11 sections available

Multiple sections available

3 sections available

40 sections available

3 sections available

12 sections available

2 sections available

2 sections available

Like other 300-level composition courses, CO302 emphasizes writing processes with specific attention to revising, editing, and critical reading.

CO302 diverges from other 300-level courses by analyzing and producing primarily digital texts. Students develop technical literacies and rhetorical competencies to navigate a world where information and ideas are increasingly shared and produced in digital contexts. 

AMST101-1: Self/Community in American Culture Since 1877

AMST101-2:  Self/Community in American Culture Since 1878 

AMST101-3: Self/Community in American Culture Since 1879

E181A1-1

E181A1-2

E181A1-3

E181A1-4

4 sections available

5 sections available

Instructor: Todd Mitchell, TR 12:30-1:45
E311A is a fiction workshop designed to help students develop the skills to better meet their individual writing goals. An anthology of contemporary short stories will be used, and writing short literary fiction will be emphasized. Through classroom workshops, discussion of contemporary fiction, and student writing assignments, students will consider a wide array of story-telling techniques and elements of craft including character development, use of setting, dialogue, description, voice, POV, form, and plot development. Specific topics for classroom discussion will be determined by student needs as revealed by trends in student manuscripts.

This course will focus on the craft and theory of creative nonfiction – transforming personal experience, observation, memory and research into compelling literary narratives. We will produce original works of nonfiction – everything from personal essay to memoir to lyric essay - and become proficient in the analysis and discussion of published work and peer manuscripts. We will also read widely across form and style and delve into the ethical considerations of writing from life as well as factual truth vs. imaginative reconstruction. Although class will involve some lecture, it is primarily designed as a studio environment of workshop critiques and generative prompts. This class encourages exploration and experimentation and I encourage you to take risks.

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.

2 sections available

Foundations of language structure, emphasizing grammar, sounds, spelling, word structure, linguistic variation, usage, acquisition, and pedagogy.

Who: Christina of Markyate, Clemence of Barking, Marie de France, Heloise, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Margaret Paston. No, you probably haven’t heard of most of these writers, and yes, there is a man in the mix – for more on these points, see “why” below.

What: A range of texts including lais (short, fantastic verse narratives), hagiography (stories about saints), religious writings, allegory, biography of sorts, and lots of letters. Notice that there are no novels, short stories, or plays – if that’s your thing, then this class isn’t. A question this class will pose is what types of texts we consider to be “literature” and how we might usefully expand the category of the literary.

When: Texts for this course were written between 1100 and 1450 CE, with a few modern works of literature and criticism thrown in.

Where: England and France

Why: I view the lack of familiarity which I expect most of you will have with these authors and texts as an advantage: the class will give you the opportunity to delve back into the past and consider what effects reading and writing had on women (that is, how women were represented and what stories were available to them). We’ll contemplate how reading and writing were themselves imagined as gendered activities in the Middle Ages; this is why we’re not just reading texts by women authors but also Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. We’ll also examine how women writers creatively adapted and altered their culture’s gender constructions and literary traditions. Another purpose of this class is to think about how we use terms like “author” or “literature” and how we might usefully expand our understanding of writing and literary production. In thinking about authorship, for example, we will often abandon the idea of the author as a singular creative genius (an anachronistic concept of authorship in the Middle Ages). Instead we’ll locate textual production and dissemination in wider networks and communities that include sources, patrons, and audiences. Throughout the course, we’ll want to avoid constructing a simplistic history of progress that advances from a “bad” Middle Ages to a “good” modern era to instead ponder how medieval texts and lives might be relevant to our thinking about the world today.

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 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, cultural, environmental landscapes influence approach and content. In addition to active discussion and critical work, we will write our own essays and imitation exercises to experiment with narrative technique and audience. 

E337 Western Mythology, 3 Credits, 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.

E339.001 Literature of the Earth, 3 Credits, Instructor Lynn Badia

This course explores how literary narratives shape our knowledge and experience of the more-than-human world. Covering a range of literary genres and media – novels, manifestoes, short stories, poems, film, etc. – we will gain critical perspective on how a variety of narratives inform our planetary and environmental consciousness. We will examine texts from the early twentieth century to the present day, utilizing a range of critical frameworks informed by environmental justice, feminism, (post)colonialism, and Indigenous perspectives.

This course fulfills a Category 2 or 3 elective requirement for English majors.

2 sections available

Theory and practice of modern literary analysis and evaluation; writing about literature.

In this new incarnation of Shakespeare in the English curriculum, we will study six plays, one of which will be selected by students. Students will have the option to study a play by one of Shakespeare’s popular contemporary playwrights. Theatre historians estimate that 25,000 people per week attended 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. We will study how different plays recast important issues in the playwright’s culture. Shakespeare's era was one of rapid change and, for many of his contemporaries, a time of disruptive upheaval in the social order and cultural values. 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.

E370.001 American Literature in Cultural Contexts - Climate Fiction, 3 Credits, Instructor Lynn Badia

In this course we will consider the challenge of representing climate in American literature and film, from the early twentieth century to the present day. Climate has traditionally referenced the weather it gathers, the mood it creates, and the setting it casts. In the era of the Anthropocene —the contemporary epoch in which geologic conditions and processes are overwhelmingly shaped by human activity—climate indexes not only natural forces but the whole of human society: the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, and the possible futures we may encounter. In other words, with every weather event, we are aware that the forces indexed by climate are as much environmental and physical as they are social and cultural. We will consider the emerging genre of “Cli-Fi” (“climate fiction”) and a range of related themes such as adaptation, human engineered weather, water wars, Indigenous knowledge frameworks, and environmental justice.

This course fulfills a Category 2or 3 elective requirement for English majors.

Instructor: Todd Mitchell, TR 2:00-3:15
E405 is designed to give future teachers, writers, and literature students a survey of mostly contemporary novels for young adults. It is an extreme reading course in which students are required to read eleven core texts, and approximately 3,000 pages of choice book reading. Class sessions will focus on discussion, ways books can be taught, and creative activities to help readers connect with texts. Central to our study will be an exploration of identity, how we “read” and “write” the self, and how adolescents are affected by issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, war, culture, and consumerism.

Professor Barb Sebek

“We are all framed of flaps and patches,” says Michel de Montaigne in John Florio’s 1605 English translation of his essays, “and there is as much difference between us and ourselves, as there is between ourselves and others.” How did writers in this period strive to give shape to the “flaps and patches” of selves and others? What concepts of difference informed their efforts? What historical conditions and literary traditions enabled or constrained the “I” of Renaissance lyric poetry, the vibrant characters written for the stage, or poets and playwrights themselves?

This course offers an intensive survey of the English Renaissance by reading a range of poetry, drama, and prose from the period (roughly 1500-1660). We will study major figures such as More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, while also challenging traditional conceptions of the Renaissance by studying writers and concerns that older frameworks excluded or neglected, especially emergent notions of race and the work of women writers.

Assignments will offer choice for students to tailor their work to suit their particular concentration within the English major or majors outside of English.

This course will ask students to trace the social origins and impacts of poverty in colonial North America and the United States across four centuries; we’ll talk about redlining, cash bail, reparations, and other pressing political issues. Along the way, we will read works of heartbreaking beauty by Tommy Orange, John Steinbeck, Gloria Naylor, and others. As students read literary representations of both historical and contemporary experiences of poverty, they will also engage in service-learning, working with community initiatives to provide aid to impoverished individuals here in Fort Collins. Students will be asked to reflect on both the literature they read and the service experiences they engage in, drawing connections between their studies and opportunities for social activism available locally.

Instructor Joanna Doxey

This course will focus both on the Anthropocene – how humans have shaped the landscape – and how the landscape shapes our identity through the discipline of Ecopoetry in particular. The field of ecopoetry (and, in extension ecoliterature and eco-art) is amorphous and yet distinct. The art and thinking that is produced within the Anthropocene is not just reflections on the land, but also interrogations of space and identity within the context of climate change. We will examine text, art, and history within ecopoetry/ecoliterature to get closer answers to questions such as: What differentiates ecopoetics from the tradition of pastoral writing? How is identity shaped by surroundings, whether that’s pastoral or urban? How does landscape shape our identity? How do we define the “field” and notion of landscape to expand beyond traditional definitions? In what other types of “fields” do we and literature exist? How do we create art and literature in the age of the Anthropocene? How do we create amongst climate grief? Likely we will generate more questions in the quest, which will be welcomed. We will talk about language as a field, the significance and implications of naming a land, defining “nature” in relationship to human nature. While the course is based in poetry, we’ll expand ecoliterature to various texts including creative nonfiction, visual art, critical theory, fiction, history, soundscapes, sociology, ethnography, etc, and create work relevant to each student’s academic focus and pursuits. Writers may include: Jen Bervin, Brian Teare, Pam Houston, Anna Tsing, Craig Santos Perez, Layli Longsoldier, Camille Dungy, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Allison Cobb.

This can count as a category 2, 3, or 4 class for English Education Students or students who have already taken a capstone.

E475 American Poetry Before 1900 - Doubt and Division in America and the Middle East, 3 Credits, Instructor Zach Hutchins

This course on early American poetry will help students think longitudinally about the relationship between the Middle East and the Americas (which Columbus discovered in search of riches that would finance another Crusade to conquer Jerusalem). Our diplomatic ties to Israel and our fraught military engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and other Middle Eastern countries are the products of centuries of history—and much of that history has been considered in poetry. We will devote sustained attention to Clarel, Herman Melville’s magnum opus, which has been described as “a fundamentally necessary document of our human experience” and “some of the best American poetry ever written”; we’ll also spend time with works by Mark Twain, Emma Lazarus, Emily Dickinson, and others. These readings will help students appreciate that it is impossible to fully understand the history and culture of the United States without comprehending its connection to the past, present, and future of Palestine and its neighbors.

Instructor: Ricki Ginsberg

This course is designed to prepare middle and high school teachers to teach reading, writing, speaking, and listening in English/Language Arts classrooms. It will focus on the processes, principles, and practices of developing and supporting learners. Upon completion of this course, students will be better able to ground their instruction in the standards, plan lessons and units, consider means for assessing learning, implement sound practices in their classrooms, and enter into professional conversations about the teaching of English. The course is designed in an experiential way in order for pre-service teachers to learn and practice skills and strategies to better understand their validity and usefulness in the classroom. Students will have an abundance of choice in their course readings and assignments.

The Thinking Hand is a course that undoes the ease of keeping separate radically different media—words, clay—to discover those curious grounds of overlap and reciprocity where the deep work of poetry and sculpture mirror one another in their most fundamental creative aspects. This course hopes to open for everyone involved this influential collaborative ground. Neither a course on Poetry, nor a course on Ceramics, nor a simple combining of the two disciplines, The Thinking Hand offers a unique studio experience in which experiment in both art forms opens up a larger concern—as much philosophical as pragmatic—regarding the nature of, desire to, and consequences of art-making.