OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Course ID: ENG438/538
Course Name: STUDIES IN MODERNISM
Section: 1
CRN: 39270
Instructor: Davison, Neil R.
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 332
Day(s): TR
Begin time: 1400
End time: 1520
Description: This course examines intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of the pre-and-post-World War I era of literature characterized by the practitioners of its day as Modernist. Modernism from its fin de siècle inception onward was a pan-arts movement based on the overarching assertion that 20th-century consciousness mandated new “purified” forms for the arts to match psychoanalytic, gender, race, class, and imperialist revisions of 19th century paradigms or what Francois Lyotard dubbed “master narratives” from a Postmodern perspective. As a studies course, we will not dwell long on the history of the era nor conduct a survey of various genres, but will narrow our focus to a study of Modernist fiction in particular from 1900-1940. Each work studied represents an example of formalist experimentation with former conventions of the novel, novella, or short story that was fundamental to the movement from its beginnings. We will early on trace this formalism as it arises from the overlap of the late-19th-century school of Naturalism with Literary Impressionism/Symbolism; we will also grapple with Modernist Free and Indirect narrative style, stream-of-consciousness, and a late version of Dada/Surrealism. We will examine how these schools represent subjectivity from psychoanalytic, racialized, gendered, and liberal humanist perspectives. Simultaneously we will study political and cultural issues that inform the era along theses same lines with the addition in some works of colonial/post-colonial discourse. Please note that this is an upper-division course: students are expected to have previously studied some examples of Modernist literature and to have acquired at least a cursory knowledge of the movement (ENG 206, 214, or 318 are all viable but unofficial prerequisites). Undergraduates will be evaluated through a mid-term exam, a formal longer essay (10-12 pages), and a final exam. Graduates may sit for the mid-term, but will be predominately evaluated through a graduate level research/analysis essay modeled on the standard article in the discipline.
Course ID: ENG445/545
Course Name: STUDIES IN 21ST CENTURY NONFICTION: The Book-length Essay
Section: 1
CRN: 37777
Instructor: Passarello, Elena
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 334
Day(s): TR
Begin time: 1200
End time: 1320
Description: This course examines innovations in 21stcentury nonfiction through a particular lens: that of the book-length essay. While many might describe the essay as a short-form enterprise, the past two decades have seen a significant uptick in writers and publishers releasing prose works of over 30,000 words and labeling them essays. These books are often genre-bending, innovative, and wonderfully tricky. But why call them essays? This class will ask that question of seven texts by authors including Amy Fusselman, Shawn Wen, John D’Agata, and Claudia Rankine, looking for commonalities, definitive moments, and noteworthy leaps toward a new artistic tradition. Students should prepare for a lively, discussion-focused class with several short writing assignments, creative opportunities and, for the graduates, a group presentation.
Course ID: ENG454/554
Course Name: MAJOR AUTHORS: DANTE
Section: 1
CRN: 39272
Instructor: Anderson, Wayne C.
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 332
Day(s): MWF
Begin time: 900
End time: 950
Description: In this class we’ll spend ten weeks just trying to figure out what’s going on in The Divine Comedy and what the main themes are. We won’t be interpreting it so much as just trying to see it, and the poem itself will help us do that. The Comedy is the sort of work that teaches us how to read it, first in the character of Dante, in his reactions and questions as he goes through, and then in the figure of Virgil, who is always instructing him. We’ll join with Dante the character, relying as well on the notes in John Ciardi’s great translation. We’ll spend most of our time in the famous cantos of the Inferno, but we’ll also spend a fair amount of time in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, noticing all the parallels and symmetries, because unless we read the Inferno in the context of the rest of the poem, we just get it wrong. The work: three essays in the form of prose “cantos” describing your journey down, and then up, as well as three exams emphasizing scenic and plot details. This is a great poem, and it’s great fun to read in a group, with other people. I guess that’s my main course objective: to show you how much fun hell is, once you get the hang of it. What tremendous play. Text: John Ciardi, trans., The Divine Comedy.
Requirement fulfilled:Pre-1800
Course ID: ENG505
Course Name: TRANSATLANTIC SYMPOSIUM
Section: 2
CRN: 39939
Instructor: Kneis, Philipp
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 214
Day(s): F
Begin time: 1400
End time: 1550
Description: The current geopolitical climate appears to increasingly produce narratives suggesting that democratic governments are on a declining path, that authoritarianism is a winning proposition, and that democratic values and cultures are losing their appeal on both sides of the Atlantic. The class will investigate this proposition from a transdisciplinary perspective and discuss the historical, political, cultural and literary dimensions of democratic cultures in the United States and Europe.
This class prepares students for their participation in the 17th Transatlantic Students Symposium, which is scheduled to take place during Spring Break 2019 in Vienna and Berlin. Organized in collaboration with Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Warsaw, the field trip offers a space for a transatlantic dialog among students from different disciplines that is accompanied by institutional and cultural visits, workshops and a student conference.
Course ID: ENG516
Course Name: POWER AND REPRESENTATION: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Section: 1
CRN: 39273
Instructor: Osagie, Iyunolu F.
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 214
Day(s): W
Begin time: 1700
End time: 1950
Description: Through a series of readings in Postcolonial studies, we would examine ways in which 19th and 20th century colonial rhetoric is challenged, contested, and revised. Methodologically, our aim is to examine shifting modes of power in colonial and postcolonial documents and explore the performativity of power circulating in literary representations from the standpoint of the empire. Theoretical texts in this course may include authors like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiongo, V.Y. Mudimbe, Benedict Anderson, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, Kwame Appiah, Leela Gandhi, Olakunle George, Rey Chow, Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy. Literary texts may include Wells-Brown, The Escape, Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Hwang, M. Butterfly, Euba, The Gulf, Kincaid, A Small Place, and Achebe, Arrow of God.
No prior knowledge of the field is assumed. Rather, you are encouraged to think about ways in which foundational claims in postcolonial studies may inform your own work in areas such as critical race theory, globalization studies, transnationalism, and rhetoric.
Requirement fulfilled: MA Experience
Course ID: FILM480/580
Course Name: STUDIES IN FILM, CULT & SOCTY
Section: 1
CRN: 39276
Instructor: Zuo, Mila
Building: Owen Hall
Room: 103
Day(s): T
Begin time: 1600
End time: 1950
Screening Time: R 1800-2150 in LINC 368
Description: “Star Bodies in Cinema and Media” critically analyzes celebrity, stardom, and mediated performance. Why and how are some bodies privileged to become spectacular representatives of the human species in screen cultures? How do stars generate cultures of belonging (and exclusion) for audiences and spectators? How do gender, race and ethnicity, and class become articulated through the technologies of the celebrity body? What kinds of theories and frameworks enable us to critically discuss issues of charisma, appearance, and presence? Throughout the course we interrogate the structures of desire and fascination that determine our relationship to public bodies by screening key films and media texts that have helped launch actors/personalities to stardom and into our collective imaginations. In this course, we pursue a methodology of reading the body as a kind of text (our own, as well as the star body) while examining notions of visual pleasure and “the gaze,” affect, and reception as they pertain to our imagined contact with celebrity bodies.
Course ID: WR519
Course Name: TEACHING PRACTICUM: WR 222
Section: 1
CRN: 40020
Instructor: Kelly, Kristy L.
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 214
Day(s): M
Begin time: 1800
End time: 1850
Description: WR 519 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.
Requirement fulfilled: Pedagogy
Course ID: WR420/520
Course Name: WRITING WOMEN'S LIVES
Section: 400
CRN: 35532
Instructor: Detar, Liddy
Building: Ecampus
Description: How can we transform our lives from lived experience into written texts of many different forms: from autobiography, memoir, poetry, fiction to personal essays and academic writing? While challenging the very category of “woman,” this course explores what moves us to write the stories of our lives or someone else’s and how questions of genre and form are related to the stores we need to tell – and the narratives we must resist, about ourselves and our communities.
In addition to reading great memoirs, this course includes BOTH creative and critical projects designed to support a personal practice of memoir writing.
Course ID: WR521
Course Name: TEACHING PRACTICUM: FICTION WR
Section: 1
CRN: 32528
Instructor: Dybek, Nicholas
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 204C
Day(s): R
Begin time: 1730
End time: 1820
Description: Required course for GTAs teaching WR 224.
Requirement fulfilled: Pedagogy
Course ID: WR462/562
Course Name: ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING
Section: 1
CRN: 37811
Instructor: Jensen, Tim
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 362
Day(s): TR
Begin time: 1000
End time: 1120
Description: From early conservationism to monkey-wrenching to deep ecology to climate science to indigenous rhetorics—this class will journey through a forest of diverse voices, while also journeying through actual forests (with waterproof notebooks in tow). We’ll explore how environmental issues get communicated—and why that matters—by reading works from leading-edge environmental writers, tracing histories of environmental writing in America, and by composing our own works along the way. We’ll learn how conceptions of nature, earth, and sustainability get shaped through communication and practice techniques for reshaping them through creative and critical compositions.
Course ID: WR495/595
Course Name: INTRO TO LITERACY STUDIES
Section: 1
CRN: 39284
Instructor: Helle, Anita
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 330
Day(s): TR
Begin time: 1200
End time: 1320
Description: This class introduces the field of literacy studies. The class approaches literacy from historical, cultural, and critical perspectives, seeking to question dominant narratives about literacy and to unveil the ways such narratives are implicated in common practices of schooling, colonization, gendering, and racialization. Students will read, write, about and discuss definitions of literacy and literacy narratives--fictional and non-fictional accounts of the importance of reading and writing in ordinary and extraordinary lives. The class is organized chronologically and by critical moments of “transition” in the history of literacy, past and present, with particular emphasis on histories of reading and reading/writing connections.
Requirement fulfilled: Pedagogy
Course ID: WR524
Course Name: ADVANCED FICTION WRITING
Section: 1
CRN: 30187
Instructor: Dybek, Nicholas
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 214
Day(s): R
Begin time: 1400
End time: 1650
Description: WR 524 is a graduate-level fiction workshop. We will discuss student fiction (and occasionally published fiction) with an eye towards answering two essential questions. First, what experience is this piece of fiction asking us to have? And second, how can that experience be made more potent or successful upon revision? This term, we’ll pay special attention to the aesthetics of style and form in the short story. Students will be asked to find and identify confluences in their own work and the work of their peers with music, painting, film and a number of other artistic mediums.
Course ID: WR540
Course Name: ADVANCED NONFICTION WRITING
Section: 1
CRN: 34756
Instructor: St Germain, Justin
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 206
Day(s): T
Begin time: 1800
End time: 2050
Description: This course is open only to nonfiction MFA students; others must have instructor approval to enroll. This graduate workshop will focus primarily on discussing student writing and providing feedback to works in progress. Each student will be required to submit three original pieces of creative nonfiction for discussion, and provide thoughtful feedback to their peers. The class will also read published works as departure points for discussing specific craft issues.
Course ID: WR541
Course Name: ADVANCED POETRY WRITING
Section:1
CRN: 33428
Instructor: Richter, Jennifer B.
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 214
Day(s): T
Begin time: 1400
End time: 1650
Description: WR 541 is the MFA graduate poetry workshop: a course focused on rigorous discussions of both student work and published collections. During the term, we'll read three books of contemporary poetry; we'll study these as models and inspiration for what's possible in your thesis and subsequent collections. You'll offer an oral presentation on one of those books, and at the end of the term you'll turn in a final portfolio of revised poems. Please note: enrollment in this course is limited to graduate students who have been accepted into OSU's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
Course ID: WR599
Course Name: GRAD WRITING FOR ELL
Section: 1
CRN: 36259
Instructor: McGreevy, Sarah
Building: Moreland Hall
Room: 206
Day(s): MWF
Begin time: 1200
End time: 1250
Description: This class focuses on graduate academic writing for multilingual students. We will discuss the kind of voice that is expected in academic writing, and rhetorical strategies to make our writing more clear in framing the results of our research. We will also learn to self-edit for common grammar errors, focusing on individual student writing. The goal of this class is to become more confident and effective writers of academic argument.