Courses in English

Below are descriptions of the courses at Penn State Altoona for the coming semester that can count to satisfy requirements of the English major and minor. Many of them also fulfill requirements of the Secondary Education/English major, the Letters, Arts, and Sciences 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.  

NOTE: These are not the standard course descriptions you'll find on LionPATH. These were written by the faculty members themselves and will give you a much better idea of what to expect in each course.

Fall 2019 Courses

ENGL 50.001 Introduction to Creative Writing (Emerging Writer): This section will focus on the writing of at least two genres and will be taught by the Emerging Writer in Residence (TBA).

ENGL 50 Introduction to Creative Writing (Davis): If you like to write stories and poems, then this is the class for you.  We’ll read the work of some of the best contemporary authors, and then try our hand at the craft of turning the material world into words.  This workshop will focus on fiction and poetry and will involve a great deal of drafting and critiquing before a final creative writing portfolio is prepared.  (A Gen Ed—Arts course.)

ENGL 50 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 50 Introduction to Creative Writing (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, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, and more!  (A Gen Ed—Humanities course, and a United States Cultures course.)

ENGL 141N (2 credits, plus 1 in spring 2018) African American Read-in Engaged Learning Experience (Reese) “Black Theatre Through a Black Lens” is the theme for the February 2020 African American Read-In. This course will introduce students to major writers and works in the African American literary tradition, focusing on dramatic literature, or playscripts. By considering a broad range of written texts produced over the past several hundred years in the U.S., students will gain an understanding of how the African American dramatic literary tradition has developed—that is, what historical events, social forces, and cultural contexts have influenced its writers, and what thematic and formal characteristics are central to the tradition. By putting Black writers at the center of our investigation into dramatic literature, we can better understand the rich development of theatrical writing in America and how African American writers greatly influenced American writing. The tradition of African American plays starts before slavery was abolished with William Wells Brown’s The Leap, or Escape to Freedom, then moves to the pageants of W.E.B. DuBois, through the 1960s Black Arts Movement with plays by Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), to contemporary writers August Wilson, Suzan Lori Parks and George C. Wolfe as well as today’s popular writers including Katori Hall, Stew and Regina Taylor, and others. Students will not only study these works, but also be involved in the process of performance-making through collaboration with Everett Perry-Johnson, director of Ivyside Dance Ensemble, and his students, on a new work to be performed by the company. Excerpts from this new work, inspired by the dramatic texts we read, will be presented during the Read-in events in February 2020. Some students in the course may find performance opportunities through this collaboration as well. In the fall semester, students will study the course materials and create projects to be presented at the 2020 African American Read-In. These projects may involve working with Ivyside Dance Ensemble, but are not limited to that collaboration, and may take a range of forms, creative or scholarly—film/video, research, writing, visual or performing arts. In the spring semester, students will take part in shaping, promoting, and delivering the 2-day African American Read-In at Penn State Altoona, which includes a children’s program, a community dinner program for Altoona area residents, visiting authors and speakers, and the famous day-long Monday Marathon, at which they will also present their final projects/performances. ENGL/INART/AFAM 141N meets with ENGL/INART 497 (instructor sign-in required for 497 – contact Professor Robin Reese at RLR28@psu.edu) 2 credits in the fall; 1 credit in the spring (spring course only 5 weeks).

ENGL 142N Science in Literature (Rotunno & Siegfried): Approach great fiction and thought-provoking readings about current science as well as past thoughts! Join Drs. Rotunno and Siegfried for this interdomain course (GH & GN), entitled Science and Literature, that will explore scientific questions such as: how do we define “human”? What are the personal, political, and social responsibilities of a scientist? Should we use clones? Is your identity dictated by your genes? What can we learn from those termed “neurodivergent” or those born with “mutations,” and what exactly do we mean by those terms? Will Artificial Intelligence lead us to learn more about ourselves? And the big question, underlying the course itself: what can science and art learn from each other?

ENGL 163N Defining the Animal (Marshall): Leave it to good old Winnie the Pooh to remind us why we in our time and place need a course like this: “Some people talk to animals,” said Pooh Bear. “Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” In this integrative class, by reading poems, stories, and essays about animals, we’ll listen to what the animals have to tell us. Likely what they have to say will tell us something about ourselves as well as the animal others we share the planet with—the two-legged, the four-legged, the winged, and the scaled. You’ll read some great literature by writers like Alice Walker, Ursula LeGuin, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Faulkner, and Walt Whitman—and you’ll also learn a bit about evolutionary theory, ecology, environmental ethics, and animal rights.

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 200 Introduction to Critical Reading (Marshall): In this class we deal with some of the most basic questions about literature: how do we make sense of a work of literature and where does its meaning come from?  Is meaning found when a literary work fulfills the author’s intention?  Is it found in the text itself?  Or do readers make meaning?  Is it even possible to know the meaning of a work of literature?  How does the author’s culture, or the reader’s, affect how we receive a literary work?  We will explore how different approaches to reading literature—New Criticism, Deconstruction, Psychological Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, Feminist Criticism, Cultural Studies, Ecocriticism—deepen our understanding and enjoyment of the works we read. Expect interesting reading, lively discussions, mind-blowing new ideas, and lots of opportunities to explore your inner theorist. You’ll also become a skilled practitioner of MLA style. (NOTE: This is a required course for the English major and is typically offered only in the fall semester.)

ENGL 209 Journal or Magazine Practicum—Hard Freight Literary Magazine (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 campus online literary magazine. Students will participate on editorial boards, in the advertising and marketing of the magazine, in the design of the online magazine, and in coffee-house events created to celebrate the artistic efforts of students on campus. (Students may take this course up to eight times in their career.)

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.  (Students interested in eventually taking a 400-level creative writing class should take one 200-level creative writing class first.)

ENGL 231: American Literature to 1865 (Petrulionis): Read the founding fathers and mothers of your country; explore the American frontier with various guides—from Native Americans to European explorers/exploiters to kidnapped women; examine the double standard of sexual virtue for early American men and women; learn what it meant in the nineteenth century to be “self-reliant” and to live a “life with principle”; flee slavery with self-emancipating men and women on the Underground Railroad; get buried alive with Poe; chase dark phantoms in forests with Hawthorne; try to figure out what a legal assistant “prefers” not to do; exchange bodily fluids with Whitman; row in Eden with Dickinson.

ENGL 234: Sports, Ethics, Literature (King): What do your favorite athletes and competitions reveal about your worldview? How have sports shaped you into the person you are today? Is sport a mirror that reflects society? Can we use sport to imagine the world differently? This course asks these questions and enlists you to answer them by reading novels, poetry, and journalism and watching television, films, and documentaries about the importance of sports for individuals and communities in the U.S. and around the world—from immigrant communities playing weekend cricket in New York City to Friday night and Saturday afternoon football cultures in (fictional) Dillon, Texas, and (real) Penn State University. Throughout the semester, you will respond to those visions about what sports means to others, but you will also have opportunities to speak and write about your own relationship to sports, as well. We will focus on how sport allows us to build and refine an ethical imagination, especially as depicted in literary texts across a variety of media and genres. This course will cover a wide range of athletic events, from football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and mixed martial arts to tennis, cricket, poker, dog sledding, and professional wrestling. (A Gen Ed—Humanities course)

ENGL 250 Peer Tutoring in Writing (Lang): 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.  (Instructor’s signature required for enrollment.)

ENGL 237N Reading and Writing Documentary Poetry (Peterson): Poetry presents a unique way to discover the human voice within the headlines. This course will guide you through the process of creative writing as one way to better understand and explore current events and the stories we hear from history. We will both read and write in the tradition of "poetry of witness," also known as documentary poetry. Using visual images from print journalism, historical texts, or documentary films as a starting point, in this class we will discuss and practice how to identify topics that interest and how to best engage the world around us through poems. We will also look at the work of poets who have done documentary poetry well and will practice a variety of simple yet effective methods to build the bridge between the poetic, the personal, and the political on the 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. Prerequisite: at least one 200-level creative writing class. Instructor’s signature required for enrollment.)

ENGL 419 Advanced Business Writing (Latterell): This is a project-based course in writing for the workplace. We will review styles and techniques for effective workplace writing and focus on how to target our writing for professional contexts. From drafting resource guides, promotional documents and writing for social media to producing infographics and short video profiles, my goal for students enrolled in this class is to create sample documents they can use for job interviewing or as a part of graduate school applications. To that end, for the final assignment students will create ePortfolios. An ePortfolio is a highly useful (electronic) platform for presenting samples of your work and highlighting your academic (as well as work-related) resume. (Prerequisite: ENGL 202A, B, C, or D)

 

ENGL 442 Medieval English Literature (Findley): This course focuses on British literature from 600-1500. We’ll read poems, heroic epics, myths, and chivalric romances from the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, and Middle English traditions, as well as some comparative texts from the Old Norse tradition. Arthurian legends, monster stories, shapeshifters, the tale of a transgender knight, the first known English poem (composed by a very holy cowherd), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s naughty tales will all be included. 900 years of literary history from one very multiethnic, multilingual little island.

ENGL 487W Senior Seminar – “Trickster Literature” (Simpson): In this course we’ll track the figure of the trickster from several of his (and her) origins in folklore from around the world to some of his/her most remarkable appearances in contemporary American literature. What Anansi and Eshu of Africa, Monkey of China,  Crow and Coyote of Native North America, and B’rer Rabbit of African American culture have in common is a propensity for shapeshifting, an affinity for crossroads, borders, and in-between spaces, a tendency to wander,  a serious sense of play, and a love of ambiguity. At once fool and hero, trickster functions in traditional and modern cultures as mediator between worlds, transgressing and disrupting boundaries, rules, and limits, and thus facilitating needed social change. Examining traditional trickster tales alongside contemporary American works by Toni Morrison, Gerald Vizenor, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others, we’ll ask what brings trickster and his bag of tricks to his new home among the pages of postmodern multicultural texts, and what that, in turn, can help us understand about the significance of the trickster in oral and written literatures throughout literary periods and traditions. Students will make connections between the assigned texts in this seminar and other literary works they have studied and read throughout their previous college coursework in English, and create an original analytical research project that both reveals the trickster and explores his/her function across literary traditions. In addition to engaging in intensive reading and writing activities throughout the semester, students in the seminar will share responsibility for course discussions by leading and participating actively in class discussions.

ENGL 491/INART 420W Capstone Course in Professional Writing/Portfolio Matters (Latterell): This is a writing-intensive course designed for students working toward the Professional Writing minor, but it will be equally valuable to all students in English nearing graduation. In this course, we will identify and explore the rhetorical styles and design practices of a writers, designers, and visual artists. The goal is for students to find connections between what you've studied as a student earning your degree and where your next steps will lead you. We will investigate career questions and reflect on how writing and visual design will matter in your careers. Students can expect assignments that include seminar-based discussions, self-reflection exercises, research in careers involving writing and visual communication, individual presentations that will include visual, written, and video elements—all with a focus on developing your resume and ePortfolio. ENGL 491 is cross-listed with INART 420W Portfolio Matters, which is the capstone course for the Integrative Arts degree. (Prerequisite: ENGL 202A, B, C, or D)

ENGL 492/WMNST 491 Women Writers – “Women and Authorship in Early America” (Petrulionis) Who were the earliest women writers in America, why did they write, and what did they write about? Who were their readers? How difficult was it for women in 1650, 1750, and 1850—not only to find time to write but to be educated and encouraged enough to do so, let alone to publish their work? Why was it common for early works by women in early America to be authored by “anonymous” or by a unnamed “lady from Massachusetts?” Why do so many manuscripts by women still lay buried in the archives, waiting for you to find them? Addressing these and other questions, this class focuses on the women who in our nation's formative centuries found a way to write the burning stories, books, essays, dramas, and poems of their own lives, of the world around them, and of their imaginations. From religious propaganda by a Puritan woman who survived three months of captivity by the Wampanoags, to a memoir of a formerly enslaved woman who hid for seven years in a cramped attic in order to stay close to her children, to a biting satirical novel by America’s highest-paid news columnist that caused a national scandal, to a play by a cross-dressing soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War, to novels of interracial romance, to an intellectual thunderbolt whose unpublished poems (all 1,700+ of them) were left neatly folded in a trunk when she died—we’ll examine the literature in which women made their case for social and political equality, experimented with language and ideas, and entertained audiences hungry for sentimental romance and gothic thrillers. We’ll learn some of the reasons that American women were, by 1850, earning a fortune from their pens, a marketplace phenomenon of our first "bestsellers" that caused Nathaniel Hawthorne to trash them as “a damned mob of scribbling women.” Yes, really. Ranging widely across genres, we will track writing women from the early 1600s through the end of the Civil War. And we will also delve into the archives to recover texts by women you’ve never heard of.

ENGL 497 (2 credits, plus 1 in spring 2018) African American Read-in Engaged Learning Experience (Reese):  “Black Theatre Through a Black Lens” is the theme for the February 2020 African American Read-In. This course will introduce students to major writers and works in the African American literary tradition, focusing on dramatic literature, or playscripts. By considering a broad range of written texts produced over the past several hundred years in the U.S., students will gain an understanding of how the African American dramatic literary tradition has developed—that is, what historical events, social forces, and cultural contexts have influenced its writers, and what thematic and formal characteristics are central to the tradition. By putting Black writers at the center of our investigation into dramatic literature, we can better understand the rich development of theatrical writing in America and how African American writers greatly influenced American writing. The tradition of African American plays starts before slavery was abolished with William Wells Brown’s The Leap, or Escape to Freedom, then moves to the pageants of W.E.B. DuBois, through the 1960s Black Arts Movement with plays by Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), to contemporary writers August Wilson, Suzan Lori Parks and George C. Wolfe as well as today’s popular writers including Katori Hall, Stew and Regina Taylor, and others. Students will not only study these works, but also be involved in the process of performance-making through collaboration with Everett Perry-Johnson, director of Ivyside Dance Ensemble, and his students, on a new work to be performed by the company. Excerpts from this new work, inspired by the dramatic texts we read, will be presented during the Read-in events in February 2020. Some students in the course may find performance opportunities through this collaboration as well. In the fall semester, students will study the course materials and create projects to be presented at the 2020 African American Read-In. These projects may involve working with Ivyside Dance Ensemble, but are not limited to that collaboration, and may take a range of forms, creative or scholarly—film/video, research, writing, visual or performing arts. In the spring semester, students will take part in shaping, promoting, and delivering the 2-day African American Read-In at Penn State Altoona, which includes a children’s program, a community dinner program for Altoona area residents, visiting authors and speakers, and the famous day-long Monday Marathon, at which they will also present their final projects/performances. ENGL/INART/AFAM 141N meets with ENGL/INART 497 (instructor sign-in required for 497 – contact Professor Robin Reese at RLR28@psu.edu) 2 credits in the fall; 1 credit in the spring (spring course only 5 weeks).

Other Courses That May Be of Interest to English Majors

CMLIT 003 Introduction to African Literatures (Wesley): is a general education course that gives students an opportunity to visit Africa through in the comfort of their classroom. The course will provide an introduction to the incredible variety of African literary production, including fiction, poetry, and plays about the African literary tradition and the historical and cultural issues that have influenced the African people throughout the centuries. We will focus on a cross section of African literature from precolonial to postcolonial day, including African Diaspora Literature, to the present. Students in the course will connect to works by the best as well as emerging African writers. The literature we study will be a cross section of works from the various geographic and cultural regions of Africa, giving students a global perspective on the continent. All readings are in English. (A gen ed Humanities and IL course)