Instructor: Christopher Reed

This section of ENGL 15S focuses on forms of communication that combine text and image. Topics will include visual rhetoric, writing about art, fusions of poetry and painting, fictions about art and artists, and graphic novels. Students with an interest in creative writing and/or visual art are encouraged to enroll.

Monday/Wednesday 10:10–11:25 a.m.

General Education: Writing/Speaking (GWS)

Instructor: Scott Smith

This course surveys literature that depicts the intrusion of supernatural forces into social order. The fantastic or horrific elements of these tales might be their best-known traits, but such texts can also express social desires and fears, as well as ruminate on personal and political history. The supernatural, in other words, works to reveal those individuals and institutions that face it. Students will read horrific texts in a range of forms and media, including poetry, drama, the short story, the novel, the graphic novel, and film.

Tuesday and Thursday 9:05–10:20 a.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Karrieann Soto Vega

This course provides a general introduction to the practices and traditions of rhetoric, as well as its presence and use in daily life. Are landscapes and institutions rhetorical? How do people use language to move audiences in strategic ways? How have different forms of technology facilitated or limited different modes of persuasive communication? What about our own bodies, or things like bicycles? In addition to the consideration of different rhetorical situations in popular texts and media, we will emphasize local spaces where rhetoric can be found and enacted.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 10:10–11:00 a.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Marcy North

Looking back at the first recorded women writers in Britain, this course traces their innovations, authorial agency, protofeminism, and resistance to misogyny. The texts cover a period from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. Students will read fairy tales, mystical visions, life-writing, defenses of women, poems, plays, and early prose fiction. Students will be encouraged to ask how early women defined themselves, how they navigated the restrictions their cultures placed on women, and why they chose the kinds of writing they did. Discussion topics will include literary craft, early domestic and public culture, gender traditions and challenges to tradition, anonymity and authorship complexities, women’s reliance on and manipulation of religious topics, and autobiographical elements of literature. There will be opportunities to explore early examples of cross-dressing, the gender ambiguity of anonymous texts, same-sex attraction, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in early Britain. Students will participate in class discussion and complete small in-class assignments, in-class group work, and Canvas discussion forums. Assignments will also include short quizzes and two short papers. Early women writers often prove a delightful surprise to modern readers!

Tuesday and Thursday 12:05–1:20 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: Stacy Tibbetts

Instructor: Paul Kellermann

English 215 is designed to acquaint you with the principles of writing narrative nonfiction and give you practice producing quality writing. While providing students with an opportunity to dabble in a variety of nonfiction forms, the course emphasizes literary writing techniques that transcend genre. Learning occurs primarily experientially: students study the principles of effective nonfiction writing and relate the concepts to professional samples. Then, they research and write their own stories. Students in this class should expect to read and write extensively.

Web Course

Instructor: Brian Lennon

This course introduces students to concepts, methods, and resources for the cultural study of digital computing and digital culture as foundations of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Covers fundamentals of the digital representation of textual, visual, and other cultural data; considers the difference between language and code; surveys the history of creative and expressive computing; explores examples of algorithmic and generative digital culture; and concludes by reflecting on the limits of the digital, in the question of what computers can’t do.

Tuesday and Thursday 10:35–11:50 a.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Sean Goudie

In this course we will examine the ways in which European colonialism and United States nationalism and imperialism influence American writing from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. For much of their history, Americans (broadly defined) have paradoxically resisted and endorsed European influences on their institutions and traditions. One issue we will focus on is how writers figure these conflicting impulses in pre-twentieth-century American literature and culture. Our conclusions will derive from our systematic examinations of a full range of cultural encounters that contribute diversely to the formation of American literature. Encounters between Europeans and American colonials, European American men and women, Native Americans and American colonials, Native Americans and European Americans, African Americans and European Americans, and between Americans and a cast of “foreign” friends and foes occasion a dynamic—if volatile—set of texts that we will treat in this course. These works include political writings and trial records; captivity and slave narratives; literary essays and poetry; and short fiction and novels.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 2:30–3:20 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: Paul Kellermann

Instructor: Brian Lennon

Suitable for students in any area, from the liberal arts and communications to IT, computer science, engineering, and business, who are interested in literary approaches to digital media. Incorporates a micro-course in AI literacy. Many materials are web-based; others are in book form. Applied and analytic assignments with creative alternatives. If you are an ENGL major, this course satisfies the 20th century or later period requirement and counts toward the Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

Instructor: Steele Nowlin

Terrifying monsters, chivalrous knights, and epic quests are perhaps among the first things that come to mind when we think of medieval literature. To be sure, those are important parts of English literature of the Middle Ages, but the period also offers a dazzling array of topics, writers, and genres. We’ll read, discuss, and write about a wide variety of texts, including epic, lyric, religious stories, romance narratives, tale collections, history writing, dream visions, sermons, riddles, travel writing, and spiritual meditations. We’ll also begin to explore the forms of English in which these texts are written, examining the connections between present-day English and Old and Middle English, and we’ll get to work with medieval manuscripts held in Penn State’s Special Collections Library. Our class meetings will center on lively discussion, and assignments are likely to include shorter written reflective and critical pieces, in-class exams, and a final project that combines both creative and analytical approaches. Medieval literature can seem remote at first, but it also resonates strongly with our own time. What we find when we look carefully at medieval texts are things at once strange and strangely familiar.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 1:25–2:15 p.m.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: Marcy North

What is a woman author? Does compiling a book of household recipes count as authorship? What about writing letters to a secret fiance? Or answering interrogators before facing death at the stake? And how do we decide who counts as a “woman” when so much literature is anonymous, including poems, pamphlets written against misogynists, and group petitions from widows to the king? Should we even worry about who counts as a woman? Maybe expanding the canon to include less gendered texts and ambiguously gendered authors would benefit the field! This course offers students the chance to grapple with these questions as they explore English literature and cultural contributions from the centuries before the novel. Some of the works we read will belong to relatively well known women such as Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Cavendish, but other works will have more mysterious authors, authors about whom we know nothing and whose only claims to female authorship are a name and a voice. The course will also have an archival component, and we will use some primary texts that are available as digital images for discussions of witch trials, jest literature, lives of martyrs, and recipe books. Some of our other genres will include diaries and personal letters, poems and plays, mothers’ advice literature, and defenses of women’s virtues and rights. Students will complete a set of small assignments (review of an archive or database, bibliography, abstract, etc.) that lead up to a final research project on a topic of choice.

Tuesday and Thursday 9:05–10:20 a.m.

Writing Across the Curriculum

Medieval through Sixteenth Century or Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Honors

Instructor: Lauren Cameron

Although the Victorians are often viewed in popular culture as stuffy and prudish, they were just as passionately human as we are today. The Victorians also lived during an explosion of literacy and publishing, allowing them to record the nuances of their lived experiences in greater detail than any preceding era. In this class, we will come to understand from the Victorians’ perspective how love (romantic and familial, condoned and forbidden) was understood and conveyed, how lust could lead individuals to the most freeing or most destructive decisions of their lives, and how deeply loss was felt (be that loss of innocence, loss of a way of life, loss of faith, loss of a loved one, and/or loss of possibilities).

Tuesday and Thursday 12:05–1:20 p.m.

The Nineteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: Lynn Lewis

This course examines contemporary rhetorical thinking including but not limited to queer and trans rhetorics, disability studies, feminist rhetorics, rhetorics of non-conformity, dissent, and resistance, and futurity rhetorics. Our guiding questions include: How does identity affect rhetoric? How can we understand the impacts of the body from a rhetorical standpoint? What constitutes effective dissent in a visual-driven world? Discussion will be an integral part of the course as well as two major essays and 3-4 short reaction papers. Our readings will include traditional texts as well as short stories, videos, podcasts, and other multimodal artifacts. All materials will be provided.

Rhetoric and Writing Concentration

Instructor: Karrieann Soto Vega

Given the spread of multimedia technology, you may be aware of the pervasive ways in which meaning is made via visuals. But what about sound? This course introduces sonic (or aural) rhetoric, covering its history, current practice, and possible futures. Utilizing the (inter)disciplinary tools of sound studies in rhetoric and composition, students will compose using textual forms and soundwriting, learning a variety of methods with which to create and critique sound-based artifacts.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 1:25–2:15 p.m.

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Rhetoric and Writing Concentration 

Instructor: Richard Doyle

This course will explore meditation and chanting as practices of contemplation. We’ll explore images and texts devoted to instruction in meditation including Plato, the Upanishads and the English mystics as we follow the trail of artists and writers attempting to guide readers on the path to self awareness and enlightenment. Short writing responses will be paired with practice in meditation, chanting and longer (5-7 page) assignments to hone student writing on their path to the ineffable.

Tuesday and Thursday 10:35–11:50 a.m.

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course