Current Graduate Course Offerings - English

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience: The primary audience for the course will be TESL/TEFL MA students. However, English Education students may find it valuable too, as it will have a pedagogical orientation. However, students from all disciplines, English and beyond, are welcome. The course will be of particular and general interest because everyone, regardless of disciplinary addiction or affiliation, uses words and can benefit from their careful study.

E513B – Form & Technique: Poetry

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

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

E514 – Phonology/Morphology: ESL/EFL

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

E514 introduces the descriptive study and linguistic analysis of English phonetics/phonology, morphology/word formation, and lexis, and their connections to second language acquisition and teaching. This course is designed for students in the English MA in TEFL/TESL and students in the Joint MA programs in TEFL/TESL and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. It will introduce some basic assumptions about language, then focus mainly on the primary topics of the course and encourage you to explore these topics in ways that connect with your other TEFL/TESL coursework and teaching. While the course will focus primarily on English phonetics/phonology, morphology/word-formation, and vocabulary but comparative/contrastive data from other languages may be introduced, especially from those languages whose native speakers our graduates are most likely to teach. The topics are selected so as to maximize the overlap with the topics, constructions, and terminology current in the major ESL pedagogical texts.

E526 – Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language

E526 Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language | 3 credits | 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM | TR | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala

This course 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.

E600A – Research Methods: Literary Scholarship

E600A Research Methods: Literary Scholarship | 3 credits | Time TBA| Lynn Shutters

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

E601 – Research in Teaching English as a Second Language

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

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

E607A – Teaching Writing, Composition & Rhetoric

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

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

E630A – Special Topics in Literature: In the American Grain

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

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

E633 – Special Topics in Writing and Rhetoric: Autoethnography

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

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

E635 – Critical Studies in Literature and Culture

E637 – Histories of Writing & Rhetoric

E640A – Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction

E640B – Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry

E640C – Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay

E687C - Literary Editing

E692 - Seminar in Writing, Rhetoric and Social Change

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

This 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.

English

Graduate Courses, Fall 2023

The Rambler