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All Spring 2024 English courses can be found in LionPath
A complete list of English courses is available through the bulletin

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Select Fall 2024 Courses

Instructor: Christopher Castiglia 

TAYLOR SWIFT
 
Are you ready for it?
 
This class will focus on the music and popular representations of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. Topics will include: Swift’s lyrics as poetry; the history and current state of pop music fandom; Swift’s musical influences; public representations of and debates over Taylor Swift; Swift and feminism; queering Taylor Swift; and music videos and the visual culture of pop music.
 
Requirements will include short writing assignments (1 paragraph-1 page), several in-class writing exercises, and two 4-5 page papers.
 
General Education: Humanities (GH) 
 
United States Cultures (US)

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).

For a student-focused “news” story that conveys the many benefits of taking ENGL 111 authored by a former student in the class, please see here.

Instructor: Michael Anesko

In many important respects legal writing and certain legal forms and practices are highly literary, and their literary qualities are critical to how law functions in society. (Why else would it be so important to “get it in writing?”) The social efficacy of law is largely dependent upon the literary techniques by which it expresses its authority; and, from the very beginning, legal writing has formed a significant part of America’s literary heritage. At the same time, the law has been a central subject in American literature. The problem of justice has preoccupied many important writers who, while fascinated by the law, have also been suspicious of its claims to authority and yet eager to appropriate some of its power in their own literary expression.
 
Readings will include fundamental historical documents, decisions handed down by the U. S. Supreme Court, and works by Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Stowe, Twain, and Wright.
 
Students will also advocate for themselves during in-class “moot court” sessions, to advance arguments about the nature of “justice” in the assigned reading.
 

General Education: Humanities (GH)

United States Cultures (UL)

Instructor: Claire Bourne

What can the writing of William Shakespeare still offer us more than four hundred years after his plays débuted in London’s commercial playhouses? This course takes up exactly that question through close, collaborative study of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. You will practice how to read Shakespeare’s well-crafted verse, explore how his plays used the multi-sensory environment of the playhouse to communicate with socially diverse audiences, and feel empowered to explain how his works resonated on stage and page in his time and continue to resonate in our own moment. We will visit the Eberly Family Special Collections Library to work with Shakespeare editions published four centuries ago, and you will have the chance to set type and print passages from Shakespeare’s corpus using a moveable-type letter press, that is, the same technology used to print the first editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. You should expect to complete small weekly writing assignments (designed to keep you on track with your reading and thinking), which will culminate in a final project. Previous experience with Shakespeare is welcome but not required.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

Instructor: Christian Haines

This course examines weird fiction, or supernatural horror tales, by writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Victor LaValle, Kelly Link, and Jeff VanderMeer. We will analyze how weird fiction uses strange creatures and scientific anomalies to examine the limits of human thought. Occult histories, underground cities made of fungi, threatening entities from parallel universes, superintelligent life – these strange phenomena make us question what it means to be human.
 
Assignments include 2 short essay assignments, a take-home midterm exam, and a final project. There will also be some creative exercises.
 
General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Steele Nowlin

Alien encounters, interstellar voyages, time travel, artificial intelligence, virtual realities, machine-human augmentation, dystopian (and utopian) futures, alternate histories, climate apocalypses: They’re all the stuff of science and speculative fiction, one of the preeminent forms of imaginative expression in contemporary culture. Indeed, SF seems to be everywhere these days, and we could even argue that many of the items in the list above are not so much the stuff of science fiction but aspects of everyday life in 2024! Either way, SF is more popular now than ever before in its history. What is it exactly that so many find so appealing in this genre of speculation and imagination?
 
Focusing on late 20th- and early 21st-century texts of various SF subgenres, our class will examine how SF works as a form of literature and how it might help us think in new ways about the realities and concerns we encounter in our present moment. We’ll discuss short stories and novels by writers like Octavia E. Butler, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ted Chiang, N. K. Jemisin, Geoff Ryman, Margaret Atwood, Greg Egan, Cixin Liu, Joanna Russ, William Gibson, and more. Our class meetings will be based in discussion, and our class work will include several shorter writing assignments and a final project that allows you to engage analytically and creatively with science/speculative fiction.
 
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 craft, culture, and tradition as well as challenges to tradition. 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, in-class group work, and Canvas discussion forums. Assignments will also include short quizzes and two papers. Early women writers often prove a delightful surprise to modern readers.
 

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Develop some of the disciplines and skills you will need to practice this splendid art. Consider the basic elements of poetry in the American/English language tradition, examine some approaches to the craft, and most of all, foster the habits of writing, mind, and conversation that poets share. Be prepared to read, write, and share your poems as an artist-apprentice in a workshop.

General Education: Arts (GA)

Creative Writing Concentration

Instructor: Chris Reed

This Interdomain course takes up the many links between modern art and modern literature in order to explore different ways to tell stories. We look at fiction about artists, illustrations of fiction and poetry, ways of writing that evoke particular artworks or styles of art, and modes of story-telling that combine words and images, such as graphic novels. Students are introduced to major figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and art – Washington Irving, John Keats, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Faith Ringgold– and also study recent interactions between artists and authors.
 
This course invites students to develop skills of critical and integral thinking as they compare modes of visual and verbal creativity and expression. Assessment will be based on written papers, an oral presentation, participation in class, and some short assignments that involve mixing images and words.

General Education: Arts (GA)

General Education: Humanities (GH)

General Education – Integrative: Interdomain

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. For ENGL majors, this course counts toward the Professional and Media Writing concentration.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Instructor: Carla Mulford

How does fiction work? How does it differ from other genres in how it works? These are some of the questions we will consider by reading novels that offer stories about the coming of age of the central characters. Becoming an adult is challenging enough, but how to cope with that challenge when facing significant moral dilemmas – this forms part of our concern. We will read three novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All three novels enable us to consider the challenges faced in the American West. Notably, two of these novelists are of Native descent, enabling us to examine issues faced by both settlers and indigenous peoples. By the end of the semester, we will assess whether the genre of Bildungsroman changed across time or whether it seems to have had a fairly stable set of generic qualities. The novels we will read include: Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By (1961); James Welch, Fools Crow (1986); and Louise Erdrich, The Round House (2012). Written work includes three relatively short papers (about 4 pages each). Active engagement, including class participation, matters (and counts) in this class. This course is a general humanities course, and it suits the other cultures requirement, as well.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Jeffrey Nealon

This course is called “reading poetry,” so that’s what we’ll do: we’ll spend our time reading 20th and 21st century American poetry, broadly considered, in the free-verse traditions. The style of reading we’ll be developing will have less to do with formalist assessments of “what poetry really means” (because it’s pretty clear that any given poetic usage of language means lots of different things), and focus more on how language works in and for poems – how poetic language provokes certain kinds of responses in its readers, and how differing poetic forms might impact whatever content or meaning the poem might evoke. We’ll spend a fair amount of time along the way thinking about how American poetry of the 20th and 21st century has or hasn’t been imbricated with other art forms – the African-American artistic forms of blues, jazz and hip-hop; modernist American visual art of the abstract expressionist and pop variety; and American popular music broadly considered. If the blues or popular music isn’t “poetry,” then what is it, exactly? Of course, this is a question that functions somewhat differently today (when Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature and people are happy to think about rappers as poets) than it did only a few decades ago, when people were a lot more hesitant to take popular culture seriously.
Far from its reputation as a hopelessly obscure corner of American culture, this course will wonder whether poetry has in fact become a kind of ubiquitous, everyday American form – much more culturally important in the era of X and Instagram than its long-winded sibling the American novel?
 
Grading: This course will require 2 exams, 2 short papers, and vigorous class participation.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Garrett Sullivan

The horror story and film have often been denigrated as cheap, frivolous forms of lowbrow entertainment. And yet, horror taps into aspects of the human experience sometimes downplayed in more “serious” genres and raises profound questions about ontology (who—or what—we are); epistemology (what we know, or think we do); vitality and mortality (the porous boundaries between the living and the dead); (class-, gender-, race-, and nation-based) forms of difference; and, more generally, about the lived experience of embodiment. Horror centers on therelationship between the self and the Other and it invites us to consider the nature and limitations of dominant belief systems. And it does all of this by scaring the bejesus out of us, which in itself raises some interesting questions: Why do we like to be frightened? Is there a salutary dimension to our fear? Or, to the contrary, does horror have a corrosive effect on our psyches?

What do our individual and collective responses to horror say about us and the world in which we live?

This course focuses specifically on the sub-genre of supernatural horror, with a particular emphasis on some of the landmark literary and cinematic texts within that sub-genre.  We will read writers such as Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Stephen King, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker; and watch films such as Paranormal Activity, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, An American Werewolf in London, The Shining and Horror of Dracula.  Additionally, we will read and discuss some key critical works in horror studies and monster theory.  Assignments will include short papers, discussion posts, reading quizzes, in-class examinations, and a final project.  

The Nineteenth Century Time Period

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration 

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Hester Blum

Herman Melville’s novels have a monumental reputation. Less well known are his works’ unexpectedly weird, funny, queer, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. We’ll read much of Melville’s body of work, which brings outlandish curiosity to bear on the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our diverse world.

The Nineteenth Century Time Periods

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instrutor: Elizabeth Kadetsky

Through analysis of literary journals that are most highly represented in the “Best of” anthologies (essays/short stories/poetry), this course will explore the landscape for literary magazine publishing today and get into the mechanics of how selection and acquisitions work for such magazines. Students will gain an inside knowledge of how, why, and to what extent a diversity of voices from different cultures and communities is represented and foregrounded as part of the journals’ editorial vision, while also exploring elements of taste, style, and aesthetic across journals. Modules will include guest speaker visits from journal editors, discussing submissions from the reader queue (aka slush pile) at New England Review, and students’ trying their hand at a literary submission and effective cover letter geared toward one of the journals. 

Creative Writing Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Paul Kellermann

In this class, we apply the principles of narrative nonfiction to writing about science-related topics. This is not a science class; it’s a writing class. It’s a writing class where students employ the creative writer’s tools to translate empirical esoterica into digestible narratives. Accordingly, students develop a deeper understanding of the correlation between science and storytelling.

English 416 has one simple goal: to cultivate the skills necessary to convey scientific knowledge to lay audiences. To facilitate the process, students will research, interview, and observe faculty affiliated with Penn State’s Sustainability Institute–and coordinate with communications professionals across the university–to write stories for publication.

Professional and Media 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. 

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Robert Edwards

We will spend the semester reading Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, his most innovative, experimental, and influential work—full of memorable characters, great stories, and occasional scandal. Chaucer writes at a moment of intense cultural change. We will look at the various contexts (historical, social, literary) that bear on the Tales and draw on the criticism and scholarship. At the start, we will review the fundamentals of Chaucer’s language so that we can read and perhaps hear him in his own idiom. But our focus will be on a close critical reading of the texts—the same skill required for reading a modern novel, short story, or poem. There will be several short quizzes to check in on your progress, a midterm to pull ideas together, and in the second half of the semester a project on one of the Tales. You will have a chance to develop the project in a short abstract, do preliminary research on your topic, and write a final paper (10-12 pages). There is no final exam. Your participation in class discussion and discussion posts remains important throughout the course. This course fulfills the requirement that English majors take one 400-level course from the medieval period through the sixteenth century. No previous work in early period courses is expected; non-majors welcome.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration 

Instructor: Carla Mulford

Prose fiction in Britain became popular around the same time that Britain 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 enslavement, 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) appearing 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) and quizzes on each of the novels. Active engagement, including class participation, matters (and counts) in this class. This course meets the sixteenth through eighteenth century requirement for English majors.

Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: John Marsh

Twentieth-century poetry is one of the major achievements of human culture. At some point in their lives, every writer or reader should grapple with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” Sylvia Plath’s “Bee Poems,” and any of the other monuments of modern poetry. In this class, you will learn how to read these occasionally difficult but always rewarding poems and how to write meaningfully about them. Our focus will be on Anglo-American poetry written in English, with more time devoted to the American scene. We will begin with the birth of modern poetry in the 1910s and 1920s and proceed through the various figures, schools, and movements of the twentieth century. Poetry, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote, is “a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” A poetry class, like this one, is a search for what poets have found. By way of assignments, students will write a couple of short papers (or one short paper and a longer paper) and take a midterm and a final.
 
Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period
 
Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Kevin Bell

The person who complains that the film is ‘nothing like the book’ ought to read the book; so writes one of the more incisive intellectuals of our moment. This course invites you to do both–and in so doing, to explore more intensively the zone of suspension between the literary work and the film that is shaped from the thematic basis of the literature. We investigate not only the sounds, images, intensities and textures of the literary source materials; but that we also work from within the sounds, images, intensities and textures of the temporal cadences and incessantly re-shaped spaces of the rejected (perhaps because unfamiliar and differently provocative) ‘nothing like’ that is figurational cinema’s point of departure. One thing we will take from every encounter with each novel, short narrative and film we work with in this course, is that no moment of any of these artworks can be flattened into ‘just another way of presenting stories’ or into a work of representational mimesis. On the contrary, we learn that the very conversion of thought into a new linguistic or imagistic figure radically alters the scope of possibilities for thinking and imagining the boundaries of any idea.

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Lisa Sternlieb

You have grown up in what is now called “the age of mass incarceration.” How did “the land of the free” come to have the largest penal system on the planet? And what can we do about it? We will consider our country’s addiction to imprisoning its citizens while reading some of the best writers in our language on the subjects of crime and punishment. I will choose readings from among the following: Charles Dickens on the criminal underworld in Oliver Twist, Philip Roth on the trial of a Nazi war criminal in Operation Shylock, and Kate Grenville on the conflict between British convicts and aboriginal Australians in The Secret River. We may read Jane Hamilton’s description of a women’s prison in A Map of the World, Herman Melville’s vision of the workplace as prison in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Ann Patchett’s tale of a group of international music lovers held hostage in Bel Canto, Matthew Kneale’s stories about feckless tourists in Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, and Ian McEwan’s tragedy about an innocent man’s imprisonment in Atonement. We will definitely read Humbert Humbert’s prison confession in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the long letter, De Profundis, Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover while serving time in prison.

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Marcy North

In this seminar, we’ll be stepping back in time to explore the different ways that women became authors and the different ways that authors were identified as women in medieval and early-modern British culture. We’ll be complicating the idea of authorship. Is a woman an author if she receives visions from God telling her what to write? Is she an author if she can’t use a pen and must dictate her story to a scribe? We’ll also be complicating the methodologies by which we define ‘woman’ author. How do we understand a writer who speaks as a woman but may or may not be a historical woman? If an anonymous author’s texts and voice are not gendered, could they possibly be included in the canon of women’s literature? Could certain early voices be considered non-binary, and how might these voices contribute to and help us to understand women’s literature?
 
The texts in this seminar will introduce students to a wide range of medieval and early modern literature associated with women and speaking to issues of sex and gender. The genres will include mystical and devotional writing, drama, poetry, life writing such as diaries and autobiographies, prose fiction, and personal letters, among others. Some of the works will belong to relatively well known women such as Queen Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn, 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. As a part of our exploration, we will consider critically how the canon of early women’s literature came to be formed and how some women found their way into modern textbooks and anthologies and others did not. We will also have opportunities to discuss the intersections of gender, race, and class in early Britain. Additionally, students will look at digitized original materials and will learn a bit about archival research and the material conditions of women’s writing.
 
Assignments will include short in-class writings, group work, or home works designed to generate discussion, quizzes, and two 3.5-5-page papers. This course should fulfill the English department’s diversity requirement.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century; Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Periods

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

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