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Instructor: John Marsh

In this class, you will learn how to read critically, how to make persuasive arguments, and how to craft clear prose. In short, you will learn how to write. The course is divided into roughly two parts. In the first, you will learn how to make the kinds of arguments you will need to make for the rest of your college life and, for many of you, the rest of your working life. In the second part, we will, as our textbook puts it, “read serious thinkers addressing serious issues.” Or, as it also puts it, the “writers who have shaped—and are still shaping—the way we think today.” We will have units on government, culture, wealth, education, ethics, gender, and science. Interspersed throughout the course are what I call Style Days. (Style in this sense simply refers to a way of using language.) These classes teach you how to write clear, concise, and correct prose. In addition to brief, weekly quizzes, students will write four short essays.
 

General Education: Writing/Speaking (GWS)

Instructor: David Durian

In English 100, we will examine the structure of English via its sounds, words, and syntax using traditional, structural, and modern linguistic approaches. We will do so by looking at the language from a sociolinguistic perspective–that is, how the language is used to communicate social, as well as linguistic, meaning. We will start with an introduction to the study of the linguistic structure of English, and then move into a discussion of geographical and social dialects of American English, with a specific focus on linguistic diversity in Central Pennsylvania. Other topics discussed will include language attitudes and ideologies towards different dialects of English, language variation and change within American English, language contact between English and other languages, and the historical development of American English. 
 
Projects in the class will include analysis essays that will involve looking at dialect data obtained from speakers of local dialects of English in Central PA and a debate where students look critically at issues such as the pros and cons of English as the Official Language of the US. Readings will come from the excellent text on language and dialect variation in American English entitled Language and Linguistic Diversity in the US by Susan Tomasi and Lamont Antieau.
 
This class fulfills the Bachelor of Arts: Humanities requirement.

Instructor: David Loewenstein

This Shakespeare course will focus on a selection of his greatest plays with an emphasis on the ways these works explore love, politics, and war. We’ll consider how Shakespeare examines these major issues from multiple perspectives by reading plays from four different literary categories that he experimented with and sometimes creatively blended: comedies, history plays, tragedies, and romances. Plays studied will include the following works: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, as well as a selection of his sonnets (complex short poems often exploring the turmoil of human sexuality). We will also enrich our close reading of Shakespeare’s plays by watching and evaluating some excellent film and stage productions of them.
 
Our selection of Shakespeare’s plays will enable us to consider his development and creativity as the outstanding dramatist of his age and, arguably, of Western literature. As we proceed, we’ll consider why Shakespeare’s plays continue to engage our imaginations so deeply and with such vitality. What makes them such probing representations of human love and sexuality, the human imagination, gender relations, politics, power, war, nationhood, evil, prejudice, friendship, forgiveness, and human frailty, among other notable issues? One aim of this course is to demonstrate that rich literature—exemplified by Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets—engages imaginatively and complexly with central issues in human life and culture, prompting us to think about them in deeper and multifaceted ways.
 
Writing assignments will likely include two papers and two tests.
 

International Cultures (IL)

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Christian Haines

This course examines the horror fiction of Stephen King. We will read several major novels by King (including The Shining and Carrie), as well as novellas. We will also read writers that influenced King, such as Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, and view film/television adaptations of King’s works. The course will focus on three main topics: 1) how King represents and reinvents the genre of horror; 2) how King’s fiction deals with gender, race, and class; and 3) what King can teach us about the publishing industry, mass culture, and the institution of literature.
 
Course assignments will include a midterm exam, one or two essays (analyses of King’s writing), creative exercises (like writing horror scenes), and a final project.
 

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Verna Kale

English 133 is an introduction to American literature from the turn of the 19th century through World War II. This time period coincides with a literary movement known as “Modernism.” The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel of the “roaring twenties,” turns 100 years old in 2025, so is Modernism even still modern? In our study of the fiction, creative nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and cinema of this era we can’t possibly be comprehensive, but we can be reflective. In addition to performing close reading and analysis of key texts of this period, we will consider cultural influences, publication history, and the continued significance of these works in our own tumultuous present. Regular attendance, daily reading assignments, and active participation are required components for success in this readings- and discussion-based class.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: Matt Tierney

This course combines literary and cultural studies with labor and management studies. Focusing on the role of genre in the presentation and transformation of workers’ expression and organization, we’ll read everything from science fiction novels and documentary poetry to memoirs, critical theory, history, and other kinds of nonfiction. We consider topics like 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 3-4 short writing assignments.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

General Education: Social and Behavioral Scien (GS)

General Education – Integrative: Interdomain

Instructor: Hester Blum

This course offers an introduction to environmental literature through a focus on human interactions with ice, fire, water, and stone. How do people survive in environments seemingly hostile to human life? In this class we will read speculative fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and creative nonfiction about polar exploration, forest fires, mountain climbing, sea voyages, interstellar travel, and desert islands, among other environments. In a world in which ecological extremity is increasingly close to home, these texts may help us imagine and navigate climate futures.
 
The class will be discussion based, with several on-campus field trips during class sessions to observe ice, fire, water, and stone on Penn State’s campus. Requirements include three short papers and occasional discussion posts.
 
General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Steele Nowlin

This course studies “medievalism,” a term used to describe the act of looking back to an “idea” of the Middle Ages for inspiration or subject matter. Our class will explore examples of medievalism in literature, art, and culture, working to understand what so many creative thinkers in later time periods have found so captivating about the Middle Ages. Why have the Middle Ages been such a fruitful imaginative source for writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, scholars, and thinkers? How does engaging with an idea of the Middle Ages allow artists to comment on their own time? What makes something “medieval,” anyway? We’ll approach questions like these by looking at a variety of “medieval” works and cultural phenomena, including works produced in the Middle Ages and works produced in later times, up to the present day. We’ll study works of literature and art–stories and paintings, for example–but also other kinds of creative productions: things like maps, manuscripts, movies, games, musical compositions, and public exhibitions. We’ll explore how ideas of “the medieval” changed over time and how the term “medieval” even now has a variety of competing meanings and connotations. To help with our exploration, we’ll also read scholarship that explores the “medieval” in literature, art, and culture, and we’ll explore creating some “medieval” works of our own. Our class meetings will center on lively discussion, and classwork is likely to include shorter written assignments throughout the semester, creative assignments and activities, and a culminating project that blends creative and analytic approaches to the idea of the “medieval.”

General Education: Arts (GA)

General Education: Humanities (GH)

General Education – Integrative: Interdomain

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, tradition and challenges to tradition, authorship complexities like anonymity, character development, 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-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.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: Jeffrey Nealon

Description: English 200 is, broadly speaking, designed as an introduction to critical reading — which is to say, an introduction to the specific questions posed by reading literature and other cultural artifacts, as well as an introduction to some recent critical concepts that offer (at least provisional, sometimes differing) answers to these questions. What and/or how do texts and other cultural artifacts mean? What are the roles of the author and the reader in the production of this meaning? How are readings produced by readers, and, conversely, is there a way in which readers are produced by what they read? What are the important differences between just reading something and interpreting it critically? How are social roles and identities important in reading? In short, perhaps the best way to describe the course is as an introduction to the theory and practice of interpretation.
This class assumes that the beginning student’s primary difficulties with theory are not content-related (“This is too hard!”), but are related more immediately to questions of practice (“What can I do with this ‘difficult’ material?”). It is to the this question that we will return time and time again.
 
Grading: Aside from robust class participation, there will be 2 exams, and you will write 2 graded essays–each about 5 typed pages.
 
Major Requirement (or ENGL 201)

Instructor: Claire Bourne

This course covers key works of British literature written and published in the medieval period through to the end of the eighteenth century. We will approach the poems, plays, and prose texts on the syllabus by paying close attention to the ways that these works reflect the material culture of their time and how their authors and makers leveraged textual technologies (whether the pen or the printing press or both) to make important points about contemporary English culture, politics, religion, and/or social issues. Some of their arguments captured by these texts still resonate in the present—we will discuss this, too. The reading list may include writing by anonymous, Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, and Phillis Wheatley. The course will include visits to the Eberly Family Special Collections Library to view rare copies of the works we read as well as other object related to the stories captured therein. Coursework may include in-class writing assignments, intermittent reading quizzes, and a creative final project.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

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, European American men and women, 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.
 

General Education: Humanities (GH)

United States Cultures (US)

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. If you are an ENGL major, this course counts toward the Professional and Media Writing concentration.

Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Instructor: Michael Anesko

As a survey course in American literature since the Civil War, English 232 will introduce you to the major literary genres in which writers worked during the century after Appomattox: poetry, fiction, and drama.
 
The reading list likely will include poetry by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens; plays by Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller; and fiction (short stories and novels) by Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston.
 
Final grades will be based upon class participation (20%), cumulative quiz average (50%), and a final examination (30%).

General Education: Humanities (GH)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: John Marsh

The American poet James Dickey once said, “What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe.” An exaggeration? Maybe. But many, like me, share Dickey’s enthusiasm. In this course, you will learn how poets write poems, what they have used them to say, and how to read and write about what poets have written and said. Broadly speaking, the course is divided into two parts. For the first ten weeks or so, we study the various elements of poems (speaker, situation, language, tone, sound, structure, and form) and read poems that illustrate these elements. For the remainder of the course, we put what we have learned to use in reading several long poems written by American poets: Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage”; Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”; and Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems.” Afterwards, you can decide for yourself whether Dickey is right. Students in this class will write two papers and take a midterm and a final exam.
 

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Garrett Sullivan

The dramatist William Shakespeare and the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock are routinely praised as the greatest artists working in their respective media. This course will consider not only Shakespeare’s influence on Hitchcock, but also how Hitchcock’s work transforms our understanding of Shakespeare. We will take up topics such as: tragedy, suspense and terror; the male gaze and the construction of desire; marriage, mutuality and property; homosociality, homosexuality and heteronormativity; the industrial dimensions of artistic production in Hollywood and on the early modern stage; reflexivity, representational technologies and the media-specific mechanics of depicting subjectivity. Paired works might include Othello and Rear Window; Hamlet and North by Northwest; The Winter’s Tale and Vertigo; or Merchant of Venice and Strangers on a Train.
 
This course meets the English major requirements for a course literature of the 16th century (either Medieval through 16th century or 16th century through 18th century) and the diversity requirement for a course related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, and/or postcolonial issues. Course assignments will include short papers, discussion posts, in-class tests and a final paper or project.
 

Medieval through Sixteenth Century and Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Periods

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Christopher Castiglia

This course will examine queer life as depicted in a variety of nineteenth-century genres, including horror (Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Turn of the Screw), Romance (The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance), Sentimental Literature (Ethel’s Love Life), poetry (Leaves of Grass, The Ballad of Reading Gaol), drama (The Importance of Being Earnest), love letters (between Emily and Susan Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed), and short fiction by authors such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, and Bret Harte. We will discuss concepts such as “romantic friendship,” the rhetoric of passion, queer utopianism, queer obsession, criminality and queerness, the psychology of the closet and the formation of sexual subcultural, gender nonconformity, and queer aesthetics. Students can expect to write 3 5-7 page papers, including one leading to an exhibition in the library.

Nineteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Julia Kasdorf

Have you have learned some things about writing poems in the prerequisite workshop course, English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing? Take this course if you want to continue developing your craft. Expect to practice the skills and vocabulary common to practicing poets, while also reading and writing in new directions. As part of a community of learners, you will create a serious conversation about craft and content in response to the poems you read and write. You can expect to write a new poem each week, respond to assigned weekly readings, give written and oral critiques of peers’ writing, attend public readings, and memorize poems. Assessment based on participation, completion, and quality of a final portfolio.

Creative Writing Concentration

Instructor: Paul Kellermann

This course asks you to ingrain yourself in the community. What’s more, it implores you to convince your peers that they too are members of this community. To do so, you’ll have only one tool at your disposal — language. You will examine the rhetoric of the community around you, and you will join the fray by entering the discourse. On one hand, you’ll be one voice among many. On the other, you will learn to deploy your voice effectively to cut through the cacophony.
 
English 421 isn’t a conventional college class. It requires no standard texts. You design your own assignments. It conforms to no traditional syllabus, beyond a basic framework required by the university. And the walls of our classroom extend in a twenty-mile radius from the corner of College and Allen — and likely farther. In other words, this class is a complete experiment, the success of which depends entirely upon you.
 
We begin with a simple question: What is a community?
 
And we end with an equally simple question: How do we deploy writing to effect positive change in that community?
 
How we get from Point A to Point B remains a mystery, a journey to be taken.
 
Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Instructor Tina Chen

In this class we will explore contemporary Asian American literary production by reading a wide variety of texts focused on the possibilities and limits of space and place. Our goal is two-fold: to orient ourselves in relation to Asian American literatures and to orient Asian American literatures in relation to other geographical formations such as the nation, the hemisphere, the transpacific, and the world. To accomplish this, we will consider how physical and geographical spaces map on to psychic and historical ones, in the process focusing on a diverse set of locations—including ethnic enclaves, detention camps, islands, the transpacific, the hemisphere, and Global Asias. We will engage key concepts in Asian American literary studies such as transnationalism, globalization, racialization, imperialism, history, culture, and postracialism. Additionally, we will think about how issues of identity, belonging, contestation, aesthetics, diaspora, and genre are critical to Asian American literary production. Finally, we will interrogate the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of “Asian America” as itself an imagined nation. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of Asian American literature by considering a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, drama, memoir, comics, poetry, and film.
 
Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period
 
Literary and Media Studies Concentration
 
United States Cultures (US)

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 Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period
 
Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: Carla Mulford

Fictional works were 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 up for this class include a 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 we will attend to whether women actually had free choice over their lives in this historical era. We will likely read, in chronological order, the following novels: 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). This is a hard-copy book course. Written assignments include three papers (about 4 to 5 pages each). Active engagement, including class participation, matters (and counts) in this class. This course meets the nineteenth-century requirement for English majors.

Nineteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: Michael Anesko

Students in English 433 will try to understand why most critics of American literature generally regard the first half of the twentieth century as the high watermark of American fiction. Authors will include Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.
 
Undergraduates in English 433 will be responsible for writing three critical essays, some occasional in-class quizzes, and a final examination. Final grades will depend upon each student’s essays (50%), quizzes and participation (25%), and the final examination (25%), although the exact weighting of these elements will be affected by demonstrated improvement over the course of the semester.
 
Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period
 
Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Instructor: Marcy North

In ENGL 443, English Renaissance, we will focus on the poetry and prose of the 16th and 17th centuries, with attention to popular literature, controversy literature, verse fashions, and prose fictions. There will be units on jest literature, fictions of the craft classes, stories of martyrs and religious controversy, utopias and romances, sonnets and satires. The authors might include Sir Thomas More and his daughter Margaret Roper; sonneteers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ann Lock, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth; prose by writers such as Francis Bacon and Margaret Cavendish; early fiction writers such as Thomas Deloney, and anonymous authors who were part of the antifeminist controversy in the 17th century. Students will be expected to contribute to class discussion. Assignments include in-class work, Canvas forum posts, short quizzes, and two papers.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century and Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Periods

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: David Loewenstein

What did liberty mean to writers and readers in the early modern period? One of our greatest English writers, John Milton (1608-1674), redefined the meanings of political, domestic, and religious liberty as he lived through an age of revolution. We’ll examine the meanings of liberty in his prose and poetry and see how they compare with our notions today, including contemporary notions of liberalism. Related issues—for example, press censorship, religious toleration, and religious and political dissent—will likewise be important to our discussions since they are major issues in his writings. We’ll study selections from Milton’s early poetry and his prose before turning our close attention to Paradise Lost, his greatest literary achievement and the finest epic in the English language. We’ll conclude by studying Samson Agonistes, Milton’s great drama about liberty and servility. As we study Milton’s writings, we’ll also address some of the interpretative issues involved in reading literary texts in their cultural and historical contexts. At the same time, we’ll consider how Milton’s writings still speak to us today as we continue to confront such issues as political and religious liberty, freedom and gender relations, religious toleration, and freedom of the press.
 
Writing assignments will likely include two short papers, a mid-term test, and a final take-home essay question. The class will also include a visit to our Library’s Special Collections so that students can view Penn State’s outstanding collection of early editions of works by Milton and other early modern writers.
 
Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period
 
Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructors: Karrieann Soto Vega

Perhaps you have heard prevalent descriptions of political communication through accusations of “dangerous rhetoric” or the common false equivalence of rhetoric as disingenuous speech: “that’s just rhetoric.” But what exactly is rhetoric? This course tackles that question by surveying different understandings of rhetoric from antiquity to today. Simple dictionary definitions would categorize rhetoric as “the art of persuasive speaking or writing” (Oxford), typically from the Greco-Roman tradition. However, more contemporary conceptions expand this definition to include diverse cultural traditions, goals, and communication strategies. Considering different temporal and spatial locations of rhetorical traditions, via academic readings and new media examples, you will be expected to engage in rhetorical analysis of cultural dynamics in this socio-political moment and cast new directions for rhetorical efforts in the future.

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

Rhetoric and Writing Concentration

International Cultures (IL)

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 (4 to 5 pages each) and quizzes on each novel. 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 Cultural Studies Concentration

 

Instructor: Steele Nowlin

In this Honors seminar, we’ll dive into the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (still famous today as the author of The Canterbury Tales) and his friend and fellow poet John Gower (who may not enjoy the same name recognition these days, but who was a fascinating, prolific, and influential writer in his own time). We’ll place Chaucer’s and Gower’s work side by side and in its broader literary and cultural context, thinking about how these writers engaged, adapted, and reimagined a wide variety of source material and ideas, including the work of other writers (both of Latin antiquity and more recent European writers); historical and chronicle narrative (both “real” and “legendary” history); the “current events” of their own tumultuous days (including war, social uprisings, and the deposing of the king); vexed ethical and political questions (and the power dynamics inherent in those questions); and aspects of “everyday” human experience (like social relationships, emotional experience, and the construction of identity) which especially fascinated both writers. Because Chaucer and Gower also read each other’s poetry, we’ll look too at how they reimagined each other’s work and sometimes took similar poetic material in very different directions. We’ll read a wide variety of forms and genres in which they wrote, including dream vision, romance, chronicle, saint’s life, lyric, exemplary narrative, and tale collection. We’ll spend some time at the start of the semester familiarizing ourselves with the Middle English in which they wrote. (This is great fun, and no prior experience with Middle English is required or expected!) Over the course of the semester, we’ll read and discuss modern scholarship about these writers as well. The core of our class will be our daily, lively discussions of these poets and their reimaginings. Students can expect to complete shorter writing assignments, some Middle English reading and “translation” activities early on, and a substantial final project that we will build toward incrementally over the course of the semester.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Sean Goudie

The achievement of writers and artists from formerly colonized areas in the world represents arguably the most significant facet of literary production during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. The selections of St. Lucian poet, playwright, and essayist Derek Walcott and Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul as recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 and 2001 respectively aptly emblematizes the importance of that achievement. In this course, we will consider literature produced by the formerly colonized—artists and works now frequently termed “postcolonial”—from one of these areas: the Caribbean. We shall focus especially on the Caribbean novel in its Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone manifestations but we will also treat poems, plays, songs, paintings, and other forms of literary and cultural production. (All course readings will be in English.) As we proceed, we will concern ourselves with the formal virtuosity and thematic nuances that characterize richly diverse Caribbean postcolonial literary traditions. A central preoccupation of the course will be to identify the ways in which colonial and postcolonial realities shape the contours and central issues of Caribbean writing, issues such as cultural and linguistic syncretism, gender and ethnic relations, and race and resistance.

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Karrieann Soto Vega

In this course we will explore theories of social movement rhetoric as they pertain to historical and contemporary events of social protest. Where do they begin? What are their goals? What available means do social movements utilize? What composition practices emerge? How do rhetorical theories shape how we understand social movements and activism? What about culture? We will take an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to study how social movements begin, function, and interact with larger social forces. Besides student presentations of academic readings, course discussions will also attend to distinct modalities of expression in specific case studies.

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Toby Thompson

The course will be conducted as a writing seminar based on the life and work of the 2016 Nobel laureate in literature, Bob Dylan, and on related writings about rock in its extensive canon. You will relate Dylan’s life to his work, and techniques for doing so will be taught–as will the basics of rock criticism and of related nonfiction writing.
 
Two 2,000-word articles, one due near the beginning of the semester, one due near the middle, and a longer one (3,000 to 4,000 words) toward the end, will be required. The first will be in response to a Dylan love song, the second in response to a political song, and the third longer piece will center around a critical look at Dylan or another artist contemporary to him.
 
This last piece may be personal–an essay or nonfiction story in response to the work or life of Bob Dylan or another rock artist. These three pieces will constitute two-thirds of your grade. Shorter exercises will be done, either in class or as homework assignments. A 150-200 word meditation on Dylan’s music or life will be due every week.
 
Any late article will receive a maximum grade of C. There will be neither mid-term nor final examinations.
 
Textbooks will include my book about Dylan, Positively Main Street, as well as Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles, and Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Rock critics such as Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau, Amanda Petrusich and Carrie Battan will be read. You will read or listen to Dylan’s lyrics weekly, at Bobdylan.com or at Spotify. You will watch Martin Scorcese’s “American Masters” film about Dylan, No Direction Home, and the film, Don’t Look Back. Also Scorcese’s documentary about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour The Rolling Thunder Revue. Each is available online.
 
Above all, Bob Dylan and the Literature of Rock promises an invigorating time. Dylan’s first era is one synchronous with our own. As he wrote during the 1960s, “They times they are a changin’,” then advised, “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parkin’ meters.”
 

Writing Across the Curriculum course