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 Spring 2023 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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SPRING 2023 COURSES

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2023

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

AMST101 – Self/Community in American Culture Since 1877

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

CO401 – Writing and Style

CO402 – Principles of Digital Rhetoric and Design

E140 – The Study of Literature

E140 The Study of Literature | 3 credits | 02:00 - 02:50 PM | MWF | Grant Bain

Greetings, intrepid literary explorers! In this course you will develop the fundamental skills of reading and interpreting literary texts, including close reading, symbolic analysis, literary allusion, and pattern recognition. In addition, you’ll learn some of the fundamentals of critical theory. This section of English 140 will teach you these skills through the genre of science fiction. Focusing on science fiction will also help you to learn more about how these skills apply in the field of literary study, all while delving into a rich and entertaining body of writing. So beam up, set your phasers to “learn,” and let’s boldly go where you haven’t gone before!

E142 – Reading Without Borders

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

E280A2 – Language: Society, Culture and Identity

E280A2 - Language: Society, Culture and Identity | 3 credits | 10:00 - 10:50 AM | MWF | Luciana Marques

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.

E281A1 – Activist Rhetoric and Writing

E281A1 - Activist Rhetoric and Writing | 3 credits | 03:30 - 04:45 PM | TR | Lisa Langstraat

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.

E311A – Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction

E311B – Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry

E322 – English Language for Teachers

E329 – Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

E329 – Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis | 3 credits | 01:00-01:50 PM | MWF | Luciana Marques

E329 introduces the study of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in natural languages, with examples from English and other languages. Pragmatics is the study of general principles that communicators invoke when producing and interpreting language in context. Discourse analysis studies the properties of specific types of language use in specific settings, e.g., conversational, advertising, legal, medical, educational, as well as such topics as politeness, gender, genre, identity, and culture, all areas of exciting current research and discovery. In this class, you will understand and be able to make analytic use of the essential concepts in the study of pragmatics and discourse analysis; you will become familiar with variant terminology; you will become proficient in basic linguistic analysis and will begin to apply analytic techniques to data you have collected yourself.

E330 – Gender in World Literature

E330 - Gender in World Literature | 3 credits | 03:30 - 04:45 PM | TR | Aparna Gollapudi

This course initiates conversations about genders, sexualities, and bodies between writers from a range of geographical and cultural locations. We will read a variety of genres as we explore the historical and cultural processes that shape discourses about gendered identities and experiences. Focusing mostly on non-Anglo-American literature, we will consider how these works reinforce, interrogate, or complicate gendering practices in the context of their specific times and locations. But through celebrating the multiplicity of voices and complex nuances of social politics, the course will also seek connections or resonances between diverse literary works in order to see if any common themes or persistent ideas emerge as a shared concern throughout this world of literatures.

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

E333 – Critical Studies of Popular Texts: "Defective" Detective Fiction

E333 - Critical Studies of Popular Texts: "Defective" Detective Fiction | 3 credits | 12:00 - 12:50 PM | MWF | Gerry Delahunty

Detective fiction is a global phenomenon. It is today's most popular literary genre. Millions of copies of detective fiction are sold each year. Agatha Christie's books have sold over 2 billion - yes, that's billion with a "b" - in over 100 different languages. This course will give you the opportunity to try your hand at creating your own "defective" detective and setting them loose on a difficult and intriguing investigation of a major crime, hindered though often helped their "defect."

"Defective" detectives suffer from a range of maladies: arrogance; alcohol and opium addiction; loneliness and self-doubt; incipient dementia; incurable nosiness. Some detectives have "sidekicks," who may be a narrator, a therapist, or a savior. Detective (and sidekick) almost always solve the mystery and bring closure and justice, sometimes because of the detective's defects, sometimes in spite of them.

We will read, watch, read about and discuss engrossing examples of the genre in novels, movies, and tv dramas selected from a variety of countries, representing considerable cultural and historical diversity, a broad range of social issues, and several legal systems and processes.

The themes include family relations, racism and race relations, colonial rule and resistance to it, ecological degradation and activism, and particularly relevant to dangerous current events, the fall of the USSR and its effects on countries that had belonged to the union and on their neighbors.

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

E339 – Literature of the Earth

E339 - Literature of the Earth | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 PM | TR | Lynn Badia

This course explores environmental literature, film, and theory from the early twentieth century to the present day. Covering a range of literary genres and media – novels, manifestoes, short stories, poems, film, etc. – we will learn to think critically about how texts not only represent the natural world but also narrativize and shape our interactions with it. We will examine texts utilizing critical frameworks informed by environmental justice, feminism, (post)colonialism, and Indigenous perspectives.

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

E341 – Literary Criticism and Theory

E344 – Shakespeare

E344.001 Shakespeare | 3 credits | 12:00 - 12:50 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

E407 – Genre Bending

E407 - Genre Bending | 3 credits | 01:00 - 01:50 PM | TR | Barbara Sebek

“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.

This semester’s focal genre is tragedy and the longstanding yet ever-evolving sub-genre of revenge tragedy. We will read a combination of ancient, renaissance, and modern revenge narratives including one biblical narrative, one verse narrative, three Renaissance plays, a twentieth-century crime novel, and several modern film and stage adaptations of the plays and the novel. Students will create their own topics for final papers and projects tailored to their individual interests, including revenge tales that aren’t assigned on the syllabus.

Like other variable topics courses, this may be taken for up to 6 credits.

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

E412A – Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

E412B – Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry

E412C – Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction

E425 – Restoration and 18th Century Literature

E425 - Restoration and 18th Century Literature | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 PM | TR | Aparna Gollapudi

In 1660 monarchy was restored to England after years of civil war and parliament rule. In 1807 the buying and selling of slaves was made illegal across the British empire. This course will introduce you to the literature and culture of the years between these momentous historical bookends. You will study a wide range of literature including poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and memoirs from this period, often referred to as the 'long eighteenth century. ' But instead of a comprehensive literature survey, the course is structured as a series of vignettes, each introducing you to a fascinating and important aspect of the period. Using focused thematic clusters on topics such as "Politics and Comedy," "Sex and Sexualities," "Empire, Race, and Slavery," we will explore literature that tells us much about the long eighteenth century while also offering insight into our own world. This period was a cauldron of ideas and ideologies that might seem both starkly alien as well as startlingly familiar. Similarly, as new readers of literature from this era, the unfamiliar linguistic style will challenge you even as it will delights you with its rich wit if you persevere in engaging with it meaningfully. Expect plenty of reading, writing (both formal and informal), discussion participation and leadership, group work, presentations etc. Warning: We will be studying works that contain explicit language, graphic bodily imagery, violence, and overtly sexual content.

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

E441 – American Prose Since 1900: Writing Identities

E441 - American Prose Since 1900: Writing Identities | 3 credits | 10:00 - 10:50 AM | MWF | Leif Sorensen

This study of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and non-fiction explores how writers have sought to construct different models of national, individual, cultural, gendered, and subcultural identity in novels, short fiction, essays, and memoirs. Our readings will be drawn from an eclectic mixture of realism, experimental and avant-garde writing, popular works, and documentary or autobiographical texts. In addition to considering literary genres we will also spend some time discussing the different communications media (from film and radio in the early 1900s to contemporary digital media) that are crucial components of the social world from which our texts arise. Authors studied may include Leslie Feinberg, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ralph Ellison, Cathy Park Hong, Gish Jen, Billy-Rae Belcourt, Zora Neale Hurston, and P. Djeli Clark. Student work for the class will include regular participation in class discussion, discussion facilitation, a series of short analytical essays, a creative or critical reflection on art and identity, and a final project addressing a topic chosen by the student.

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

E465 – Topics in Literature and Language: Reading and Creating YA Novels – Using a Practitioner’s Approach to Explore Narrative Theories and Forms

E465 - Topics in Literature and Language: Reading and Creating YA Novels – Using a Practitioner’s Approach to Explore Narrative Theories and Forms | 3 credits | 03:00 - 04:15 PM | MW | Todd Mitchell

YA literature is a rapidly growing and evolving genre that incorporates an astonishing variety of narrative forms including novels in verse, epistolary novels, hybrid texts, polyphonic narratives, graphic novels, scripted novels, and other narrative innovations.

In this interactive capstone course, we’ll explore prominent narrative theories for how to develop stories, and we’ll see how these theories unfold in several contemporary YA novels selected to demonstrate a diverse range of forms, cultural perspectives, and narrative techniques. In our discussions we’ll pay particular attention to how form works with content, and to what we can learn from texts as writers and creators. To further our exploration of narrative theories and forms, we’ll use a practitioner’s approach by generating story ideas, experimenting with writing different forms, and shaping, plotting, and developing chapters for our own potential novels. Hence, the course will combine analytical work with creative work to meet the entwined goals of increasing critical literacy while developing creative skills.

The course will incorporate an active learning, author-centered workshop approach, and will culminate with students creating a portfolio of 20-30 pages that includes a 4–7-page analytical essay discussing how the novels explored during the course influenced their approach to creating narratives, a story synopsis for a proposed novel, and sample chapters demonstrating potential forms and narrative techniques. Ultimately, by both reading and creating innovative narratives, we'll develop a more intimate understanding of how form shapes content, and how content is unearthed through form.

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.

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.

LB393.001 Seminar in Arts, Humanities, and Social Science – Satire and Irony as Protest: Comedy in the Face of Systemic Prejudice

Have you ever heard the phrase, "I have to laugh to keep from crying?" How about "Funny-Not funny?" Or the common defense "It was just a joke?" We will look at the roots and uses of humor, satire, comedy, and irony, to show how laughter is used as forms of protest and resistance. When is comedy appropriate? For whom? How can people laugh in the face of their despair? Applying core principles of literary and ethnic studies we will explore seriously humorous movies, songs, comedy sketches, books and more.

This course fulfills a Category 3 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.

Graduate Courses, Spring 2023

E504 – Professional Issues in Composition & Writing

E504 – Professional Issues in Composition & Writing | 3 credits | 12:30 - 01:45 PM | TR | Sue Doe

This graduate course will focus have two focuses, the first on how composition programs have traditionally been theorized, designed, and positioned in the academy and the second on new remixes and reconfigurations of writing programs that suggest emerging opportunities for those interested in or committed to the field. We will consider writing programs in the most capacious way possible, examining programs that exist in traditional university settings as well as programs in communities outside of university structures. Overall, we will examine narratives of a discipline that is still being constructed by a wide range of creative and adventurous minds whose interests, while wildly varied, tend to share a commitment to strong pedagogy, attentiveness to language use, and the broad application of social justice. After grappling with the history of the relatively young field of rhetoric and composition, we will situate ourselves as part of the arc of the field’s development and become part of the story ourselves. Along the way, we will demystify processes of publication, consider how to apply for academic positions, deepen our understanding of the demands of faculty work, including faculty work done off the tenure-track, and contemplate emerging opportunities for those working in writing programs and writing program administration.

E506B – A Bewitching Survey of American Literature

E506B - A Bewitching Survey of American Literature | 3 credits | 09:30 - 10:45 AM | TR | Zach Hutchins

This survey of American literature (satisfying the pre-1800 requirement) will examine gendered stereotypes undergirding the theorization and historical persecution of witches as well as the rich archive of artistic responses to these stereotypes, in works that perpetuated, complicated and, eventually, subverted conventions of the tradition. The figure of the witch is grounded in theological history, scientific discourse, and sexual politics, so students will approach the wide range of texts, images, and films we study from various disciplinary perspectives, including women’s studies, history, psychology, sociology, queer studies, literature, and religious studies. This diversity of approaches and the class’s sweeping chronological scope will require students to consider the synergies and discordances of works from radically different contexts in order to formulate persuasive arguments that explain how the idea of witchcraft has shaped and continues to influence Western understandings of gender and sexuality.

E513A – Form & Technique in Modern Literature: Fiction

E513A - Form & Technique in Modern Literature: Fiction | 3 credits | 02:00 - 04:50 PM | R | Ramona Ausubel

Writing a novel is part ultramarathon over lava fields, part love affair and part magic trick. How does anyone do it for the first time? In this class we will read first novels from beloved and emerging authors and study their choices and techniques. At the same time, you will begin your own first novel. You can enter the class without a novel idea—all you need is the willingness to welcome magic of whatever sort and embark on a wild and unknowable run over varied terrain.

E513C – Form & Technique in Modern Literature: Essay

E515 – Syntax for ESL/EFL

E515 - Syntax for ESL/EFL | 3 credits | 04:00 - 04:50 PM | MWF | Gerry Delahunty

Teachers of English as a second or foreign language must be familiar with the major syntactic patterns of English, their typical meanings and uses, and with the inflectional and derivational morphology they entail. This knowledge will enable them to appropriately select and present this material in a variety of teaching circumstances, as well as to read and make use of grammatical descriptions of English and other languages. 

Students completing this course will be able to understand the linguistic concepts in ESL/EFL pedagogical materials and in SLA research; they will be familiar with variant terminology; they will be proficient in basic linguistic analysis; and will be able to apply analytic techniques to learner data. 

The course will focus on topics in English syntax and relevant morphology, but comparative/contrastive data from other languages will be introduced, especially from those languages spoken by members of the class and those 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/EFL grammar texts. 

E527 – Theories of Foreign/ Second Language Learning

E527 – Theories of Foreign/ Second Language Learning | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 PM | TR | Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker

This course provides an introduction to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) focusing specifically on how humans learn a second (or third) language in addition to their native language and the factors that affect variability in their language development. Areas covered in this course include: background on the historical development of the field, characteristic features of the L2 learner, interlanguage development and variability, individual differences, and social factors affecting L2 learning. In addition, the course introduces a variety of experimental methods used in the SLA field to explore L2 development and highlights the implications of SLA findings for L2 teaching. Student will read and discuss research articles in SLA and engage in the analysis of learner data.

Required Textbook:

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2013). How Languages are Learned (4th edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The textbook is referred to as Textbook in the schedule.)

E528 – Professional ESL Teaching: Theory to Practice

E526 – Professional ESL Teaching: Theory to Practice | 3 credits | 03:30 - 04:45 PM | TR | Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker

The course is offered to pre-service TEFL/TESL teachers as a guided opportunity to learn about and apply principles for planning, designing, and carrying out effective classroom instruction and assessment. The main goal of the course is to help establish connections between theory and practice and to engage students in non-threatening interaction about language teaching experiences with colleagues.

E600B – Research Methods in Writing Studies

E600B - Research Methods in Writing Studies | 3 credits | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | TR | Mike Palmquist

This course is an introduction to research methods used in the field of English studies, with particular emphasis on those used in qualitative and quantitative research. The course builds on the assumptions that research is intimately related to theory and practice and that all research—quantitative, qualitative, or a combination of the two approaches—is an act of selecting and interpreting information. Throughout the course, we will explore the implications of these assumptions, test their applicability to specific research methodologies, and look for common ways in which they shape the work of researchers using a variety of approaches to research.

We will also interrogate and reflect on Burke’s notion of terministic screens, which essentially contends that a way of seeing is a way of not seeing. (For a brief overview of terministic screens, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terministic_screen.)

E615 – Reading Literature: Recent Theories

E615 - Reading Literature: Recent Theories | 3 credits | 11:00 - 11:50 PM | MWF | Paul Trembath

This course is a graduate level introduction to literary and cultural theory since the 1970s. We will be studying material roughly in the chronological order of its academic development in the United States, from semiotics and deconstruction (which displaced the hegemony of New Criticism with its formalist and aestheticist approach to reading literary texts) through various forms of historicism and cultural materialism. Finally, we will study more recent developments in critical studies ranging from neo-psychoanalysis to affect theory, aesthetic materialism, speculative realism, eliminative nihilism, and object- and process-oriented ontologies. On the way, we will study various feminisms, transcendental empiricism, lesbian and gay studies, gender and somatic criticisms, postcolonialism, and cultural studies generally. The purpose of the course is to familiarize students with the critical rhetorics that inform literary/language study, and to explain the conceptual antagonisms that have emerged between various approaches to literature and culture since the late 20th century up to the present. Requirements: assigned readings; 1 or 2 critical papers (topics to be decided on an individual basis); attendance.

E630A.001 – Special Topics in Literature: Area Studies – Getting Medieval: Imagining the Middle Ages, 1800 to the Present

E630A.001 – Special Topics in Literature: Area Studies – Getting Medieval: Imagining the Middle Ages, 1800 to the Present | 3 credits | 03:00 - 05:50 PM | W | Lynn Shutters

The Middle Ages have always been retroactively constructed; how could one know that one was “in the middle,” after all, until after that middle was over? This course asks 1) How have Western cultures imagined or drawn inspiration from the Middle Ages? and 2) What cultural, political, or aesthetic purposes do such imaginings serve? By examining literary, popular, and political discourses that invoke the Middle Ages, we will come to understand how history itself is a cultural construct that has profound effects on the “present” – when- and wherever that present might be. Our focus will be nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century U.S. and British interpretations, invocations, and recreations of the Middle Ages.

In thinking about what shapes our current cultural tastes and practices, you might not answer “the medieval.” Yet two of the most popular current television series, Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and HBO’s House of the Dragon, are set in medieval-inspired worlds. During the January 6, 2020 Capitol attack, some members of the attacking mob displayed medieval inspired clothing and tattoos. Authors representing marginalized communities, such as Nigerian-British poet Patience Agbabi and trans poet Jos Charles, draw upon the medieval to unravel social preconceptions. By considering the real-world manifestations and consequences of medievalism, we will link academic inquiry to cultural and political critique.

Students will play a part in determining what “texts” we study in this class, which can include literary works, television/films, video/role playing games, and other forms of medievalism.

E630A.002 – Special Topics in Literature: Area Studies – Multiethnic US Modernisms

E630A.002 – Special Topics in Literature: Area Studies – Multiethnic US Modernisms | 3 credits | 04:00 - 06:50 PM | F | Leif Sorensen

This course asks what US modernism looks like when the work of African American, Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous, Asian American, and Latinx writers is at the center and not the periphery. After a brief orientation in critical approaches to modernism in the US and discussion of a couple of canonical landmarks we will turn our attention to works by Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Younghill Kang, Sui Sin Far, Jose Garcia Villa, D’Arcy McNickle, John Joseph Mathews, Ella Deloria, Américo Paredes, and Jovita Gonzalez. Students will write a series of short analytical essays, facilitate discussion, and develop a final project by completing a scaffolded series of assignments (project proposal, annotated bibliography, final draft).

E632 – Professional Concerns in English: Critical Content Analysis of Children’s and Young Adult Literature

E632 – Professional Concerns in English: Critical Content Analysis of Children’s and Young Adult Literature | 1-3 credits | 05:00 - 07:50 PM | M | Rosa Nam

This course is open to students from all programs and interests. Local teachers are also welcome and encouraged to join. We will explore the foundations of critical content analysis as a research method. This approach moves beyond traditional content analyses and uses a critical lens to explore the dynamics of power in texts. Using mentor texts, students will work collaboratively in groups to conduct their own critical content analysis of contemporary diverse children’s or young adult literature for a topic of their choosing and write a journal article that they can choose to submit for publication.

E634 – Special Topics in TESL/TEFL: Second Language Literacy

E634 – Special Topics in TESL/TEFL: Second Language Literacy | 3 credits | 12:30 - 01:45 PM | TR | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala

The goal of this course is to guide participants in developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to effectively design and implement second/foreign language literacy instruction for a diverse group of English language learners. That is, participants will learn how to develop and enhance the reading/writing skills of learners of English namely in academic contexts, with emphasis on higher education (but with opportunities to cover other contexts, based on students’ interests and professional goals, such as K-12). Special/contemporary topics of interest (e.g., translingualism) will also be covered.

This course’s primary audience is graduate students in the TEFL/TESL program, but other graduate students who are in Rhetoric/Composition and English Education, in particular, are welcome. Opportunities for tailoring some of the contents to their specific interests / professional needs will be provided.

Prerequisites for Course: Grad student in TEFL/TESL or instructor’s consent.

E638 – Assessment of English Language Learners

E638 – Assessment of English Language Learners | 3 credit | 02:00 - 02:50 PM | MWF | Tony Becker

This course prepares language teaching professionals with the knowledge and skills they need to design, implement, and utilize language assessments that are reliable, valid, and fair. Specifically, the course familiarizes students with the fundamental concepts and principles underlying the language assessment of second/foreign language learners (e.g., reliability, validity, authenticity, impact, interactiveness, practicality) and it engages students in the planning and construction of both traditional (e.g., tests, quizzes, essays, etc.) and alternative language assessments (e.g., portfolios, role plays, journals, etc.).

Furthermore, the course develops students’ ability to analyze and interpret assessment results (both quantitative and qualitative), for the purposes of guiding instruction and improving language program effectiveness. Finally, the course invites students to investigate the ways in which assessment results can be used to account for and evaluate student performance, as well as improve language teaching practices. Any graduate student interested in language and assessment is invited to take this class. 

E640A – Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction

E640B – Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry

E640C – Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay

E684A - Supervised College Teaching: Composition

E684C - Supervised College Teaching: Creative Writing

E687C - Literary Editing

E692 - Rhetoric and Composition Seminar

Browse the CSU Course Catalog

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.

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

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.

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

E487C – Internship: Community Literacy Center

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

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.

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The Rambler

The Rambler is a semesterly printable document that provides current preregistration advising information and descriptions of special courses available for the coming semester. It also includes a range of timely and important topics for English majors and minors.

The Rambler: Spring 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
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