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 Fall and Summer 2023 course offerings (class time and instructor subject to change) 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.

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Fall 2023 Courses

Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2023

AMST100 – Self/Community in American Culture, 1600-1877

AMST101 – Self/Community in American Culture

CO130 – Academic Writing

CO150 – College Composition

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

CO301A – Writing in the Disciplines: Arts and Humanities

CO301B – Writing in the Disciplines: Sciences

CO301C – Writing in the Disciplines: Social Sciences

CO301D – Writing in the Disciplines: Education

CO302 – Writing in Digital Environments

E140 – The Study of Literature

E142 – Reading Without Borders

E150 – English Studies Symposium

E179 – Western American Literature: Contemporary Poets and the Shaping of the American Democracy

E179 Western American Literature: Contemporary Poets and the Shaping of the American Democracy | 3 credits | 08:00 - 09:15 AM | TR | Camille Dungy

We will read the work of recent U.S. poet laureates and public-facing poets who have ties to the American West to consider how poetry and literature shape our views of social justice, inclusive practices, public policy, political engagement, environmental engagement, and communal care. Poets studied this term include: Ada Limon, Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Robert Hass, Amanda Gorman, CMarie Furman, Natalie Diaz, TC Tolbert, Matthew Zapruder, Tommy Pico, and Brenda Hillman.

E200 – Inquiry-Based Teaching, Learning, and Communicating

E210 – Beginning Creative Writing

E232 – Introduction to Humanities

E236 – Short Fiction

E238 – Contemporary Global Fiction

E240 – Introduction to Poetry

E242 – Reading Shakespeare

E245 – World Drama

E270 – Introduction to American Literature

E276 – British Literature: Medieval Period to 1800

E277 – British Literature: After 1800

E305 – Principles of Writing and Rhetoric

E305.001 Principles of Writing and Rhetoric | 3 credits | 12:30 - 01:45 PM | TR | Lisa Langstraat

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

E310 – Researching and Writing Literary Criticism | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | MWF | Zach Hutchins

This class is designed to help students learn to do literary research and write literary criticism—skills that will facilitate your success in upper-division literature courses. We’ll practice those skills by reading the work of three authors selected by students, in the opening weeks of the course. If you really want to hone your writing chops, this is the class for you, and since you're helping to pick the books—the reading should be pretty good, too.

E311A – Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction

E311B – Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry

E311C – Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction

E320 – Introduction to the Study of Language

E320 – Introduction to the Study of Language | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Tony Becker

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.

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

E324 – Teaching English as a Second Language

E324 – Teaching English as a Second Language | 3 credits | 9:30-10:45 AM | TR | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala

This course offers participants with an introduction to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages in the U.S. or abroad. This is a course that may potentially contribute to teacher certification. This is a highly interactive and participatory course intended to offer a rich introduction to this exciting area of work in the field of applied linguistics. It will offer a combination of both theory and practice with plenty of opportunities to discuss current topics related to the teaching of English learners across contexts.

E332 – Modern Women Writers

E332 – Modern Women Writers | 3 credits | 3:30-4:45 PM | TR | Lisa Langstraat

Women’s writing/activism has often radically challenged traditional notions of aesthetics and the organization of knowledge. In the spirit of that challenge, this course is structured not by historical period, nor by “literary movements.” Instead, I’d like us to engage in a spirit of inquiry that asks questions and seeks (provisional) answers for questions that reflect women writers’ challenges to—and from—our cultural norms and expectations:

Why do we need/have a course devoted to women writers? That is, what makes a woman author’s writing “women’s writing”?
Do we read women’s writing differently? If so, how? If not, why not?
How does women’s writing reflect the union of the personal and the political, the aesthetic and the social? Can art change the world? Does women’s writing take a special position in light of that world change?
How does an author’s subjectivity and identity frame her process of creation and the creative product?

Given these questions, this course is designed to address

A selection of late-20^th century women writers who represent various identities, nationalities, and ethnicities. We will be reading works that reflecta diverse range of experience, perspective, and aesthetic approach;
A variety of literary forms and genres, including the traditional narrative sprinkled with the fantastic, the epistolary novel, autobiographical and journal writing, lyric and prose poetry, the essay, journalistic writing, manifestoes, and many more.
A multitude of feminist/womanist perspectives that represent theorizing experience and experiencing theory insofar as they blend the personal & political, the intellectual and the emotional, aesthetic transformation and social transformation.

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

E333 – Critical Studies of Popular Texts: The New American Essay

E333 – Critical Studies of Popular Texts: The New American Essay | 3 credits | 2:00-3:15 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 – Western Mythology

E337.001 Western Mythology | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 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 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.

E338 – Ethnic American Literature

E338 - Ethnic American Literature | 3 credits | 09:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Leif Sorensen

This class offers a survey of contemporary ethnic writing from the U.S. We will read a range of genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and graphic novels). Because contemporary writing is in dialogue with a range of media, we will also watch films and discuss digital art and storytelling. Our texts include popular commercial blockbusters, critically acclaimed works from mainstream publishers, and lesser-known experimental works from small presses. Focusing on ethnic writing published since the year 2000 will give us an opportunity to think about how ethnicity functions in the twenty-first century U.S. and to consider how different artists imagine the future of identity. Authors covered will likely include Claudia Rankine, Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, Valeria Luiselli, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Stephen Graham Jones, and others. Students will write a final project on a topic of their choosing as well as a series of short papers focused on individual texts.

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

E341 – Literary Criticism and Theory

E344 – Shakespeare

E344 - Shakespeare | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | MWF | Aparna Gollapudi

In this course, we will study a selection of Shakespeare's plays through the lens of race and colonialism. While we will also focus on elements such as Shakespeare’s use of dramatic conventions and modes, his figurative language, issues of gender and sexuality etc., the course will emphasize the production of national and global identities through theatrical performance in plays such as Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest.

This course fulfills a Category 1 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.

E370 – American Literature in Cultural Contexts: Mothering in the Margins

E370 – American Literature in Cultural Contexts: Mothering in the Margins | 3 credits | 2:00 - 2:50 PM | MWF | Elizabeth Steinway

What are the parameters of American motherhood? Who is included in these definitions and who is left out?

Motherhood is often presumed to be a natural status for women, an identity category that is marked both by reproductive capability and societal expectation. Because of this, the act of mothering becomes a site of ideological debate, with “good” and “bad” mothers pitted against each other. In this course, we will examine motherhood as an ideological and social construction, focusing on representations of mothers in American literature, visual media, public discourse, and popular culture who disrupt maternal conventions through radical acts of mothering.

E373 – The Afterlives of Literature

E373 - The Afterlives of Literature | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | Lynn Shutters

The Afterlives of Classical Women: Helen, Cassandra, Antigone, Medea: these are a few of the famous women from Greco-Roman myth, women who are involved in the larger affairs of men—wars, quests, and such—but who either lack power and agency in a patriarchal world or are branded wicked or dangerous if they do have power. While the legends of these and other classical women begin in classical antiquity, they don’t stop there: authors have rewritten classical women for generations, up until the present. In this class, we’ll begin with classical literature, works by Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Ovid, among others, and wend our way forward to consider how various authors have reshaped classical women and how classical women themselves have serves as touchstones for how femininity is contemplated and represented in Western culture. It’s no exaggeration to say that the history of female identity in the West is a history of these women. To bring this class up to the present, we’ll spend significant time on contemporary authors and creators, particularly women and BIPOC authors, including Kamila Shamshie, Jesmyn Ward, and Spike Lee, who remain fascinated by stories of classical women.

This course fulfills a Category 1-4 elective requirement for English majors.

E384A – Supervised College Teaching: Classroom

E401 – Teaching Reading

E401 Teaching Reading | 3 credits | 04:30 - 07:20 PM | W | Kelly Burns

Learning to read is a civil right. In this course, we integrate evidence-based foundational reading instruction with the reading workshop model through lenses of culturally responsive and sustaining practices. We craft an agency-based and student-centered philosophy that grows readers in a civically-engaged classroom.

E402 – Teaching Composition

E402 Teaching Composition | 3 credits | 04:30 - 07:20 PM | R | Kelly Burns

Writing is our thinking made visible. In this course, we cultivate writers through evidence-based writing instructional practices that are embedded within the writing workshop model to move past outdated writing practices into iterative, agency-based, and authentic writing that honors the "mesearch" of individuals and the research of our communities in service of social change and civic engagement.

E405 – Young Adult Literature

E412A – Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

E431 – Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

E431- Nineteenth-Century British Fiction | 3 credits | 3:30 - 4:45 PM | TR | Philip Tsang

In this course, we will read some of the most celebrated novels from Victorian England. The nineteenth century saw the transformation of England into a modern professional society. Thanks to the increasing division of labor brought about by industrialism and capitalism, society could no longer be managed by hereditary aristocrats or wealthy landlords. Instead, individuals with specialized training and expertise dominated every sector. One’s social status was determined less by circumstances of birth than by education and professional pursuits. The novelists from this period reflected on a series of questions that still resonate today: How does one find meaning and fulfillment from career development? Is there such a thing as a vocation or calling? How does one negotiate the tensions between personal desire and professional demand? The answers to these questions were in turn shaped by gender, sexuality, social reform, and imperialism. Our novels will include Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

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

E465 – Topics in Literature and Language: Intercultural Communication (Capstone)

E465 - Topics in Literature and Language: Intercultural Communication | 3 credits | 03:00 - 04:15 PM | MW | Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker

This course will introduce students to the process of communication between and among individuals from different cultures or subcultures. The term “culture” is broadly defined to include race, ethnicity, national origin, economic class, gender, and other markers of social identity. The course will provide theoretical and methodological insights into intercultural communication and will give students an opportunity to apply their knowledge through reflection and critical analysis of various manifestations of intercultural communication differences.

This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 3 elective.

E466 – Interdisciplinary English Studies: Literature and Politics in the Contemporary US (Capstone)

E466 – Interdisciplinary English Studies: Literature and Politics in the Contemporary US | 3 credits | 12:30 - 01:45 PM | TR | Andrew Altschul and Leif Sorensen

Is the pen still mightier than the sword? Was it ever? This capstone class invites students to identify strategies that writers adopt to address political subject matter, to assess the ability of literature to intervene in political issues, and to develop their own approaches to writing and reading politically in our current moment. Class readings will bring together important critical writings from Marxist, Critical Race, Queer, Trans*, and Feminist theories with an eclectic range of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and popular culture. Students will write both critically and creatively in response to assigned texts, and the closing weeks of the semester will be devoted to presentations and workshops of students’ projects on topics of their choosing.

This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 3 or 4 elective.

E478 – Modern Poetry

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

What is Modern Poetry, let alone what is Modern? When did it begin? Where? What are its characteristics? Is it still happening? And is Modern the same as Modernity? Modernism? What's Modernity's relationship to democracy? And how does the Contemporary interact with and/or supplant the Modern? These questions hinge on definitions that are neither stable nor consensually ratified. This Modern thing is moving. From “Make it New!” (Pound) to “Buy it Used!” (Jameson) we are witness in Modernism to a radical transformation of forms, values and historical understandings that are intensely present for us across the whole range of the arts (and indeed the sciences). Modern Poetry brackets the debate by parsing out an historical period that shows the loss of meter and the gain of free verse. Something radical happens from the 19th c. to the 20th. As such, we might claim the Modern—or Modern Poetry—as something occurring possibly from mid 19th c to the end of World War II. But as with all things Modern, pronouncements induce a deep skepticism. Belief and doubt, history and its opposite, things to query and worry and wonder.

The purpose of this course is to help you discover the joys and difficulties of Modern Poetry. We will explore the transformations of poetry from Romanticism and the Victorian era (and whatever it’s called in America) to High Modernism, and the transition to what’s next. We will do this by reading history in the poems, and by the poems, and by developing strategies to unlock Modern Poetry’s notorious difficulty. We will also try to situate Modern Poetry in the socio-political context from which it—and all the arts—arise. Is modern poetry a signet of democracy? Culture formation then, as much as close reading, and the development of a critical vocabulary by which we might understand this period so conjunct with our own. We will do this primarily by reading poems and discussing them in class. The goal of all this learning will be the deep pleasure of recognition; for if Modern Poetry is relevant to our time, it is still happening, still evocative of the daily joys and struggles of a recognizably human condition.

This course fulfills a Category 2 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.

E487B – Internship: Literary Editing – Greyrock Review

E487B.001 Internship: Literary Editing – Greyrock Review | 1 credit | 07:30 PM - 09:50 PM | M | Stephanie G'Schwind

Students can 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 a staff intern, you will be expected to attend weekly staff meetings to discuss promoting the call for submissions, reading submissions, copyediting, layout, proofreading, and publicity.

Students must be Junior or Senior English majors or minors with a minimum GPA of 3.0 and should have taken E210. Qualified students must register for both Fall 2022 and Spring 2023—this is a one-year commitment. Interested students should contact Stephanie G’Schwind at Stephanie.GSchwind@ColoState.EDU.

E487C – Internship: Community Literacy Center

E487C.001 Internship: Community Literacy Center | 1-3 credits | Tobi Jacobi

Students may receive credit (up to 3 per semester for up to two semesters) for an internship with the Community Literacy Center, an outreach arm of the English Department, which coordinates creative writing workshops for confined populations in the community. In this internship, you will have opportunities to blend academic and experiential learning through three primary focus areas: program design and facilitation, administration and leadership, and public engagement and dissemination. An interest in literacy and confined communities is useful, though no experience is required. Training provided in facilitation methods and responses.

Students must be Juniors or Seniors with a minimum GPA of 3.0 Qualified students must register for both Fall 2022 and Spring 2023. This is a one-year commitment. Interested students should contact Tobi Jacobi at tobi.jacobi@colostate.edu.

Graduate Courses, Fall 2023

E501 – Theories of Composition

E502 – Politics of Literacy

E502 Politics of Literacy | 3 credits | 05:00 - 07:50 PM | W | Dr. Naitnaphit Limlamai

This course is driven by the key question, “In what ways are learning how to read and write the word and the world political?” We begin by developing complex understandings of literacy and literate practices through an examination of definitions, approaches, and contexts. Using these ideas, we'll examine contemporary debates in the field of literacy, including engagements with critical literacy, "reading wars," and banned books. Throughout the course we'll cultivate our own literacy skills as we investigate what forces and factors limit and expand our literacies and our access to it.

E505A – Major Author (British) – Novel Rivalries: Samuel Richardson vs. Henry Fielding

E505A – Major Author (British) – Novel Rivalries: Samuel Richardson vs. Henry Fielding | 3 credits | 03:00 PM - 04:15 PM | MW | Aparna Gollapudi

Did you know that the word 'novel' that today refers to one of the most popular forms of fiction, actually comes from the notion of a 'novelty'? The literary form that we now recognize as 'The Novel' was taking shape in the 18th century, when it was often seen as somewhat of a novelty. But the period was more than just a time when the genre of the novel was in its "infancy" or not fully developed. Indeed if you think of the history of the novelistic form as a progression from 'imperfect' experiments in early 1700s to the glimpses of perfection in the works of Jane Austen, you will not be fully engage in this course. Indeed, in the absence of a 'fixed' or well-established form with clearly recognizable narrative qualities, plots, or generic expectations, eighteenth-century British writers were producing varied modes of storytelling that were often quite different from each other. One of the most famous literary rivalries in the period was between Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, and Henry Fielding, who wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The course is focused on these two novels, though you will read a lot of contextual and scholarly material. You might not be familiar or comfortable or partial to older linguistic and narrative worlds - indeed there's good possibility you have never read long fiction written before Austen's time. So be prepared to get out of your comfort zone. learn to read differently, and engage with the way the literature of this time period unfolds! The rewards of such an engagement would be a deeper understanding of modernity and it's favorite literary form, the novel.

This course fulfills the pre-1900 requirement for MFA and Literature MA students

E507 – Special Topics in Linguistics: Vocabulary (Words, Words, Words-All About Words)

E507.001 Special Topics in Linguistics: Vocabulary (Words, Words, Words-All About Words) | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | MWF | Gerry Delahunty

Focus and area of study: The course will use words to address words: little ones, big ones; short ones, long ones; lexical ones, grammatical ones; Alice ones and Humpty Dumpty ones; dictionary ones, academic ones, and vocabulary ones (language teachers know what these are). It will address word forms (e.g., lexical categorization, inflection, and derivation) and word sources: making them up (e.g., googol, NB not Google); creating them lego-like from available parts (e.g., hen-deca-syllable); shmushing them together (e.g., fishtail, cronut, whachmacallit); cutting them down to size (e.g., COVID, detox, edit); begging, borrowing, stealing them from other languages (e.g., Avon, Carnival). It will devote valuable semester time to the ways in which word meanings change (e.g., (critter) mouse > (curser) mouse) and how they are adjusted in context (e.g., flat as a perfect oak floor or flat as Eastern Colorado; morpheme in linguistics and biology), as well as the contexts in which various types of words are likely to occur (e.g., phoneme in linguistics, pandemic everywhere else). It will embrace the form, meaning and function of words and provide a user-friendly introduction to linguistic, phraseological, and lexicographical approaches to the study of words.

Audience: 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 words and can benefit from their careful study.

E513B – Form & Technique: Poetry

E513B - Form & Technique in Poetry | 3 credits | 03:30 - 4:45 PM | TR| Matthew Cooperman

In this poetry-intensive literature and writing course we will examine our formal decisions, the techniques we use to execute them, and the theoretical underpinnings that give these decisions moral and aesthetic gravity. We will do this by reading widely in poetry and poetics, and applying our insights into actual poems and statements about poems. Specifically, we will trace the beginning of our modern poetic sensibility from the Romantics forward, hoping to glean, in the emergence of free verse, some sense of our current practice in the ‘open field’ of the 21st c. Toward the Open Field provides just such an historical narrative to our practice, with some of the most seminal essays ever written about modern poetry. These include forays into French and Spanish poetics, and so we will do some reading of the Symbolists. An Exaltation of Forms offers an excellent range of essays focused on traditional and experimental forms, alongside examples of poems that successfully embody these forms. We will use these two texts as a springboard for experiment. To take the spectral cue, the field is wide, and we are here to play it. Additional individual volumes of poetry will be added as formal and aesthetic models.

E514 – Phonology/Morphology: ESL/EFL

E514 Phonology/Morphology: ESL/EFL | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | 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

E526 Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language | 3 credits | 12:30 PM - 01:45 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 Methods: Literary Scholarship

E600A Research Methods: Literary Scholarship | 3 credits | 3:00 - 4:15 PM | MW | Lynn Shutters

You will read and think about what graduate literary study entails in order to shape your identity as a scholar. In addition, you will pursue a research project relevant to your individual interests -- whether Shakespeare, Medieval poetry, modern science fiction or contemporary graphic novels. In pursuit of the research project, your will familiarize yourself with and practice writing genres common to the discipline of literary criticism, including footnotes, annotated bibliographies, book reviews, and conference abstracts.

E601 – Research in Teaching English as a Second Language

E601 – Research in Teaching English as a Second Language | 3 credits | 3:30 - 4:45 PM | TR | Tony Becker

This course will focus on introducing students to classroom-based research as a method of improving teaching and learning in language classrooms, particularly in those instructional settings with ESL/EFL students. Specifically, this course will focus on conducting classroom-based research as an important activity for refining teaching techniques and methods in the language classroom. Students will gain hands-on experience with conducting classroom research in the four skills (i.e., listening, reading, speaking, and writing) within the context of the language classroom. 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. This course is recommended for TEFL/TESL graduate students but is also open to any graduate students interested in conducting language research, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches.

E607A – Teaching Writing, Composition & Rhetoric

E607A Teaching Writing, Composition & Rhetoric | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 PM | TR | Tobi Jacobi

Addresses theoretical and applied understandings of reading and writing processes in the first-year college writing classroom; considers practical implications for professional practice in the teaching of writing; critically examines theory, disciplinary conventions, and policies in regard to writing pedagogy.

For first-year GTAs teaching CO 150. Contact department for registration.

E607B – Teaching Writing: Creative Writing

E607B Teaching Writing: Creative Writing | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 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.

E608 – Integrating Writing in the Academic Core

E610 – Literature Program Colloquium

E630A – Special Topics in Literature: In the American Grain

E630A – Special Topics in Literature: In the American Grain | 3 credits | 4:00 - 7:00 PM | W | Sasha Steensen

In his autobiography, William Carlos Williams describes his motivation for writing In the American Grain as an attempt to “try to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify” (178). This course charts the contradictory impulses that Williams found in American literature: the romanticizing and demonizing of the wilderness; the battle between our liberal transcendentalist and our conservative Puritan pasts; the contradictory relationship between individualism and democracy; and American literature’s struggle between Eurocentrism and the Poundian dictum “make it new!” After spending a few weeks exploring foundational texts by Puritan ministers, antinomians, slaves, captives, indigenous thinkers, and the founding “fathers,” we will consider the nineteenth-century shift away from the fear of the wilderness. Dickinson, Thoreau, Melville and others believed, just as their Puritan ancestors did, that the wilderness was inhabited. But rather than simply fearing these inhabitants, they attempted to harness their energy for their work. The twentieth century ushered in a self-conscious, poetic exploration of historiography itself. William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and Susan Howe’s The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history are texts that blur the lines between primary and secondary, between literature and literary criticism. We will pair these texts with chapters from Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Finally, we will look at more recent texts that begin to expose the many limitations of our racist, sexist and capitalist past and present, including Claudia Rankin’s Citizen, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Paisley Rekdal’s West,. By tracing this grain in American history back to its roots, we’ll see how American poets and essayists have acted as historians, mining early American texts and giving voice to those who have been silenced or forgotten by the traditional tomes of history.

E633 – Special Topics in Writing and Rhetoric: Autoethnography

E633 – Special Topics in Writing and Rhetoric: Autoethnography | 3 credits | 05:00 - 07:50 PM | R | Dr. Sue Doe

Welcome to auto-e, the challenging study of self within the structures and the dynamics of power in culture(s), and, paradoxically also the study of cultural concerns through an acknowledged awareness of self. Engaging in this dialectic, we will consider theoretical and critical examinations of autoethnographic representations, will examine methodological strategies associated with autoethnography as a form of research and field work, will examine others’ approaches to the challenging undertaking of autoethnographic writing, and will originate our own autoethnographic projects in directions relevant to individual interests as well as upon shared experiences at CSU.

E635 – Critical Studies in Literature and Culture: Modernist Poetry

E635 – Critical Studies in Literature and Culture: Modernist Poetry | 3 credits | 09:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Philip Tsang

In this course, we will examine the development of modernist aesthetics in twentieth-century poetry. How did modernist poets situate themselves historically in relation to earlier poetic traditions? How did they respond to such diverse issues as immigration, exile, social reform, racism, gender and sexuality, world war, imperialism, and technology? What did they aspire to achieve through formal experimentation? How do poetic forms shape social communities? We will explore these questions through the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, H. D., Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, David Jones, Claude McKay, Louis Zukofsky, Aimé Césaire, among others.

E637 – Histories of Writing & Rhetoric

E637 - Histories of Writing & Rhetoric | 3 credits | 05:00 - 07:50 PM | W | Tim Amidon

Understanding writing as socially, historically, and technologically situated, E637 explores how composers act rhetorically to mediate self-identities, social communities, and material worlds. The central question that will motivate our inquiry in E637 will be: How has/does/can writing impact the individuals, cultures, and material worlds we inhabit? To address this question, we will rhetorically attune to a range of narratives, texts, artifacts, theories, and histories related to the practice of literacy and language. For instance, we’ll engage with decolonial theory and historiographies of the field of writing studies and apply concepts from actor network, post humanist, and activity theory to make sense of what and how writing might be understood as a situated socio-technical activity.

Broadly, we will consider how such practices mean with/for/across peoples, cultures, identities, nations, and historical eras where such practices might be located. In more narrow terms, we will study the ways that embodied, analog, and digital literacies are leveraged by specific individuals and social aggregates to realize epistemic and communicative goals. We will explore topics that range from the role of social media/digital composing technologies within disasters, social movements, and marketing campaigns to the kinds of corporeal writing practices such as tattooing, ecriture feminine, and pit-sense. In sum, we will seek to trace how writing allows humans to cultivate connections to ourselves, other humans, institutions, living beings, and the Earth. Assignments will include multimodal writing projects, ethnographic projects, and research projects designed for presentation at national conferences and/or publication within disciplinary journals.

Through our examinations, we will theorize what it means to historicize writing, and how writing, literacies, and language systems have been wielded to concretize power relationship across time, place, and cultures.

We will explore:

• the historiography of writing practices, technologies, and literacies; • contemporary histories which theorize writing, literacy, and authorship; • how to read rhetorically, using critical techniques and writings; • how reading and writing are socially and culturally constructed;

• how to develop research questions; • how to read and compose scholarly genres; • how to present research findings in a conference or journal.

Mostly, we’ll read, read, read, and write, then, we’ll read some more. We’ll talk about our reading and our writing. We’ll question how our own literacy, writing, and language practices are subject to ideological and historical forces. And, we’ll think about what reading and writing mean for us a scholars, teachers, and citizens of this place and time.

E640A – Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction

E640B – Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry

E640C – Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay

E687C - Literary Editing

E692 - Seminar in Writing, Rhetoric and Social Change

E692 Seminar in Writing, Rhetoric, and Social Change | 1 credit | 04:00 - 06:50PM | M | Tim Amidon

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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Summer 2023 Courses

To learn more about the Environmental Humanities program at CSU's Mountain Campus, click here!

Undergraduate Courses, Summer 2023

CO130 – Academic Writing

CO150 – College Composition

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.

Sections may be offered online.

CO300 – Writing Arguments

CO301B – Writing in the Disciplines: Sciences

E210 – Beginning Creative Writing

E232 – Introduction to Humanities

E232 Introduction to Humanities | 3 credits | Online | May 15 - June 11, 2023 | 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 Fiction

E311B – Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry

E320 – Introduction to the Study of Language

E320 – Introduction to the Study of Language | 3 credits | Online | June 12 - August 6, 2023 | 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.

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

E332 – Modern Women Writers

E332 - Modern Women Writers | 3 credits | Online | May 15 - June 11, 2023 | Elizabeth Steinway

What is “women’s writing”? How do we identify, describe, and understand female-authored literature? How and why does this distinction matter? In this course, we will consider these questions through our examination of works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers from across the globe. Using a range of historical and theoretical perspectives, we will study various literary forms, including poetry, short stories, comics, novels, and drama. As we analyze the intersections between identity, experience, and representation, we will continue to develop our understanding of what it means to view women’s writing as a distinct literary category.

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

E339 – Literature of the Earth

E339 - Literature of the Earth | 3 credits | Moutain Campus | June 12-24 | Matthew Cooperman

This summer, explore the Literatures of the Earth (E339) in the shadow of the Great Divide. Let CSU’s Mountain Campus be your portal to the grand tradition of American Nature Writing. From Rocky Mt homestead literature to indigenous borderlands writing, we’ll read the genre in poetry and prose, and we’ll get outside to write it—the far/near, then/now—of this living literature.

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

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New Courses

Join us for interdisciplinary explorations and deep-dives into Creative Writing, English Education, Linguistics, Literature, and Rhetoric!

E200 – Inquiry-Based Teaching, Learning, and Communicating

E202 – Language: Society, Culture, and Identity

This course examines the interaction of language with individuals and larger social communities, as well as with the many cultures represented within those various communities. Students explore how language functions to establish and/or solidify notions of power, ethnicity, gender, in addition to social and cultural identities. As a result of this course, it is our hope that students will develop an appreciation of how language can serve as an object of scientific study and will identify ways to apply what they learn about language to everyday social and cultural interactions in their own lives and communities.

E204 – Creative Writing as Transformative Practice

E282 – Activist Rhetoric and Writing

We’ve all heard the claim, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Yet in our contemporary culture, it can sometimes be difficult to reach readers, to shape opinion and inspire action. This course is intended to help you develop tools to do just that. We will discuss a multitude of texts that have stirred audiences, motivated social and legal change, and encouraged social justice. We’ll examine a variety of genres of activist writing—fiction, poetry, memoire, manifestoes, social media campaigns, etc.--to understand how they reach their intended audiences, how they promote new feelings and ideas, and how they build solidarity. You’ll have an opportunity to explore a variety of issues and to write a variety of genuine activist texts, all while participating in a community of writers whose ideas, while differing widely, will inspire new ways of thinking and communicating.

E373 – The Afterlives of Literature

E407 – Genre Bending

“Genre Bending” is a new variable topics literature course. By studying examples of a specific literary genre and its offshoots and “cousins,” this course builds a foundation for understanding how genre functions as a way to categorize texts and set audience expectations. At the same time, we’ll explore how genre offers writers and readers a fluid, open-ended set of conventions or elements to play around with or subvert. This tension between genre as a fixed system and as open-ended process informs how we create, evaluate, and enjoy literary texts and other media.

Colorado State University students walking to and from classes on the Lory Student Center Plaza, May 3, 2019.

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College of Liberal Arts Info

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.

The Rambler: Fall and Summer 2023 courses, advising information

The Rambler Archive beginning 2013

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