Spring 2024 Courses

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

Notes:

If a course is designated as low-cost, the course materials will cost $40 or less.
If a course is designated as no-cost, students do not need to purchase any course materials.
Course descriptions are subject to change based on instructor submissions. If the instructor has not submitted a course description, please refer to the PSU Bulletin for more information.

Resources

Spring 2024: Undergraduate English Courses

ENG 201 001 INTRO TO SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: John Vignaux Smyth
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

We will read:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida

Secondary texts will include René Girard’s A Theater of Envy and other critical materials, and Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “That in Aleppo Once,” a title taken from Othello. Films will include Gregory Doran’s 2009 Hamlet, starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, and the Tennant and Tate version of Much Ado About Nothing. Also Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and John Cleese in The Taming of the Shrew.

Main requirements are two essays and two weekly Canvas Discussion posts.

The class is conducted entirely in writing, without class meetings or Zoom lectures.

ENG 254 001 SURVEY OF AMERICAN LIT II

Instructor: Hildy Miller
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

In the course we’ll read a variety of pieces of American literature, including short stories, drama, novels, and poetry from the late 19th and 20th and 21st centuries by taking “snapshots” of particular periods: turn of the century, 20s-30s, 40s-70s, and 80s to contemporary times. These snapshots will allow us to sample—and enjoy—key writings from these eras and to consider their connections to significant literary movements and canons and to view them from a variety of critical perspectives with attention to formal elements, literary history, and cultural identities.

We’ll also examine how recent sociopolitical events—such as the 1619 Project, controversies around women’s reproduction, the Me Too movement, questions of cultural appropriation of Native American identities, generational reverberations of the Holocaust, and the re-articulation of LGBTQI identities, among many issues,—suggest timely re-readings of some American literature staples. From Henry James to Sandra Cisneros, our writers will be diverse in gender identifications, race/ethnicity, class, and culture. In the contemporary era readings, we’ll pay special attention to new genres and will read and discuss Canadian/North American Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale, a story which, even though it was initially published several decades ago, seems to be speaking powerfully to a new generation. And we’ll consider Richard Wright’s recently published novel The Man Who Lived Underground, an account of one Black man’s urban experience that many readers are saying could have occurred today. In addition to the literary texts, there will be related essays and some film adaptations.

ENG 300 001 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

Instructor: Michael Clark
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

ENG 300 002 LIT FORM AND ANALYSIS

Instructor: Marcel Brousseau
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 304 001 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA

Instructor: Matthew Ellis
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

What is cinema? What is the relationship between film, photography, and a “real” world captured on camera? How do films “mean” what they do? How do they construct or affect a spectator? Who or what is a film spectator, and how do they interface with questions of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, empire, and the economy? What distinguishes cinema from other media, especially digital media, which have in recent decades been replacing the analog components of filmmaking first established in the late nineteenth century? Can watching a movie on your phone be considered the same activity as visiting a cinema? Questions such as these have long been posed within a rich tradition of film and media theory by scholars, filmmakers, and activists. This course serves as an introduction to this field within a broader critical theory tradition, moving chronologically from the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment, using both readings and film screenings as our materials. By course’s end, we will have mapped out a basic introduction to central debates in film studies as well as twentieth century critical theory.

While “theory” can have a reputation for being dense and obtuse at times, we all have watched movies, and thought about them afterwards. This is ultimately the work we will be doing in this course, and no prior experience with film studies is expected, or required.

ENG 305U 001 TOP: POST-CINEMA

Instructor: Matthew Ellis
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

In the past few decades, cinema scholars and artists have responded to increasing technological and economic changes in the film world with a number of assertions: The age of cinema has passed, replaced by “quality television,” video games, and internet streaming! Digital technology has surpassed the capabilities of analog filmmaking! Movies just don’t look like they used to! Something is clearly afoot.

This class will be an introduction to many of the debates sparked by such comments—an overview of the way historians, theorists, filmmakers, critics, and audiences have responded to the myriad changes in the cinema industry over the past 20 years. From considering theories of an emergent “post-cinematic” form that suggest a fundamental rupture with the classical cinema of the 20th century, to investigating works that suggest a continuity between the earlier analog cinema contemporary digital culture, our class will seek to provide answers to a number of questions: What “was” this thing called cinema, and how might its so-called “end” mean for the future of moving images? Is something happening to film language, both in mainstream cinema and on our social media screens? Are the technological shifts in the medium simply affording new ways to tell stories on screen or are they indicative of broader and more troubling shifts in the global economy? What makes television different from “cinema,” if it is? Can computers "make" cinema? Is TikTok "cinematic?" Where do we “watch” when we watch, and how do we think about our attention when we do?

ENG 305U 002 TOP: CINEMA OF US/MEX BORDER

Instructor: Marcel Brousseau
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

ENG 306U 001 TOP: FANTASY LITERATURE

Instructor: Michael Weingrad
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

ENG 306U 002 TOP: LAW AND LITERATURE

Instructor: Michael Clark
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

ENG 307U 001 SCIENCE FICTION

Instructor: Jacob Tootalian
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 307U is a course that encourages students to read and critically analyze works of science fiction, exploring how that genre participates in the process of making knowledge. Honing their understanding of its distinctive conventions, students will use science fiction to investigate the relationship between scientific notions of truth and fictional modes of representation, a line of inquiry that will help them challenge the perceived “two cultures” divide between the humanities and the sciences in the modern university. The historical scope of the course will range from the imaginative critique of the scientific revolution found in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) to the more recent visionary Afrofuturism of Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer (2018). By engaging with works of science fiction from a diverse set of social contexts and cultural perspectives, students will come to appreciate the impact of the past on both the possible futures we can imagine and the present assumptions that shape our lives. The course will also sample works from across the formal spectrum, including literary prose, graphic art, audio drama, and film, examining science fiction’s investment in technology as both a thematic concern and as a structuring force for different types of media. ENG 307U explores these concerns as part of University Studies’ “Examining Popular Culture” cluster, presenting science fiction as a powerful tool for honing critical thinking skills and for examining the role of cultural artifacts in representing and rethinking a society’s intellectual priorities.

ENG 310U 001 TOP: CHILD/YOUNG ADULT LIT

Instructor: Elizabeth C. Brown
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

The figure of the teenage outsider, a character who in one way or another inhabits the social margins, is ubiquitous within young adult fiction. You might think, for instance, of popular young adult characters such as Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Miles Morales. In this class, you will learn critical methods for reading YA fiction by attending to representations of outsiders in literature published for, and sometimes by, young adults. How have authors represented outsider characters in different historical and cultural contexts? How do these characters confront social expectations in families, schools, and other institutions? What lessons might these texts attempt to teach young adults about the roles they inhabit in the world? We will explore these and other questions in texts across various forms and genres, paying particular attention to representations of outsiders inflected by race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. Authors we will likely read include S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Ralph Zamora Linmark, Cherie Dimaline, and Leila Abdelrazaq.

ENG 315 001 POETRY AND FORM

Instructor: Tom Fisher
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 327 001 CULTURE, IMPERIALISM, GLOBAL

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

ENG 335U 001 TOP: MELODRAMA

Instructor: Josh Epstein
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

The melodrama—a genre defined by its emotional extremes, sweeping gestures, irrational climaxes, and clichéd plot formulae—often finds itself intervening into questions of race and nation in conflicted, problematic, and often deceptively complex ways. In ENG 335U, we shall study how melodramas, sometimes called “tear-jerkers” or “weepies,” use sentiment and feeling as leverage into these (and other) incendiary cultural problems. Our job will be neither to condemn nor to praise the melodrama; rather, we’ll examine how melodramas’ exaggerations and distortions make them both useful as a catalyst for social critique and deceptive as a way of understanding the past. We shall therefore explore how melodramatic novels and films shed light—and heat—on issues of inequality and difference, authenticity and “passing.” We’ll also examine films and literary texts that resist the melodrama’s sentimental manipulations, and think about how melodrama continues to shape today’s media.

As part of PSU’s “Examining Popular Culture” cluster, then, ENG 335U aims to help students:

Understand the conventions, traditions, and histories of literary/cinematic melodrama, and examine how these conventions continue to saturate popular culture;
Develop effective strategies for analyzing, and writing about, cinematic and literary texts, as artworks and as documents of their cultural and historical contexts;
Examine how uses of melodrama in popular media draw on, and feed into, cultural images of race, nation, gender, class, and other social categories.

Texts studied will include Fannie Hurst’s novel The Imitation of Life, and the film versions by John Stahl and Douglas Sirk; Dion Boucicault’s 1859 stage melodrama The Octoroon and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2015 deconstructed revision, An Octoroon; and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Films will include some (probably not all) of the following: R.W. Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, Walter Lang’s The King and I, and/or DJ Spooky’s The Rebirth of a Nation (a “remixed” take on D. W. Griffith).

ENG 340U 001 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Instructor: STAFF
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 343U 001 ROMANTICISM

Instructor: W. Tracy Dillon
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

"The Romantic was invented by Shakespeare, in the character of Hamlet, and was refined by Milton, in the figure of Satan... Poetry ever since has been a form of Romanticism, whether orthodox or in rebellion against it."

—Harold Bloom

The PSU catalog has this to say about ENG 343: “Selected works of Romantic literature; introduction to themes, genres, history, and culture of Romanticism.” Beyond absorbing some of the greatest hits of English Romanticism, you should expect to come away from the course with an enhanced understanding of the function of poetry (as Romantic poets attempt to explain it), a sense of the historical continuity that constitutes “a poetic tradition” (a Euro-western one, anyway), and emerging expertise on authors or topics of your choice related to the very broad historical and aesthetic movement commonly referred to as “Romanticism.” It’s a sweeping term, with dizzying historical, critical, and aesthetic implications, as suggested by Bloom’s assessment above.

Our approach to the complexities of Romanticism will be to simplify. I tend to retain a canonical approach to 300-level courses, encouraging you to read as much of this good stuff as you can in the short time we have together. So: Read, read, read! You will be writing weekly responses to questions about the module lectures and readings as well as completing a final exam at term’s end.

What about textbooks?

I provide online links to major works and major figures so that you can easily complete the course without paying for expensive anthologies. In this way, I try to minimize costs.

Read: No textbook required.

But if you prefer hard copy (and who doesn’t?) just about any healthy anthology of English Romantic poetry/literature will serve, as well as a standard scholarly edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I recommend the following editions.

David Perkins, English Romantic Writers, 2nd Edition.

The Perkins text can be ridiculously expensive and hard to track down online, but it’s seminal. As I write this course description, the Evil Empire of Amazon lists its price (from used to new) at $19.99-$175.64. Ouch. Amazon also projects a delivery date of six-to-seven months. However, savvy internet book shoppers should be able to find used copies that are less expensive and more readily available.

A good alternative is Editor Michael O’Neil’s Blackwell's Romantic Poetry, 1st edition.

Alternatively, the Norton Anthology of English Literature: Romanticism is a solid choice, and you can find plenty of older/used editions online for good prices.

My recommended edition of Frankenstein is the Bedford/St. Martin's edition edited by Johanna Smith. It’s pretty inexpensive, availability looks good, and you can get it on Kindle (if that’s your thing) for a whopping $1.99!

Romanticism rules! Come check it out, and if you have questions, let me know: dillont@pdx.edu.

ENG 344U 001 VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Instructor: Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This spring, we'll pry into Victorian secrets. Who's confined to the attic, cackling at midnight? Who creeps into the back alley? Who hides in the country, making calls under a false name? What insights about gender and sexuality, empire and nationality, class and religion, might these secret lives reveal? And what new forms in fiction, poetry, and drama helped the Victorians police the ever-porous boundary between public and private, domestic and foreign, human and monstrous?

ENG 345U 001 MODERN BRITISH LIT

Instructor: Josh Epstein
Instructional Method: Hybrid

This course will focus especially on what might loosely be called "dark comedy" in twentieth-century British and Irish fiction, drama, and film. For a variety of reasons—post-war malaise, economic depression, imperial instability, lousy weather—modern British and Irish writing is saturated with humorous misery: sometimes in ways that emphasize the local, domestic struggles of poverty, family, work, and sexuality; sometimes emphasizing social problems of economic austerity and colonial displacement; sometimes thinking about "tragicomedy" on a metaphysical level. Whether we find these texts "ha ha funny" or just ironically jaundiced, will think about the narrative and formal strategies that writers employ to find a new, often experimental language for these tensions. Texts will likely include the following (one or two may not make the cut):

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Henry Green, Party Going
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Mike Leigh (dir.), Naked

ENG 353U 001 AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT III

Instructor: Elizabeth C. Brown
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This class will introduce you to contemporary African American literature by focusing on Black feminist cultural production from the 1970s to the present. Black feminism has had a wide-reaching influence on contemporary Black studies scholarship and social movements. In our class, we will focus specifically on Black feminist methodological and literary legacies. We will begin by reading Black feminist literature from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. How did Black feminists use literature to advance theories of race, gender, sexuality, and social change? How did they envision liberation across scales of the personal and political, past and present, local and global? How has Black feminist literature been a site of what the historian Robin D.G. Kelley calls “freedom dreams”? In the last few weeks of the quarter, we will consider Black feminist legacies in the 21st century, especially in relation to queer and trans studies, Afrofuturism, environmentalism, and abolition feminism. Authors we will likely discuss include Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, N.K. Jemisin, and others.

ENG 367U 001 TOP: AMERICAN GOTHIC LIT

Instructor: Hildy Miller
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

Gothic literature is 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 what haunts American culture. In this course we will read as widely as we can through two centuries of Gothic novels, short stories, and poetry and we’ll watch several films along the way in an effort to define for ourselves the components of the American Gothic tradition. We’ll consider the conventions, theories, and techniques of this genre and the fears and anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, urban and rural spaces, the unconscious and dreams, and death itself.

ENG 381 001 TOPICS IN TRANSLATION STUDIES

Instructor: Cassio de Oliveira
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 383U 001 TOP: EXPLORATION AND MEDIA

Instructor: Marcel Brousseau
Instructional Method: Hybrid

ENG 387U 001 WOMEN'S LITERATURE

Instructor: Susan Reese
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 413 001 TEACHING & TUTORING WR

Instructor: Dan DeWeese
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 428 001 CANONS AND CANONICITY

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course examines the historical, institutional, and ideological contexts in which traditions of “great works” have been established, contested, and creatively appropriated. It focuses on questions of literary value and its relation to national identity, cultural encounter, and power. It also investigates how categories of social difference such as gender, race, and class have shaped the criteria by which works and authors have been included and excluded from dominant traditions. We will explore these issues by taking Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as a case study of “classic” American literature, tracing its critical and cultural history. We will read it alongside Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a work with similar themes published a decade after Hawthorne’s novel, which has become a critical text in multiple “revisionist” canons. We will consider the afterlives of these texts, and the effects of canonicity on artistic creation and cultural reception, in contemporary adaptations and recent cultural works. Pre-requisite: ENG 300; Co-Requisite: WR 301. This course fills the Culture, Difference, and Representation requirement for the BA/BS in English.

REQUIRED TEXTS (available at PSU Bookstore)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Dover edition)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover edition)

ENG 441 001 ADV TOP: FIRST FOLIO IN 5 ACTS

Instructor: Jonathan Walker
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

When Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, only 18 of his 38 plays had been published in small quarto (and one octavo) editions. Also in 1616, Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson published a volume in folio titled Workes, which contains 9 plays, 2 works of poetry, 13 masques, and 6 “entertainments.” Several of Jonson’s contemporaries scoffed at the classicized title Workes, which they viewed as an attempt to elevate vernacular English plays to the status of serious literature. Because the folio format tended to be reserved for prestigious and perdurable books on history or religion, Jonson’s Workes in folio aspired to transcend the ephemerality that characterized not just theatrical performance but also the cheap imprints of plays in quarto and octavo. Yet it was Jonson’s audacity to collect and publish his works in folio that made possible the 1623 printing of MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES, now known as the First Folio. Even then, however, the success of the First Folio was not guaranteed.

In the 400th anniversary year of the First Folio’s publication, we will consider a wide variety of questions raised by 4 plays, by the First Folio as a material book, and by larger social issues with which the plays and the book engage. Our first play, Twelfth Night, is a conventional comedy, featuring disguises, cross-dressing, trickery, mistaken identity, and a love triangle. Measure For Measure is also a comedy, but modern scholars usually call it a “problem play” because it strains comedic conventions to the breaking point. While categorized under the comedies in the First Folio, The Winter’s Tale is now typically classified as a “romance” because it tends to obscure the line between comedy and tragedy. Unlike our other 3 plays, the tragedy of King Lear had appeared in an earlier quarto edition in 1608, but the differences between the quarto and folio texts reveal important questions about book history and the transmission of dramatic texts in the English Renaissance.

This undergraduate seminar is reading-intensive and above all discussion-based. This means that you should be prepared to commit considerable time to reading and preparing for class and to participate actively in the discussions that will occupy most of our class time. During our conversations, I encourage you to voice your questions as well as your observations and ideas about the material: such contributions will be essential to the insights and knowledge we will gain about the First Folio and the questions that the book both poses and answers 400 years on.

ENG 447 001 MAJOR FORCES: LIT & PHILOSOPHY

Instructor: John Vignaux Smyth
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

This class begins with the rivalry between poetry and philosophy in classical Greece, specifically with the dialogue between philosopher Plato and comedian Aristophanes as we may deduce it from the former’s Symposium and Republic, and the latter’s Clouds, Frogs, and Assembly of Women.

At the same time, via Jacques Derrida’s, Leo Strauss’, and Martha Nussbaum’s commentaries on Plato and Aristophanes, we will explore the problem as it has been interpreted by philosophers in the twentieth century.

In the second half of term, we turn to René Girard’s theoretical reading of Shakespeare in A Theater of Envy, particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Troilus and Cressida.

Finally, we read several of Franz Kafka’s stories, including "Investigations of a Dog" and "Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse-Folk," which treat the relation between knowledge and art in modernity.

Main requirements: Two essays and two weekly Canvas posts. The class is conducted entirely in writing without Zoom meetings or lectures.

ENG 460 001 ADV TOP: AMER ENLIGHTENMENT

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course considers “Enlightenment” as a contested political, philosophical, and ideological concept and “the Enlightenment” as a period of American cultural history covering roughly the last half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on the texts of the Revolutionary and Early National periods, we will examine representations of America and the rhetorical making of revolution, nation and “We the People.” The guiding issues of the course will be some of the guiding issues of 18th century American culture: the relationship between private and public virtue; republican versus liberal concepts of selfhood; the conflict between ideals of freedom and the institution of slavery; the gender, race, and class coding of reason, sentiment, and morality. This course fills the historical literacy requirement for the B.A./B.S. in English.

REQUIRED TEXTS (available at PSU Bookstore)

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Dover)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano (Dover)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Dover)
Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (Dover)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Penguin Classics)

Spring 2024: Graduate English Courses

ENG 507 001 SEM: LYRIC AND ANTI-LYRIC

Instructor: Joel Bettridge
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 518 001 COLLEGE COMP TEACHING

Instructor: Susan Kirtley
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 531 001 TOP: COLLOQUIUM

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

ENG 535 001 ADV TOP: SCREENING CAPITAL

Instructor: Matthew Ellis
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

We are living through an era of profound change in the global economy. The post-industrial turn has given rise to a number of economic crises both large and small, digital technologies are transforming the ways we work and represent the material world, and growing geopolitical conflict influences not only the media we consume but also the supply chains that enable our expected standard of living. These issues and more have led many scholars to argue that capitalism is facing, if not merely an important period of transition, then a serious historical crisis.

This course asks how popular culture—from cinema to television, photography, and digital media—has dealt with these myriad changes, from attempts to represent changes in the global capitalist economy on screens to their very impact on creative industries and the future of work in capitalist economies. In the process, we will unite approaches of contemporary film theory with World Systems Theory and Marxian economics, with screenings ranging from Hollywood blockbusters to art films and social media.

Likely readings to include: Marx, Fredric Jameson, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Anna Tsing, Anna Kornbluh

ENG 560 001 ADV TOP: AMER ENLIGHTENMENT

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

REQUIRED TEXTS (available at PSU Bookstore)

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Dover)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano (Dover)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Dover)
Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (Dover)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Penguin Classics)

Spring 2024: Undergraduate Writing Courses

WR 121Z 001 COMPOSITION I

Instructor: Madison Willis
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 121Z 002 COMPOSITION I

Instructor: Rachel Blair
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Engages students in the study and practice of critical thinking, reading, and writing. The course focuses on analyzing and composing across varied rhetorical situations and in multiple genres. Students will apply key rhetorical concepts flexibly and collaboratively throughout their writing and inquiry process.

WR 121Z 003 COMPOSITION I

Instructor: Marielle LeFave
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 121Z 004 COMPOSITION I

Instructor: Derrick Galloway
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Preparation for college writing and beyond.

WR 210 001 GRAMMAR REFRESHER

Instructor: Caroline Hayes
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 212 001 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Chukwudaru Michael
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 212 002 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: JT Maruyama
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

In this class we will explore the practice of writing fiction as an experience that not only includes putting words to page and telling stories, but also listening, observing, giving attention, feeling, moving, walking, and sensing. The course will work as a creative laboratory, giving the students the opportunity to experiment and investigate within the realm of fiction. Our work will be guided by writing exercises, readings by diverse contemporary authors, and discussions of core craft elements such as point of view, character, plot, and setting. There will also be discussion of student work. Throughout, we will explore what it means to articulate via language, to be challenged by language, to recreate intimacy with language, and to see differently because of and via language.

WR 212 003 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Alex De La Cruz
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 213 001 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Lora Kincaid
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 213 002 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Consuelo Wise
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 214 001 INTRO NONFICTION WRITING

Instructor: Kate Chilelli
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 222 001 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: Kelly Connor
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This class emphasizes the following aspects of writing research papers: tracking the topics and ideas that spark a writer’s interest; locating, reading, and synthesizing an array of sources that deepen the writer’s understanding of their topic and that provoke the writer to enter the conversation; and composing in genres that are appropriate to the writer’s purpose and for their intended audience(s). This process is meant to help writers develop a toolkit for thinking, researching, composing and audience analysis that will transfer to many different contexts and situations. Over the course of the quarter, Writing 222 students have the opportunity to deeply explore a topic of their choice and write in several genres on that topic. Along the way, writers in this class will regularly reflect on their experiences and how what they have learned could be applied to different contexts.

One of the major obstacles to performing deep research and writing is distraction, and a companion objective of this course is the development of the attention and stamina necessary to learn, think, and create.

In this class, students will become familiar with…

Elements of rhetoric,
Elements of argumentation,
The anatomy of an academic article, and
Discipline-specific writing conventions.

Students will have opportunities to practice…

Using library resources and scholarly databases,
Reviewing the writing of fellow students with an appropriate feedback style,
Creating a revision plan based on feedback received,
Citing sources,
Engaging in a conversation within a particular discourse community,
Thinking about how to transfer literacy and learning skills to other academic and professional contexts, and
Metacognitive strategies for doing deep work.

WR 222 002 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: Hannah Ahern
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 227Z 001 TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: Jacob Tootalian
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 227Z 002 TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: Francisco Cabre Vásquez
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 227Z 003 TECHNICAL WRITING

Instructor: Emma Luthy
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 300 001 TOP: PROFESSIONAL WRITING

Instructor: Keri Behre
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

Have you ever wished you had a portfolio of tailored professional documents, so that when the perfect opportunity came along, you felt ready? This course focuses on professional writing and communication through a genre theory approach. Together, we will identify and undertake a study of examples of the types of writing required for various professional and scholarly aspirations, which may include (but will not be limited to) resumés/CVs, LinkedIn profiles, emails/letters, reviews, professional websites, grants, and personal statements. This is a process-oriented course that will utilize peer-review writing workshops and extensive revision. Each student will build a portfolio of polished work targeted to their individual goals. Required coursework will include multiple drafts of three writing projects, peer-review workshops, weekly low-stakes writing assignments, class discussions, and a final self-reflective essay. This course is a good fit for anyone seeking to transfer academic writing skills to the various sectors of the professional world; English/writing majors and nonmajors alike are welcome.

WR 301 001 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

Instructor: Keri Behre
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This class will ask you to reflect upon what it means to engage in the study of and writing about texts and, in the process, introduce you to the history of, conventions within, and controversies surrounding English as an academic field. We will use the lens of fairy tales, both classical and contemporary and from a variety of cultures, to develop skills in analyzing poetry, prose, and drama; familiarize ourselves with genre; establish a working vocabulary of literary terms; consider historical context as part of the reading experience; and interpret texts critically. We will read a variety of fairy tales in the first half of the term, and will follow the thread of one tale type through the remainder of the term: Aarne-Thompson type 709, Snow White. We will encounter several of the major theoretical approaches to reading and writing about literature practiced by contemporary scholars, which will help you to better understand the secondary sources you will utilize in your research and writing. All the while, you will practice writing based in close reading, interpretation, and careful research through three writing projects designed to give you a solid process-based grounding in the creation of academic arguments. We have a busy term together, but one which, I hope, you will leave with renewed confidence about the disciplinary practices that set English scholars apart. I’m so glad you’re here!

WR 301 002 WIC: CRITICAL WRTING ENGLISH

Instructor: Sara Atwood
Instructional Method: Hybrid

This course will sharpen students’ critical, analytical, and interpretive skills through engagement with a variety of literary texts (poetry, short stories, essays, and novels). We will study and practice a range of strategies for thinking and writing about literature and will generate ideas for essays through close reading and discussion. Students will learn to effectively integrate secondary sources into their work; to engage with and respond to critical commentary and debate; to organize and communicate clearly and persuasively; and to develop a practice of drafting, revising, and editing.

WR 312 001 INTERMED FICTION WR

Instructor: Molly Reid
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 312 002 INTERMED FICTION WR

Instructor: Benjamin Kessler
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 313 001 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Consuelo Wise
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 314 001 INTERMEDIATE NONFICTION WRITIN

Instructor: Paul Collins
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Nonfiction is unusual in being ostensibly defined by what it is not: Not Fiction, apparently. But this course focuses on what creative nonfiction writing *is*: an approach that shares profound commonalities with the narrative possibilities of fiction and the aesthetic intensity and richness of poetry, while also making use of field observation and research. Students will draft, workshop, and revise their own creative nonfiction, and our classroom discussion will explore flash nonfiction, Esmé Weijun Wang's personal essays on mental illness, David Foster Wallace's field reporting on corporate radio, and Wayétu Moore's memoir of retracing her family's journey from the Liberian civil war.

Texts:

Brief Encounters -- Judith Kitchen & Dinah Lenney (978-0393350999)
Tell It Slant -- Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola (978-1260454598)
The Dragons, The Giant, The Women -- Wayétu Moore (978-1644450567)
Consider the Lobster -- David Foster Wallace (978-0316013321)
The Collected Schizophrenias -- Esmé Weijun Wang (978-1555978273)

WR 323 001 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Caroline Hayes
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 323 002 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Amy Harper
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 323 003 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Sara Atwood
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

It might be said that all writing is a form of inquiry, to one degree or another, because writing is always a process of discovery. The broad project of fiction and poetry is to inquire into and convey something meaningful about the human condition; the critical essay explores the nuances of structure and language; the research essay seeks to answer a question or demonstrate a claim. We write for many reasons, but curiosity is chief among them—curiosity about ourselves, our families, communities, histories, about the world and its complexity. Even when we think we are writing on a subject we know well or think we have mastered, we often end up learning something new during the writing process—the writing itself takes us in a new or different direction. As novelist and essayist Joan Didion put it, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

In this course we will engage in close reading and critical analysis of a variety of texts, looking closely at structure, form, and language, with an eye to the ways in which writers approach the project of inquiry (there are as many ways as there are writers!). Students will learn to craft meaningful and productive critical questions, to write in various forms and styles, to examine the connection between form and meaning, and to bring together what they have learned in their own writing.

WR 323 004 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Elle Wilder Tack
Instructional Method: Hybrid

A writing course for upper-division students, which offers sophisticated approaches to writing and reading. Students enhance critical thinking abilities by reading and writing challenging material, refine their rhetorical strategies, paying special attention to context, rhetor, audience, and purpose. Students will also practice writing processes from prewriting to drafting to revision with an emphasis on development of personal style, and write and read in a variety of genres, including formal and informal writing, In this course, we will practice critical inquiry in personal, academic, and professional writing. Students will be given reign to choose their own topics within the assignment structures, so our work can encompass personal writing goals. Required coursework will constitute multiple drafts of two writing projects, peer-review workshops, weekly low-stakes writing assignments, participation in class discussions, and a final self-reflective essay.

WR 323 005 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Jarrod Dunham
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 323 006 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Amy Harper
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 323 007 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Perrin Kerns
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 323 008 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Travis Willmore
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 323 009 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Perrin Kerns
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 327 001 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: W. Tracy Dillon
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

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

What about textbooks? Due to the cross-disciplinary nature of students taking this course for their program requirements or electives, no one-size-fits-all textbook will work for us. Course lectures should be sufficient to help you complete assignments. In short, no textbook is required. However, if you want to purchase a textbook, the course materials identify options for each major.
Should be fun!

Any questions? Ask: dillont@pdx.edu.

WR 327 002 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: Lezlie Hall
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 327 003 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING

Instructor: Julie Kares
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 398 001 TOP: WRITING COMICS

Instructor: Brian Bendis
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 407 002 SEM: STEIN AND AFTER

Instructor: John Beer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

A class is a class is a class is a class: in this poetry seminar, we will examine the work and legacy of Gertrude Stein. Stein’s writing divided her contemporaries and remains both controversial and more discussed than read today. Was she the author, as she herself claimed, who did “the most serious thinking about writing in the twentieth century”? Or is the reviewer from the Detroit Free Press more accurate when he writes, “Certainly the attempt to make sense of such nonsense is calculated to put her readers into asylums.” We’ll read several of Stein’s major works to try to get a grip on this elusive stylist and theorist of style, exploring her inimitable reflections on writing, identity, sexuality, gender, and above all the nature of the modern. We’ll also look at the enduring legacy of her writing for experimentalists throughout the last hundred years. Assignments will involve both criticism and creative writing; along the way, we may even address the question, “If this is a poetry seminar, why are we reading so much prose?”

Texts:

Gertrude Stein, Writings, 1903-1932
John Cage, Silence
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
Renee Gladman, Calamities

WR 410 001 TOP: ENTREPRNEURSHP IN PBLSHNG

Instructor: Ali Shaw
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

This course provides an overview of the role of entrepreneurship in the book publishing industry and equips students with skills to start up their own entrepreneurial ventures in publishing, from freelancing to publishing company creation to bookstore management and more. Topics include opportunity analysis, business models, organizational creation, business integrity, financial planning, and risk management.

Course Objectives

Introduce students to the role of entrepreneurship in society and in the book industry
Familiarize students with key concepts and competencies of entrepreneurship
Expose students to the social, political, and economic contexts that impact entrepreneurship and how their businesses will impact those contexts as well
Teach students skills needed to identify business opportunities and manage risk
Convey principles for starting and running a business in the book industry
Emphasize that freelancing is a business and lay groundwork for freelancer success

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

Develop a business plan
Identify gaps/opportunities in the market
Solve problems creatively and innovatively
Strategically address business pain points

WR 410 002 TOP: AUDIOBOOKS

Instructor: Pariah Burke
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 410 003 TOP: PUBLISHING MANAGEMENT

Instructor: Robyn Crummer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

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

WR 410 004 TOP: COMICS EDITING

Instructor: Shelly Bond
Instructional Method: Online - Scheduled Meetings

Comics Editing is an exciting, all-consuming, and messy business! Find out what it takes to be at the center of this fast-growing field where the editor must master the art of collaboration, above and beyond the necessary deadline crunching, art directing and grammar pedantry. This course will demystify the role of the comic book editor by immersing students in every stage of the comics creation process. The end result? A class anthology comic and a deeper understanding of the inner mechanics of making and editing comic books. Guest speakers and recorded interviews with industry all-stars will punctuate class lectures and weekly exercises.

Shelly Bond is an Award-winning Comic Book Editor with over thirty years of red ink on her hands. She’s worked with industry luminaries including Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, and for publishers including DC Comics/Vertigo, Black Crown/IDW among others. Bond is writer/creator of Filth & Grammar: The Comic Book Editor’s (Secret) Handbook, which serves as the main textbook for this course. She runs Off Register Press, a Comics & Design Lab, with her husband, British artist Philip Bond.

WR 410 005 TOP: COMICS PUBLISHING

Instructor: Ted Adams
Instructional Method: Online - Scheduled Meetings

This course is designed to explain the role of the publisher in the comic book industry and to demystify the business side of comics. By looking at comic publishers over the last 90 years, we’ll learn about the different ways comics have been produced, marketed, and distributed. We’ll examine several publishers in detail to learn what did and didn’t work for them. We’ll discuss how comics are sold and why publishers choose content and format. We’ll look at publishing contracts and how revenue and cost impact profit-and-loss statements and creator royalties. We’ll conclude by thinking about what the future may hold for comic creators and their publishers.

No required textbooks. All readings are online or supplied.

WR 412 001 ADV FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Leni Zumas
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 420 001 WRITING STUDIO

Instructor: Justin Hocking
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

"To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it."

―Ursula K. Le Guin

In this asynchronous online course, students will propose an advanced writing project and then pursue self-directed writing and refinement of their project for the duration of the quarter, with the opportunity to discuss ongoing progress, process, and revision strategies during several individual conferences with the instructor. A short story, novel excerpt, personal essay, memoir excerpt, short cycle of poems, or hybrid work are all acceptable options for the advanced writing project. In addition, students will be invited to participate in informal weekly writing prompts and generative experiments via Canvas.

WR 427 001 TECHNICAL EDITING

Instructor: Victoria Raible
Instructional Method: Online - Scheduled Meetings

WR 431 001 ADV TOP TECH WRITING TECHNLOGY

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel
Instructional Method: Hybrid

WR 433 001 RESEARCH METHODS FOR TECH WRIT

Instructor: Sidouane Patcha Lum
Instructional Method: Hybrid

WR 459 001 MEMOIR WRITING

Instructor: Paul Collins
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Memoir Writing is a workshop focused on the development and revision of new work, as well as exploring authors and issues in memoir. Prior writing workshop experience is helpful, but not required.

Texts:

Autobiography of a Face – Lucy Grealy (978-0544837393)
The Art of Memoir – Mary Karr (978-0062223074)
The Magical Language of Others – E.J. Koh (978-1951142278)
Truth & Beauty – Ann Patchett (978-0060572150)
The Book of Eels – Patrik Svensson (978-0062968821)

WR 463 001 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: Tara Lehmann
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 471 001 TYPOGRAPHY, LAYOUT, PRODUCTION

Instructor: Frances Fragela
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 472 001 COPYEDITING

Instructor: Des Hewson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 474 001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Robyn Crummer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 475 001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Robyn Crummer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 476 001 PUBLISHING FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Instructor: Abby Ranger
Instructional Method: Hybrid

WR 480 001 ADVANCED BOOK DESIGN

Instructor: Elaine Schumacher
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Intermediate to advanced functionality of Adobe InDesign in the context of print and digital book design. Units on advanced application of design principles and production considerations. Builds upon the Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat skills that students developed in WR 462/562 Book Design Software and further applied in WR 471/571 for long-form book projects. Prerequisite: WR 462/562 Book Design Software.

WR 481 001 EBOOK PRODUCTION

Instructor: Pariah Burke
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Spring 2024: Graduate Writing Courses

WR 507 001 SEM: MFA POETRY

Instructor: Consuelo Wise
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 507 002 SEM: MFA NONFICTION

Instructor: Justin Hocking
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

"Creative nonfiction does not simply borrow elements from fiction and poetry but bends and recombines them to make a hybrid that perpetually troubles and transcends generic bounds."

—Margot Singer & Nicole Walker, from the introduction to Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

"So perhaps the genre-defying writer is a queer one, who understands gender and genre derive from the same classifying, categorizing impulse—the impulse not to invent but to consume, commodify, own."

—Kazim Ali, from “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries”

How might hybridization infuse wild energy into familiar literary forms? What happens when we abandon linearity in favor of associative logic and digressive leaps in time and space? How and when might fragmentation, the use of white space, and other poetic techniques enhance the meaning and readerly experience of our prose? What part does genre-crossing play in queering the literary cannon? What possibilities exist for collaging visual art and/or music with memoir and personal essays? And, as writers of creative nonfiction, how might we dive deep into personal and emotionally charged material, while also expanding outward, well beyond the self, to weave in news from the wider world? This seminar course will examine these and other questions, along with generative writing exercises, weekly discussions of works from the reading list, and a strong emphasis on writing as a process rather than a product.

Tentative course reading list:

Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (second edition) edited by Margot Singer & Nicole Walker
In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado
The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
Instrument/Traveler’s Ode by Dao Strom

WR 510 001 TOP: ENTREPRNEURSHP IN PBLSHNG

Instructor: Ali Shaw
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

Course Objectives

Introduce students to the role of entrepreneurship in society and in the book industry
Familiarize students with key concepts and competencies of entrepreneurship
Expose students to the social, political, and economic contexts that impact entrepreneurship and how their businesses will impact those contexts as well
Teach students skills needed to identify business opportunities and manage risk
Convey principles for starting and running a business in the book industry
Emphasize that freelancing is a business and lay groundwork for freelancer success

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

Develop a business plan
Identify gaps/opportunities in the market
Solve problems creatively and innovatively
Strategically address business pain points

WR 510 002 TOP: AUDIOBOOKS

Instructor: Pariah Burke
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 510 003 TOP: PUBLISHING MANAGEMENT

Instructor: Robyn Crummer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 510 004 TOP: COMICS EDITING

Instructor: Shelly Bond
Instructional Method: Online - Scheduled Meetings

WR 510 005 TOP: COMICS PUBLISHING

Instructor: Ted Adams
Instructional Method: Online - Scheduled Meetings

No required textbooks. All readings are online or supplied.

WR 520 001 WRITING STUDIO

Instructor: Justin Hocking
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

"To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it."

―Ursula K. Le Guin

WR 521 001 MFA CORE WORKSHOP FICTION

Instructor: Leni Zumas
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 527 001 TECHNICAL EDITING

Instructor: Victoria Raible
Instructional Method: Online - Scheduled Meetings

WR 531 001 ADV TOP TECH WRITING TECHNLOGY

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel
Instructional Method: Hybrid

WR 533 001 RESEARCH METHODS FOR TECH WRIT

Instructor: Sidouane Patcha Lum
Instructional Method: Hybrid

WR 540 001 TECH WRITING PORTFOLIO

Instructor: Sidouane Patcha Lum
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 550 001 PORTLAND REVIEW

Instructor: Michael Seidlinger
Instructional Method: Online - No Scheduled Meetings

WR 563 001 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: Tara Lehmann
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 571 001 TYPOGRAPHY, LAYOUT, PRODUCTION

Instructor: Frances Fragela
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 572 001 COPYEDITING

Instructor: Des Hewson
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 574 001 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Robyn Crummer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 575 001 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Robyn Crummer
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 576 001 PUBLISHING FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Instructor: Abby Ranger
Instructional Method: Hybrid

WR 580 001 ADVANCED BOOK DESIGN

Instructor: Elaine Schumacher
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting

WR 581 001 EBOOK PRODUCTION

Instructor: Pariah Burke
Instructional Method: In-Person Meeting