in working in publishing.

Prerequisite: WR 228

WR 331-001 BOOK PUBLISHING FOR WRITERS

Instructor: Kathi Inman Berens

Provides writers who aspire to one day publish a book with an overview of the book publishing process, organized around the division of labor typically found in publishing houses. In addition to learning how to find an agent or publisher, students learn about editorial, design, production, marketing, distribution, and sales.

WR 333-001 ADVANCED COMPOSITION

Instructor: Susan Reese

This course is designed to hone already well developed writing skills; I do not want to be your editor; I want to set you free to further develop your voice, your range, your ability to respond to a variety of prompts and then turn them into written treasure. Our text is The Best American Essays, 2015, edited by Ariel Levy, and we will use the pieces in this text as the foundation for class discussions and for our writing. We will approach writing from the standpoint that process is most important as it leads to excellent results, and we will accomplish this through in class writing, small workshop groups as well as with my interaction with each student’s writing. Join me and soar on the page!

This course counts in Section D or E of the English Major requirements. It can also count for the Minor in Writing.

WR 399-005 SPST: WRITING FOR COMICS

Instructor: Brian Bendis

WR 410-004 TOP: ADVANCED INDESIGN

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

This course is exactly what it sounds like: an advanced course in Adobe InDesign. Prerequisite: WR 471/571: Typography, Layout, and Production.

WR 410-001 TOP: EBOOK PRODUCTION

Instructor: Amanda-Ann Gomm

Ebook Production teaches the hands-on skills of digital publishing. The course will build on an established understanding of basic text-based languages like HTML, CSS, and XML. Students will be introduced to new tools like iBooks Author, oXygen, and Sigil. It is recommended (though not required) that students have first taken WR 410/510: Digital Skills.

WR 410-002 TOP: FLARE

Instructor: Laura Johnson

Gone are the days of paper technical manuals, stacks of user guides, and binder after binder of policies and procedures. Creating those documents, outdated the minute they are published, takes time and money…and maintaining over time them is even worse. Instead, companies are putting that information online for employees and customers. One of the leading tools to make that easier is MadCap Flare, an authoring tool designed to save you time and effort.

This course is offered to both undergraduate and graduate students by Ms. Johnson, a leading Flare developer and trainer. Ms. Johnson will introduce you to the concept of topic-based authoring, content reuse across both online and printed documentation, and the fundamentals of using Flare to create and manage content.

Goals for the class include your being ready to take the Flare Certification exam offered by MadCap Software and a portfolio-ready help project on a subject of your choice.

WR 410-009 TOP: TRENDS IN TRANS TECH

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel

Emerging Trends and Best Practices in Translating and Localizing Content

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, TMX, TBX, and others, and with the proliferation of commercial and open source tools, customers of translations (writers, managers, etc.) are more in control. Learn how technical communicators, writers, and managers can work more efficiently with translation providers in a way that everybody wins.

WR 410-006 TOP: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BOOK

Instructor: Charles Seluzicki

Archaeology of the Book investigates a wide range of subjects relating to the history and culture of the book through a material textual lens. Lectures include topics as varied as cuneiform and the economic origins of the alphabet, Gutenberg’s career as a jeweler and the origins of moveable type, and Dante’s sudden popularity and publishing trends in 19th century America. These topics all conspire to create a singular and coherent understanding of the nature of the material book. Field trips to local rare book collections provide exposure to original editions of classic works. Traditional seminar format coincides with the presentation of independent student research projects.

WR 416-001 SCREENWRITING

Instructor: Kyle Aldrich

Students will be introduced to the process of conceiving, structuring, writing, rewriting, and marketing a screenplay for the contemporary American marketplace. "Screenplay paradigms" will be discussed, and a variety of movies will be analyzed. May be repeated for credit. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 516.

WR 427-002 TECHNICAL EDITING

Instructor: Garret Romaine

Gives technical writers practice in technical editing by exposing them to samples of a variety of documents from the files of organizations in the surrounding community. As a community based learning course, it requires students to interact with community partners in collaborative student teams. May be repeated for a maximum of 8 credits. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 527.

WR 459-001 MEMOIR WRITING

Instructor: Michael McGregor

No nonfiction genre has been as consistently popular in recent decades as memoir. People want to read it; people want to write it. It’s a natural thing to want to tell your story, especially if you have lived through exciting, difficult or uncommon experiences. But memory is a tricky thing and writing about events and people from memory is trickier still. In this course we’ll look at how successful memoirists have dealt with the limits of memory, the crafting of a personal story, the difficulties that can arise when writing about family, and the finding of some kind of truth, however personal or provisional. Through exercises and the writing of an essay-length memoir, students will learn to excavate and work with their own stories, turning the raw material of their lives and personal development into finely crafted, publishable pieces.

WR 461-001 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Adam Rodriguez

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. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 561 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 462-001 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

Comprehensive course in professional book design and production. Issues specific to the design of fiction and nonfiction books in a variety of genres and markets will be covered, including the applications of both old and new technologies in design and production. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 562 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 463-001 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: Kathryn Juergens

Comprehensive course in professional book marketing. Issues specific to the marketing of fiction/ nonfiction books in variety of genres and markets will be covered. Students will do market research, produce marketing plans, write press releases, write advertising copy, and develop related marketing materials. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 563 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 464-001 BUSINESS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Kent Watson

Comprehensive course in the business of book publishing. Topics covered include publications management, accounting, book production, distribution, and bookselling. Students learn how a variety of agents, including publishers, publishing services companies, distributors, wholesalers, bookstores, etc., are organized. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 564 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 472-001 COPYEDITING

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

Learn how to improve the clarity, coherency, consistency, and correctness of other people’s writing through application of grammatical and stylistic guidelines. Study grammar, usage, punctuation, and style. Narrow focus on editing at the line and substantive level, with little to no attention given to broad development of a manuscript. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 572 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 474-001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

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. Departments include Acquisitions, Editing, Design and Sustainable Production, Marketing, External Promotions, Sales, Digital Content, Social Media, and Project Management and Operations. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 574; may be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 475-001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

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. Departments include Acquisitions, Editorial, Design, Marketing and Sales, Digital, and Social Media. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 575; may be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 476-001 PUBLISHING FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Instructor: Rosanne Parry

Study the techniques commonly deployed by writers and publishers of young adult and middle grade literature. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 576 and may be taken only once for credit.

Graduate Writing Courses

WR 507-001 SEM: TIN HOUSE

Instructor: Paul Collins

This seminar, as part of our continuing series of Tin House Visiting Writer spring seminars, will discuss the works of Dave Eggers as a starting point for developing your own critical and creative writing. After an initial week of contextual readings, we'll read in their entirety three equidistant works from distinct stages of his editing and writing -- McSweeney's #4 (2000), What Is The What (2006), and A Hologram for the King (2012). There will also be one class meeting apiece on each of his intervening works of literary fiction and nonfiction. These will culminate in the author's visit near the end of the course for a reading and onstage interview at Lincoln Hall on May 25th.

The course syllabus and readings can be previewed on its blog: http://daveeggersseminar.blogspot.com

WR 507-003 SEM: MFA SEMINAR

Instructor: Charles McLeod

In this course, we will read a selection of contemporary fictional works focusing on characters living on life’s fringes: a drug-addled vagabond, the son of a Mexican cartel boss, an American soldier with pronounced PTSD, and a paranoid schizophrenic teen obsessed with the New York subway system, among others. While we won’t eschew theory, class discussion will center on elements of craft—language, syntax, action, description, tone, mood, and more—with an eye toward linking issues of class, gender and race with authorship.

Required texts:

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea
Veronique Olmi, Beside the Sea
John Wray, Lowboy
Don Lee, The Collective
Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

WR 510-004 TOP: ADVANCED INDESIGN

Abbey Gaterud

This course is exactly what it sounds like: an advanced course in Adobe InDesign. Prerequisite: WR 471/571: Typography, Layout, and Production.

WR 510-003 TOP: EBOOK PRODUCTION

Instructor: Amanda-Ann Gomm

WR 510-001 TOP: FLARE

Instructor: Laura Johnson

Goals for the class include your being ready to take the Flare Certification exam offered by MadCap Software and a portfolio-ready help project on a subject of your choice.

WR 510-009 TOP: TRENDS IN TRANS TECH

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel

Emerging Trends and Best Practices in Translating and Localizing Content

WR 510-006 TOP: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BOOK

Instructor: Charles Seluzicki

WR 512-001 ADV FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Leni Zumas

From sixty-page marathons to six-sentence sprints, from quests to questionnaires, from voice-driven blasts to carefully choreographed ensemble pieces, from texts that obey Freytag’s pyramid to those that dismantle it—short stories come in a dizzying range of shapes, sizes, and narrative strategies. We will sample and pry from this range; we will fixate on sentences; we will test out devices.

The course is primarily geared toward MFA poets and nonfiction writers, but MA in English and MA/MS in Publishing/Tech Writing students, as well as advanced undergraduates and post-bacs, may also enroll by permission of instructor. Interested non-MFA students should submit 5-7 pages of fiction to zumas@pdx.edu.

WR 521-002 MFA CORE WORKSHOP FICTION

Instructor: Leni Zumas

The graduate workshop in fiction focuses on the writing, revision, and critical discussion of student short stories and chapters from novels. Students’ critical analyses of their peers’ work are informed by their study of published fiction, supplemented by lectures clarifying technical strategies in the writing of fiction. May be repeated three times for a total of 16 credits. Restricted to student admitted to the MFA writing program (fiction strand).

WR 522-001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP POETRY

Instructor: John Beer

The MFA Core Workshop in Poetry focuses on the writing, revision, and critical discussion of student poems. Students' verbal and written critical analyses of their peers' work are informed by their reading of published poems representing a range of formal strategies and historical and cultural contexts, and by their reading in prosody and poetics. May be taken up to three times for credit. This course is restricted to graduate students admitted to the Writing Program (Poetry).

WR 527-001 TECHNICAL EDITING

Instructor: Garret Romaine

WR 559-001 MEMOIR WRITING

Instructor: Michael McGregor

WR 561-001 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Adam Rodriguez

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. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 461 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 562-001 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

Provides a strong foundation in design software used in the book publishing industry, focusing on Adobe InDesign. Also explores Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat, as well as XHTML and e-book design. The class considers audience expectations through a range of hands-on design projects. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 462 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 563-PB2 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: Kathryn Juergens

Comprehensive course in professional book marketing. Issues specific to marketing of fiction and nonfiction books in variety of genres and markets will be covered. Students will do market research, produce marketing plans, write press releases, write advertising copy, and develop related marketing materials. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 463 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 564-001 BUSINESS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Kent Watson

Comprehensive course in the business of book publishing. Topics covered include publications management, accounting, book production, distribution, and bookselling. Students learn how a variety of agents, including publishers, publishing services companies, distributors, wholesalers, bookstores, etc., are organized and function in the marketplace. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 464 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 572-001 COPYEDITING

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

Learn how to improve the clarity, coherency, consistency, and correctness of other people’s writing through application of grammatical and stylistic guidelines. Study grammar, usage, punctuation, and style. Narrow focus on editing at the line and substantive level, with little to no attention given to broad development of a manuscript. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 472 and may be taken only once for credit.

WR 574-001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

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. Departments include Acquisitions, Editing, Design and Sustainable Production, Marketing, External Promotions, Sales, Digital Content, Social Media, and Project Management and Operations. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 474; may be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 575-001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

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. Departments include Acquisitions, Editorial, Design, Marketing and Sales, Digital, and Social Media. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 475; may be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 576-001 PUBLISHING FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Instructor: Rosanne Parry

Study the techniques commonly deployed by writers and publishers of young adult and middle grade literature. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 476 and may be taken only once for credit.