E140 The Study of Literature | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | Ed Lessor

Basic principles of reading literary texts.

This course fulfills Category 3B: Arts & Humanities for the AUCC requirements.

E142 Reading Without Borders | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors

Authors from a range of international, cross-national, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds focusing on themes of immigration, exile, or education.

E150 English Studies Symposium | 3 credits | 3:00 - 3:50 PM | MWF | Ted Fabiano and Grant Bain

This experimental course is designed to ignite your curiosity and creativity and encourage you to think across our five disciplines within the English major.

Each fall, our instructors develop a new theme to act as a lens through which we will study the connections between literature, language, philosophy, education, and culture. Recent themes have included world-building, creation stories, and monster narratives. In this class, students learn alongside their teachers, asking questions and posing solutions together.

Ultimately, this course inspires imaginative thinking and practical application. By the end of the semester, you’ll not only grasp how inherently interdisciplinary and collaborative the study of English is, but you’ll also gain the theories and tools to meaningfully consider questions about language, text, and practice.

E204 Creative Writing as Transformative Practice | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | MW | Sarah Perry

Emphasizes the transformative possibilities of creative writing by exploring its relationship to the social, environmental, intellectual, aesthetic, and personal. Engage and develop the many ways that creative writing methodologies can change both the self and the world.

E210 Beginning Creative Writing | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors

In this course, you will be introduced to the basic techniques of writing fiction and poetry, including writer workshops. May also include some elements of drama and/or creative nonfiction.

Sections may be offered online.

E222 Banned Books and Censorship | 3 credits | 9:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Ricki Ginsberg

This course explores the diversity of voices found in banned and challenged books, analyzing how school censorship, in particular, reflects and reinforces broader societal patterns of interaction related to race, gender, sexuality, and power. Through critical reflection of frequently banned texts, students will consider patterns of historical and contemporary censorship. Students from all majors and levels are invited to enroll.

E232 Introduction to Humanities | 3 credits | 10:00 - 10:30 AM | MWF | Mitch Macrae

What are the humanities?

The humanities can be described as the study of how people express, process, and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to comprehend and communicate our “being-in-the-world.” These modes of expression have become some of the subjects that traditionally fall under the humanities disciplines for both creation and contemplation. Engaging with these records of human experience give us the opportunity to feel a sense of connection to those who have come before us, while also enhancing our understanding of contemporary forms of expression that are essential to human understanding.

In this course, we will investigate some of the history of the Western expression of human experience with authors who have left a lasting imprint on the Western mind.

This course fulfills Category 3B: Arts & Humanities for the AUCC requirements.

E236 Short Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors

Examines form, technique and interpretation in short fiction.

This course fulfills Category 3B: Arts & Humanities for the AUCC requirements.

E237 Introduction to Science Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors

How do we imagine the future in literary texts? From post-apocalyptic landscapes to the alternative worlds of Indigenous futurism, we will analyze a range of speculative realities offered to us in science fiction. This course explores the history of the science fiction genre and the topics that continually animate it, including utopia/dystopia/heterotopia, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and resource wars. We will examine science and speculative fiction through a range of media (novels, films, short stories, manifestoes, etc.) and think critically about the questions it poses concerning science, community, ecology, colonialism, and the future of the human species.

E238 Contemporary Global Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Sections | Multiple Instructors

Contemporary fiction chosen for its relevance to global and cultural awareness.

Sections may be offered online.

E240 Introduction to Poetry | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | TR | Ryan Campbell

Development of critical skills necessary to understand and enjoy poetry.

E245 World Drama | 3 credits | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Nina McConigley

World drama in cultural contexts.

E270 Introduction to American Literature | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Catherine Ratliff

History and development of American writings from 16th-century travel narratives through early 20th-century modernism.

This course fulfills Category 3B: Arts & Humanities for the AUCC requirements.

E276 British Literature: Medieval Period to 1800 | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | William Marvin

British literature from Beowulf through the 18th century in relation to its historical contexts.

This course fulfills Category 3B: Arts & Humanities for the AUCC requirements.

E301 – Framing Texts with Critical Theories and Teaching Equity, Justice, and Activism | 3 credits | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Rosa Nam

This course explores the ways in which literary critical theories and approaches can be used to frame texts and rethink pedagogy for secondary education. Students will apply lenses for understanding young adult texts and centering equity in education. All majors welcome.

This course satisfies the requirement for AUCC 4A and 4B.

E305 Principles of Writing and Rhetoric | 3 credits | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Doug Cloud

This course examines how writing and rhetoric work. In other words, it asks questions about the relationship of writing and power, the relationship between discourse and reality, alternatives to traditional notions of rhetoric as the "art of persuasion," and how to enhance your writing skills by understanding the history of rhetorical theories and practices.

This is a required core course in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy concentration. It counts as English elective credit for all others.

E310 – Researching and Writing Literary Criticism | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Mark Bresnan

This class is designed to practice skills in conducting research and writing literary criticism—skills that will facilitate your success in upper-division literature courses. We will also study strategies for translating these skills to research and writing occasions beyond the literature classroom. We’ll read and discuss an array of literary texts from ancient to modern.

Required for Literature concentrators.

E311A Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Meetings Times | Multiple Instructors

Group discussion of student writing, literary models, and theory; emphasis on developing individual style.

Must register for lecture and recitation. Sections may be offered online.

E311B Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry | 3 credits | 3:00 - 4:15 PM | MW | Camille Dungy

Group discussion of student writing, literary models, and theory; emphasis on developing individual style.

Must register for lecture and recitation.

E311C Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | TR | Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Group discussion of student writing, literary models, and theory; emphasis on developing individual style.

Must register for lecture and recitation. Sections may be offered online.

E320 – Introduction to the Study of Language | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM | MWF | Luciana Marques

This course introduces the basic concepts and theories that linguists/applied linguists adopt in trying to understand how language works and how language is used. Language is studied from a structural perspective, with emphasis on morphology, phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Additional topics of interest include language acquisition, language variation, and language change. This course is recommended for, but not limited to, students interested in language description and its applications, such as TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), language documentation, computational linguistics, foreign language teaching and teaching in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.

E324 – Teaching English as a Second Language | 3 credits | 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM | MWF | Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker

This is a required core course in the Linguistics and Culture Interdisciplinary Minor and strongly advised for students with the Linguistics concentration.

E329 – Pragmatics and Discourse | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | TR | Gerald Delahunty

This course introduces the study of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, with examples from English and other languages that students know or are studying. Pragmatics is the study of general principles that communicators invoke when producing and interpreting language in context. Discourse analysis studies the properties of specific types of language use in specific settings, e.g., conversational, advertising, legal, medical, educational, and multi-medial, as well as such topics as politeness, ideology, gender, genre, identity, and culture, all areas of exciting current research and discovery.

E333 – Critical Studies of Popular Texts | 3 credits | 9:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

This course is inspired by controversial writer John D’Agata, who advocates the broadest definition of the essay, which at its French root, essai, means to attempt, to endeavor, to try. According to D’Agata, writers should be free to use any and all methods at their disposal in pursuit of their intellectual, spiritual, cultural or aesthetic goals, including blurring genre, form, fact and imagination. Drawing from The Next American Essay, edited by D’Agata himself, we will discuss what makes an essay and essay as well as how events, memories and landscapes influence approach and content. In addition to active discussion and critical work, we will write our own creative endeavors to experiment with technique and audience.

E337 Western Mythology | 3 credits | 9:00 - 9:50 AM | MWF | William Marvin

The gods who emerged from the timelessness of pre-creation, the cannibal gods and the cosmic gods who with war shaped the order of existence, and the gods who loved sacrifice, ruled in discord, and had ado with mortals in the guises of human-and-animal-kind: These are the personified inscrutables that “western myth” built a coherent core of narration around, and to this narration attached plots and characters in endless variety. Even the story-telling itself, like creation, began in time immemorial. Its main cycles coalesced in spite of migrations and the wrack of civilizations, long even before the advent of writing and literature. But literature, when it came, changed everything. No longer was hieratic myth, the mythology of priests, to be solely the property of cult. This course is about how poets in the age of writing reshaped the potential of the gods. We will track the gods’ wanderings from their cultic origins in magic and hymn to their fluorescence in Sumerian and Greek creation myth, Indic and Germanic dragon slaying, Greek siege epic around the war for Helen of Troy, up to the point of the Roman de-sacralization of the gods in a modern kind of erudite, humane irony. We shall discover furthermore how myth first prompted literary criticism, when readers asked if what Homer said about the immortal gods was true? So, the course will also cover the history of reading myth from classical antiquity to the present, develop this history into a set of critical perspectives, and apply these as hermeneutic tools to the myths as we read them.

This course fulfills a Category 4 elective requirement for English majors and world literature for English Education concentrators. It also counts toward the Religious Studies minor.

E341 Literary Criticism and Theory | 3 credits | 2:00 - 2:50 PM | MWF | Jenny Albright

This course will introduce you to several major schools of contemporary literary theory and provide an overview of the history of theory as an academic field. The primary goal of the course is to make students critically aware of the way that acts of reading, writing, and making art are connected to a range of political, social, cultural, and nonhuman forces at work in the world around us.

E344 - Shakespeare | 3 credits | 12:00 - 12:50 PM | MWF | Barbara Sebek

This course will focus on six plays by Shakespeare, studying them through a global lens. The very name of one of the playhouses in which our plays were staged—The Globe—attests to a lively, topical, and novel form of awareness of the wider world. How does this awareness register in the plays, and how do Shakespeare's plays continue to inform global consciousness today? We will read plays in their historical contexts and consider recent screen productions as creative appropriations that speak to our own moment. Final papers or projects will allow students to tailor their work to their specific concentrations within or beyond the English major.

E375 – Mindfulness Practices and Literacy Tools For Healing a Changing World | 3 credits | 1:00 - 1:50 PM | MWF | Cindy O'Donnell-Allen

This course will immerse students in a centuries-old conversation on mindfulness that is still more relevant than ever, considering the existential challenges we face in today’s world. After critiquing contemporary renditions of mindfulness, students will explore diverse texts that center “engaged mindfulness,” which is rooted in compassion for self and others; geared toward justice, community, and intentional social action; and supported by neuroscientific research. Students will actually apply the principles and literacy practices of engaged mindfulness through hands-on, choice-based projects that are geared toward their interests and programmatic tastes. All majors welcome.

E384 Supervised College Teaching: Classroom | 1 to 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors

Supervised assistance in instruction.

Written consent of department chair. A maximum of 10 combined credits for all 384 and 484 courses are counted towards graduation requirements.

E401 Teaching Reading | 3 credits | 3:30 - 4:45 PM | TR | Rosa Nam

Teaching Reading is designed to introduce students to current theory, research, and instructional strategies founded on a critical literacy approach that amplifies a human-first approach for growing readers in secondary grades, within and beyond the classroom.

E403 – Writing the Environment | 3 credits | 3:30 - 4:45 PM | TR | Matthew Cooperman

In this course we will explore our various ideas about the Environment, and try to write as accurately and fully about it as possible. But what is the Environment? Is it the same thing as Nature? Is it near or far?  How to make contact?  What things and creatures do we encounter there? And what—or who—do we remember?   What is an ecosystem and how does it function? And what is a shared environment? And where do you live? Right now, no doubt on a street in a town in the west of a teetering country. Can you write about that? Is that "writing the environment?" These questions will drive our inquire into the local and global environments in which we live. We will consider what the human animal is, and how it interacts with the more-than-human world. Through all this we will learn to write about the environment with understanding, nuance, and compassion, and try and connect our experiences with the larger world.

E405 Young Adult Literature | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | TR | Ricki Ginsberg

E405 is designed to give future teachers, writers, and literature students a survey of mostly contemporary novels for young adults. During this course we'll read and discuss approximately a book a week, with a focus on applying a critical literacy lens to explore texts that engage adolescents. All majors welcome.

E407 – Genre Bending | 3 credits | 10:00 - 10:50 AM | MWF | Barbara Sebek

In this course, we will examine how genre shapes our understanding of literature. We’ll learn that genre functions as a means to categorize texts, trace literary genealogies, and establish audience expectations and explore how genres are subject to hybridization, manipulation, and contingency. With a focus on genre as both a fixed system and open‑ended process, we’ll increase our understanding of how writers and readers create, evaluate, and enjoy literary texts and other media.

E412A Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | TR | Andrew Altschul

A workshop that delves into the techniques of fiction, paying particular attention to the ways in which “rules” and “conventions” are followed, re-interpreted, or subverted by different writers. We will examine a range of published fiction and write a number of shorter pieces before turning to longer student stories in the last third of the semester. For students who have previously passed E311A with a grade of B or higher.

Must register for lecture and recitation. Maximum of 6 credits allowed in course.

E412B Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry | 3 credits | Online - Asynchronous | Cass Eddington

E414 – Grant and Proposal Writing | 3 credits | 9:30 - 10:45 AM | MWF | Erika Szymanski

Course description coming soon.

E456 – Topics in Critical Theory: Literature and Philosophy of the Non-Human | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | Lynn Badia

Experiments in narrative form have created new ways of seeing and thinking from non-human perspectives. This course examines the theoretical and narrative project of understanding non-human agencies, and, as Donna Haraway has described, “multispecies becoming-with.” In the process of taking on the perspective of the animal, plant, and mineral, the texts examined in this course necessarily reconsider what it means to be human. We will be reading post-humanist theory alongside a range of literary authors such as John Joseph Mathews, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Franz Kafka, and J. M. Coetzee.

E458 – Topics in Language, Law, and Justice | 3 credits | 9:00 - 9:50 AM | MWF | Jesse McLain

Societies are governed by laws and, ideally, justice is determined according to law. Laws are crafted in language, and, ideally, people should be able to read the laws they are subject to. However, the language of English law is very different from other uses of English. Few of us are skilled in reading legal texts because of the strangeness of their language. And we are only superficially knowledgeable about the laws that are most immediately relevant to us, e.g., those governing reasonable search and seizure, Miranda rights, and freedom of speech. We will investigate these and many other issues by studying the language in which laws are written, how laws govern language use and interpretation, and how legal actors have interpreted and manipulated those laws.

We will examine an instance where law and justice have not aligned for linguistic reasons and examine the ideologies of language that affected the jury's decision in that case, as well as media reactions to the speech of the most important prosecution witness. We will also examine cases in which expert testimony by linguists has prevented injustice and cases where such testimony has led to the release of people unjustly convicted. Linguists' study of language in legal settings has a substantial research history which is growing in influence in legal settings. This course will explore the intersections of these two important disciplines and pay particular attention to how laws about language, and the beliefs they are based on, affect access to justice by all, but especially by linguistically diverse populations.

This course can count as an upper division Supporting Course for the Linguistics and Culture Interdisciplinary Minor and the Legal Studies Interdisciplinary Minor.

E465 – Experimental Correspondences: Photography, Painting, and Writing from U.S. Modernism to the Native American Renaissance (Capstone) | 3 credits | 1:00 - 1:50 PM | MWF | Bryce O'Tierney

We will encounter U.S. Modernism through photography, painting, poetry and prose, along a historical continuum to present day photo-poetics, with a particular emphasis on women creators and the West. Within Modernism we will examine the particular craft and cultural stances of the Arts & Crafts Movement, Abstraction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Native American Renaissance, through close inquiry and analysis of the work of: Anne Brigman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jean Toomer, Joy Harjo, and Leslie Marmon Silko. We will examine how these artists wrote about, and alongside- or otherwise documented- their primary artistic mediums, and consider the impacts of correspondences both personal and contextual to stimulate and complicate craft, form, and content.

E478 – Modern Poetry | 3 credits | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Matthew Cooperman

What is Modern Poetry—and what do we even mean by “Modern”? When does it begin, what defines it, and how does it collide with both Modernism and the Contemporary? These questions resist fixed answers, which is exactly what makes this period so exciting to study.

In this course, we’ll explore the major transformations in poetry from the mid‑19th century through the end of World War II—when writers like Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud were reshaping form, voice, and vision. This era sees the shift from meter to free verse and a radical reconsideration of art, culture, and history.

Together, we’ll read poems closely, develop strategies for navigating Modern Poetry’s famous complexity, and place these works in their social and political contexts. Our goal is to discover both the challenges and the deep pleasures the Modern offers—because if Modern Poetry still feels alive today, it’s because it continues to speak to the joys and struggles of being human.

E487B.001 Internship: Literary Editing – Greyrock Review | 1 credit | 7:30 - 8:20 PM | M | Stephanie G'Schwind

Students receive credit (one free elective credit per semester for up to four semesters) for an internship with Greyrock Review, CSU's annual, student-run, undergraduate literary magazine.

During this year-long internship, students learn the intricacies of publishing, printing, and promoting a literary journal. As staff interns, students must attend weekly sessions to discuss promoting the call for submissions, reading submissions, copyediting, layout, proofreading, design, and publicity.

Students must be junior or senior English majors or minors with a minimum GPA of 3.0 and should have taken E210 with a grade of B or better. Students must register for both Fall 2026 and Spring 2027—this is a one-year commitment. Interested students should contact Stephanie G’Schwind at Stephanie.GSchwind@ColoState.EDU by March 31.

E487C Internship: Community Literacy Center | 1-3 credits | Tobi Jacobi

The Community Literacy Center looks for juniors, seniors and grad students for full year placements as CLC interns (September to May).

Interested candidates should read the CLC website for insight into our program and for more information about the internship application.