Spring Term 2021

ENG 516 Power and Representation: Anti-racism in English Studies                          

CRN 59897, Wed 1700-1950        

Ana Milena Ribero

Introduces students to research and scholarship on and around race in literature studies and rhetoric & composition. The course features a series of masterclasses presented by specialists within each field on topics including Black performance studies, anti-blackness in language and writing practices, land-based indigenous rhetorics, transnational feminism, and law and Asian-American literature. In addition, students will read, discuss, and write about anti-racism in higher education, including the racial politics of citation, tenets of Critical Race Theory, and Black radical critique of academia.

 

ENG 545 Studies in Nonfiction: Nonfiction and Performance (Craft)

CRN 57748, Wed 1700-1950

Elena Passarello              

This course explores fusing the art of fact with the art of theater. The six texts fit loosely into three categories: first-person storytelling (like Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me), plays made of staged interviews (like Anna Deavere Smith's Notes from the Field), and the dramatization of historical documents (like Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency). For each unit, we will both discuss readings and explore targeted aspects of the form through guided creative exercises. For the last third of the term, we will work together to research, design and rehearse a collectively written piece of documentary theater.

 

ENG 580 Studies in Literature, Culture, and Society: Premodern Sexualities

CRN 59159, Mon/Wed/Fri, 1400-1450

Tekla Bude

We in the 21st-century are heirs to intersecting frameworks of gender, sexuality, race, and class that grew out of Enlightenment-era (18th- and 19th-century) imperialism and capitalism. These frameworks include the gender binary, the tokenization and hypersexualization of black and Asian bodies, and the marginalization and criminalization of sex workers, among others – all things that gender and sexuality scholars today seek to critique and dismantle. In this class, we will look to the period BEFORE the Enlightenment for a better understanding of how these frameworks came to be. How does the period before European imperialism understand sex and sexuality? What models for gender and sexuality – and their intersections with race and class – do the medieval and early modern periods offer? The answers might surprise you: from queer nuns to cross-dressing sex workers, from female Jesuses to black Madonnas, and from trans heroes of medieval fiction to the all-male casts of Shakespearean drama, premodern literature provides us with some startling counterpoints to our received notions of gender, sex, and sexuality.  

 

ENG 582 Studies in American Literature, Culture, and Environment: Pandemic in America: A Literary History (MA Experience)

CRN 59162, Tues/Thur 1000-1150

Ray Malewitz

This MA Experience course is designed to introduce students to the diverse means by which North American culture has represented viral outbreaks from the “Spanish flu” of 1918 to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. As the disastrous US response to COVID-19 makes clear, viruses are and have always been cultural as well as biological actors, shaping American understandings of the value of human and animal life, the nature of its political, medical, and economic systems, and its attitudes towards marginalized communities. Students will explore the contested, uneven American literary history of the virus through a variety of generic perspectives including drama, essay, fiction, and film.  In addition to a shorter midterm paper, at the end of the course, students will create and deliver a conference paper on one aspect of this literary history. 

 

WR 519 Teaching Practicum: WR 222

CRN 58557, Mon 1700-1750

Kristy Kelly

The WR 519 teaching practicum will prepare you to teach WR 222 (Argumentation). The practicum includes both theoretical and practical components, equipping you with an overview of the curriculum while also working through the nuts-and-bolts of course development, lesson planning, and pedagogical best practices. Our primary goal will be for you to leave the practicum with a full set of teaching materials and a conception of how you’ll frame 222 in the context of your own interests and expertise. We’ll also explore inclusive pedagogies and universal design to enrich pedagogical approaches that can extend into WR 222 and beyond. 

 

WR 522 Teaching Practicum: Poetry Writing

CRN 55531, Tues 1700-1750

Karen Holmberg                             

WR 522 is the Poetry Teaching Practicum for graduate students who have been accepted into Oregon State University’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing and who want to teach poetry writing (WR 241) in their second year. This course is repeatable for a maximum of 3 credits.

 

WR 523 Teaching Practicum: Nonfiction

CRN 56847, Mon 1800-1850

Justin St. Germain

This course instructs graduate students in the best practices for teaching creative nonfiction. It covers topics such as text selection, assignment structure, course design, classroom management, and grading. Students will design their own WR 240 courses over the course of the quarter.

 

WR 524 Advanced Fiction Writing

CRN 50514, Thur 1400-1650

Marjorie Sandor

In this graduate level fiction-writing workshop, students will be expected to produce two full-length stories or novel chapters. Students will also be graded on the quality of their written and oral critiques and class participation. We will, in addition, be reading and discussing professional short stories, selected by students, as the term progresses. These stories will constitute the course text.

 

WR 540 Advanced Nonfiction Writing

CRN 56941, Tues 1800-2050

George Estreich

In WR 540, we'll spend most of our time in workshop, with the remainder devoted to discussing published essays. The class has two main goals: giving you specific, practical help with your own writing projects, and providing a space in which to develop your ideas about literary nonfiction. Requirements include weekly readings (distributed through Canvas), active participation, and a short oral presentation on craft.

 

WR 541 Advanced Poetry Writing

CRN 51372, Tues 1400-1650

Jen Richter

WR 541 is the MFA graduate poetry workshop: a course focused on rigorous discussions of student work and in-depth studies of published work as models and inspiration for the thesis and subsequent collections. Note: enrollment in this course is limited to graduate students who have been accepted into OSU's MFA Program in poetry; other MFA students wishing to enroll must have instructor approval in advance.   

 

WR 562 Environmental Writing

CRN 58495, Tues/Thur 1600-1720

Ehren Pflugfelder

There are few issues as significant or overwhelming as the environmental problems that humanity faces. Hasit always been this way, and how have we reacted to these concerns? Environmental Writing is a course that asks these questions and more. The course focuses on a range of writing and theory on the environment, examining scholars, concepts, documents, and methodologies that are central to the evolution of American environmental theory, while also touching on popular theorists who has explored specific issues in ecology, nature writing, wilderness, environmental communication, and the emergence of the anthropocene. The aim of this course is to provide students a background in environmental writing techniques and concepts, as a means of enabling us to perform critical thinking and analytical writing about the environment. Students will be able to recognize concepts in the history of environmental writing in America, as well as be able to articulate ongoing and currently unfolding debates in environmental topics in their own writing.

 

WR 599 Critical Race and Feminist Pedagogies (Pedagogy, MA Experience)

CRN 59898, Mon/Wed 1200-1320

Ana Milena Ribero

Introduces students to some major feminist and critical theories of teaching, with a particular emphasis on how such approaches apply to the teaching of writing in higher education. Students will have the opportunity to explore practical applications and to draw on their disciplinary knowledge and interests to create tools and materials to apply to their own classrooms.