Courses in English

Below are descriptions of the courses at Penn State Altoona for the coming semester that can count to satisfy the requirements of the English major and minor, as well as the Professional Writing minor. Many of them also fulfill the requirements of the Secondary Education/English major, the Multidisciplinary Studies major, and the Integrative Arts major. Some fulfill general education and B.A. Humanities or Arts requirements. Or you might find them interesting enough to take as electives.

Spring 2023 Courses

ENGL 050: Introduction to Creative Writing (Sherrill)

Two, count ’em two, genres here! We’ll dive first into the spooky world of poetry and swim right through into fiction writing. What’s the difference? Come and see. This class will be about the process of writing, and about you producing poems and stories. I’ll challenge you, work you hard, but make sure you have fun as well. (A Gen Ed—Arts course.)

ENGL 050: Introduction to Creative Writing (Jabbeh Wesley)

This is a class where learning is fun, where you will work on your own writing in a circle of student writers, where the major text is your own work. The course will focus on two genres of the creative process: poetry and fiction writing. It is a student-centered workshop or seminar course that will both inspire you and help shape you into a better writer. The course should test your ability to make words do what no words have ever done before. You will be required to come up with your own original poetry and one short story while at the same time critiquing fellow students’ poetry. There will be immediate feedback, mentoring, and tutoring. You will have a new opportunity to see writing as craft and as art by carving up your own images, using all of the tools you need to write with the passion that makes good literature enjoyable. (A Gen Ed—Arts course.)

ENGL 139: African American Literature (Simpson)

What is a “talking book”? What is it that’s “African” in African American literature? What makes it uniquely “American”? What characteristics define this literary tradition, and how have its innovations enlarged the scope and achievement of American letters as a whole? Explore these and other questions as we survey major writers and works in the African American literary tradition. We’ll consider a broad range of oral and written forms, including folk tales, spirituals, rap lyrics, sermons, slave narratives, plays, poems, and fiction. Authors we’ll study include Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more! (A Gen Ed—Humanities course, and a United States Cultures course.)

ENGL 180: Literature and the Natural World (Davis)

Come read the new and the old, stories and poems about the beginning of the world and the end of the world, told by talking crows and bachelors who go to the woods to live deliberately. Investigate the species these writers name, the topography that shapes their way of seeing the world. Thoreau will be there. Annie Dillard will be there. Whitman will be there. Elizabeth Bishop will be there. And a host of other writers who wanted to save the world, to celebrate the world, to embrace nature in its many and myriad manifestations. (A Gen Ed—Humanities course.)

ENGL 209: Journal or Magazine Practicum—Hard Freight (Murphy)

Have you always wanted to see your name on a masthead? Then join the staff of Hard Freight! This 1-credit experiential course offers students hands-on experience in the development and production of the online campus literary magazine. Students will participate on editorial boards, in the advertising and marketing of the magazine, and in coffee-house events created to celebrate the artistic efforts of students on campus. (Mode: Asynchronous web. Students may take this course as many as eight times in their career.)

ENGL 211W: Intro to Writing Studies (King)

In this course, students will build skills in three types of rhetorical analysis and production: the textual analysis of a landmark piece of public address (and your own attempt at speechwriting); the genre analysis of a contemporary style guide (capped off by a book review); and the visual analysis of a multimedia text of your choosing (followed by your attempt to pitch your classmates on a story of your own creation). To help us in our journey of understanding what we can do with these writing and analysis skills, we will invite practicing professional writers from a variety of academic and non-academic pursuits for Q&A sessions. These conversations will provide the launching pad for your final project: a journalistic profile into “what writing looks like” for a particular person or location. Our texts will include William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, Arthur Plotnick’s Spunk and Bite, Erin Williams’s Commute, Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl, and Richard McGuire’s Here. (NOTE: This course will be offered via remote synchronous mode through the Digital Learning Cooperative to students at multiple Penn State campuses. ENGL 211W is a required course for the Professional Writing minor. It is not a substitute for ENGL 15 – Rhetoric and Composition. Please contact Professor Kyle King at [email protected] with any questions.)

ENGL 212: Introduction to Fiction Writing (Sherrill)

In this course we will identify and explore the fundamentals of Fiction Writing from the ground up: fear, hope, rage, lust, love, want, need, honesty, and dishonesty. Along the way, we’ll develop skills in narration, plot development, characterization, etc. Telling stories is one of the ways we carry our humanity from generation to generation. Creating compelling and entertaining stories is the artist’s challenge. This class is about Art; the art of looking at the world around us and rendering that vision, with bravery and honesty, in words. (NOTE: This course meets concurrently with ENGL 412; students who qualify for Advanced Poetry may contact Professor Sherrill at [email protected] for more information.)

ENGL 250: Peer Tutoring in Writing (Peterson)

Students enrolled in this course will study theories of peer tutoring in order to prepare to work as paid Writing Consultants in the Writing Commons. If you are contemplating a career in education or as a professional writer, or if you are simply a strong writer and would like to help others, consider enrolling in this course. (This course counts toward English major elective credits as well as toward the Professional Writing Minor. Instructor’s signature required for enrollment; email Professor Peterson at [email protected].)

ENGL 268: Reading Sexuality and Race in Medieval Drama (Stoyanoff)

How do we bring to life on stage something written over five hundred years ago? More importantly, why would we want to do this? How is any of this “relatable” to us in 2022? This course offers the unique opportunity for students to see the history/histories of sexuality and race in texts that most folks would often (wrongly) assume are all about heterosexual, cis-gendered, white people. Medieval drama is, quite literally, the story of humankind in a Christian context, and even in this focused context, it portrays the human experience in ways to which all people can relate. Free will and faith. Fashion and sin. Heaven and Hell. Angels and demons. In this course we will first focus on context: the economic, political, and social anxieties that pervaded medieval England. Such context is remarkably similar to our own cultural context, really, and through such context, we will see how sexuality and race in particular are at work in these texts and/or are available as possibilities in performance. Then, we will read a number of the Corpus Christi pageants, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and the medieval morality play, Mankind. The Corpus Christi pageants were performed on pageant wagons that would process through city streets over the course of a day (think parade floats) while morality plays, such as Mankind, were performed on scaffold staging in which these smaller, raised stages encircled the audience seated in the middle. We will also be concerned with how to stage and to perform these texts, which means we will use the online tools available to us (TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) to aid us in recreating certain scenes. In addition to these recreations, all students will be asked to write bi-weekly short essays engaging the texts directly. (NOTE: This course will be offered via remote synchronous mode through the Digital Learning Cooperative to students at multiple Penn State campuses. Meets concurrently with ENGL 442.)

ENGL 225N / WMNST 225N: Sexuality and Modern Visual Culture: Sex Sells ... So What, Exactly, Are We Buying? (Rotunno and Page)

Our world bombards us with images, and we contribute to that barrage each time we post a picture. This class will engage you in vital discussions about those images as well as those that came before us and continue to shape what we see and create today. At its core, this class will be driven by our discussion of visual presentations that use “sex” to “sell” us a story; that story might be about what family is or should be, about what political activism looks like, about how a society thinks about love, beauty, hate, even its future hopes or its present fears. To spur those discussions, we’ll offer you readings by and about artists and their subjects—both fictional and real—and a rich, diverse historical background in visual representations that reflect how Western society, from the mid-19th-century to today, has viewed itself through the lens of sexuality, which always intersects with race, gender, gender identity, and class. For example, the terms “feminist” and “homosexual” were invented by the Victorians and reflect profound shifts in conceptions of identity. Another 19th-century invention was the idea of the literary and artistic “avant-garde” as a minority contingent with politically and/or aesthetically advanced views. These ideas of minority culture were deeply enmeshed with one another and still have effects on our world today. Discussions of these ideas then, hopefully, can help us all navigate the flood of images that today’s media presents as well as the self-images we cast into the world. This course can be used as a prerequisite for a 1-credit study abroad (to LONDON!) opportunity that will occur—circumstances allowing—in late May 2023.

ENGL 442: Reading Sexuality and Race in Medieval Drama (Stoyanoff)

How do we bring to life on stage something written over five hundred years ago? More importantly, why would we want to do this? How is any of this “relatable” to us in 2022? This course offers the unique opportunity for students to see the history/histories of sexuality and race in texts that most folks would often (wrongly) assume are all about heterosexual, cis-gendered, white people. Medieval drama is, quite literally, the story of humankind in a Christian context, and even in this focused context, it portrays the human experience in ways to which all people can relate. Free will and faith. Fashion and sin. Heaven and Hell. Angels and demons. In this course we will first focus on context: the economic, political, and social anxieties that pervaded medieval England. Such context is remarkably similar to our own cultural context, really, and through such context, we will see how sexuality and race in particular are at work in these texts and/or are available as possibilities in performance. Then, we will read a number of the Corpus Christi pageants, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and the medieval morality play, Mankind. The Corpus Christi pageants were performed on pageant wagons that would process through city streets over the course of a day (think parade floats) while morality plays, such as Mankind, were performed on scaffold staging in which these smaller, raised stages encircled the audience seated in the middle. We will also be concerned with how to stage and to perform these texts, which means we will use the online tools available to us (TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) to aid us in recreating certain scenes. In addition to these recreations, all students will be asked to write bi-weekly short essays engaging the texts directly. (NOTE: This course will be offered via remote synchronous mode through the Digital Learning Cooperative to students at multiple Penn State campuses. Meets concurrently with ENGL 268; instructor signature required. Email Professor Stoyanoff at [email protected].)

ENGL 403: Literature and Culture: Sexuality and Modern Visual Culture: Sex Sells ... So What, Exactly, Are We Buying? (Rotunno and Page)

ENGL 412: Advanced Fiction Writing (Sherrill)

This advanced fiction writing course will meet concurrently with ENGL 212. (Students may take this course twice in their career. Instructor’s signature required for enrollment. Email professor Sherrill at [email protected].)

ENGL 420: Writing for the Web (Cohen, Penn State Abington)

Social media has become central to our collective lives. Digital technologies enable messages composed by anyone anywhere in the world to spread further and faster than ever before. Writing has always been social, but technologies continue to create new avenues for meaning-making and new ways to build credibility, shape relationships, and make arguments. How do social media items get produced? How do you know which messages to trust? This course will help you think through the social and ethical implications of web-assisted communication as you discuss, research, plan, and carry out digital projects that address issues in your community. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate how writing on the web affords opportunities to convey ideas and arguments in visual, aural, spatial, and gestural modes, and in turn, how communication in those modes shapes credibility and relationships. (NOTE: This DLC course is remote synchronous Wednesdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m. and includes students from multiple Penn State campuses.)

ENGL 432: The American Novel to 1900 (Petrulionis)

Novels. The best reading for our afternoons, all curled up in comfy chairs, in hammocks on a breezy day, or on a blanket at the beach. But back in the seriously back then day, the earliest American novels were denounced for leading young women astray and diverting their attention from more serious and virtuous pursuits. How did this literary genre become our favorite reading pleasure? Are you interested in reading novels written from the start of our young U.S. republic to the dawn of the twentieth century? Would you like to learn what role the frontier, Native Americans, revolutionary and civil war, politics, slavery, religious upheaval, gender relations, and “the gilded age” of industrialization played on the literary imagination? Among others, we will read the earliest novels written in the new United States—about ventriloquists, serious flirts, and “rakes” (today, we call them “players”),the first American “classics,” gothic and true crime stories, and novels you’ve never heard of, including books that definitely did not win awards for their uplifting message—i.e., regardless how hard you work, you’ll never rise out of the drudgery and despair of your life and society.

ENGL 474: Special Topics in Rhetoric and Composition: Advanced Peer Tutoring in Writing (Peterson)

Students enrolled in this course will study theories of peer tutoring in order to prepare to work as paid Writing Consultants in the Writing Commons. If you are contemplating a career in education or as a professional writer, or if you are simply a strong writer and would like to help others, consider enrolling in this course. (This course meets concurrently with ENGL 250. It counts toward English major elective credits as well as toward the Professional Writing Minor. Instructor’s signature required for enrollment; email Professor Peterson at lmp2[email protected].)