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).

Instructor: Michael Anesko

As a survey course in American literature of the modern period, English 133 will introduce you to the major literary genres in which writers worked during the first half of the twentieth century: fiction, poetry, and drama. The modern America that came of age in the years 1900-1945 is, in many ways, the America we still live in: a mass consumer culture driven by unprecedented prosperity. Many kinds of “freedom” that most of us now take for granted—of mobility, made possible by the automobile; of communication, made possible by rapid technological advances; of more liberal extensions of gender and racial equality, made possible by changing legal codes and social values—first gained momentum during our period of study, which is why the literary record passed down to us from that time remains so vital to our understanding of who we are today.

Authors to be considered likely will include: (fiction)—Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston; (poetry)—Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens; (drama)—Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller.

Grading will be based upon a number of in-class quizzes (50%), attendance and active participation (20%), and a final examination (30%).

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Matt Tierney

This course combines literary and cultural studies with labor and management history. Readings range from novels and poems to memoirs and philosophy, as 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 three to five short writing assignments.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

General Education: Social and Behavioral Sciences (GS)

General Education – Integrative: Interdomain

Instructor: Camille-Yvette Welsch

Literacy and the Lit Corps offers students the unique opportunity to use their education to change people’s lives. Married to an LA 495, students earn six credits between the two courses. In 202, they learn about literacy and impediments to its acquisition while in LA 495, they tutor adults working towards GEDS or adults who are emerging language learners from around the world. Our students have helped learners pass citizenship tests, get their green cards, pass their high school equivalency tests, and read to their grandchildren for the first time. All tutors are trained and richly supported with materials and experienced leaders who will help them learn how to help their tutees. This course gives you the opportunity to expand your education and change lives—yours and your learner’s. To sign up, go to https://sites.psu.edu/english202bliteracy/

General Education: Writing/Speaking (GWS)

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 satisfies the 20th century or later period requirement and counts toward the Professional and Media Writing concentration.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Instructor: Verna Kale

English 232 is an introductory survey of American literature from 1865 to the present. A comprehensive study of every important literary work, author, movement, genre, or form during the past 150+ years would be a daunting and exhausting (and ultimately impossible) task, and so we will focus instead on careful study of selected representative works by diverse authors, literary and cultural influences, publication history, and impact (including adaptations in other genres) and, importantly, the significance of these authors and works in our own tumultuous present. Students can expect classes to include a mix of lecture, discussion, and writing exercises. Written assignments will require you to think critically and creatively to analyze texts; to use a variety of resources to conduct research; to cite your sources in a properly formatted bibliography; and to present your ideas and findings to a public audience.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Chris Reed

Course is open to all students. Contact Professor Carla Mulford at cjm5@psu.edu to register.

Modern art and modern literature developed together. Authors and artists moved in the same circles and often worked together, some authors were also artists–and vice versa. Whether you know it or not, your study of literature, therefore, has given you an excellent grounding to understand and enjoy modern and contemporary art.

This course invites students to develop skills of critical and integral thinking by exploring the interrelations of art and literature from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. We will examine: relationships between visual expression and written language; formal or generic relationships between texts and images at particular historical moments; issues of creative collaboration and cross-pollination between writers and artists, which have been crucially important in the history of literature and poetry; conceptions of creativity as these have been expressed by writers using the figure of the artist. The course will take up major figures of modernist literature and art – Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso – as well as more recent interactions between artists and authors, including graphic novels and computer poetry.

Twentieth Century to Present Time Period

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Christopher Castiglia

This course will examine the conditions that allow for humans to flourish, both individually and collectively. We will look at the function of love, friendship, compassion, affiliation, belief, and justice as ways humans make connections with the world around them.  What was the role of social reform in nineteenth-century America, and how did writers understand what it meant to be citizens of a functional democracy?  Along with nineteenth-century literature by Hawthorne, Melville, Jewett, Delany, Whitman, Douglass and others, we will study recent developments in “positive psychology” and the enhancement of human flourishing, as well as how reading and the literary imagination may be tools for creating human (and environmental) positivity.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum

Instructor: Samuel Kọ́láwọlé

The art of fiction isn’t solely about inventing; it’s the art of thinking itself, of making sense of your own world, your own life, and the imagined ones of others. It’s the art of creating your world in words, finding a way to make it so real that your readers can inhabit it with you. It’s the art of finding your voice, putting together words and images, and creating moments that are uniquely yours. In this class, we will explore the art and craft of fiction writing, sharing our work and responding to the work of others with care. We will consider some ideas for writing fiction and closely consider examples from diverse writers who effectively use those techniques. We will read works by writers such as Stuart Dybek, Steven Millhauser, Jamel Brinkley, Crystal Wilkinson, and Tiphanie Yanique.

Creative Writing Concentration

Instructor: Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Assume that you have learned some things about writing poems in the prerequisite workshop course, English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing. Take this course because you want to continue developing your craft. Expect to develop 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 s serious and evolving conversation about craft and content in response to the poetry you read and write. You can expect to write a new poem each week, prepare responses to assigned weekly readings, provide written and oral critiques of peers’ writing, and attend public readings. Assessment based on participation, completion, and a final portfolio.

Creative Writing Concentration 

Instructor: Elizabeth Kadetsky

This creative writing course focusing on creative nonfiction, which fulfills credits for the BA/MA creative writing program and the creative writing minor, looks at three popular forms of life storytelling and leads students in producing and performing work in the three forms. Coursework will include reading several examples from the New York Times “Modern Love” Column and The New Yorker “Personal Histories” feature, and watching and listening to Moth and Moth Story Hour performances. By examining the particulars of each form, students will explore the rules of each and discover the possibilities for creative expression within those structures. Guest speakers who have published and performed in the selected venues will share from their experiences and creative processes. Students may attend a field trip to a local Moth performance, and/or host a public salon for Moth performances.

Creative Writing Concentration

Instructor: Benjamin Schreier

In this course we will read a selection of Jewish American novels along with the film adaptations they have inspired. We will focus on differences in thematic emphasis and formal capacities across media and genre, and pay particular attention to how the representation of Jewish and American identity changes between original written text and filmed adaptation. Subjects such as assimilation, the Holocaust, and Zionism will feature prominently. Required texts will likely include works such as Exodus, The Pawnbroker, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Fleishman Is In Trouble.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Periods

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. For ENGL majors, this course satisfies the 20th century or later period requirement and counts toward the Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

Instructor: Michael Anesko

Modern American fiction written by major figures of the new century: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Careful study of the ways in which the modern idiom explores the relation between self and society. Grades will be based upon three assigned papers (50%), attendance and active participation (20%), and a final examination (30%).

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Instructor: David Loewenstein

The English Renaissance produced some of the greatest literature in our language. In this course we’ll study some of the outstanding works of the period in order to understand what made this age a time of enormous literary creativity. We’ll read not only major works by Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. We’ll also study important works by women writers (for example, Anne Askew, Queen Elizabeth, and Aemilia Lanyer) to see how female authors defined their literary authority and creativity in relation to the patriarchal culture of early modern England. We’ll also consider how the religious and political upheavals of the period (when England became primarily a Protestant nation) had an impact on the rich literary culture of the period. We’ll conclude our course by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674) in its entirety: we’ll consider how this greatest of epic poems embodies the literary innovation and cultural reform of the English Renaissance.

The course will be conducted by a mixture of discussion and informal lecture. Written assignments include several short papers, a midterm, and a take-home final. Our principal text for the course will be The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth and The Early Seventeenth Century (10th edition).

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

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,” he 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 1 Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale. 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. 2 short response papers; 2 critical essays; 1 final examination.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Instructor: Scott Smith

This course explores the literature and culture of England prior to the Norman Conquest. This era produced a number of Latin scholars renowned throughout medieval Christendom and also generated the earliest vernacular literature in Europe. Despite these cultural accomplishments, the period seldom receives much coverage in English courses. Beowulf is the most widely studied literary text from the era, yet in many ways it is not typical of the period. This class goes beyond Beowulf to examine the diverse literature of early medieval England as it survives in both Latin and Old English texts. (All texts will be taught in modern English translation.) The course addresses issues of translation, manuscript production and circulation, early practices of reading, material culture, cultural exchange, and the historical forces that shaped early literature. Finally, the course surveys some modern appropriations and reinventions of early medieval literature and history.

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Instructor: Claire Colebrook

When you read or view the works of Romanticism in the twenty-first century you will probably notice many resonances with the present. The way we think about art today (as individual expression and genius) is indebted to Romantic conceptions of originality. Romanticism’s politics anticipates twenty-first-century concerns regarding truth, illusion, oppression, gender norms and racial injustice. The Romantics also believed it was possible for the world to be radically different than it happens to be — a belief that no longer seems possible in the twenty-first century. The Romantics used various genres to forge theories of ecological politics, gender equality, racial justice, sexual difference and industrialization. This is a close reading course of poems that we will go through line by line, images that we will discuss as a group, and two novels (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Jane Austen’s Emma). Poets to be studied include William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

The Nineteenth Century Time Period

Instructor: Scott Smith

This course introduces students to the field of Comics Studies, the academic study of comics and graphic novels. We will survey different methodologies and focuses within comics scholarship, with historical representation of different theoretical approaches. In addition, students will study several comics texts in different forms and genres, for which they will produce their own analyses and criticism. Overall, the course provides a foundation in Comic Studies, with broad reading across primary and secondary texts.

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Instructor: Cynthia Mazzant

This course provides students with a rigorous training in professional writing that is specific to the grant writing genre and also applicable across disciplines. Students choose a cause important to them, and then actively develop a real-world feasible grant project by researching root causes and ally organizations; identifying a value-matched funder to target; systematically creating an action and evaluation plan; writing a letter of intent and project budget; and finally, completing a common application grant form aimed at their targeted funder. There are no exams or quizzes; all class activities directly feed the four papers that then lead to the final grant application.

Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Instructor: Leslie Mateer

This course investigates the activities of and career opportunities for professional and media writers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in this area is projected to grow 15% from 2012 to 2022, faster than the average for all occupations. But what, exactly, do professional and media writers do? Where do they work? How do they approach their work? What do they need to know? Why? We will pay special attention to digital literacies and contexts and to how digital devices and information affect the work landscape of professional and media writers. Some topics we will address include document design, document usability and writing for the web.  A major project for the course will be an e-portfolio for employers.

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Jeffrey Nealon

“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.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

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 course 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 Canvas forum contributions, short in-class writings, group work, or home works designed to generate discussion, quizzes, and two 3.5-5-page papers. The focus of the course will be from about 1400-1690, so this course should count for either the first or second literary period in the English major as well as fulfilling the English Department’s diversity requirement.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Instructor: Janet Lyon

In this course we will read novels, poems, and short stories by American women.  Nearly all of them were written in the past 75 years, and most are from the past 50 years. “American Women” is a pretty broad category, so we’ll be looking at it closely and from several of the angles introduced in the works themselves, including geography, aesthetics, political history, immigration, Native culture and dislocation, identity, gender, genre, disability, decolonization, anti-Black racism, sexuality, and Americanness, whatever that is. Requirements: several reading quizzes, research about authors, two papers, two exams, strict attendance, complete engagement.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period