Courses
Experience and Engage
CSU English Department Courses
English department courses are opportunities for you to explore the ways in which we employ the language to meet demands of the twenty-first century. A vibrant and diverse group of teacher educators, linguists, literary scholars, novelists, composition specialists, and writers of creative nonfiction comprises your faculty.
Scroll down for descriptions of summer and fall course offerings, and access important links to help you begin mapping out your English education today.
Course Registration, Availability, and the University Course Catalog
The course descriptions on this web page aim to provide a sense of our disciplinary scope. To search for course availability or register for courses, students with access can login to RAMweb. Incoming or prospective students can visit CSU's online course catalog to browse a general listing of English department courses. New students can apply to CSU or reach out for more information. New undergraduates can schedule a visit.
Courses for Summer 2021
The accordion lists below highlight the English department's course offerings for the coming semester. Click on course titles to expand their respective descriptions, and to help plan your immersion in the interdisciplinary study of language arts.
The accordion lists below highlight the English department's course offerings for the coming semester. Click on course titles to expand their respective descriptions, and to help plan your immersion in the interdisciplinary study of language arts.
Scroll to the accordion list for full descriptions of each of the courses featured in this slideshow.
Undergraduate Courses, Summer 2021
CO150 - College Composition | 3 credits | Multiple dates and instructors
CO150 focuses on initiating students into academic discourse and developing composing practices that will prepare them for success as university students and as citizens. Therefore, the course focuses on critical reading and inquiry, writing for a variety of rhetorical situations, and enabling effective writing processes. The course or its equivalent is required by the All-University Core Curriculum to satisfy Category 1a., Basic Competency in Written Communication.
This course is also a gtPathways course. The Colorado Commission on Higher Education has approved CO150 for inclusion in the Guaranteed Transfer (GT) Pathways program in the [GT-2] category. For transferring students, successful completion with a minimum C‒ grade guarantees transfer and application of credit in this GT Pathways category. For more information on the GT Pathways program, go to http://highered.colorado.gov/academics/transfers/gtpathways/curriculum.html
CO130 - Academic Writing | 3 credits | June 14 - Aug 8 | Instructor Leslie Davis
In CO130 you will learn writing for academic contexts. As preparation for your other writing-intensive classes, CO130 will develop your research & writing skills in a small class setting.
For some students, CO130 is a required prerequisite for CO150. Other students may elect to take CO130 to further develop their writing skills before completing the required AUCC writing classes — CO150 College Composition and the 300-level advanced writing requirement.
Depending on your ACT/SAT scores, you may test out of CO130. Consult the Composition Placement for more information.
E210 - Beginning Creative Writing | May 17 - July 11 | Instructor Felicia Zamora
Introduction to Creative Writing acquaints students with basic principles, techniques, and tools for writing literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. In this writing-intensive course, students will read and write within a community designed to generate, share and discuss the work being created throughout the semester. Students are expected to work on their prose and/or poetry every day, outside of class. Semester activities include writing assignments, writing exercises, large group, and small group discussions, a presentation, a literary reading response, and a fiction and poetry portfolio. The focus of the course is writing, so the emphasis is to practice throughout the three genres, and to read historical and contemporary examples of these genres.
By the end of the course, students participating in E 210 will be able to:
- Identify techniques, tools, and individual elements of writing in the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.
- Analyze readings from three genres from wide and varied examples of published works.
- Produce original works of writing in all three genres.
- Demonstrate knowledge of editing and the revision process by rethinking, editing and revising their own writing throughout the semester.
- Understand the writing workshop format through direct class experience.
- Effectively articulate comments toward other students’ writing by integrating learned creative writing elements into responses.
- Create two portfolios of original work, with revisions, in two of the three genres.
This course can be applied toward the minor in creative writing.
E232 - Introduction to Humanities | 3 credits | June 14 - August 8 | Instructor Tom Conway
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. The philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, explains that, “the very notion of something called ‘Western culture’ is a modern invention.” Thus, by no means will we discount the importance of non-Western traditions and we will often recognize the contradictions of arbitrary, socially constructed boundaries, seeing how the west/non-west distinction breaks down under scrutiny. We will question the western distinction at times and make important connections to the thought from other parts of the world. However, this class will focus primarily on the so-called “Western tradition,” as an examination of ideas that have influenced the “Western” mindset.
E238 - Contemporary Global Literature 3 credits, June 14 - August 8, Instructor Jeremy Proctor
Contemporary Global Lit is an exciting exploration of books from the last century to today. Students will study the convergence between literature and important events of the twentieth century such as the Russian communist revolution, the struggle for women’s rights, the aftermath of the Reconstruction era, the colonization of Africa, the search for morality in turbulent postmodern times, and the reaction of fundamentalists in the Middle-East. Beyond the fascinating content of the texts, students will learn new theoretical approaches to studying literature which opens new doors to the way fiction can be read and understood.
This online course includes an original approach to studying fiction. Educational and entertaining video lectures will serve as a guide to the student-led discussions, while treasure hunts motivate students to search for themes and other literary conventions. This course is perfect for those looking for flexibility in their schedule!
CO300 - Writing arguments, 3 credits, Multiple dates and instructors
Reading, analyzing, researching, and writing arguments
CO301B - Writing in the Disciplines: Science, 3 credits, May 17 - August 8
In contrast with scientific writing directed at expert readers, writing about science informs non-experts about how science concepts and discoveries are relevant in our daily lives. Thus, writing about science relies more on analogy than on jargon, more on metaphor than on data tables, and more on writer- based narrative than data-based analysis. Ultimately, writing about science is an educational tool that provides non-technical but interested readers the opportunity to enhance their understanding of the world around them. Some of the best known and widely used examples of writing about science include Scientific American; WebMD; articles about science in TIME, Newsweek, and daily newspapers; and even the brochures we pick up in medical and veterinary offices.
Who are these non-technical but interested readers? Just about anyone. Except when experts write to experts in their own field, writers have to take into account that readers won’t know as much about the science as the writers do. Readers who are less knowledgeable about the science content are more likely to be called non-expert or non-technical readers. Here are some examples of texts to show the range of non-technical readers and how they use science writing texts:
- Webtexts on scientific method with activities that children can do with their parents at home.
- A website that teaches children about the importance of hygiene and vaccinations.
- Materials explaining the physiological and neurological effects of tobacco use to adolescents.
- Newspaper articles explaining the environmental impact and/or benefits of dams on a particular river system.
- Brochures detailing medical treatment options for cancer patients.
- Newsletter articles for fund-raising describing research being done at a local scientific organization.
These are just a few examples of potential texts and readers. Again, anybody can be interested in science and CO301B students study and practice how to write in the sciences effectively.
E311A - Intermediate Fiction Workshop, 3 credits, May 17 - July 11, Instructor Dana Masden
E311A is an eight week online intermediate online fiction workshop. This course deepens the beginner’s fiction writing knowledge learned in E210 through the study of craft and contemporary short stories. Students will learn specifically about sensory imagery, dialogue, characterization, plot, point of view, and setting, as well as writing techniques and process. Students will participate in online whole group and small group workshops of their own short fiction and will produce a final fiction portfolio including an original revised short story and a work of flash fiction. The course is designed to enhance craft knowledge in the techniques of writing fiction, expand the student’s experience in a writing community, encourage a fruitful writing practice, and prepare the student for further advanced workshops.
E311B - Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry, 3 credits, May 17 - July 11, Instructor Sarah Pipelow
Group discussion of student writing, literary models, and theory; emphasis on developing individual style.
E311C - Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction, 3 credits, May 17 - July 11, Instructor Dana Chellman
Group discussion of student writing, literary models, and theory; emphasis on developing individual style.
E320 - Introduction to the Study of Language, 3 credits, June 14 - August 8, Instructor Luciana Marques
E320 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 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.
Upon the completion of this course, students will be able to:
- describe and account for the differences and relationships among various sub-fields of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics;
- demonstrate control of basic analytical tools and linguistic techniques in the examination of linguistic data to identify and interpret linguistic patterns and state generalizations;
- formulate hypotheses on the basis of observations appropriate for linguistics;
- account for the diversity of language experience and language use; and
- describe the usefulness and relevance of linguistic knowledge to real-world experiences.
E332 - Modern Women Writers, 3 credits, May 17 - June 13, Instructor Aparna Gollapudi
This course brings together twentieth- and twenty-first- century women writers from all over the world working in various literary forms. Poets from Russia and Iran, novelists from India and Zimbabwe, Asian American playwrights, a graphic novelist: these are some of the figures you might meet in this course. We will consider their works from a range of historical and theoretical perspectives. Due to the pandemic, the course will be taught online using strategies such as recorded lectures, online discussion posts, formal essay assignments, optional video conferencing office hours.
E370 - American Literature in Cultural Contexts: American Fairy Tales, 3 credits, June 14 - July 11, Instructor Zach Hutchins
The fairy tale is a genre particular to Europe, populated with talking animals, witches, wizards, gnomes, dwarves, elves, goblins, fairies (of course), and other creatures of the Old World. American authors found themselves fascinated by these moralistic stories of magic and foreign realms and felt compelled to re-imagine them within the context of a melting pot United States. The innovative fairy tales they composed feature these traditional magical creatures but also draw mythic figures from Native American and African folklore into stories that communicate truths about the tragedies and triumphs of the American experiment. In this class, students, will journey to Oz, the Village of Cream Puffs, and many other fantastical settings only to gain a clearer and more nuanced view of the nation and reality they’ve just left. Featuring classic works of cinema as well as texts written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. E. B. DuBois, Rebecca Roanhorse, Mourning Dove, and Gloria Naylor, among others, this is a course that will transport and delight while illustrating the deadly seriousness of child’s play.
This course fulfills a Category 2 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.
E412A - Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction, 3 credits, June 14 - August 8, Instructor Maurice Irvin
E412 builds on concepts learned in E311A and E210; however, it is the most workshop-intensive course in this series and most closely resembles a graduate level workshop. This means students’ primary concern will be developing his or her own voice and secondary concern to learn by participating in discussions about others’ work.
AMST 101 - Self/Community in American Culture Since 1877, 3 credits, May 17 - June 13, Instructor Dr. Catherine Ratliff
What does it mean to be American? How do stories reflect and shape American cultural identity in roughly the last one-hundred years? These are some of the questions we’ll explore in AMST 101.
True to the discipline of American Studies, and not a traditional history course, we will employ a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and materials from the fields of history, literature, music, popular culture, visual arts, and more in order to examine the development of American cultural identity since 1877. We are not exploring the chronologies of facts, but the formations and interrelationships of ideas related to Americanness. This course asks you to think critically and engage with U.S. cultural histories from new perspectives. Students will engage with primary and secondary sources dealing with themes of gender, identity, race, religion, and society all to help answer some key questions such as: How do we currently identify and explore past elements of American culture via narrative? How do various narratives and culture(s) inform U.S. identities? What influences the creation of national narratives in the U.S.? In short, this class will be an exploration of Americanness as told through stories, cultures, and histories and it will challenge you to think of U.S. culture and history in new ways.
Graduate Courses, Summer 2021
E526 - Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language, 3 credits, June 14 - August 8, Tony Becker and Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker
This course provides an overview of second language (L2) methods and materials, focusing on the teaching and learning of four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Additional attention will be given to vocabulary and grammar. The goal of the course is to guide participants in developing the knowledge and skills needed to effectively design and implement language instruction for a diverse group of English language learners. This course is also designed to incorporate classroom observation. The course is open to all graduate students who have an interest in research within the English department.
Courses for Fall 2021
The accordion lists below highlight the English department's course offerings for the coming semester. They are organized into two tables by undergraduate and graduate courses. Click on course titles to expand their respective descriptions, and to help plan your immersion in the interdisciplinary study of language arts.
The accordion lists below highlight the English department's course offerings for the coming semester. They are organized into two tables by undergraduate and graduate courses. Click on course titles to expand their respective descriptions, and to help plan your immersion in the interdisciplinary study of language arts.
Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2021
AMST100 Self/Community in American Culture, 1600-1877 | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | James Roller
Critical analysis of the meaning and development of American culture, 1600-1877, through themes of self and community in art, politics, society, and religion.
AMST101 Self/Community in American Culture Since 1877 | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Critical analysis of the meaning and development of American culture since 1877, through themes of self and community in art, politics, society, and religion.
CO130 Academic Writing | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Academic writing, critical thinking, and critical reading through study of a key academic issue.
CO150 College Composition | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Understanding and writing for rhetorical situations; critical reading and response; writing source-based argument for academic and public audiences.
Must have taken CO 130 or Composition Challenge Essay (score of 3, 4, or 5) or SAT Verbal/Critical reading score of minimum 570 or SAT Evidence Based Reading/Writing score of minimum 620 or ACT COMPOSITE score of minimum 26 or Directed Self-Placement Survey code of 15.
Sections may be offered online.
CO300 Writing Arguments | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Reading, analyzing, researching, and writing arguments.
Prerequisite: CO 150 or HONR 193. Sections may be offered online.
CO301A Writing in the Disciplines: Arts and Humanities | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Learning writing strategies for addressing general audiences in arts and humanities.
Prerequisite: CO 150 or HONR 193. Sections may be offered online.
CO301B Writing in the Disciplines: Sciences | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Learning writing strategies for addressing general audiences in sciences.
Prerequisite: CO 150 or HONR 193. Sections may be offered online.
CO301C Writing in the Disciplines: Social Sciences | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Learning writing strategies for addressing general audiences in social sciences.
Prerequisite: CO 150 or HONR 193. Sections may be offered online.
CO301D Writing in the Disciplines: Education | 3 credits | 3:00 - 3:50 PM | MWF | Amanda Memoli
Learning writing strategies for addressing general audiences in education.
Prerequisite: CO 150 or HONR 193. Sections may be offered online.
CO302 Writing in Digital Environments | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Writing strategies, patterns and approaches for online materials.
Prerequisite: CO 150 or HONR 193.
E140 The Study of Literature | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Basic principles of reading literary texts.
E142 Reading Without Borders | 3 credits | 07:00 - 08:15 PM | TR | Edward Lessor
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 | 4:00 - 04:50 PM | MWF | Multiple Instructors
Introduces majors to the study of English across the whole array of the department's concentrations and approaches.
Credit not allowed for both E 150 and E 181A1.
E210 Beginning Creative Writing | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Basic techniques of writing fiction and poetry, including writer workshops. May include some elements of drama and/or creative non-fiction.
Sections may be offered online.
E232 Introduction to Humanities | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Literature of Western cultural tradition from ancient times to present.
E236 Short Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Examines form, technique and interpretation in short fiction.
E238 Contemporary Global Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Contemporary fiction chosen for its relevance to global and cultural awareness.
Sections may be offered online.
E240 Introduction to Poetry | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Development of critical skills necessary to understand and enjoy poetry.
E242 Reading Shakespeare | 3 credits | 8:00 - 09:15 AM | TR | Mitchell Macrae
Reading of Shakespeare texts, using various approaches of interpretation for understanding and relation to our contemporary cultural situation.
Sections may be offered online.
E245 World Drama | 3 credits | 5:00 - 5:50 PM | MWF | Judith Lane
World drama in cultural contexts.
Sections may be offered online.
E270 Introduction to American Literature | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Mark Bresnan
History and development of American writings from 16th-century travel narratives through early 20th-century modernism.
Sections may be offered online.
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.
Sections may be offered online.
E277 British Literature: After 1800 | 3 credits | 2:00 - 2:50 PM | MWF | Philip Tsang
British literature from the Romantics to the present in relation to its historical contexts.
Sections may be offered online.
E305.001 Principles of Writing and Rhetoric | 3 credits | 3:30-4:45 PM | TR | Doug Cloud
This course offers a humanities-based exploration of central principles of writing and other forms of rhetoric. Students will explore critical concepts in ancient and contemporary readings – everything from Plato to Nietzche to Foucault. We’ll ask questions like, what is rhetoric? What is writing? How has our 12 understanding of them changed over time? Do rhetoric and writing create or merely reflect reality? How do writing and rhetoric reinforce and challenge power? And why should we care?
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 | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Barbara Sebek
Discipline-specific conventions of literary criticism and composing essays framed for literary scholars. Preparation for sharing research with public audiences, outside the classroom, in undergraduate research conferences and appropriate publication venues.
E311A Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting 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 | 9:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Camille Dungy
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.
E311C Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | TR | Harrison 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.
E320.001 – Introduction to the Study of Language | 3 credits | 7:00-8:15 PM | TR | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala
This course offers participants with an introduction to the study of language. Language is studied from a structural perspective with attention to morphology, phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Additional topis of contemporary interest may include raciolinguistics and translingual practice. This course is particularly recommended for students who may be interested in pursuing further studies in TESOL, linguistics, and applied linguistics.
This is a required core course in the Linguistics and Culture Interdisciplinary Minor and strongly advised for students with the Language concentration.
E322 – English Language for Teachers I | 3 credits | 2:00 - 02:50 PM | MWF | Cindy O'donnell-Allen
Foundations of language structure, emphasizing grammar, sounds, spelling, word structure, linguistic variation, usage, acquisition, and pedagogy.
E324.001 Teaching English as a Second Language | 3 credits | 11:00 AM-12:15 PM | TR | Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker
This course addresses the general principles of how second language (L2) learners acquire a new language and focuses on methods and approaches (both traditional and current) appropriate for diverse teaching situations. The course will provide the participants with knowledge, strategies, and skills to work with adult learners at various levels of L2 proficiency on the development of receptive and productive L2 abilities.
E332.001 Modern Woman Writers | 3 credits | 12:30-1:45 PM | TR | Sarah Sloane
Are you interested in reading stories, essays, and poems about or by women? Are you curious about how stories are gendered, whether a narrative poem or a family story? How does gender connect with the American dream, notions of the meritocracy, and “how to get ahead”? How does an understanding of what gender is, how it defines your roles in your family and community, how it shapes desire and sexuality, how it shapes notions of what you can do or say, how it connects with emotions like shame, change according to cultural beliefs and norms? We will be reading “rhetorically” and paying attention to how these texts suggest we think, say, or do, explicitly or implicitly. Readings will likely include Amma Darko, Margaret Atwood, Arundhati Roy, Nadine Gordimer, Dorothy Allison, Jeanette
Winterson, Emily St. John Mandel, and Chandra Mohanty, among others. We will also be reading selections of feminist theories, theories of writing and rhetoric, reader response theory, and queer theory. Weekly responses, two longer essays, and two open-book, take-home exams required. All students in any English Concentration are welcome. All genders welcome.
This course fulfills a Category 2 or 3 elective requirement for English majors.
E333.001 Critical Studies of Popular Texts: The Next American Essay | 3 credits | 11:00 AM-12:15 PM | TR | Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
The 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 such sources as The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate and The Next American
Essay edited by D’Agata himself, the course will examine that assertion. We will discuss what makes an essay and essay as well as how events, places, memories and social, political, cultural, environmental landscapes influence approach and content. In addition to active discussion and critical work, we will write our own creative essays and imitation exercises to experiment with narrative technique and audience.
This course fulfills a Category 3 elective requirement for English majors.
E337.001 Western Mythology | 3 credits | 2:00-2:50 PM | 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 desacralization 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.
E311A Literary Criticism and Theory | 3 credits | Multiple Meeting Times | Multiple Instructors
Theory and practice of modern literary analysis and evaluation; writing about literature.
E344.001 Shakespeare | 3 credits | 2:00-3:15 PM | TR (hybrid) | Barbara Sebek
Theatre historians estimate that 25,000 people per week attended theatrical performances in and around London, totaling 50 million visits between 1576 and 1640. Shakespeare remains the most familiar of those who wrote for this flourishing institution. Our over-arching theme for the course will be “Shakespeare 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 does it shape our own world and recent critical race and postcolonial studies? In addition to exploring the global dimensions of Shakespeare, we will ask: How do Shakespeare’s plays register and intervene in debates about politics, religion, gender, family, and other social conflicts? In addition to reading the plays in their historical contexts, we’ll consider recent screen productions as creative appropriations that speak to our own moment. Students will select one of the six plays that we read in the course.
This course fulfills a Category 1 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.
E344.001 Shakespeare | 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 | 5:00 - 07:50 PM | W | Kelly Burns
Theory and pedagogy for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating print and visual texts.
E402 Teaching Composition | 3 credits | 4:30 - 07:20 PM | R | Kelly Burns
Theory and practice of the analysis and the teaching of writing.
E405 Young Adult Literature | 3 credits | 12:30 - 01:45 PM | TR | Todd Mitchell
Survey of literature for young adults emphasizing development of critical ability, appreciation, and taste.
3 credits of CO or E.
E412A Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | MWF | Ramona Ausubel
Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.
Must register for lecture and recitation. Maximum of 6 credits allowed in course. Sections may be offered online.
E431.001 The Nineteenth-Century British Novel | 3 credits | 11:00-11:50 AM | MWF | Philip Tsang
This course will explore some of the most celebrated novels from nineteenth-century England. We will look at how Victorian writers like Dickens responded to the massive changes brought about by industrialism, urbanization, poverty, social reform, and imperial expansion. In particular, we will focus on the depiction of crime and punishment. Why are Victorian novelists so obsessed with criminals, prison, and violence? How does crime intersect with issues of gender, class, and national identity? Possible texts include Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and a few Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
This course fulfills a Category 2 or 4 elective requirement for English majors
E438 Native American Literature | 3 credits | 5:00 - 06:15 PM | TR | Leif Sorensen
Literature of Native Americans emphasized as distinctive tradition in American literature and cultural expression of indigenous peoples.
Credit not allowed for both E 438 and ETST 438.
E440.001 American Prose to 1900: The Great American Novel(s) | 3 credits | 10:00-10:50 AM | MWF | Zach Hutchins
This course in the rise and development of the American novel will introduce students to runaway bestsellers (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), eccentric but acclaimed novels (Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker), and classic works of children’s literature (The Marvelous Land of Oz), as well as a few other excellent but more obscure books. Chances are good that you’ll cross off more than one title on that to-read list sitting on your nightstand. Novels for this class are divided into three clusters. In the first, we will read three novels considering problems posed by the American revolution and an experiment in self-governance. The second group of three novels address the problems of slavery and racism that culminated in the Civil War. In the final weeks of our semester, we will turn to three novels that were written for juvenile readers and ask how these works teach children to think through the questions of gender and the social challenges that occupied earlier generations.
This course fulfills a Category 1 elective requirement for English majors.
E460.001 Chaucer | 3 credits | 2:00-3:15 PM | TR (hybrid) | Lynn Shutters
In this course we’ll be studying Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales. The premise of this work is simple enough: a group of English men and women from all walks of life undertake a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. To pass the time, they tell tales – thus the Canterbury Tales. Today the Canterbury Tales is by far Chaucer’s most famous work, despite the fact that he was better known for other poems up until around the nineteenth century. And, it’s partially based on the artistic merit and perceived “Englishness” of the Canterbury Tales that Chaucer came to be viewed as the alleged Father of English Poetry. As we study Chaucer and his tales, we’ll also be studying these perceptions of Chaucer and this work. Why does the Canterbury Tales appeal to various audiences, including audiences today? Is Chaucer a quintessentially medieval poet, and does he therefore provide us a glimpse of a medieval past? Does he espouse universal themes, and if so how do we define those? Is he somehow modern avant la lettre, pointing a way forward to later developments in English literature and society? Chaucer has been subject to any number of theoretical approaches; consequently, we now have deconstructionist Chaucer, feminist Chaucer, queer Chaucer, postcolonial Chaucer, animality studies Chaucer, and the list goes on. We’ll examine what these various perspectives on Chaucer yield, and where their strengths or weaknesses may lie. Finally, in our pursuit of Chaucerian afterlives, we’ll consider some recent takes on Chaucer, including the film The Knight’s Tale (2001) and the poetry collection Telling Tales (2014), by Nigerian-British poet Patience Agbabi. This class will provide the opportunity to enjoy a great poet from the past, as well as the opportunity to think about how and why the past matters in a twenty-first century world.
This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. For English Education concentrators only, it fulfills both the capstone and a Category 1 or 4 upper-division English requirement. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 1 or 4 elective.
E480A.002 The Narrative Experiment: Form, Structure and Creative Possibility | 3 credits | 12:30-1:45 PM | TR | Ryan Claycomb & Ramona Ausubel
This capstone invites students to participate equally as readers, theorists, and creative writers to investigate avant garde and experimental narratives as literary specimens or artifacts and as vehicles of social and global justice movements. Traditional narrative structure—the arc, three-act structure, hero’s journey, etc.—fit some stories and some storytellers. At the same time, they also preserve a narrative hierarchy (the brave knight is greater than the contemplative ironsmith) and omit or de-center a vast array of experience and thought. In contrast, we will explore the literary experiment’s potential as an anti-racist project, a feminist project and a post-colonial project. What happens to the canon when writers are free to invent forms that fit their stories? What does the conversation look like when expectations for conformity are upended? The course will feature readings, writing exercises, and a longer final project, but this course is also an experiment of its own sort, so students will help create a framework for writing and thinking that opens hearts, invents ideas, and topples the boundary between critical and creative “sides.”
This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. For English Education concentrators only, it fulfills both the capstone and a Category 2, 3, or 4 upper-division English requirement. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 2, 3, or 4 elective.
LB393.001 – Cultural Extraction: Energy in the Humanities | 3 credits | 9:00-11:50 AM | T
Team- taught seminar course by Lynn Badia (Department of English) and Erika Osborne (Department of Art and Art History)
We are in the midst of a global energy transition. Scholars and artists in the rapidly growing field of “Energy Humanities” are working to examine the mutually-determining relationship of energy systems and human society. Yet, for most of us, “energy” remains an abstract term that we only encounter during momentary experiences – when we light a fire, get our winter electric bill, or hear about an oil spill. In order to begin to perceive how our energy systems are coupled with the conditions of our daily lives, we need to methodically examine the cultural and historical ways energy infrastructures shape our societies.
As cultural practitioners, this is where artists, writers, and theorists come to the table. Energy Humanities is beginning to shed light on the complex relationship between energy and culture. In the realm of social change, artists, writers, and thinkers often act as visionaries – slowly moving the cultural tide toward new ways of thinking and being. To harness these critical and visionary capacities, students in this course will embark on a semester-long collaboration that will result in the creation of a speculative museum exhibition titled, “Museum of Energy Transitions (Real and Speculative).” The intent of this speculative “museum” is to examine our current energy transition and its precedents as if looking back from the future. This critical framework will allow students to reflect on our energy pasts and to engage the radical imaginary for thinking about possible energy futures.
This course is open to all College of Liberal Arts Students, for English majors this course fulfills a Category 2 and 3 elective requirement.
Graduate Courses, Fall 2021
E501 Theories of Composition | 3 credits | Online | Lisa Langstraat
Theories of Composition is designed to introduce you to the most influential theories of writing in the field of Rhetoric and Composition and to examine the ways in which the politics of writing and social justice efforts shape those theories. In this section of E501 we will engage a multitude of theoretical approaches—from Current Traditional Rhetorics to Post-Process Composition and beyond. These approaches are by no means static. Sometimes complimentary, sometimes competing, they reflect the identity of a discipline—and its practitioners. To that end, it is my hope that we come to understand these theoretical frameworks in light of what it means to do theory as teacher/scholars of composition and to understand how a variety of compositionists work toward social justice--in and out of the classroom.
E506A Literature Survey: English | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Lynn Shutters
We often imagine that the classics (ancient Greek and Roman literature) died out in the Middle Ages, only to be “reborn” in the Renaissance. Medieval authors, however, were steeped in the Roman classics, and the history of medieval literature can be construed as a history of the adaptation of classical works to new ends. In this class, we’ll be studying just such a literary history, beginning with the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid and then proceeding to medieval works including the Romance of Aeneas, Marie de France’s Lais, the Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Inferno, and various works by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Topics of interest will include authorship and the anxiety of influence; foundation myths; secularity and religious difference (pagan vs Christian); temporality and historical perspective; and the feminist and queer potentials of a medievalized classical past.
E507 Special Topics in Linguistics: Sociolinguistics | 3 credits | 1:00 - 1:50 PM | MWF | Gerry Delahunty
Sociolinguistics is the study of the interactions between linguistic variation and a very broad range of social factors. Regional dialects are probably the most familiar sociolinguistic phenomenon: linguistic variants correlate with geographically defined groups of people. But language variation correlates also with groups defined according to social class, ethnicity, race, gender, age—in fact, any group of people, however defined, will exhibit some linguistic idiosyncrasies.
In addition to investigating the associations between language variation and groups of people, we will investigate the ways in which linguistic variation is a resource for the construction, maintenance, and evolution of personal, social, gendered, and cultural identities; of social networks; of power structures and relationships; and of the ideologies—especially those derived from language standardization—that underlie identities and power relations. And we will also investigate how language variation is a resource for challenges to all these.
Language varies also with factors deriving from its mode, medium, and context of use: whether it is spoken or written (or written as if spoken or spoken as if written); whether mediated electronically; whether formal or informal or anywhere in between; whether the interlocutors are related by (a)symmetries of power or solidarity; and whether they intend to be polite or impolite to each other. Sociolinguistics is concerned also with the distribution of, and interactions among, languages and their speakers. Most modern states include multiple languages, with consequent implications for social and educational policy; many, if not most, of the people in the world are bi- or multi-lingual, with implications for language choice, language change, language planning, pidginization and creolization, and language survival or death.
In this course we will critically assess the notions of “language,” “dialect,” “language variety,” “Standard English,” “computer mediated communication,” “style,” “(im)politeness,” “pidgin,” “creole,” “linguistic repertoire,” “register,” “linguistic accommodation,” “bi- and multi-lingualism,” “bi- and multi-dialectalism,” “language change,” “language beliefs,” “language attitudes,” “language choice,” 18 “language deficit vs. language difference,” “language testing,” and many others, especially those of particular interest to the students in the course.
The primary audience for the course will be TESL/TEFL MA students. However, English Education students may find it valuable too, as it will have a pedagogical orientation. However, students from all disciplines, English and beyond, are welcome. The course will be of particular and general interest because everyone, regardless of disciplinary addiction or affiliation, uses language and can benefit from its careful study.
E513B Form and Technique in Modern Literature: Poetry | 3 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | M | Sasha Steensen
Selected readings in and discussions of modern literature and criticism from the writer's point of view with emphasis on form and technique.
E514 Phonology/Morphology: ESL/EFL | 3 credits | 3:00 - 3:50 PM | MWF | Gerry Delahunty
E514 introduces the descriptive study and linguistic analysis of English phonetics/phonology, morphology/word formation, and lexis, and their connections to second language acquisition and teaching. This course is designed for students in the English MA in TEFL/TESL and students in the Joint MA programs in TEFL/TESL and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. It will introduce some basic assumptions about language, then focus mainly on the primary topics of the course and encourage you to explore these topics in ways that connect with your other TEFL/TESL coursework and teaching. While the course will focus primarily on English phonetics/phonology, morphology/word-formation, and vocabulary but comparative/contrastive data from other languages may be introduced, especially from those languages whose native speakers our graduates are most likely to teach. The topics are selected so as to maximize the overlap with the topics, constructions, and terminology current in the major ESL pedagogical texts.
E526 Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala
This course is intended for students pursuing a certificate or an M.A. in English with concentration in TESL/TEFL. In this course, participants will learn to develop language instruction that will support the acquisition and development of English across diverse educational settings. Attention will be devoted to the role of TESOL professionals in advancing an antiracist pedagogy in their classrooms.
E600A Research Method/Theory: Literary Scholarship | 3 credits | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Lynn Badia
This class is designed for first-semester literature graduate students. Over the course of the semester, we will work to build the skills you need to conduct literary research and write literary criticism on the text and topics that inspired you to pursue the M.A. degree. We will cover foundational skills like close reading, review major fields of literary criticism, learn about the conventions of academic writing, and develop research strategies for long-term writing projects. Along the way, students will pursue research topics relevant to their individual interests, whether fourteenth-century morality plays or twenty-first century graphic novels. In the second half of the course, we will work towards writing for publication in one of the many venues associated with the discipline.
E601 Research in Teaching English as a Second Language | 3 credits | 2:00 - 2:50 PM | MWF | Tony Becker
This course will focus on conducting (both qualitative and quantitative) classroom-based research as an important activity for refining teaching techniques and methods in the language classroom. Throughout the course, students will gain hands-on experience with conducting classroom-based research that concerns the four language skills (i.e., listening, reading, speaking, and writing) commonly taught in language classrooms. Finally, the course will explore the relative strengths and potential challenges of different approaches to classroom-based research, as well as how these pieces of information can contribute to gaining expertise in language teaching. The course is open to all graduate students who have an interest in research within the English department.
E607A Teaching Writing, Composition & Rhetoric | 3 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | W | Genesea Carter
In this seminar we will explore the teaching of writing through rhetoric and composition theories, research, and practice. While this seminar is focused on the teaching of writing, the teaching of writing is solidly part of field of rhetoric and composition—a discipline grounded on the principle of rhetoric and composition informing every communication situation. As new graduate teaching assistants teaching writing in the Composition Program, this seminar aims to orient you to this intersection through the reading of disciplinary position statements, scholarly articles, ethnographies, and rhetorical theory.
The teaching of writing is also informed by the contexts, values, and expectations of where CO150 fits into the Composition Program, the College of Liberal Arts, and the campus. CO150 is a General Education course that 6,000 CSU first-year students take a year, and it brings millions of dollars of revenue to the English Department, college, and campus. As a multi-million industry in the U.S., first year composition reflects varying philosophies, priorities, and tugs-and-pulls from the discipline of rhetoric and composition, university systems, departments, students, parents, politicians, and employers. As a result, teaching first-year composition is not a siloed experience; it is critical for you to be willing to listen, to gather information, and to join the existing conversation. For many of you after your Master’s program, you will take a teaching position in which you teach composition courses in addition to your specialization; if you enter a doctorate program with a teaching assistantship, you will also be teaching composition courses. Therefore, our course is useful beyond your graduate work here at CSU and will, assuredly, follow you into your post-graduate work and professional endeavors.
My hope is that you’ll leave this seminar better prepared to teach composition and other writing courses in the future, as well as understanding how the current theory and research in rhetoric and composition can help you develop your daily lives as teachers, writers, academics, and global citizens.
For first-year GTAs teaching CO 150. Contact department for registration.
E607B Teaching Writing: Creative Writing | 3 credits | 12:30 - 1:45 PM | TR | Dana Masden
E607B is designed to help graduate students in the MFA program become confident, competent teachers of Beginning College Creative Writing (E210). In this class, students will explore various teaching philosophies, techniques, materials, and the basic elements of craft for writing Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction. Students will also get to explore writing exercises and practice teaching. Upon successful completion of the course, MFA students will design their own E210 class and syllabus and become eligible to teach E210, Beginning Creative Writing, for compensation.
MFA Creative Writing students only. Contact department for registration.
E615 Reading Literature: Recent Theories | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | Paul Trembath
This course is a graduate level introduction to literary and cultural theory since the 1970s. We will be studying material roughly in the chronological order of its academic reception in the United States, from semiotics and deconstruction (which displaced the hegemony of New Criticism with its formalist and aestheticist approach to reading literary texts) through various forms of historicism and cultural materialism. Finally, we will study more recent developments in critical studies ranging from neopsychoanalysis to affect theory, aesthetic materialism, speculative realism, eliminative nihilism, and object- and process-oriented ontologies. On the way, we cover various feminisms, transcendental empiricism, lesbian and gay studies, gender and somatic criticisms, postcolonialism, and cultural studies generally. The purpose of the course is to familiarize students with the critical rhetorics that inform literary/language study, and to explain the conceptual antagonisms that have emerged between various approaches to literature and culture since the end of the 20th century up to the present. Requirements: assigned readings; 1 or 2 critical papers (topics to be decided on an individual basis); attendance.
E630A Special Topics in Literature: Global Modernism | 3 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | W | Philip Tsang
Modernism has traditionally referred to a canon of works produced in Europe during the interwar era, but recent scholarship has greatly expanded our understanding of modernism as a truly transnational movement, an interconnected phenomenon shaped by material, cultural, and geopolitical changes on a global scale. In this course, we will examine various approaches to global modernism: not only will we read a wide array of canonical as well as lesser-known works from all across the world, but we will also explore how modernist writers respond to such issues as immigration, exile, social reform, world war, imperialism, energy extraction, and climate change. Possible authors include Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Richard Hughes, Alfred Döblin, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, Sol T. Plaatje, Mulk Raj Anand, and Aimé Césaire.
E630B Special Topics in Literature: Restoration and 18th Century Drama | 3 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | R | TBD
Genre study of Restoration and 18th century drama.
E632 Professional Concerns in English: Critical Approaches to Multicultural Young Adult Literature in the Classroom | 1 to 3 credits | 6:00 - 8:50 PM | W | Ricki Ginsberg
This course has two overarching objectives: a) to think about strategies for overcoming perceived challenges to the instruction of multicultural and/or young adult literature and b) to study and develop our own critical approaches for instruction. We will extend beyond traditional critical theoretical approaches and contextualize pedagogical approaches in community-based and student-centered ways. As is the philosophy of this course, all assessments will include a significant amount of choice for students to center the course content into their own goals and practices. Students from all perspectives are encouraged to enroll, including those who intend to teach or currently teach at the secondary or college level and/or those who are interested in thinking deeply about the opportunities that come with the inclusion of multicultural young adult literature in schools and colleges.
E633 – Special Topics in Writing and Rhetoric | 3 credits | 2:00 - 3:15 PM | TR | Michael Palmquist
Varied topics covering social, political, cultural or historical areas, or literacy and rhetorical theory and practice, or professional and pedagogical issues.
E637 Histories of Writing and Rhetoric | 3 credits | 3:30 - 4:45 PM | TR | Sarah Sloane
Beginning with the moment in Plato’s Phaedrus where Socrates says that writing is a drug (and a recipe for forgetting) and ending with an exploration of French aleatory rhetorics (OULIPO) and hybrid forms of writing (including the body as written upon and immersed in synthetic realities) this course takes an historical and historiographical view of writing as primarily two-dimensional, but also threedimensional, symbolic communication. In its broadest terms, we will study how writing changes according to historical moment. cultural and geographical location, gendered, economic, and technological contexts, and the materials or media available. We will consider the purposes and audiences for writing as they change across genres, time period, and cultural context. In all contexts our studies will be centered on who is speaking (writing), what gets said (text), and how that “saying” (audience) is distributed. Graduate students will write three shorter research essays: one that relies on local historical archives to reconstruct the contexts of writing and assay primary historical research methodologies; another that traces the development of a contemporary keyword or rhetorical term (genre, purpose, research, e.g.) from early historical use to present meaning, using a cross-cultural lens. An independent historical research project defined in consultation with the professor in the last third of the semester will help students understand or question the changing premises of what writing is and does across histories and cultures. Graduate students from all concentrations (and other departments) are welcome.
E640A Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction | 1 to 5 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | M | Andrew Altschul
Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.
Maximum of 11 credits allowed in course. Contact instructor for registration.
E640B Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry | 1 to 5 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | T | Matthew Cooperman
Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.
Maximum of 11 credits allowed in course. Contact instructor for registration.
E640B Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay | 1 to 5 credits | 4:00 - 6:50 PM | M | EJ Levy
Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.
Maximum of 11 credits allowed in course. Contact instructor for registration.
E692 Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay | 1 credit | 4:00 - 7:00PM | M | Multiple Instructors
E692: WRSC Colloquium is a one-credit course required of all WRSC MA students in both their first and second years in our program.
We encourage a relaxed, yet professional, atmosphere in the Colloquium because we believe that conversation about our field and the many roles we assume as rhetoric and composition teacher-scholars is vital for developing our disciplinary identities.
E692 is designed to:
- build community and professional relationships among WRSC students and faculty, particularly since not all faculty and students will have coursework together in students’ first year at CSU;
- provide formal opportunities for faculty (at CSU and beyond) and students to share their research interests and experiences; and
- discuss contemporary issues and trends in our field from multiple perspectives.
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The Rambler
The Rambler is a semesterly printable document that provides current preregistration advising information and descriptions of special courses available for the coming semester. It also includes a range of timely and important topics for English majors and minors.
Click the button above for this semester's issue of The Rambler, and find an archive of past issues in The Rambler archive, also linked above.
In each issue of The Rambler, you will find:
- Advising information
- Course descriptions
- Registration details
- Important dates
- Composition Placement Challenge & Re-evaluation essay information
- Award information
- Internship information