Undergraduate English Courses
Graduate English Courses
Undergraduate Writing Courses
Graduate Writing Courses
Undergraduate English Courses
ENG 300-001 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR
Instructor: Thomas Fisher
FULFILLS GROUP A
Focuses on methods of textual interpretation. This course provides students with the analytical and critical tools necessary for the successful study of English at the upper division level. Required for, but not restricted to, English majors. A prerequisite for 400-level English courses, English 300 is also strongly recommended as preparation for all upper-division English classes. Expected preparation: 8 lower-division credits in literature.
ENG 304-001 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA
Instructor: Michael Clark
FULFILLS GROUP A UNDER 2010 CATALOG YEAR, OTHERWISE FUILFILLS GROUP E
Outlines the central elements of cinema criticism, including interpretive theories and approaches. Begins with an outline of critical approaches, including critical history. Moves to contemporary criticism, including feminist, structuralist, sociological, and psychoanalytic analyses. Includes discussion of film as a cultural commodity.
ENG 305U-004 TOP: AFRICA IN WESTERN FILM
Instructor: Sarah Lincoln
FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR POP CULTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
“The cinema is war pursued by other means.” — Sylvère Lotringer
Since the earliest days of cinema, the ""dark continent"" has fascinated filmmakers and audiences, and provided a setting or subject for hundreds of Hollywood films, from big-budget epics to now-forgotten ""B"" movies. Recently, with films like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, The Constant Gardener, The Last King of Scotland and Tears of the Sun, Hollywood has once again turned its attention to Africa. Why Africa, why now?
In this fast-paced 4-week summer course, we will be studying representations of Africa and Africans in Western film and television during the twentieth century, looking at the ways that myths, stereotypes and assumptions about the continent have persisted, been reinforced, and evolved over time. Comparing films made during the British Empire with later works that tackle Africa's place in the ""war on terror,"" we will consider the relationship between film and imperialism, and the changing role of the media in shaping popular ideas about war, wealth, individualism, intervention and ethics.
We will work ONLINE each week between June 20 and July 17. Each week’s work will include viewings of films (available online and on reserve in the library), as well as discussion of the films and supporting perspectives from theoretical, historical and critical works. Course requirements include semiweekly keyword journal essays, active contributions to online discussion and quizzes, and a final exam.
Required films
All of the films will be available online, and are also on reserve at the PSU Library
- Kony 2012
- King Solomon’s Mines, dir. Robert Stevenson (1937)
- Tarzan, the Ape Man, dir. W.S. Van Dyke (1932)
- Zulu, dir. Cy Enfield (1966)
- Out of Africa, dir. Sydney Pollack (1985)
- Gorillas in the Mist, dir. Michael Apted (1988)
- Black Hawk Down, dir. Ridley Scott (2001)
- Blood Diamond, dir. Edward Zwick (2006)
ENG 305U-005 TOP: WAR CULTURE AND FILM
Instructor: William Bohnaker
FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR POP CULTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
Everyone hates war, yet it remains, perpetually, one of the few constants in human behavior. War, despite our fervent hopes and efforts, is quintessentially human. In this course we will examine cinematic and other representations of war, not as battle, but as culture, seeking to understand the causes and consequences of this elemental social practice. The course will place special emphasis on the analytical strategies of cultural studies.
ENG 306U-002 TOP: POST MOD POP CULTURE
Instructor: William Bohnaker
FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR POP CULTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
Hey, whatever happened to High Culture, Western Civilization, Humanism, Reason and Truth, Marx/or Market, patriarchy, identity, the autonomous person, fixed gender, not to mention the unique work of art and the individual artist-creator? Where did Reality go (wrong)? How did Meaning lose its meaning? Is PoMo just a cheap drive-by shooting at Modernism, or is PoMo a genuine, bona fide Paradigm Shift? We'll investigate the postmodern condition for its causes and consequences, transgressing our way through places we don't belong (politics, economics, architecture, art, music), trying to win the frigid heart of theory, and interviewing PoMo's (dysfunctional?) family: post-structuralism, post-industrialism, post-Fordism, post-humanism, post-colonialism, post-ideology, post-nation state, and the family fanatic, The End of History. We'll look directly into the blinding light of PoMo's Big Bang, then examine its radiation burns on the body of popular culture (movies, TV, ads, MTV, WorldWideWeb, pop manuals). After PoMoPop, you will be a better person.
ENG 307U-001 SCIENCE FICTION
Instructor: William Knight
FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR POP CULTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
Study of recent science fiction, both novels and shorter fiction by American, European and other writers.
ENG 313U-001 AMERICAN SHORT STORY
Instructor: Lorraine Mercer
FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR AMERICAN IDENTITIES CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
June 20-July 17. This is a intensive four week fully online course.
“A great deal of the story is believed to be inside of the listener, and the storyteller’s role is to draw the story out of the listener.” Leslie Marmon Silko
Text: The Story and Its Writer, Compact 8th Edition, editor Ann Charters
In her introduction to the text Charters asks: What is a short story? Her answer includes the following: The short story is a concentrated form, dependent for its success on feeling and suggestion. When readers understand the ways an author uses language to create a fictional world, the story’s unity has an even greater impact. Then every detail of the narrative adds to our enjoyment of the final impression. Writers of short stories must forgo the comprehensiveness of the novel, but they often gain a striking compression by using language with the force of poetry. Like poets, short story writers can impress upon us the unity of their vision of life by focusing on a single effect (3).
This course will focus on elements of fiction, narrative strategies, and literary and political movements. The study of the American short story, or more specifically, the Short Story of the United States, in all its aspects will be our project for the next 10 weeks as we examine the development of the short story genre from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sandra Cisneros and beyond.
Requirements will include an exam, weekly writings and posts and a final project.
ENG 332U-001 HST CINEMA & NARRATIVE MEDIA I
Instructor: Sarah Berry
FULFILLS GROUP E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR POP CULTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
Surveys the history of cinema and narrative media from the late nineteenth-century moving image through the Second World War.
ENG 335U-001 1970s BLACK CINEMA: FROM BLAXPLOITATION TO THE AVANT-GARDE
Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri
FULFILLS GROUP B OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR POP CULTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
This class will explore black film in the 1970s--from the blaxploitation film to black avant-garde cinema--in relation to the political-economic upheavals of post-civil rights era: including the rise of black power and black socialist liberation movements, the 1960s urban rebellions, the antiwar movement, the prevalence of liberal and neoconservative discourses regarding the "black underclass," and the rise of the American police state and the prison industrial complex.
Required course texts may include Chester Himes's novel, Blind Man with a Pistol. Other texts, including films and supplementary texts, will be detailed in the course syllabus.
ENG 343U-001 ROMANTICISM
Instructor: Tracy Dillon
FULFILLS GROUP C ( PRE-1800 ) OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR INTERPRETING THE PAST CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
Selected works of Romantic literature; introduction to themes, genres, history, and culture of Romanticism.
ENG 345U-001 MODERN BRITISH LIT
Instructor: Susan Reese
FULFILLS GROUP C OR E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
I am so excited to share some of my favorite works from one of my favorite periods, and in summer, when we can sometimes go outside to read and share poetry! Our texts will be The Dubliners by James Joyce, To the Lighthouseby Virginia Woolf and The Bell by Iris Murdoch, and we will read them in that order, in case you want to get a start on reading before the term begins. I will also be bringing in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden, and we will watch two films so that E.M. Forster and Samuel Beckett may join us, yet we aren’t over-burdened with reading during our four week shared adventure. And an adventure it will be! Please join me and let’s make those four weeks ring!
ENG 367U-001 TOP: TONI MORRISON/J. BALDWIN
Instructor: Maria Depriest
FULFILLS GROUP B , C or E FOR ENGLISH MAJORS OR AMERICAN IDENTITIES OR POP CULUTURE CLUSTER FOR NON-MAJORS
ENG 367U puts us in the presence of two great American writers: Toni Morrison and James Arthur Baldwin. Both of them scorch us with language that examines the consequences of racial and gender violence—to the individual, the community and the body-politic. We will discuss ways in which our writers pick through the ruins of history to re-imagine home, to reclaim roots and mobility, and to re-member and transform their subjects. Finally, we will keep a close eye on the precise and luminous uses of language to summon what is irrepressible and outrageous: laughter, dreams, pleasures, and love.
ENG 480-001 ADV TOP 20TH CEN BRITISH LIT: IMPERIAL ADVENTURES IN THE MODERN NOVEL
Instructor: Joshua Epstein
FULFILLS GROUP C OR E
This class will focus on literary twentieth-century adventure fiction (defining that term very loosely), along with some poetry and some film adaptations. We will focus especially (though not exclusively) on how adventure fiction intersects with the innovations of literary modernism, and with the ideological and imaginative discourses of Empire: contacts with the Other, exotic constructions of race, and dynamics of trade and economics. We'll examine how our texts both challenge and reinforce the politics of imperialism, global war, civil war, Cold War, etc., and will discuss adventure(ish) fiction by modernist writers—who, though often seen as antagonistic to popular culture, often relied on its narrative methods and tropes. Thus as we consider our texts' narrative strategies and cultural work, in a range of venues both ""popular"" and ""highbrow,"" we may find these very categories in need of complication.
Texts are still in flux, but may include some of the following, along with film adaptations:
- H. Rider Haggard, She
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
- John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Graduate English Courses
ENG 580-001 ADV TOP 20TH CEN BRITISH LIT: IMPERIAL ADVENTURES IN THE MODERN NOVEL
Instructor: Joshua Epstein
This class will focus on literary twentieth-century adventure fiction (defining that term very loosely), along with some poetry and some film adaptations. We will focus especially (though not exclusively) on how adventure fiction intersects with the innovations of literary modernism, and with the ideological and imaginative discourses of Empire: contacts with the Other, exotic constructions of race, and dynamics of trade and economics. We'll examine how our texts both challenge and reinforce the politics of imperialism, global war, civil war, Cold War, etc., and will discuss adventure(ish) fiction by modernist writers—who, though often seen as antagonistic to popular culture, often relied on its narrative methods and tropes. Thus as we consider our texts' narrative strategies and cultural work, in a range of venues both ""popular"" and ""highbrow,"" we may find these very categories in need of complication.
Texts are still in flux, but may include some of the following, along with film adaptations:
- H. Rider Haggard, She
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
- John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Undergraduate Writing Courses
WR 121-002 COLLEGE WRITING
Instructor: Susan Reese
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 212-001 INTRO FICTION WRITING
Instructor: Leni Zumas
This course is a fiction laboratory—a place for experiments and discovery. Students will practice core elements of craft, including point of view, description, conflict, and dialogue. We’ll devote close attention to short stories and novel excerpts that will serve as models for students’ own inventions. Recommended prerequisite: Freshman Inquiry.
WR 213-001 INTRO TO POETRY
Instructor: John Beer
Love! Death! Pain! Truth! Beauty! Your poems don’t have to be about any of these things, but they can be. In this intro course, we’ll concentrate on the elements of poetry: form, syntax, metaphor, image. Exercises will develop your abilities and awareness of the poetic tradition. We’ll study your own writing & some outstanding historical and contemporary examples. By the end of the term, you’ll have written some poems, & you might just see the world, language, yourself a little differently.
WR 214-001 INTRO TO NONFICTION
Instructor: Cooper Lee Bombardier
“In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”
Joan Didion
WR 214 is an introduction to writing literary nonfiction; including memoir, personal essay, long-form feature writing, and graphic nonfiction works. We'll explore an overview of this complex, strange, exciting, and multivalent genre with a select swath of authors so that we may delve into the skills that have fostered their art. Students will develop the foundational skills used in major forms of literary nonfiction writing, including research and interview, and walk away with a solid understanding of the craft. We'll also hone critical reading skills, discuss course readings in depth, and learn to give and receive constructive and effective feedback in writing workshops. Beginning with the raw material of exercises in description and dialogue, writing assignments will become fodder for a fully-realized, polished final work of short literary nonfiction as a final paper.
WR 222-001 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS
An elective course. The techniques for compiling and writing research papers. Attention to available reference materials, use of library, taking notes, critical evaluation of evidence, and conventions for documenting academic papers. Practice in organizing and writing a long expository essay based on use of library resources. Recommended: Wr 121 or Freshman Inquiry. May not be used to fulfill English major requirements.
WR 227-004 INTRO TECHNICAL WRITING
Instructor: Garret Romaine
Practical experience in forms of technical communication, emphasizing basic organization and presentation of technical information. Focuses on strategies for analyzing the audience and its information needs. Recommended: Wr 121 or Freshman Inquiry.
WR 323-011 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY
Instructor: Hildy Miller
FULFILLS GROUP D OR E OF ENG MAJOR
In this upper division writing course we will focus on developing a more sophisticated understanding of our own writing processes, reflect on the concept of academic discourse and how to express abstract ideas, and see how writing in your discipline will require certain conventions and that, as you leave the university, the writing tasks that lie ahead will require others. Includes formal writing, responding to a variety of readings, sharing writing with other students, and reflecting on writing. Our class will run as a workshop in which you’ll be collaborating with other students throughout phases of both your and their writing processes.
WR 327-005 TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING
Instructor: Jeffrey Gunderson
FULFILLS GROUP D OR E OF ENG MAJOR
This special topics course introduces students to the field of trade publication writing, including the opportunities and requirements for writing for these types of publications. The course will cover the breadth of prospects, analysis of trade publication styles and formats, strategies for researching ideas and developing pitches, interview techniques, as well as the planning and writing of informative articles.
WR 331-001 BOOK PUBLISHING FOR WRITERS
Instructor: Abbey Gaterud
FULFILLS GROUP D OR E OF ENG MAJOR
Provides an overview of the book publishing process, organized around the division of labor typically found in publishing houses. Through readings, discussion, and participation in mock publishing companies, students learn about editorial, design, production, marketing, distribution, and sales.
WR 474-001 PUBLISHING STUDIO
Instructor: Abbey Gaterud
Perform the work of a real publishing house, from acquiring manuscripts to selling books. Gain publishing experience by participating in the various departments of a student-staffed publishing house, Ooligan Press. Departments include Acquisitions, Editing, Design and Sustainable Production, Marketing, External Promotions, Sales, Digital Content, Social Media, and Project Management and Operations. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 574; may be taken multiple times for credit.
WR 475-001 PUBLISHING LAB
Instructor: Abbey Gaterud
FULFILLS GROUP D OR E OF ENG MAJOR
Perform the work of a real publishing house, from acquiring manuscripts to selling books. Gain publishing experience by participating in the various departments of a student-staffed publishing house, Ooligan Press. Departments include Acquisitions, Editorial, Design, Marketing and Sales, Digital, and Social Media. Also offered for graduate-level credit as Wr 575; may be taken multiple times for credit.
Graduate Writing Courses
WR 574-001 PUBLISHING STUDIO
Instructor: Abbey Gaterud
Perform the work of a real publishing house, from acquiring manuscripts to selling books. Gain publishing experience by participating in the various departments of a student-staffed publishing house, Ooligan Press. Departments include Acquisitions, Editing, Design and Sustainable Production, Marketing, External Promotions, Sales, Digital Content, Social Media, and Project Management and Operations. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 474; may be taken multiple times for credit.
WR 575-001 PUBLISHING LAB
Instructor: Abbey Gaterud
Perform the work of a real publishing house, from acquiring manuscripts to selling books. Gain publishing experience by participating in the various departments of a student-staffed publishing house, Ooligan Press. Departments include Acquisitions, Editorial, Design, Marketing and Sales, Digital, and Social Media. Also offered for undergraduate-level credit as Wr 475; may be taken multiple times for credit.