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.

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FALL 2022 COURSES

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 2022

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

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

E280A3 – Creative Writing as Transformative Practice

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 – Writing and Research: Coming of Age in Twentieth-Twenty First Century Literature

E310 Writing and Research: Coming of Age in Twentieth-Twenty First Century Literature | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | MWF | Lynn Shutters

This class is designed to teach students how to conduct literary research and write literary criticism—skills crucial to your success in upper-division literature courses. To develop those skills, we’ll study three authors whose work addresses the concept of “coming of age.” The first author is American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), who wrote at a time when first-wave feminism was coming of age in the U.S, and who sought to carve out a space for woman-centered poetics in a predominantly masculine aesthetic tradition. The second author is Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose Nervous Conditions (1988) is a coming of age story addressing intersections of gender and race in a postcolonial context. The third author is Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Never Let Me Go (2005) is a coming of age story set in a dystopian world of human cloning. Although these three authors are usually thought of as belonging to different cultural and literary traditions, we will ask how the theme of coming of age might allow us to bring them together. We’ll also discuss how this theme continues to resonate in our world today.

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

E311A – Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction

E311B – Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry

E311C – Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction

E320 – Introduction to the Study of Language

E320.001 – Introduction to the Study of Language | 3 credits | 11:00-11:50 AM | MWF | 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 Language concentration.

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.

E340 – Literature and Film Studies: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa

E340.001 Literature and Film Studies: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 PM | TR | Philip Tsang

Akira Kurosawa is one of the most important directors in film history. Known for his unique directing style, he has revolutionized the language of cinema not only in Japan but all across the world. In this course we will watch ten of his major films and explore what is so distinct about his art. In addition, we will take a brief look at three other Japanese directors to gain a wider perspective on Japanese cinema.

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

E341 – Literary Criticism and Theory

E344 – Shakespeare

E344.001 Shakespeare | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | MWF | Barbara Sebek

Theatre historians estimate that, between 1576 and 1640, 25,000 people per week attended theatrical performances in and around London, totaling 50 million visits. 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 do Shakespeare's plays continue to inform global consciousness today? We will also study how 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. Final papers or projects will allow students to tailor their work to their specific concentrations within or beyond the English major.

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

E384A – Supervised College Teaching: Classroom

E401 – Teaching Reading

E402 – Teaching Composition

E405 – Young Adult Literature

E412A – Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

E422 – African-American Literature

E422 African-American Literature | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | Zach Hutchins

This course will introduce students to the voices of black African and Black American writers who have shaped the trajectory of American literature and of the nation itself. From the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the fictionalized true story of Thomas Jefferson’s children by Sally Hemings to the novels of contemporary luminaries such as Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead, students will investigate the realities and legacies of racism, slavery, and other forms of oppression on a body of literature luminous in its beauty and liberating power. Because so much of African American literature has been produced outside of conventional publication channels, students will also participate in a self-directed exploration of the archive to locate, share, and analyze materials that expand our conception of what stories and voices the study of African American literature encompasses. A selection of these archival discoveries will be collected and curated in an anthology prepared and published by the class, as students participate in the creation promotion, as well as the consumption, of an African American literary canon.

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

E430 – Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

E430.001 Eighteenth-Century English Fiction | 3 credits | 12:00 - 12:50 PM | MWF | Aparna Gollapudi

The eighteenth century is said to have witnessed the "rise of the novel." Modern readers have a fairly fixed set of generic expectations when they pick up a novel. But for its earliest readers, the novel was just what its name implied - a novelty. And as the earliest novelists were not constrained by any set novelistic conventions or expectations, their works are richly experimental. It is apt, therefore, that the course claims to focus on Restoration and eighteenth-century "fiction" and not the "novel." However, in all its diverse forms, fiction in this period explored and articulated individual subjectivity in new and unprecedented ways. Also, in the eighteenth-century emerged narrative forms densely textured with the minutiae of everyday life, containing characters with contemporary manners and morals. Eighteenth-century readers were highly conscious of the power of the new narrative form, but there was little consensus as to whether the novel was an effective tool for moral instruction or an instrument of corruption. This course focuses on some of the most popular practitioners of the dynamic and multifarious genre that was the eighteenth-century novel.

You should expect a good amount of reading - it is, after all, a fiction course, and those eighteenth-century folks wrote nice, long novels! For each text, the required reading will be divided into even,
manageable segments, however, be ready to be initially challenged by the unfamiliar words or phraseology of eighteenth-century fiction. The assignments in the course include formal and informal writing, presentations, and group work.

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

E465 – Topics in Literature and Language: Discourse, Identity & Social Change

E465.001 Topics in Literature and Language: Discourse, Identity & Social Change | 3 credits | 03:00 - 04:15 PM | MW | Doug Cloud

Identities matter, both those of the writer/speaker and those of the “spoken about.” In this class, we will explore the ways in which identities (both group and individual) shape and are in turn shaped by language, with consequences both social and individual. We’ll ask questions like these:

1. What is the relationship between language, identity, and social change?
2. How do we negotiate essentialist and constructionist perspectives on identity in real life?
3. Is focusing on identity a bad thing?
4. What do people do with identities? What’s the point of them?
5. Do we have a choice about our identities, and does it matter?
6. Who has the “authority” to talk about identity categories? Is it only people in those categories?
7. And many others.

Students will emerge with a complex (and occasionally contradictory) understanding of how identities transform our language and are in turn transformed by it. This knowledge can shape how we write and speak in many contexts: professional, political, personal, and others. Students will read and apply important theories of discourse and identity in a collaborative study of how the category “student” is constructed and used across contexts. Students’ final projects will focus on an identity category of each student’s choice. Many students choose to study categories relevant to their professional identities.

This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. For English Education concentrators only, it fulfills both the capstone and a Category 3 or 4 upper-division English requirement. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 3 or 4 elective.

E470 – Individual Author: James Joyce – Ulysses at 100

E470.001 Individual Author: James Joyce – Ulysses at 100 | 3 credits | 09:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Philip Tsang

In 1922, Irish author James Joyce published one of the most important works in the English language: Ulysses. Loosely modeled on Homer’s Odyssey, the book explores one single day in the life of an ordinary man in Dublin. In this course, we will carry out a slow reading of this rich and complex work. Immersing ourselves in Joyce’s pre-WWI Ireland, we will ask what makes Ulysses the masterpiece that it is.

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

LB393 – #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #DREAMers, and #Pride: Social Movements & Collective Action through History and Story

LB393.001 #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #DREAMers, and #Pride: Social Movements & Collective Action through History and Story | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Ricki Ginsberg and Jessica Jackson

Calling all activists! This interdisciplinary course is designed to explore protest and activism as it appears in history and story. Through current events, discussion, film, and young adult literature, students will explore the formation, growth, and currency of social movements and forms of collective action through an in-depth exploration of contemporary issues of race, gender, immigration, and sexuality.

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 2022

E501 – Theories of Composition

E501 Theories of Composition | 3 credits | 09:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | 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.

E503 – Investigating Classroom Literacies

E503 Investigating Classroom Literacies | 3 credits | 05:00 - 07:30 PM | R | Ricki Ginsberg

This course is open to students in all programs and designed to investigate classroom literacies. There will be a considerable amount of choice within the course to meet the needs and interests of all students who enroll. Students will read and explore various examples of investigations of classroom literacies and will conduct their own small studies. They will develop a classroom literacy topic they are interested in exploring, conduct a literature review, write a research question, collect and analyze a small amount of data, and produce preliminary findings and discussion sections. The goal of this course is to prepare teachers (or those who may go into teaching) with sound, ethical research knowledge to allow for participation in teacher action research. The course will include a specific focus on educational change.

E505A – Major Authors: English

E505A Major Authors: English| 3 credits | 03:00 PM - 04:15 PM | MW | Barbara Sebek

A variety of developments in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reconfigured how many Englishmen and women understood their place in the world, and how they conceptualized the contours of the “global” itself: Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe; new technologies of mapping and navigation; the establishment of organized long-distance trading companies and expanding trade networks; English incursions into the waters and territories of rival and more established colonial and economic powers; the growth of London as an economic, political, and cultural center. Shakespeare’s professional theatrical company—operating like a guild and organized according to principles not unlike those of the long-distance trading companies—took to the stages of the Theatre, the Curtain, the Globe, and the Blackfriars at the historical moment when these developments were transforming how human difference was construed. How do Shakespeare’s plays inform shifting constructions of "others" (internal and external) and processes of cultural self-definition?

This course will study a few of Shakespeare’s plays and critical and creative treatments of them in the context of these phenomena. We will explore the generative tensions between studying the plays in their earliest contexts and studying their various global and postcolonial afterlives. Students will be encouraged to pursue final projects relevant to their graduate concentration, whether pedagogical, rhetorical, creative, or critical frameworks.

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

E507 – Special Topics in Linguistics: Current Professional Concerns in TESOL/Applied Linguistics - Decolonization and related topics.

E507.001 Special Topics in Linguistics: Current Professional Concerns in TESOL/Applied Linguistics: Decolonization and related topics. | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | MWF | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala

Central to current discussions among applied linguists and TESOL professionals is the need to decolonize our field. Indeed, our field and professional organizations have been heavily criticized for our complicity with colonialism and the empire, ignoring other ways of knowing. This course is intended to address these issues. It will offer participants the opportunity to build background knowledge on key topics/terms necessary to participate in this important project and, ideally, help advance this ongoing professional discussion. Therefore, the following will be at the center of our class discussions: decolonization, decoloniality, hegemonic epistemologies (i.e., epistemologies from the North), epistemologies from the South, positionality, etc. Together, we will tackle questions such as: Why does it matter that we work on decolonizing our field? What will it take? What role do we play in this process? What can we do to legitimize other ways of knowing? How do we go about decolonizing our own research and educational praxis? This course is intended to be a highly interactive and participatory one. We will engage in much critical reflexivity throughout the course. While it is intended for graduate students in the TEFL/TESL concentration, graduate students from other concentrations are also welcome.

E514 – Phonology/Morphology: ESL/EFL

E514 Phonology/Morphology: ESL/EFL | 3 credits | 03:00 - 03:50 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.

E522 – Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Analysis

E522 Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Analysis | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 AM | MWF | Gerry Delahunty

This course introduces students to the study of linguistic meaning and how it is communicated. It will introduce topics and methods currently considered central to the field, including the crucial distinction between language and its use; the development and analysis of computerized corpora of texts; word and sentence meanings and how they are related; various principles for the interpretation of language in context; and selected topics in discourse analysis—discourse modes (the spoken/written relationships); multi-modal discourse; textual cohesion and coherence; text and discourse types (genres); rhetorical move analysis; technologically mediated discourse; speech acts; discourse as action; implicit and explicit communication; politeness and impoliteness; situational variation; critical discourse analysis; selections from discourses of racism, politics, media, law, justice, medicine, and education; discourse and gender; inter- and intra-cultural communication. The topics we discuss will be based on student interests and preferences.

Students in all fields should find these topics and approaches valuable complements to those of their own disciplines, but especially students in English programs - TEFL/TESL, Rhetoric and Composition, Literature, Creative Writing, and English Education , as well as advanced undergraduates in the Linguistics concentration and in the Interdisciplinary Minor in Linguistics and Culture.

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 | 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.

Required Textbooks

Larsen-Freeman, D., & Anderson, M. (2011). Techniques and principles in language teaching. Oxford: OUP.

Nation, I.S.P., & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL listening and speaking. New York: Routledge.

Nation, I.S.P. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL reading and writing. New York: Routledge.

E600A – Research Method/Theory: Literary Scholarship

E600A Research Method/Theory: Literary Scholarship | 3 credits | 02:00 - 04:50 PM | F | Aparna Gollapudi

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.

E603 – Critical Digital Rhetoric

E603 Critical Digital Rhetoric | 3 credits | 12:30 - 01:45 PM | TR | Tim Amidon

Designed as a graduate-level seminar, E603: Critical Digital Rhetoric, invites students to explore how digital technologies influence the practice of literacy and communication in our world. This course introduces students to theories, pedagogies, and methodologies common to the fields of digital rhetoric and computers and writing, calling on learners to actively explore how humans marshal embodied, analog, and digital technologies to realize epistemic, communicative, and mediational aims. Students explore the nexus of technology, rhetoric, and literacy through a socio-cultural lens, asking how computer-mediated and digitally-networked technologies impact, displace, and enrich the practice of human activities. Over the course of the semester, students consider five key themes that have received significant critical attention within the fields of digital rhetoric and computers and writing:

o embodiment, materiality, and multimodality
o infrastructure, interface, and spatial design
o access and accessibility
o ownership and authorship in an age of participatory composing
o digital rhetorics

As we progress through the semester, students will explicate how these themes mean with/for contemporary and historical theories of writing, literacy, and communication, pedagogies for teaching and learning literacy, methodologies for studying writing, literacy, and communication, as well as the practice of everyday literacy within civic, private, and workplace contexts. Students are responsible for presenting information to peers, planning a technology learning activity, actively
participating and collaborating within discussions and in-class learning activities, developing a piece of long-form scholarship, and offering generative, helpful, and critical peer-to-peer feedback.

E607A – Teaching Writing, Composition & Rhetoric

E607A Teaching Writing, Composition & Rhetoric | 3 credits | 04:30 - 07:20 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

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

E631 – Writing in the Immersive Field

E631 – Writing in the Immersive Field | 3 credits | 04:00 - 04:50 PM | WF | Matthew Cooperman

This course explores writing as a mobile artifact that always already occurs in the field. Where that field is, what it looks like, how we are able/not able to enter it is our ostensible subject. Yet how to define “field?” And who is doing the defining? From Olson’s “projective verse” to Gloria Anzaldua’s “borderlands” to Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology”––all various iterations of the burgeoning field of ecopoetics––we’ll set out to be where we already are. Readings in ethnography, bioregionalism, philosophy, indigenous cosmology, radical cartography and documentary art will provide deep content and methodological models for our inquiry.

E633 – Special Topics in Writing and Rhetoric

E633 – Special Topics in Writing and Rhetoric | 3 credits | 03:30 - 04:45 PM | TR | Sarah Sloane

How we travel is perhaps more important than where we travel. When we consider the ethical dimension of meetings with new people, cultures, and values, we are thinking about how we encounter difference. Some of the questions this class will address directly relate to the act of travel: What are the ethical risks a traveler takes, such as participating in poverty tourism? When travelers pack their bags, what cultural baggage do they travel with too? Is it true that wherever you go, there you are? The other questions we will entertain are connected to writing: How do we write ethically? How does a writer’s point-of-view reflect the traveler’s attitude towards a culture? What are the risks, and the evidence, of seeing a place through a monocultural lens? How can we write for social justice in places that are new to us, or where we might not belong? We will read historical samples of travel writing from the 19th and 20th centuries, paying attention to the relationship between the writer and who or what is observed, as well as the purposes and effects of that writing. We will look at contemporary travel writing in Granta, travel vlogs, daily newspapers, and travel advice websites. We will, of course, try our own hand at travelling and writing. Graduate students from all parts of the department are welcome.

E635 – Deep Time: Narrating the Distant Past and Future

E635.001 – Deep Time: Narrating the Distant Past and Future | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Lynn Badia

This course considers how we narrate and represent “deep time.” A recent topic of interest in environmental and energy humanities scholarship, deep time narratives represent or acknowledge vast scales of time (looking into the distant past or future) that greatly exceed the duration of human lives and human history. For example, some Anthropocene narratives of deep time attempt to put human actors in relationship with planetary forces and environments that long preceded humanity but condition our existence. Evolutionary lineage, climate change, fossil fuel modernity, and Earth system science all demand the representation of vast temporal durations that are not immediately commensurate with our modes of narrating human history. In this course, then, we will consider the formal strategies that have been deployed or are currently emerging to represent and narrate deep time causation, relationality, and transformation and how those narratives put pressure on our understanding of the human subject. We will consider literary texts from a variety of genres alongside selections of theory, philosophy, and film.

E640A – Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction

E640B – Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry

E640C – Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay

E644 – Creative Science Writing

E644 Creative Science Writing | 3 credits | 04:00 - 05:15 PM | TR | Erika Szymanski

An approach to science writing for diverse audiences as a simultaneously creative and strategic endeavor, through principles that apply to science writing from the journal article to the personal essay, with a particular focus on writing for audiences beyond the discipline. Read and discuss foundational science writing and science communication theory, practice writing about work for diverse audiences, and participate in extensive peer-review and workshopping.

E684A - Supervised College Teaching: Composition

E684C - Supervised College Teaching: Creative Writing

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 | 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.

Browse the CSU Course Catalog

SUMMER 2022 COURSES

Undergraduate Courses, Summer 2022

CO150 - College Composition

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

CO130 - Academic Writing | 3 credits | June 13 - Aug 7 | Instructor Christine Discoe

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

E210 - Beginning Creative Writing | May 16 - July 10 | Instructor Daniel Schonning

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

E232 - Introduction to Humanities | 3 credits | June 13 - August 7 | 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

E238 - Contemporary Global Literature 3 credits, May 16 - July 7, 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

CO301B - Writing in the Disciplines: Science

CO301B - Writing in the Disciplines: Science, 3 credits, June 13 - August 7

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.

E311B - Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry

E320 - Introduction to the Study of Language

E320 - Introduction to the Study of Language, 3 credits, June 13 - August 7, 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.

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

E332 - Modern Women Writers

E332 - Modern Women Writers, 3 credits, 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, novelists from Indian and Zimbabwe, Asian American playwrights, a graphic novelist: these are some of the figures you will meet in this course. We will consider their works from a range of historical and theoretical perspectives. This is an online course with a mix of recorded lectures and virtual synchronous discussion sessions. Students will be assessed based upon formal literary interpretation assignments, online participation/ discussions, reading responses, etc.

This course fulfills a Category 2 or 3 elective requirement for English majors and world literature for English Education concentrators

E370 - American Literature in Cultural Contexts - Prison Writing

E370 - American Literature in Cultural Contexts, 3 credits, June 13 - July 10, Instructor Tobi Jacobi

What is prison writing, and when does such writing become literature? Is prison writing spectacle, art, therapy, or rehabilitation? How might incarceration influence composing processes? How do gender, racial, and cultural identity affect prison writing? How are prison writings received by ‘free’ audiences? Whose writings get published and why? What are the relationships between writing and freedom? This course aims to make connections between literature and the material world as we read texts in historical and sociocultural contexts and consider how a diverse set of American incarcerated writers approach writing as a meaning making process. In this way, our primary goal is to consider the role of language in constructing identities within discourse communities beyond the academy and often the conventional literary canon. Our examination will include memoir (Jimmy Santiago Baca/Smedley), drama (Miguel Piñero), poetry (drawn from multiple sources), film, and critical writing (Angela Davis/Ted Conover) as well as sample texts from a local prison writing project. Course assignments will include two response projects, online discussion forums, and a final exam.

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

E403 - Writing the Environment

E403 - Writing the Environment, 3 credits, June 13 - June 26, Instructor Matthew Cooperman

This summer, try writing in the shadow of the Great Divide. Let CSU’s Mountain Campus be your portal to the grand tradition of American Nature Writing in poetry and prose. We’ll read a good deal of it, and we’ll get outside to write the far & near, and then & now of our experiences.

What is the environment? Is it the same as nature? Can we touch it, respond to it? What is the local? The global? What things and creatures do we encounter there? Who is other? What is wild? And where do you live? Right now, no doubt, in a town in the west of a teetering country. Can you write about that? Is there nature there? And what if we went way up high in the Rocky Mountains. Can we write about that? What is the tradition of ‘wild writing?’ In this course we will explore these questions as we read and write both in and out of our extraordinary mountain classroom. Through field journals, durational attention projects, and walking and talking exercises, we’ll test out what we know, what we’ve learned, what we’ve forgotten. Come with hiking boots and a contemplative mind. Authors include Barry Lopez, Lisa Robertson, Li Po, Rick Bass, Basho, Jane Naviyuk Kane, and others.

This course is part of the College of Liberal Arts New Environmental Humanities Program on CSU Mountain Campus. This course runs June 12-June 25, 2022. Instruction occurs M-F, with students residing at the Mountain Campus, and weekends free. To register, please contact Matthew Cooperman for approval and registration information.

This course fulfills Category 4 elective requirement

E412C - Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction

AMST 101 - Self/Community in American Culture Since 1877

AMST 101 - Self/Community in American Culture Since 1877, 3 credits, June 13 - July 8, Instructor Ashley Davies

Understanding our past and our vision for the future can help us to understand the present. In our study of the United States of America, we'll work to better understand our American ideology and how it shapes history, the American national identity, and ourselves as part of this country. Rather than working purely chronologically, like a traditional history class would, we will look deeply into concepts that have shaped the nation we know today. This semester, we will explore the ideas around modern Indigenous issues, equality, the American Dream, and war and its reach American Studies, as a field within the liberal arts, is interdisciplinary in nature. Therefore, you can expect to encounter, analyze, synthesize, and write about texts from literature, history, visual art, music, film, architecture, design, psychology, and others. By bringing these different texts together, we will start to understand how mythology is formed and what is sacrificed as those mythologies become pervasive.

Beyond the study of American culture, the course also requires and helps students develop skills in reading, writing, critical thinking, and speaking; it also helps develop their abilities to work both independently and collaboratively.

Graduate Courses, Summer 2022

E695 - Independent Study

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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: Summer & Fall 2022 courses, advising information

The Rambler Archive beginning 1994

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