Spring 2017 Courses

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

Undergraduate English Courses

ENG 201-001 SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: Jessie Herrada Nance

FULFILLS LOWER DIVISION REQUIREMENT

MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S 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 titled The 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.

Course requirements include discussion and participation; three close reading assignments; and one performance activity.

ENG 204-001 SURVEY ENGLISH LIT

Instructor: Jessie Herrada Nance

FULFILLS LOWER DIVISION REQUIREMENT

A survey of English literature of the period from Old English (Beowulf, etc. c. 800) through the seventeenth century (John Milton). This class is concerned with significant works and authors, as well as genres, forms and major literary movements. You will learn the early history of English literature: works, authors, dates, major intellectual and historical movements of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. This class will also build your literary vocabulary so you can discuss literature using a professional academic discourse. Assignments and tests will also help you to understand and practice how to do a close reading of a literary text.

ENG 300-001 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Michael Clark

FULFILLS GROUP A FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

English 300 is a course designed to introduce you to the wide variety of interpretive and critical approaches used in evaluating and understanding of works of literature. Our initial task will be to enhance our appreciation and understanding of an array of literary works (though this course will focus on the 20 th century novel). We will also try to develop a critical theory of literature -- that is, we will try to develop an understanding of works of literature (and all art, for that matter) that emphasizes their central importance to culture and human experience writ large.

This is a writing intensive course (WIC), and thus we will pay special attention to the art of “close reading,” formal analysis, literary genres, philosophical approaches to literature, argumentation, and the process of drafting, revising, and editing academic essays. You can expect to be submitting informal written work each week, along with a polished final essay (6 to 8 pages in length). This course is required for, but not restricted to, English majors. ENG 300 is a prerequisite for all 400-level English courses. Students should have at least some preparation in the study of English (the department recommends 12 lower division credits in literature or the equivalent).

Texts:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Elements of Style, Strunk and White

Assignments:

Weekly journal and blog entries
Short writing assignments
Final essay, including drafts and revisions

ENG 300-003 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

FULFILLS GROUP A FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

The Ethics of Reading

"There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

—Walter Benjamin, 1940

The course provides a rigorous introduction to the methods, approaches and questions necessary for advanced scholarly work in English, including close reading, historicism, research and argument: consider it boot camp for English majors! This is not a survey of theoretical perspectives, though we will read and discuss some important examples of literary theory along the way. Rather, the class prepares you for upper-division scholarship by asking what it is that we “do” as readers and critics—what English is “for,” why literature matters, and how encounters with the strangeness of literary language reflect and model other sorts of strange encounters. A careful reading of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians serves as a basis for our broader consideration of the ethical and political significance of reading, interpretation, and translation; we will also put the novel in dialogue with other works of literature, including Camus’s “The Guest”; Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; Kafka’s "In the Penal Colony"; DH Lawrence, “Snake”; and Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”; along with theoretical perspectives from Derek Attridge, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and others. As a Writing Intensive Class (WIC), the course will also focus on the strategies, conventions and techniques of scholarly writing. Reading and responding to other students’ work; drafting, revising and polishing written assignments in response to feedback; and improving grammar, style, clarity and argument will all form part of your work in the class.

Required Texts:

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Ink)
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (Penguin)
The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th Edition (MLA)
Long Night’s Journey into Day (dir. Deborah Hoffman & Frances Reid) (on reserve at the library, and via Canvas)
Strongly Recommended Graff & Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2nd edition)

ENG 301U-001 TOPICS: SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

Instructor: Jonathan Walker

FULFILLS GROUP C (PRE-1800) OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

In this course we will read and discuss four Shakespearean tragedies: The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus; The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice; The Life of Timon of Athens; and The History of King Lear. Titus Andronicus is perhaps Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, which was first printed in 1594 with no authorial attribution on its title page. Othello appeared around the middle of Shakespeare’s career, and it overturns a number of racial and generic expectations with its action. Timon of Athens is a very unconventional tragedy and, as a result, has been deeply unpopular among playgoers and critics alike. King Lear, finally, has often been hailed as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, though the English poet and essayist Charles Lamb called the play “painful and disgusting” as well as “essentially impossible to be represented on stage.”

Our guiding questions in this class will center on the generic or formal identity of these plays, that is, their tragic qualities. What is tragedy? What did early modern audiences expect to see when they attended a tragedy in the theater? Why did sensational qualities—blood, death, social chaos—draw people out to watch tragedy? And how do tragedy’s formal characteristics—the fall of a hero, a fatal miscalculation, a particular plot structure—give meaning to such stories? We will examine how the literary form of tragedy predisposes 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 interpretation. We will likewise give attention to questions of social class, language, race, and gender (among others) as they are posed by these four plays and by the early modern English culture from which they come.

Most of our in-class time will involve discussing such questions in these four texts, along with a few other short 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 304-001 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA

Instructor: Michael Clark

FULFILLS GROUP A UNDER 2010 CATALOG YEAR OTHERWISE E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

ENG 304 is an introduction to cinema as an art form, with a focus on film history, film theory, and various schools of critical analysis. We will study some of the essential components of film as a distinct art, including features like space, image, temporal manipulation (flashback, jump cutting, parallel structure), camera use, montage, and editing.

We will also discuss various film genres as well as the theories that surround them. Finally, we will discuss various hermeneutic and exegetical approaches to film often found in literary and aesthetic theory: semiotic theory, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, auteur theory, Russian formalism, and more. By the end of this course, the student will be familiar with the central critical models and tools of film criticism, as well as with the more extensive and expansive theoretical elements of academic film analysis.

This is a fully online course.

There is no textbook for this course (all materials are available online).

Assignments include:

1. Weekly blogs

2. Four short 93 to 4 page) critical essays.

3. Four short quizzes (10 questions)

ENG 305U-001 TOP IN FLM: CLASSICS OF GOTHIC

Instructor: Hildy Miller

FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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. 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.

Text: will be provided.

ENG 306U-001 TOP: THE SIXTIES

Instructor: William Bohnaker

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

Instructor: Katya Amato

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

The graphic novel is not literary fiction's half-wit cousin,

but, more accurately, the mutant sister who can often

do everything fiction can, and just as often, more.

--Dave Eggers

Memoir is the Barbie of literary genres. It exaggerates

the assets and invites the reader into an intimate,

alternative world, sometimes complete with a dream

house. We hungrily buy and read memoir even as we

express contempt for it. Memoirs are confessional and

subversive; memoirs drop names. Memoirs print

whispered secrets on their covers in 24-point type.

--Susan Cheever

This term the course will explore the graphic novel as memoir at the intersection of family, history, geography, sexuality, ethnicity, and literature. We begin by lightly deconstructing the superhero and move on to discuss graphic novels that reveal and conceal the development of the writer, that unify lives otherwise disunified, that make truth claims we will examine.

Some class time will be spent in groups, so be sure you like (or can tolerate) group work.Note that your grade is in no way dependent upon the group. Assignments include short response papers, a close reading of a panel, interpretation of a theme or imagery tying together several of our texts, and a final project (either an analytical paper or a sixteen-panel story arc to be presented to the class). Note that attendance is required.

I am working on the lineup of texts and have discovered that some especially interesting ones are now out of print and therefore too expensive. So far, these are the texts, all of which I will order at the bookstore once the list is complete:

Lynda Barry's One!Hundred!Demons!
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries
Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds
Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II

There will be a few more texts; stay tuned.

For further information, please get in touch: amatok@pdx.edu.

ENG 309U-001 AMERICAN INDIAN LIT

Instructor: Maria Depriest

FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

“I am memory alive.” ~~Joy Harjo, “Skeleton of Winter”

ENG 309U is a hybrid course. We meet in-class on Mondays and Wednesdays and we meet online on Canvas on Fridays. Course Description: The contemporary Indigenous Nations stories we will read rely on traditions that take us back-- historically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. At the same time, our artists tease us forward imaginatively, by illustrating that memory itself is intimately tied to the future and that we all have a stake in the future. Indeed, our reading list is 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). If, by quarter’s end, we have a deeper, more nuanced sense of what Heath-Justice is talking about in that last sentence, we will have been reading well.

Please attend our first class before buying the books.

Some of our Texts:

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

Approach: As a non-Native instructor of Indigenous Nations Literature, I certainly cannot speak as a cultural insider about our readings. However, in order to have a better understanding of these texts and the issues that they raise, I ask you to join me in incorporating specific tribal histories and cultural contexts when reading. My hope is that we can work together to understand this literature as a superb gathering of art that represents the lived experiences of contemporary Indigenous people.

ENG 313U-001 AMERICAN SHORT STORY

Instructor: Hildy Miller

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS AND CREDIT IN THE AMERICAN STUDIES CLUSTER

In this course we’ll trace the development of the American short story through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries by reading a variety of texts from a variety of authors from Hawthorne, Poe, and Fitzgerald to Sandra Cisneros and Sherman Alexie. We’ll consider what makes the short story such a popular genre in American literature. Of special interest will be its changing form: plot, character, narrative perspective, chronology, endings, prose styles, regional flavors, and the future of the genre. We’ll also look at its connections to other literary movements and canons, intersections with gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture. In addition to the stories themselves, we’ll read related essays and watch film adaptations.

Text:

The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. 9th edition. Macmillan Learning. 2014.

ENG 317U-001 GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Instructor: Katya Amato

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

...the helmet screams against the light;

Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen

Across three thousand years.

--Christopher Logue, War Music (1981)

Luminous and terrifying, alien yet familiar, the mythic figures of the classical world haunt the Western imagination. In this course, we read original sources from the archaic period and the Augustan period in their cultural contexts; we also glance at transformations of mythic figures and narratives in post-classical literature.

Texts:

Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Iliad
Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey
Richmond Lattimore's translation of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (in one volume)
Jules Cashford's translation of the Homeric Hymns
Rolfe Humphries' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses
The Lattimore translation of the Iliad is essential; the other translations are strongly suggested.

Requirements:

Epic reading assignments and the usual exams. All texts are available at the PSU Bookstore.
For further information, please get in touch: amatok@pdx.edu.

ENG 333U-001 HISTORY OF CINEMA & MEDIA II

Instructor: Wendy Collins

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Surveys the history of cinema and narrative media from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s. Issues will include the impact of postwar artistic and literary movements, postwar consumer cultures, the cold war, new wave movements, television, youth culture, and third cinemas.

ENG 334U-001 TOP: SCIENCE FICTION IN FILM

Instructor: Wendy Collins

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Study of major aesthetic, cultural, and social movements in film. This is the same course as NAS 334 and may be repeated with different topics.

ENG 340U-001 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Instructor: Christine Rose

FULFILLS GROUP C (PRE-1800) OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Selected works of medieval literature; introduction to the themes, genres, history, and cultures of the Middle Ages.

ENG 341U-001 RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Instructor: Jessie Herrada Nance

FULFILLS GROUP C (PRE-1800) OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the English Renaissance, a time of political, religious, and economic upheaval. Specifically, we will be examining how English authors of diverse genres use their works to adapt and appropriate new forms, cultures, themes, and ideas in order to construct personal and national identities. The course will begin with an examination of Utopia. We will then consider the English translation and adaptation the Petrarchan sonnet to begin a study of how poets, colonial promoters, political players, playwrights, and scientists use their works to chronicle and participate in the monumental cultural changes occurring in the period. The course will end with an examination of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where we will ask how these cultural developments contributed to – or challenged – a specifically Christian vision of the universe and the place of humanity within it. We will ultimately examine how the philosophies and cultural values of the English Renaissance led to modern conceptions of nation and self. Course requirements are active participation in class discussion, close reading assignments, and examinations.

ENG 345U-001 MODERN BRITISH LIT

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This class will focus on British and Anglophone literature of travel—especially inasmuch as travel calls into question what it means to be "British" in the first place. In a seminal essay entitled "Traveling Cultures," anthropologist James Clifford suggests that culture needs to be understood not only in terms of "dwelling" and settlement in one place, but also in terms of travel and movement (including the mobility of the anthropologist herself). These travels can take multiple forms (tourism, adventure, relocation, vacation, imperial conquest), some professional, some leisurely, all bringing the British, and the English language itself, into contact with various kinds of cultural difference and otherness. These pressures, as we will see, permeate a range of movements and genres in twentieth-century British writing—canonical modernist novels, epic poetry, avant-garde drama, and popular children's fiction.

Short list of texts includes:

Rudyard Kipling's Kim
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India
Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark
Derek Walcott's Omeros
Mark Ravenhill's Faust (Faust is Dead)
Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children

ENG 353U-001 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course focuses on African American literature of the post-civil rights era (post-1965). We will explore how black radical struggles to remake the world have animated recent and contemporary writing by black authors. The following questions will guide our exploration: What has been the goal in defining the canon of "African American Literature" since it first began to make its appearance in university course offerings? What is the value of such literature for contemporary American society--a society that prides itself on being diverse and tolerant even as it produces and tolerates massive amounts poverty and misery?

In addition to the reading below, we will read the work of contemporary critics, including Keeanga Yahmatta Taylor, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kenneth Warren, and more.

Required texts:

Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Toni Morrison, Jazz

ENG 363U-001 AMERICAN LIT 1865 TO 1965

Instructor: Sarah Ensor

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course reads American literature from (around) 1865 to (around) 1965, focusing on paradigms of civil disobedience. The trajectory from Thoreau’s influential “Essay on Civil Disobedience” through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” may seem to be a familiar one; however, we not only will map an alternate trajectory between these points but also will re-evaluate these iconic texts themselves. What do we make of the fact, for instance, that Thoreau left jail and went huckleberrying? How do we reconcile his famous action with his (in)famous forms of retreat? What does it mean that Carson – often deemed the mother of the contemporary environmental movement – not only didn’t consider herself an activist but also relied as heavily on literary tropes – and their patterns of indirection – as on scientific information to build her case against DDT? In other words, how do we make sense of the way in which civil disobedience is often as much about what we don’t do – or what we don’t do directly – as about what we do? How might we develop a definition of civil disobedience informed as much by Bartleby’s proclamation “I would prefer not to” as by the forms of direct speech and action that we more commonly associate with the term? Part of our challenge, of course, will be determining what we mean (or what various historical periods meant) by “obedience” – and then considering the various ways there are to resist such norms. As we proceed, and read texts by a wide range of authors, we will ask how experiences of gender and sexuality, race and class, and national (non-)belonging – and their associated forms of power(lessness) – shape practices of civil (dis)obedience. So too will we consider the ways in which the texts at hand not only depict or represent such disobedience, but also perform it. How (and what) does literature itself disobey?

ENG 367U-001 TOP: CANADIAN LIT

Instructor: Susan Reese

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

I can hardly wait to begin! Our reading will take us across genres as we share how certain people in certain times and very particular Canadian places survive their way to their identity. We will read What the Crow Said by Robert Kroetch, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Stories by Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell, Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Please join me for a breathtaking journey.

ENG 368U-001 LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY

Instructor: Alastair Hunt

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS AND CREDIT IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL SUST CLUSTER

While literature is usually thought of as essentially concerned with what is means to be human, it also provides an hospitable habitat for a rather large and various population of animals. Indeed, animals make appearances in so many literary works that it could be argued that one of literature’s essential concerns is the often-fraught relations between human beings and the other creatures with whom we share the earth. This course takes students on guided tour of literature, written in English since 1800, that takes up the theme of animals and our relations with them. Highlights will include poetry by the British Romantics, science fiction by H. G. Wells, a biography of a dog by Virginia Woolf, a fable about political animals by George Orwell, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, the Hollywood blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and a difficult-to-define text by contemporary writer Jonathan Safran Foer. In reading these works, we will take some guidance from recent philosophy and critical theory by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Peter Singer. Our reading of these texts will be organized by questions such as: How does literature explore aspects of our relations to animals that the life sciences, say, do not? Even as developments in knowledge and technology have allowed for an ever more penetrating control of animal life, does there not remain something fictional about our relations to animals? In what ways do the categories that organize social relations between human beings—race, gender, sexuality, class—intersect with the category of species? How can literature help us imagine just and sustainable alternatives to the ways we currently live with animals?

Required Texts:

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, Penguin, 1999. (ISBN 0140296409)
George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale. Signet, 2004. (ISBN 0451526341)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009. (ISBN 978031669885)
H. G. Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau, A Possibility. Penguin, 2005. (ISBN 9780141441023)
Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography. Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Books, 2013. (ISBN 9781614274902)

ENG 372U-001 TOP: ROMNCE MEDIVAL TO MDERN

Instructor: Karen Grossweiner

FULFILLS GROUP C (PRE-1800) OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course will explore the historical and literary origins of the Arthurian legends, then examine how this source material is adapted and reshaped over time and space, paying particular attention to what changes in the legends suggest about the ideologies of the author and culture that produces each version. As we follow Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, Tristan and others and their oftentimes heroic, sometimes misguided exploits, we will consider a series of conflicts and problems arising both between various codes of behavior (chivalry, courtly love, religion) and within the tenets of the codes themselves. We will also discuss issues pertinent to medieval romance in general such as how composing rhetorically transforms ideas about originality and how romances are filtered through a narrating voice that often resembles but never completely equates with the author’s. Issues of gender will be heavily addressed, as we consider such topics as the somewhat controversial idea of fin’ amors (courtly love), a system which, as governed by the feudal hierarchy, professes to venerate women but more frequently succeeds in marginalizing or vilifying them as well as masculine identity in a society that privileges male homosocial relationships. While the majority of our literary texts will come from the medieval period, we will also explore Arthurian themes and motifs in modern texts and reflect on why these legends have endured for so long in so many cultures.

Required texts (please use these editions):

The Mabinogion, trans. and ed. Sioned Davies (Oxford World Classics)
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (Broadview)
The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. David Staines (Indiana UP)
The Quest of the Holy Grail, ed. Pauline Matarasso, (Penguin)
Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Ed. Helen Cooper (Oxford World Classics)
Beroul, The Romance of Tristan (Penguin)
Merlin and the Grail, trans. Nigel Bryant (D.S. Brewer)

ENG 407-001 SEM: SOCIOLOGY! LITERATURE!

Instructor: Maude Hines

Instructor: Matthew Carlson

FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

The current political climate has increased the need for understanding--of data, of history, of each other. This course, taught by faculty from each of the titular disciplines, looks through the lenses of two disciplines--sociology and literary studies--at some of the issues at the forefront of the current moment. Among them:

race relations
immigration
housing
health care
education

How do we process the information we receive? What are the limits of narrative in creating empathy? What kind of "stories" do data tell? The course is designed as an epistemological journey through literature, film, sociological research, literary and sociological theory, and even your own "news feeds," one through which we explore our own ideas about what we "know" and "understand." Sociology! Literature! is taught by two professors: Maude Hines, a literary critic, and Matthew Carlson, a sociologist.

ENG 413-001 TCHG & TUTORING WR

Instructor: Daniel DeWeese

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

English 413 is an introduction to the theory and methods of teaching and tutoring writing to adult learners. We will focus on practical and theoretical issues involved in coaching writers through a writing process, including strategies for invention, organization, revision, and editing. In-class activities and a mix of informal and formal writing assignments will complement course readings and discussions. The course includes a required practicum of three hours per week beginning the second or third week.

ENG 414-001 CONTEMPORARY COMP THEORY

Instructor: Greg Jacob

FULFILLS GROUP A OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course begins with the roots of modern writing instruction that dates back, for the most part, to nineteenth-century rhetoric. Current-Traditional rhetoric was the mainstay of composition theory for decades, but beginning with the process movement led by Murray, Gibson, and Elbow, composition theory has gone through a variety of approaches to the teaching of writing. We will explore the complexity and fluidity of the field from process theory to critical theory.

Texts:

Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Eds. Tate, Rupiper, Schick. 2nd ed.
Cross Talk in Comp Theory. Eds. Villaneuva and Arola. 3rd Ed.

ENG 430-001 APOCRYPHAL SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: Jonathan Walker

FULFILLS GROUP C (PRE-1800) OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

In this advanced course, we will read a selection of Renaissance plays that have at one time or another been attributed—either wholly or in part—to William Shakespeare. Pericles, for instance, was excluded from the First Folio of 1623, though in 1609 it had been printed in quarto with Shakespeare’s name on the title page. Yet, while the title page of a yorkshire Tragedy (1608) also bears his name, no modern editor in her or his right mind would include it in the Shakespearean canon. The canonical status of each of the other plays we will read has also been difficult to determine, often resulting in heated critical debates.

One of our goals will be to read these plays with an eye to their dramatic qualities and the cultural circumstances in which they were produced. During our discussions, we will continually question our assumptions about what kind of dramatic material qualifies as “Shakespearean,” and for whom. In order to question such assumptions, we will explore the institutional practices in the culture that produced dramatic scripts for performance as well as printed texts for reading. Collaboration, the comparatively low literary value of drama in the culture, authorship, textual ownership, and canonicity: these issues will inform our discussion and assessment of the plays.

This course will be driven by the discussion of these questions as they are formulated in both the dramatic and critical texts we will read. There will be very few lectures. You will therefore be expected to participate actively in class discussions and to contribute to the knowledge that we will create together out of our conversations about the texts.

ENG 444-001 BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS

Instructor: Lorraine Mercer

FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” ~Angela Carter

Re-envisioning Literature: New Versions of Old Genres

In this course we will read six texts by twentieth century British women writers. These texts reveal how these particular writers have re-envisioned traditional narrative structures. From fairy tales to war stories, from non-fiction to gothic, these writers challenge narrative forms in order to explore new stories and new visions of the world.

Texts:

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Bluebeard
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Judith Raiskin
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own
& supplemental material including articles, poetry and other items provided online

Please note: you may use any editions of the books, except for Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a critical edition.

ENG 448-001 HENRY JAMES/JOSEPH CONRAD

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This class will focus on two crucial hinges between 19th- and 20th-century literature—Joseph Conrad and Henry James—pairing some of their shorter fiction with some of their major novels. Conrad and James are canonical literary figures with conflicted critical legacies. They write as outsiders: expatriates to Britain from Poland and America (respectively); a gun-smuggling, neurasthenic sailor who learned English as his third language, and a closeted and (mostly) celibate gay man. Both were gifted writers of genre fiction— gothic ghost stories, swashbuckling adventure novels—and experimental stylists who laid the ground for literary modernism. And both continue to be critically reassessed. James, long considered effete and detached from the real world, now reads as a figure consumed by the anxieties of modernity: cosmopolitanism and nation, capitalism and media, psychology and sexuality. Conrad—long seen as James's heir in the innovation of narrative form and psychological interiority—has become the site of newly contentious debates: is he a "bloody racist," as Chinua Achebe argues, or a complex skeptic open to new imaginative frames of reference? This is a mixed graduate/undergraduate course, with grad students mainly responsible for engaging with critical methods (materialist, deconstructive, postcolonial, queer, etc.) that constellate around Conrad and James. Still, their reputations must not overshadow the writing itself. As Lambert Strether puts it in James's novel The Ambassadors, "These impressions . . . have had their abundant message for me." I believe they will for you, as well.

Texts likely to include:

James: The Real Thing, The Pupil, The Beast in the Jungle, In the Cage, The Ambassadors, What Maisie Knew.
Conrad: Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, Lord Jim, Victory. (No, not Heart of Darkness, though if you haven't read it already I'd encourage you to do so before the class begins.)

ENG 467-001 AMERICAN CRIME FICTION

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course examines the obsession with “crime” in American fiction and popular narrative forms. What is the relation between crime fiction and narrative accounts of crime that pervade news media? What anxieties do these narratives express and how do they manifest within literary form? Is crime fiction's social function simply to naturalize the inequalities generated by capitalism? In this sense, does crime fiction "work" in our private spaces of leisure in similar ways to how the police operate in the streets?

Because the history of policing crime in America is at the same time a history of race-making, this course will be a study in how race is produced in American culture and the interests this race-making serves.

Required texts:

Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Herman Melville, Bartleby & Benito Cereno
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Ernest Hemingway, To Have and to Have Not

ENG 475-001 ADV TOP VICTORIAN LIT

Instructor: Lorraine Mercer

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

“The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is, mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the capitalist use of the populace — if we continue the capitalist use of external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not be on the dead.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

This course focuses on literature of the ‘long nineteenth century’ as a key to examining Victorian culture and society.

Texts:

She: A History of Adventure, H. Rider Haggard, Broadview Press
Wuthering Heights, E. Brontë, Bedford Critical Edition
Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
English Victorian Poetry, Dover Thrift Edition
Supplemental material from WWW and/or handouts

ENG 488-001 CONTEMPORARY AMER POETRY

Instructor: Joel Bettridge

FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This class will focus on American poetry published during the last fifteen years. Given the fact that such a timeframe still does not sufficiently narrow our field of study, we will examine work that explicitly marks itself as, or tends toward, the “experimental.” At the same time, we will take an expansive and critical approach to that framework, looking at poetry that places itself explicitly in the avant-garde tradition as well as poetry that concerns itself with matters of politics, race, ecology and lyric form.

Some of the books we will read include:

CAConrad, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, (wave books, ISBN: 9781940696010)
Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths and Disasters, (PowerHouse Books, ISBN: 9781576876367)
Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press; ISBN-13: 978-1555974077)
Charles Bernstein, Recalculating (University Of Chicago Press; ISBN-13: 978-0226925288)
Susan Howe, THAT THIS (New Directions; ISBN-13: 978-0811219181)
Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions; ISBN: 978-09887137102014)
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses. (New Directions, ISBN-13: 978-0811220910)
Joseph Donahue, Dark Church (Verge Books, ISBN-13: 978-0988988521)

ENG 494-001 TOP: BIOPOLITICS

Instructor: Alastair Hunt

FULFILLS GROUP A OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

In the 1970s, historian Michel Foucault offered a novel redescription of modern politics. For centuries, he argued, human beings were, as Aristotle famously defined them, animals with the extra-added capacity for politics. With the emergence of new administrative techniques in the late eighteenth century, however, human beings have become animals whose politics directly concerns their existence as living creatures. Foucault’s biopolitical hypothesis brings into view the various ways in which public and private institutions address people as populations whose life can be managed and ordered. He himself developed critical analyses of the efforts of modern governments to regulate biological life in the areas of public health, sanitation, sexuality, and race. More recently researchers have developed various revisions to his basic account and extended his analysis into topics he himself did not take up: the environment, animals, human rights, reproductive politics, states of exception, biomedicine, and neoliberalism. Indeed, biopolitics has become one of the defining developments of theoretical research in the humanities and social sciences in the early twenty-first century. This course leads students through a rigorous consideration of both the theory of biopolitics and its cross-disciplinary application in a number of fields, including literary studies, political theory, gender studies, race studies, queer theory, environmental studies, and animal studies. Authors: Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Lee Edelman, Judith Butler, Barbara Johnson, Penelope Deutscher, Cary Wolfe, Achille Mbembe, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Required Text:

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, eds. Biopolitics: A Reader, Duke University Press, 2013. (978-0-8223-5335-5)

Graduate English Courses

ENG 507-001 SEM: POETRY AND POLITICS

Thomas Fisher

This course is a focused exploration of the relationship between poetry and politics. We will primarily read postwar and contemporary American poetry, but will look at earlier poems as well as key theoretical texts to help us think the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Throughout the course we will explore the various ways that American writers make claims on a political agency and identity by way of poetry’s semantic commitments and its formal properties. In other words, we will explore the politics both of what a poem says and how it says it.

Texts will include:

Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred
Harriet Mullen, Sleeping With the Dictionary
Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary
Claudia Rankine, Citizen
Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs

ENG 514-001 CONTEMPORARY COMP THEORY

Instructor: Greg Jacob

Texts:

Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Eds. Tate, Rupiper, Schick. 2nd ed.
Cross Talk in Comp Theory. Eds. Villaneuva and Arola. 3rd Ed.

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 530-001 APOCRYPHAL SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: Jonathan Walker

ENG 548-001 HENRY JAMES/JOSEPH CONRAD

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

Texts likely to include:

James: The Real Thing, The Pupil, The Beast in the Jungle, In the Cage, The Ambassadors, What Maisie Knew.
Conrad: Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, Lord Jim, Victory. (No, not Heart of Darkness, though if you haven't read it already I'd encourage you to do so before the class begins.)

ENG 548-002 MJR FIGURES: J.M. COETZEE

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

This class will immerse us in the work of one of the “major authors” of twentieth- and twenty-first century world letters: J.M. Coetzee. We will read a representative sample of Coetzee’s novels, supplemented by encounters with his critical writing and perspectives from other scholars and theorists. Key themes we will track across the author’s oeuvre include colonialism, violence, and their aftermath; ecology and the politics of place; the ethics of representation; language, narrative, and their pitfalls; the gendered, raced, and disabled body; and the work of writing in a time of crisis. Course requirements include active, enthusiastic participation; weekly online journal essays; presentations; and one or two research papers.

Required Texts (we may need to drop one of these, alas):

Dusklands (Penguin, 978-0140241778)
In the Heart of the Country (Penguin, 978-0140062281)
Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Ink, 978-0143116929)
Life & Times of Michael K (Penguin, 978-0140074482)
Foe (Penguin, 978-8420424965)
Age of Iron (Penguin, 978-0140275650)
Disgrace (Penguin, 978-0140296402)
Elizabeth Costello (Penguin, 978-0142004814)
Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (Penguin, 978-0140265668)

ENG 588-001 CONTEMPORARY AMER POETRY

Instructor: Joel Bettridge

Some of the books we will read include:

CAConrad, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, (wave books, ISBN: 9781940696010)
Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths and Disasters, (PowerHouse Books, ISBN: 9781576876367)
Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press; ISBN-13: 978-1555974077)
Charles Bernstein, Recalculating (University Of Chicago Press; ISBN-13: 978-0226925288)
Susan Howe, THAT THIS (New Directions; ISBN-13: 978-0811219181)
Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions; ISBN: 978-09887137102014)
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses. (New Directions, ISBN-13: 978-0811220910)
Joseph Donahue, Dark Church (Verge Books, ISBN-13: 978-0988988521)

ENG 594-001 TOP: BIOPOLITICS

Instructor: Alastair Hunt

Required Text:

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, eds. Biopolitics: A Reader, Duke University Press, 2013. (978-0-8223-5335-5)

Undergraduate Writing Courses

WR 115-001 INTRO TO COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: Emily Flouton

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 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 LIT

Instructor: Loretta Rosenberg

FULFILLS LOWER DIVISION REQUIREMENT

"I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as 'truths' already known. Rather, I see writing as a process of experiment. It's like any discovery job; you don't know what's going to happen until you try it. All life is like that." William Stafford from Writing the Australian Crawl: Views of the Writer's Vocation

Course Description:

In this course we'll read different forms of literature learning key literary terms in order to discuss and write about what we read. We'll write in class daily and share our writing with fellow students. We'll revise one of our in-class assignments weekly and write a short final essay based on one of those revisions.

WR 210-001 GRAMMAR REFRESHER

Instructor: Caroline Hayes

In this class you will learn about a variety of writing rules including those of grammar, the parts of speech, sentence construction, punctuation, clarity, and mechanics. Throughout the term, readings, activities, discussion, quizzes, and final exam will help you to understand and subsequently test your knowledge of these concepts.

WR 212-002 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: TBD

Our primary goals for the quarter will be to learn basic conventions of fiction writing (such as structure, point of view, and character), and to produce original fiction that will be critiqued by the class. The “workshop” format means that you will be presenting completed drafts to the class, and that we will spend much of our class time in discussion of these drafts. And since being a good writer means being a good reader, you will also be responsible for reading and responding to several published works and essays on the craft of fiction writing.

WR 213-001 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Alice Hall

A poem is an experience, not a description of an experience." Where and when does the experience crack open? In this workshop-based introductory course, students will EXPERIENCE––they will write and read widely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. We will examine both contemporary poetry and a number of poetic traditions and forms in our exploration of the poetic experience. Through peer critique, students will respond closely to the work of fellow writers in a supportive workshop during the second half of the term. Writers at all levels of experience and comfort with poetry are welcome.

WR 214-001 INTRO NONFICTION WRITING

Instructor: Catherine Johnson

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 for a total of 8 credits. Expected preparation: Freshman Inquiry or equivalent.

WR 222-002 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: Amy Harper

This course will cover the process of writing research papers. We will discover how to find a worthy topic for research, how to formulate a working thesis, how to write a research proposal, how to find and evaluate sources, and how to synthesize these sources into cohesive and informative research papers. This course will also cover correct citation for MLA, APA, and Chicago Style documentation.

In this course we will focus on creating “new research” or new ideas demonstrated by focused research based on the worth of previous reliable sources. We will also cover plagiarism and how to avoid it.

One of the course requirements is collaborative feedback, peer edits, and reviews. The purpose of this format is to allow a collective learning style that is designed to improve all research-based writing.

Required texts:

Author: Richard Bullock/Francine Weinberg Title: The Norton Field Guide to Writing Edition: Fourth Edition (ebook available) ISBN-13: 978-0393265750 ISBN-10: 0393265757
The Norton Field Guide to Writing Third Edition ISBN: ISBN: 0393-91956-0 ISBN 13: 978-0393-91956-1 Publisher: ISBN: 0393-91956-0 ISBN 13: 978-0393-91956-1 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Format: paperback
Author: Kate L Turabian Title: A Manual For Writers of Research Paper, Theses, and Dissertations (Chicago Style) Edition: Eighth Edition, 2010 University of Chicago Press

WR 227-001 INTRO TECHNICAL WRTG

Instructor: Garret Romaine

WR227 introduces you to the world of technical communication, which is a different style and voice from other writing. You will progress through a wide variety of typical technical writing projects, such as formal and informal reports, memos, letters, proposals, procedures, and other typical writing tasks. The goal is to keep building up to a formal report that you can include in your portfolio. By the end of the term, you will develop the ability to summarize key points and provide the reader with important information up front. You will learn some tips and tricks built into your word processor to make technical information easier to understand, and you will gain insight into the organization of information. You should come out of this class with some good samples and templates that you can use later in your career.

WR 227-004 INTRO TECHNICAL WRTG

Instructor: Mary Sylwester

This class introduces technical and professional communication. Students compose, design, revise, and edit effective letters, memos, reports, descriptions, instructions, and employment documents. The course emphasizes precise use of language and graphics to communicate complex technical and procedural information safely, legally and ethically.

WR 228-001 MEDIA WRITING

Instructor: Brett Campbell

There've never been more opportunities to get true stories published than today. Although dinosaur institutions, including many major newspapers, have been shrinking, more magazines are being published than ever, and thousands of online publications -- including some of the most respected -- are bringing journalism into the 21st century. It's a chaotic time of reinvention, but also an exciting one for students who want to tell true stories, get them published -- and even get paid for writing them.

Media Writing WR 228 is a collective exploration into the state of media today, and a collective opportunity to develop the skills to write for those media outlets. All your assignments will be aimed at actual, paying journalistic media markets that *you* choose, based on *your* interests. As each student explores the various media outlets she's interested in, the entire class will learn about a range of today's publications and how to write the stories they publish. And through peer editing, you'll help each other become better writers: you will showcase your work several times for the whole class, and every student gets the chance to offer feedback on every other student's writing, in a supportive environment.

Along with exploring the changing world of media, this workshop will give you the basic skills you need to report and tell true stories. Because while the economics and structure of media are rapidly evolving, editors and publishers still demand basic journalistic skills like factual accuracy, fairness, clear expression, and, especially, exciting writing that grabs readers from the outset and keeps them engaged throughout the story.

Workshops like Media Writing provide a rare opportunity for in-depth feedback on your writing, rather than discussing basic information you can look up online or in a good reference source or textbook. Through writing exercises, reporting assignments and class discussions, you'll learn to identify news, interview sources, write effective leads and structure several different kinds of news stories for print and web-based publications. You'll also learn how to write on deadline and to make your writing tighter, brighter, and right for the media outlets you want to publish your writing.

WR 312-001 INTERMED FICTION WR

Instructor: Helen Zumas

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This class is a fiction laboratory—a place for experiments and discovery. First and foremost you will read, exploring a range of short stories and novel excerpts that showcase the pleasures, challenges, and possibilities of fiction. Using these texts as models, you’ll practice core elements of craft, including setting, point of view, characterization, conflict, and dialogue. You will offer constructive feedback (written and verbal) to your peers, and revise your own work based on feedback from peers and instructor.

Required Text:

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, ed. Ben Marcus. ISBN 978-1400034826.

WR 313-001 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING

Instructor: James Gendron

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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. May be repeated once for credit.

WR 323-004 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Kirsten Rian

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Writing 323 is designed to improve and enhance the writing skills you already possess, while enriching critical thinking skills by focusing on reflection and inquiry. Assumptions should be avoided. We will use formal and informal writing to explore and study the assigned readings, examine our own and other student’s writings, and reflect upon the nature and craft of writing. The class will focus on the process of writing, effective use of language, the studying of well-written pieces by other authors, and revision.

Required text:

The Best American Essays of the Century, Joyce Carol Oates, Editor

WR 323-007 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Paul Lask

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

There is a long history of competing narratives to define what the American wilderness is. Though conceptions of wilderness have changed over time, themes recur. It is still a place that is feared and romanticized. It is still identified as a source of purity. Conservation efforts continually come in conflict with those of preservationists, who believe large swaths of land need to remain "untouched."

We will read and respond to a variety of texts--- literary, historical and legal--- as well as film and paintings, to get at what wilderness is, keeping in mind the rhetorical methods being used. We will put together daily presentations, blog posts and three essays that will critically examine primary and secondary sources. With wilderness as a lens I hope to get at issues of displacement, industrialization, environmental equity and sustainability.

This is a writing course for upper-division students which offers reflective approaches to writing and reading. Students enhance critical thinking abilities, refine 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 and sharing writing with other students. This course will prepare students to write in professional and academic contexts, offering students the opportunity to engage in intensive inquiry into the processes and strategies of writing.

WR 323-008 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Sean Warren

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

In this class students will read a range of non-fiction and fiction writers with an eye toward advancing the ambition and craft of their own writing. Students will explore the essay and short fiction form with passion, intelligence, and wit in the following genres: memoir, cultural/travel writing, and fiction. Students will produce several pages of writing each week, including responses to writing prompts and discussion threads; mini-essays/fictions; and workshop responses, among others. The aim of the class is to explore self and society through the unique medium of writing sentences.

WR 327-001 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: Maralee Sautter

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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.

WR 331-001 BOOK PUBLISHING FOR WRITERS

Instructor: Kathleen Berens

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Overview of the book publishing process from acquisitions through book publication, marketing and distribution. Units on developing writers’ social media presence, authoring query letters, developmentally editing manuscripts, and designing a book marketing plan. Examines the culture of “Big-5” publishing houses and the rise of self-publishing.

WR 333-001 ADVANCED COMPOSITION

Instructor: Susan Reese

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course is designed to nurture and challenge the writer you already are, providing inspiration and the nudge to push boundaries and hone existing technical skills. Our texts will be Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat, After the Quake by Haruki Murakami and In Search of Duende by Federico Garcia Lorca. We will strive for a balance between discussing texts, writing and workshops. Please join me!

WR 399-001 SPST: GRAPHIC STORYTELLING

Instructor: Douglas Wolk

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Writing comics means devising stories for a particular artist's hand, meant to be experienced as drawings and some carefully chosen words. Students in this class will learn how to build visual narratives, both on your own and as writer-artist collaborations--a dynamic you will experience from both sides. We'll study a broad range of comics, discuss the mechanics of their storytelling structures, language and imagery, and make use of those strategies in the original works that you will create.

Required Texts:

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie: The Wicked + The Divine, vol. 1: The Faust Act (Image Comics)
Sophie Goldstein: The Oven (AdHouse Books)
Sonny Liew: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Pantheon)
Matt Madden: 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Chamberlain Bros.)
Carla Speed McNeil: Finder: Voice (Dark Horse)
Ed Emberley: Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make a World (LB Kids)

WR 410-003 TOP: WEB TOOLS FOR CONT PROVDR

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Students will learn how to manage the wide range of tools required to publish content to a website. As websites have grown more robust and complex to satisfy the needs of website visitors, the systems and tools have grown in robustness and complexity. The days of adding content to a static HTML website are diminishing, and the Web Content Management System (CMS) are a fact of life. Learn how a modern CMS works. Learn how the auxiliary tools (translation, graphics, videos, analytics, personas, authoring tools) are a part of this system.

WR 410-002 TOP: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BOOK

Instructor: Charles Seluzicki

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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 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 410-001 TOP: EBOOK PRODUCTION

Instructor: Amanda-Ann Gomm

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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 you first take WR 4/510: Digital Skills before taking this course.

WR 410-004 TOP: ADVANCED BOOK DESIGN

Instructor: Kelley Dodd

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

This course is exactly what it sounds like: an advanced course in book design. Prerequisite: WR 4/571: Typography, Layout, and Production.

WR 412-001 ADV FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Helen Zumas

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Members of this advanced workshop will hone their technical and imaginative powers. Reading assignments, writing exercises, and critiques will help each writer unearth fresh possibilities in her work. Our focus will be on the short story; those students working on novels will be asked to set aside the long form, for now, and tackle the short.

WR 427-002 TECHNICAL EDITING

Instructor: Garret Romaine

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Advanced Technical Editing is a web-based and community-based approach to providing students with real-world opportunities to improve their editing skills. Students will undertake an internship in a local business, non-profit, or other organization where a mentor other than the instructor can provide them tasks and projects. Students in the past have sought out their own internships that fit with their schedule, and the instructor has used contacts at local technology companies to assist that search. By the end of the term, you should be comfortable with various style guides, mark-up symbols, and online editing tools.

WR 457-001 PERSONAL ESSAY WRITING

Instructor: Sallie Tisdale

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

The history and contemporary use of personal essay as a mode of creative communication; gives an understanding of and practice in this kind of writing.

WR 458-001 MAGAZINE WRITING

Instructor: Kjerstin Johnson

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Writing for magazines and other commercial outlets is a challenging but rewarding way to reach new audiences and hone your nonfiction and reported writing.

In this class, students will study freelance writing forms—blurbs, profiles, personal essays, and features—as well as the fundamentals of freelancing, including how to pitch, how to work with editors, and how to meet deadlines, and insight into the world of publishing.

Building off of news writing, students will study and discuss the craft of feature writing by examining published features and writing their own. We will look at a variety of publications to explore an array of freelancing options and hone the strategy of pitching multiple outlets to maximize your research and time.

Students will leave with a better understanding of how "the real world" of writing works outside academia, including knowing what an editor is looking for, online writing and social media, and gearing your work for a specific audience. Guest speakers from the media world will also share insight into careers in publishing.

WR 461-001 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Adam Rodriguez

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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.

WR 462-001 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Kelley Dodd

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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.

WR 463-001 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: TBD

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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.

WR 464-001 BUSINESS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Kent Watson

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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.

WR 472-001 COPYEDITING

Instructor: Kjerstin Johnson

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

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.

WR 474-001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

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. Course may be repeated multiple times.

WR 475-001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

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. Course may be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 477-001 CHILDREN'S BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Rosanne Parry

FULFILLS GROUP D OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

Study the techniques commonly used by writers and publishers of children’s literature.

Graduate Writing Courses

WR 507-002 SEM: MFA SEMINAR

Instructor: Gabriel Urza

Research allows us to better understand the world of our stories, to more accurately portray characters and settings, to create authority in narrative voice, and to provide surprising details and nuance that complicate conflict. This class will use secondary source material (such as craft essays) as well as close readings of selected short stories 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, assignments for this course will incorporate guided research projects—including immersive, experience-based research—intended to complicate and enrich our writing process.

Texts (in whole or in part):

Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit
An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski
Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi
The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Shell Collector, Anthony Doerr
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
The John McPhee Reader, John McPhee

WR 507-001 SEM: TIN HOUSE

Instructor: John Beer & Michele Glazer

Jorie Graham is the author of 14 volumes of poetry as well as books of compilations and collaborations. Born in Italy, educated at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Graham taught for years at Iowa, and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.

The critic Calvin Bedient noted that Graham is, “never less than in dialogue with everything. She is the world champion at shot-putting the great questions. It hardly matters what the title is: the subject itself is always ‘the outermost question being asked me by the World today.’ What counts is the hope in the questioning itself, not the answers.”

Our aims this term will include to trace the movement and development of Graham’s writing and thinking over the past 40 years; to consider some of the way this much lauded and influential poet (Pulitzer, MacArthur, Guggenheim, etc.) has made a career as a poet; and, to consider this poet’s role and influence in the larger culture. Students will also lean on Graham’s writing as a catalyst for developing their own critical and creative writing. The seminar will culminate in Graham’s visit to Portland on May 26, 2017.

Texts (all by Jorie Graham):

From the New World
Erosion
The End of Beauty
Swarm
Fast

WR 510-003 TOP: WEB TOOLS FOR CONT PROVDR

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel

WR 510-002 TOP: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BOOK

Instructor: Charles Seluzicki

WR 510-001 TOP: EBOOK PRODUCTION

Instructor: Amanda-Ann Gomm

WR 510-004 TOP: ADVANCED BOOK DESIGN

Instructor: Kelley Dodd

This course is exactly what it sounds like: an advanced course in book design. Prerequisite: WR 4/571: Typography, Layout, and Production.

WR 521-001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP FICTION

Instructor: TBD

The MFA Core 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 in the texts, supplemented by lectures clarifying technical strategies in the writing of fiction. May be taken up to six times for credit. This course is restricted to graduate students admitted to the Writing Program (Fiction).

WR 522-001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP POETRY

Instructor: John Beer

In this studio class, we will seek to enlarge our sense of the possibilities for expression, and for the expressive failures of expression, that language opens up. By developing their own work through multiple drafts and commenting vigorously upon the work of fellow writers, participants will gradually accumulate both a body of work and an analytical toolkit.

While myriad theoretical and practical issues in poetics will come up, largely driven by the work which we are considering through the term, a primary focus for this workshop will be the question of subject. What is the relation of the poem to its subject? How does a poet determine the subject of her poem? How might that subject be transformed through the process of composition?

Texts:

The Work-Shy, Blunt Research Group
Of Being Dispersed, Simone White
WoO, Renee Angle

WR 527-001 TECHNICAL EDITING

Instructor: Garret Romaine

WR 557-001 PERSONAL ESSAY WRITING

Instructor: Michael McGregor

Essays come in many shapes from many perspectives, most of them (especially those required in college classes) formal in structure, tone and approach. The personal essay is a different animal altogether. Reflecting its author's preoccupations and often highly idiosyncratic view of the world, the personal essay tells us as much about the one writing it as it does about the subject it addresses. While it is not memoir or autobiography per se, it almost always includes intimate information about its author's life while at the same time connecting to some underlying element common to people in general. In this class we will explore the history of the personal essay in English, looking at its classical roots and studying works by the father of the modern essay, Michel de Montaigne, before crossing the Channel to England and journeying on to America. Once we have some idea of where the personal essay comes from, we'll study several well known modern essay writers, paying particular attention to how they have made the personal essay their own. We will also look at contemporary writing by new American writers from different cultural backgrounds with an eye toward finding the particular cultural, social, economic, ethnic, philosophical, experiential or political positions from which we ourselves might write. While our reading will give us a better idea of what a personal essay is or can be, the main focus in this class will be on writing personal essays of our own that break new ground by expressing unique individual viewpoints. You will be expected to write and revise two personal essays during the term, one focusing primarily on a personal incident or characteristic, the other focusing on an issue, idea, situation or object that you are or have been preoccupied with, perhaps to the point of obsession.

WR 558-001 MAGAZINE WRITING

Instructor: Paul Collins

This is a seminar devoted to developing magazine items, articles, and features with both text and multimedia. Each class meeting will focus on the current issue or online content of a different magazine, and we'll also examine the profession of freelancing and the economic and production parameters of magazine publishing.

TEXTS:

Associated Press Stylebook & Briefing on Media Law 2015 (ISBN 9780465062942)
Call, Wendy and Mark Kramer. Telling True Stories ( 9780452287556)
Ragland, Margit. Get a Freelance Life. (0307238032)
Tin House: Issue 70, “Winter Reading 2016.” (9781942855071)

WR 561-001 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Adam Rodriguez

WR 562-001 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Kelley Dodd

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.

WR 563-PB2 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: TBD

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.

WR 564-001 BUSINESS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Kent Watson

WR 572-001 COPYEDITING

Instructor: Kjerstin Johnson

WR 574-001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

WR 575-001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

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. May be taken multiple times for credit.

WR 577-001 CHILDREN'S BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Rosanne Parry

Study the techniques commonly used by writers and publishers of children’s literature.