English (ENGL)

Materials and techniques of research in English and American literary history; form and content of these. Required of all graduate students with an English major.

Study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and style in their applicability to teaching composition.

A problem-centered approach to literary and oral forms of English, utilizing historical and analytic perspectives.

An overview of composition studies, with particular attention to the schools of writing pedagogy.

The term post-colonial within itself has manifold meanings and implications. It is also considered a controversial term as many wonder exactly what is post to colonialism. In this class, we will explore colonial discourse theory, the roots of European imperialism and racism, and feminist constructions in relation to post-colonial theory. We will engage with and read critical theory, literature, and film to analyze the relations of power that (re)generate the roles of domination and dominated, and the in-between states of negotiation.

Professional writing for graduate students. ENGL 511 Thesis Workshop and Professional Writing (3)This course helps graduate students in all fields develop a clear, professional, prose style. Every week they give the instructor five or so pages of their writing and get detailed feedback. Several times during the semester, their week's assignment is read and commented on by the whole class in workshop. By learning how to suggest improvements to their classmates, members learn how to see and fix their own writing problems as well. In addition to style, classes discuss organization, mechanics, formats, and any special problems pertaining to the students' projects and to writing in their specialties. Students must have approximately 30 pages of professional-level writing on hand to revise for this course. Evaluation is based on weekly assignments, on a test, and on a case study.

Supervised workshop in advanced techniques of writing fiction.

For the student with considerable experience in writing poetry; a workshop devoted to advanced poetic technique.

Supervised workshop in advanced nonfiction techniques.

An introduction to the main features of the Old English language; readings in simple Old English prose and poetry.

Reading and critical analysis.

Study of biographical and autobiographical theory and practice through analysis of major English and American works in each genre.

This course offers students a working analytical familiarity with the history of Jewish writing in the United States (in North American context) and with both the history and the current state of professional study of it. Attention will be paid both to dominant and alternative narratives of this literature. Major historical topics include the earliest, pre-19th century Jewish writers in America; 19th century Jewish American writers; writers of the great Ashkenazi immigration wave of 1881-1924; interwar proletarian and modernist writers; postwar writers of assimilation; the mainstreaming of Jewish American literature in the 1950s and 1960s; post-"breakthrough" Jewish American writers; and 21st-century Jewish American literature and the new immigration. The course analyzes the development of the professional field of Jewish American literary study, including its prehistory and origins in Wissenschaft-based historicism; the professionalization of the field in the Viet Nam era; the growing dominance of so-called New Jewish Cultural Studies of the `80s and `90s; and new theoretical approaches of the first decades of the 21st century. Finally, the course examines the key debates and faultlines in the field today, including the divide between historicist and critical approaches; differences between English Department-based and Jewish Studies-based Jewish American literary study; the situation of Jewish American literary study vis-à-vis Americanist literary study and English Department-based literary study more generally; Cultural Studies-based approaches to the field vs. Literary Studies-based approaches; Comparativist approaches vs. non-Comparativist approaches; the move toward interdisciplinarity; and the ongoing struggle to theorize the field.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include figures such as Spenser and Sidney.

Studies in medieval English literature. Topics studied might include medieval romances, drama, or major figures aside from Chaucer.

A survey of Middle English literature, exclusive of Chaucer. ENGL 542 Middle English Literature (3) This seminar offers a survey of Middle English literature, exclusive of Chaucer, through a close study of some its characteristic forms and genres. The course begins with the linguistic features of Middle English, with attention to the major dialects of assigned texts (dialect instruction will continue throughout the semester as appropriate). Readings concentrate on several major forms and genres (such as romance, debate poetry, religious writing, lyrics) and authors (such as La?amon, the Pearl Poet, Margery Kempe, Lydgate, Malory). The course combines close reading and translation with ranging investigation into literary contexts and traditions. Considering the multilingual culture of medieval England, students may also read analogue and source literature in languages such as French and Latin (all of which will be taught in translation). Discussion of assigned texts will be situated within the relevant scholarship and criticism (current and historical).

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Bacon.

Major and minor works of Geoffrey Chaucer. The works studied will vary from year to year.

The poetry and prose of John Milton.

English drama from 1558 to 1642, exclusive of Shakespeare.

Special problems of sources, chronology, text, characterization, and motivation in the drama.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Fielding, Gibbon.

An overview of current research on literacy, with particular attention to language, thought, and learning and their applications to writing. ENGL 553 Literacy Studies (3) ENGL 553 will present current research on literacy, with an emphasis on language acquisition, learning theory, and their applications for writing pedagogy.1. Instructional, Educational, and Course Objectives:As a result of having completed the course, students will be able to: Demonstrate a clear understanding of current theories of literacy, including the reciprocity of writing and thinking, speaking and reading. Articulate and discuss various approaches to instruction, including uses of writing in the classroom and writing to learn. Compare and contrast traditional and current approaches to teaching writing. Demonstrate and apply the concepts of the curriculum models for teaching writing. Utilize practical methods for identifying goals and applying theory to instructional plans.2. Students' evaluation will be based on their knowledge and understanding of instructional objectives, demonstrated in written assignments, class discussions, and other assignments.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Bradstreet, Taylor, Mather, Franklin, Edwards, Paine.

This course analyzes how gender identities relate to the creation, use, and analysis of visual artifacts and bodily practices. Visual texts condition and are conditioned by intersectional embodiments of gender. In an attempt to understand and critically evaluate the role visual culture plays in our gendered lives as a dominant conduit of knowledge and identity production, this seminar examines visual processes and objects as they are informed and shaped by a nexus of gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and other forms of identity. The visualization of gendered forms of identity involves codes that produce bodies as signifiers of chaos, order, beauty, disease, nature, culture, evil, and virtue, including actions bisected according to binaries of masculinity and femininity. The seminar employs analytical approaches to these dynamics, including feminist, queer, and critical race theories of the visual as ways of interrogating a range of visual artifacts and bodily practices. After surveying key foundational texts, the course predominantly engages contemporary works and practices along complex gender matrices, including new directions in visual culture from the 1990s onward.

A practical and historical approach to film theory and analysis. This seminar develops critical visual literacy by examining a range of practices in cinema study, with emphases on the relation of film to literature and the analysis of film meaning. The course asks how to read a film, and considers the multiple ways that films combine framing, movement, editing, narrative, character, and genre toward the production of culture, ideology, identity, desire, poetic imagery, and community. Students will explore a wide range of critical methods, and will view one to two films per week. Readings will range from novels to classic film theory, cultural studies, belles-lettres, film criticism, radical poetics, apparatus theory, media theory, and contemporary philosophy.

This course explores formal and historical links between literature and art in modernist movements. "Ut pictura poesis" (like painting [is] poetry). This statement, originally articulated by the ancient Roman poet Horace, has been quoted and debated ever since. Links between art and literature have exerted a formative influence on the development of modern fiction and poetry as authors and artists in various avant-garde groupings collaborated and competed to generate modes of artistic expression appropriate to modernity. This course examines those interactions. Course objectives are to bring together for comparative examination: - 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. This course allows students to explore the ways knowledge of literature and skills in critical reading can be rewardingly brought to bear on the visual arts, and to consider how visual art can illuminate the workings of literature both for individual readers and in the classroom.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, Hardy.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats.

Figures will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Newman, Ruskin, Trollope.

Writers will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Cooper, Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James.

Studies of periods in African-American literature. Periods might include the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement.

Genre will vary from year to year, but will include categories such as poetry, fiction, essays, sermons, autobiographies, short stories.

Exploration of key concepts in African-American culture as manifested in various literary discourses.

Gender issues in African-American literature and culture. Issues may include the Black woman writer or Gay and Lesbian writers.

Students will write and revise book reviews of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction for a variety of newspapers and literary magazines. ENGL 570 The Writer as Critic: Reviewing Contemporary Poetry, Fiction, and Non-Fiction (3) In this class, students will read books and write reviews of those books, following a detailed schedule of readings and assignments established in the syllabus. Success in this class depends upon the student's ability to set priorities, organize materials, followup on initial contacts with presses and editors, and revise all reviews to publishable standards. Students begin by reading published book reviews and two texts (one poetry, one fiction) assigned by the instructor. Analyzing the structure of the published reviews, students draft model 200- and 550-word reviews, using the published reviews as guides. As the course progresses, students contact publishing houses and presses to request review copies, while simultaneously writing to editors with project proposals. With longer reviews--700 and 1,000 words--students engage complex issues about the economics and politics of publishing. Readings from the course Sampler (provided by instructor) inspire students to position themselves as literary citizens in the national conversation about contemporary writing. "The Writer as Critic" supplements the MFA course offerings in non-fiction. Students in all genres may practice advanced expository prose while gaining a practical skill. For students in the MFA program, this course fulfills a literature seminar requirement. Students will be evaluated on the quality of final reviews, the timely completion of all drafts, participation in editing teams, and final portfolio of correspondence. This course, for which MFA students have first priority, will be offered approximately every other year with a maximum of 12 students.

Students study the theory and practice of creative writing pedagogy in non-university settings.

Major figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Yeats, Conrad, Joyce, Shaw, Lawrence, Auden.

Figures studied will vary from year to year. Writers studied might include Dreiser, Wharton, Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, O'Neill, Williams.

Figures studied will be drawn from the era of Joyce and Virginia Woolf to the present.

Concentrated study in such major American writers as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.

Exploration of contemporary English language fiction.

A survey of comics and graphic novels, primarily in English. This seminar provides a survey of the comics medium and an introduction to the academic field of Comics Studies. Students acquire facility in the structural and formal analysis of comics and sequential narrative, as well as knowledge of significant critical theories and methodologies within the field of Comics Studies. Assigned primary texts may be targeted to a particular genre, mode, historical period, or creator(s). While the course has a general focus on North America, students may also read texts from European, Japanese, and/or South American traditions (all of which will be taught in translation), not to exceed 25% of the course. Discussion of assigned texts will be situated within relevant scholarship and criticism (current and historical).

Exploration of the dimensions of discourse as reflected in recent theories of rhetoric, poetics, and literary criticism.

Study of specific contemporary critical approaches to literature and application to English and/or American literary works.

Specific rhetorical problems, issues, or figures; topics will change from year to year.

Programs of readings designed to meet specific needs of individual students.

No description.

Continuing seminars that consist of a series of individual lectures by faculty, students, or outside speakers.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

Formal courses given on a topical or special interest subject which may be offered infrequently; several different topics may be taught in one year or term.

No description.

No description.

Supervised experience in teaching and orientation to other selected aspects of the profession at The Pennsylvania State University.