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

Overview of composition/writing studies including various pedagogical approaches to teaching composition and the contexts that shape effective writing.

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 | 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

E507.001 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 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 | 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 | 3 credits | 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM | TR | Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala 

Principles of teaching English as a foreign/second language. Development of a coherent method, including activities, materials, and course design.

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

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

E601 – Research in Teaching English as a Second Language | 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 | 3 credits | 02:00 - 03:15 PM | TR | Instructor TBA

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

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

E607B Teaching Writing: Creative Writing | 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 | 1 credit | Multiple Meetings Times | TR | Kelly Bradbury

Theories and best practices associated with writing integration in the academic core.

E610 – Literature Program Colloquium | 1 credit | 10:00 - 10:50 AM | M | Instructor TBA

Organizational strategies for researching and writing a final project/thesis. Opportunities to address specific challenges in order to ensure high-quality work and a timely defense. Career opportunities and professionalization issues are addressed.

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 | 3 credits | 05:00 - 07:50 PM | R | Dr. Sue Doe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will explore:

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

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

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

E640A Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction | 3 credits | 04:00 - 06:50 PM | M | Andrew Altschul

Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.

Maximum of 11 credits allowed in course. Contact instructor for registration.

E640B Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry | 3 credits | 04:00 - 06:50 PM | M | Dan Beachy-Quick

Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.

Maximum of 11 credits allowed in course. Contact instructor for registration.

E640C Graduate Writing Workshop: Essay | 3 credits | 04:30 - 07:20 PM | T | Vauhini Vara

Individual projects with group discussion and analysis.

Maximum of 11 credits allowed in course. Contact instructor for registration.

E687C Literary Editing | 1 - 5 credits | Stephanie G'Schwind 

Colorado Review.

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

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.