Instructor: Marcy North

“Authorship Today”

Instructor: John Marsh

Instructor: Sean Goudie

Designed to help students answer the age-old question, “What are you going to do with an English major?,” this two-credit class introduces students to the special career-building opportunities that Penn State English has to offer—internships, organizations, fellowships and prizes, and study abroad activities—and shows them the value of the skills that the English major emphasizes. As part of this endeavor, we will hear from some of our most successful alumni who have turned their Penn State English degrees into engaging careers and who will help students envision the possibilities of their own futures. Students will prepare questions to pose to guest speakers about their career journeys as they develop their own “Personal Strategic Plan” for pursuing professional opportunities, both as a student and beyond (no exams).

Friday 2:30–3:45 p.m.

Instructor: Steele Nowlin

Instructor: Michael Anesko

Instructor: Matt Tierney

This course combines literary and cultural studies with labor studies. Focusing on the role of genre in the presentation and transformation of workers’ expression and organization, we’ll read everything from novels and poems to memoirs and criticism, as we consider topics like craftsmanship, business management, union organizing, domestic labor and care work, industrial and postindustrial labor, remote work and gigwork, racism and sexism on the job, the purported dignity of hard work, and the right to be lazy. Grading is based on class participation and on four short writing assignments.

Instructor: Scott Smith

ENGL 221 surveys British literature extending from the early medieval period into the eighteenth century. The course provides an accessible overview of the various literary traditions and conventions from this long period, as well as some of the cultural, material, and historical forces that shaped those diverse traditions. Students will assess the interplay of tradition and innovation in this literature, with attention to a range of author, forms, genres, and technologies. The course also introduces different stages of the early English language, and models how that historical knowledge can enhance our understanding and appreciation of the language’s expressive potential over time.

Tuesday/Thursday 12:05–1:20 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

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 cultural approaches to digital technologies. Covers fundamentals of the digital representation of linguistic, visual, and other cultural data; considers the difference between language and code; surveys the history of creative and expressive computing; explores examples of algorithmic culture; and concludes by reflecting on the limits of the digital, in the question of what computers can’t do. Many materials are web-based; others are in book form. Assignments include blog posts and a final project including creative options. No exams.

Instructor: Christopher Reed

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period 

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Fulfills Diversity Requirement

Instructor: Samuel Kọ́láwọlé

It is said that we are readers and travelers alike, reading the road, moving through pages and passages and words. From The Odyssey to Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic fable The Road, the theme and symbol of the road in literature has given us a unique understanding of our world while prescribing a path for change. By immersing ourselves in stories of journeys and movements we learn about freedom, change, aspirations, and intersections. The road reminds us of our vulnerability, our humanity. In this course, we will consider the road as metaphor for journeys and movements. We will look at works about journeys, explore the physical and psychological aspect of the journey as we look at the effect of the road on travelers. We will consider texts that discuss the movement of people as in migration, looking at why people move, the implication of journeys in society and the current political system. We will explore the intersection between postcolonialism and migration. We will look at displacement as a key aspect of postcolonial theory.

Tuesday/Thursday 9:05–10:20 a.m.

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Creative Writing Concentration

Instructor: Ali Araghi

Coming from the introductory course, you are now ready to expand your knowledge of fiction writing techniques. In this course, you will write fiction (complete stories and flash fiction) and hone your skills in analyzing fictional texts and reading for craft. You will read a wide range of styles to explore many different ways of forming a narrative. You will write two full-length short stories and have them workshopped in class. You will also write several flash fiction pieces and give feedback on your peers’ work on online discussion boards and in class. With shorter exercises, you will focus on a specific aspect of craft or get creative with prompts. For your final portfolio, you will revise your stories and two of your flash fiction pieces and write an author statement. This class works best when we have vibrant class discussions, so attendance and participation are required.

Monday/Wednesday 8:00–9:15 a.m.

Creative Writing Concentration

Instructor: Shara McCallum

English 413 is an advanced creative writing workshop, centered on poetry, poetics, and aesthetics. The course requires your commitment to being fully present for each class, engaging as part of a community of poets, reading and writing continuously, and taking risks and being open to challenge. As with English 213—the introductory poetry workshop and a prerequisite for enrollment—this course is designed to foster your growth as a poet and reader of poems. Note: 413 is repeatable up to three times. Over the course of this semester, my hope is for you to extend the work you began in English 213 &/or a previous iteration of 413. Course activities designed for you to achieve this include: reading and responding in writing and via class discussions to assigned books of poetry; keeping a notebook containing handwritten poetry exercises, notes toward poems, etc.; drafting and revising your original poems and sharing those with peers via the workshop; responding to the work of your peers in workshop; assembling portfolios and meeting one-on-one with me to discuss your development as a poet; attending poetry readings held on campus; and the like. This course will not employ Canvas and the use of technology as a whole will be limited; regarding AI, specifically, its use for any part of the coursework will not be permitted.

Tuesday/Thursday 10:35–11:50 a.m.

Creative Writing Concentration

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. Covers early examples of computer-generated literature, time-based or streaming electronic or digital literature, and new media poetry as an extension of print literature; includes a focus on the literary and cultural history of password authentication and the importance of randomness in expressive and creative computing; and examines depictions of new media as literary experience and cultures of new media in contemporary speculative fiction. Many materials are web-based; others are in book form. Assignments include blog posts plus a final project including creative options. No exams. If you are an ENGL major, this course satisfies the 20th century or later period requirement and counts toward the Creative Writing concentration and the Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

Instructor: Carla Mulford

Fiction formed the heart of American reading during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an era marked by American nation-making, civil war, and federal reconstruction. The novels slated for the fall 432 class shed light on the era’s central preoccupation with the status of women in American social and political life. Indeed, this course might be called “Liberty’s Daughters,” but that would be an ironic title, because (as we’ll discuss) women actually had a diminished sense of free choice over their lives in this historical era. We will be reading several novels published between the 1790s and the 1890s: William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy (1789); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (1797); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850); Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1854); Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy (1892); and Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899). The final grade is an average of four components: class participation average, quiz (one per novel) average, talking point (averaged for 25 percent); three course papers of about 1,100 to 1,200 words each (25 percent each paper).

Tuesday/Thursday 3:05–4:20 p.m.

Nineteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Fulfills Diversity Requirement

Instructor: Michael Anesko

Instructor: John Marsh

Modern American poetry is one of the major achievements of human culture. Whether you are a writer, reader, or budding critic, if you have not grappled with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Emily Dickinson’s clockwork-like compositions, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Langston Hughes’s blues masterpieces, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” or any of the other monuments of modern and contemporary poetry, your education, literary and otherwise, is incomplete. In this class, you will learn how to read these occasionally difficult but always rewarding poems and how to write meaningfully about them. We will begin with the birth of modern poetry with Whitman and Dickinson, stop for the revolution proper in the 1910s and 1920s, proceed through the various figures, schools, and movements of the twentieth century, and end with the most recent developments in poetry and poetics. For English majors, the course satisfies the nineteenth century or the twentieth century to the present requirement. Assignments include two essays, a midterm, and a final.

Instructor: Patrick Cheney

In this course, we will read Shakespeare as a new type of English author: not simply a “man of the theater” or even a “poet,” Shakespeare is one of the first poet-playwrights in English. That is, while serving as an actor, script writer, and shareholder in an acting company, he was also an author with a capacious literary career that includes both poems and plays. We will read his most famous poetic work, the Sonnets, as well as examples from his four dramatic genres: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. Plays might include Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. In discussing Shakespeare’s poems and plays, we will concentrate on four cultural vectors that particularly engaged this author: religion (Protestantism, Catholicism, skepticism, immortality), politics (government, leadership, monarchy, republic), gender/sexuality (marriage, family, eroticism, identity), and literature itself (genre, allusion, myth, authorship). We will ground our discussion of each vector in the historical environment of Renaissance England, engage in close reading of all works, and consider Shakespeare’s contribution to modern culture. 1 early quiz; 2 mini-arguments (1 page); 2 critical essays (4-5 pages); and 1 final test.

Tuesday/Thursday 10:35–11:50 a.m.

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

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Carla Mulford

Prose fiction in Britain became popular around the same time that the first British Empire experienced dominance in the transatlantic trade in human beings. Given that prose fiction experienced a rise in readerly interest during an era of empire-building and human trafficking, it is worthwhile for us to consider the potential intersections between enslavement (a form of perpetual imprisonment) and the emplotment of novels (usually, the imprisonment of women) that appeared before and during the time of Jane Austen. We will examine a chronological selection of novels against this backdrop of the erasure of liberty and the consequent rise (for the dominant group), in Britain, of both capital and leisure. Readings will include: Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740); Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791); (anonymous), A Woman of Colour (1808); and Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814). Written work includes three papers (about 5 pages each). Active engagement, including class participation, matters (and counts) in this class. This course meets the sixteenth through eighteenth century requirement for English majors.

Tuesday/Thursday 1:35–2:50 p.m.

Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: David Loewenstein

Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Benjamin Schreier

This course will analyze literature written in and about Palestine/Israel—as site of contesting national aspirations, as asymmetrical conflict, as occupation, as geopolitical object, as focal point for cultural advocacy. We will read a wide variety of literature, manifesting a wide variety of perspectives, and written by authors from a wide variety of groups of people, including Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Americans. Most texts will be prose, though there will be some graphic narrative and film, too. Many texts were originally written in English, but some will be read in translation from Arabic or Hebrew (to be clear: the course will be conducted entirely in English). Emphasis will always be on close analysis of modes and practices of representation, including the ethics of representation, and we will examine how epistemological and affective frameworks like solidarity, enmity, fellow feeling, and identity are circulated and reproduced. We will not presume, and indeed work to avoid reinforcing, the idea that there are “two” “equal” “sides” that deserve equal praise. We’ll be doing a fair amount of reading, and course assignments will include regular short response papers and longer close reading assignments.

Tuesday/Thursday 10:35–11:50 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: Sean Goudie

In the wake of COVID-19 and disasters that occurred earlier in the twenty-first century like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, narratives have been told and retold about the significance of these catastrophic events in the context of the wider political, economic, historic, and cultural conditions that produced them and which these disasters, in turn, have produced. A central preoccupation of this course will be to examine how, why, and to what end works of American literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present have represented catastrophes, whether “natural” and/or “manmade”: volcanoes and earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, and fires and droughts; war and genocide, terrorism and sabotage, and epidemics and chemical spills. As we proceed, we will assess how a text’s artistic and thematic properties remark on the significance of a given disaster as well as the broader concept of the “catastrophic” itself. While we will consider works responsive to disasters that have unfolded in our own contemporary moment, we will also treat texts centered on catastrophes in previous centuries—the Yellow Fever epidemics in Philadelphia in the 1790s, for example. As we do so, we will try to understand how cultural responses to past catastrophes clarify public and private reactions to present-day catastrophes such as COVID-19, the Maui wildfires and the ongoing wildfires in the American West, and vice-versa. The works we will treat in the course include novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, and films by Native American, African American, Asian American, Latinx, and/or queer authors and artists. In addition to completing several essay assignments, students will lead discussion of a class focused on an author/text of their choosing and will develop their lesson plan for the class in consultation with the instructor.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:10–11:00 a.m.

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Nineteenth Century or Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: W. Oliver Baker

This course examines how African American literature represents the history of slavery and its role in shaping our modern world. It also explores the role of African American literature in the abolition movement to end slavery. The course studies various genres of African American literature including speeches, pamphlets, poetry, autobiography, the slave narrative, and the novel. While the course focuses mostly on the nineteenth century with special attention to the abolition movement of antebellum America, it also includes important works of African American literature of later periods to understand the legacies of slavery and the ongoing movements for Black liberation today. Some of the authors and abolitionists studied in the course include Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, George Jackson, and Assata Shakur. Students will learn how to analyze complex literary texts through collective discussion and writing essays. Major assignments include sharing ideas and perspectives in class discussion, completing reading responses, and writing analytical essays. There are no exams or quizzes.

Tuesday/Thursday 9:05–10:20 a.m.

United States Cultures (US)

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

The Nineteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Xiaoye You

This course will introduce you to communication theories and practices developed in ancient Greece and China. Economic globalization and increased world travel have brought Americans into direct contact with East Asian peoples and their cultures. At the same time, individuals with an East Asian background are making a strong presence in the United States. The urgency to understand East Asian peoples—their cultures, their languages, and their ways of reasoning—is being felt by a majority of Americans. This class will focus on the rhetorical traditions that have grown out of ancient Greece and China. We will not only read ancient and modern texts but also watch movies produced in China and the United States to understand philosophies, literatures, and communication arts developed in these civilizations.

The goals for the course include developing a general understanding of Greek and Chinese rhetorical traditions, i.e., their historical contexts, schools of thought, and key rhetorical concepts; being able to perform rhetorical analysis using concepts drawn from these traditions; understanding the genre of rhetorical criticism; performing rhetorical criticism in the form of a short research paper. Course assignments include readings, talking points, and a rhetorical criticism paper.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 11:15 a.m–12:05 p.m.

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Medieval through Sixteenth Century and Twentieth Century to the Present Time Periods

Rhetoric and Writing Concentration

Instructor: Karrieann Soto Vega

What or who is an activist? Does an increase in visibility or representation count as activism? How do organizers utilize digital media to disseminate their efforts? To address these questions, this course will survey literature on Latinx media representation in connection with broader debates about digital communication theories addressing under-represented communities. The goal of this class is to understand how activist rhetoric seeps into digital spheres, and to explore the significance of Latinx activism and its potential impact on the improvement of detrimental conditions in day-to-day life.

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

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Sherita Johnson

Reading a diverse selection of texts, this course will survey the life and times of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), one of the most preeminent public figures in the nineteenth century. His experiences of being enslaved and later his escape from the “peculiar institution” launched an activist and literary career that span throughout the abolitionist movement, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. Douglass’ writings are essential to the study of American print culture as it developed during his lifetime and his works remain popular even today. We will therefore examine his autobiographies, speeches, novella, and radical journalism. We may also read selections of writings by some of Douglass’ contemporaries with whom he engaged in intense debates and formed constructive alliances. In light of recent scholarship, our interdisciplinary studies will also include the “photographic narrative” of Douglass’ life considering his use of images (estimates of more than 160) to promote “a great democratic art” of representation. 

Tuesday/Thursday 12:05-1:20 p.m.

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Paul Kellermann

Writing Across the Curriculum course