Spring 2024 Course Descriptions
English Program and Writing Program
Penn State Abington
English Major (Writing and Literature in Context) Requirements:
- ENGL 200 or 201: ENGL 201
- Pre-1800: ENGL 444
- Post-1800: ENGL 428, ENGL 453, ENGL 462
- Literature, Writing, or Rhetoric: ENGL 002, ENGL 050, ENGL 165N, ENGL 201, ENGL 211, ENGL 215, ENGL 223N, ENGL 228, ENGL 415, ENGL 419, ENGL 420, ENGL 422, ENGL 428, ENGL 444, ENGL 453, ENGL 462, ENGL 487W
- Diversity: ENGL 428, ENGL 453, ENGL 462
- Senior Seminar: ENGL 487W
Writing Minor Courses: ENGL 050, ENGL 211, ENGL 215, ENGL 415, ENGL 419, ENGL 420, ENGL 422
ENGLISH MINOR COURSES: ENGL 002, ENGL 050, ENGL 165N, ENGL 201, ENGL 211, ENGL 215, ENGL 223N, ENGL 228, ENGL 415, ENGL 419, ENGL 420, ENGL 422, ENGL 428, ENGL 444, ENGL 453, ENGL 462, ENGL 487W
English 002: Great Traditions in English Literature
Professor Walters
What do Anglo-Saxon riddles, translated French chivalric Romances, Shakespearean sonnets, slave histories, and short stories written by Pakistani immigrants in London have in common? They are all considered works of “British” literature! In this course, we will read selected pieces of British literature written over a thousand year period. An island nation state that was conquered, but also conquered others, Britain and its overseas empire has produced some of the most diverse and exciting writing in human history. This course provides an historical and thematic overview of many of the texts that have come to constitute the so-called canon of British literature. Together, we will examine several works of British literature, establishing them within their larger, historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. And we will discuss literary texts as both the products and constituters of culture at large. Throughout, we will query what, precisely, is considered to be literature at a given historical moment, and why. And we will ask how British literature contributes to our collective understanding of what it means to be human.
ENGL 050: Introduction of Creative Writing
Professor Pack
In our Introduction to Creative Writing class we will explore our artistic sides by playing with language, plot, history, and character through the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, script writing, and poetry. Two concepts to keep in mind while you work on your writing: that writing is mostly the act of revision, and that all writers start out by imitating those writers they love the most. You will be given ample time to revise your work. We’ll spend a quarter of our class time reading the work of established writers (Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, John Keats, Anne Sexton, Bryan Washington, Thomas McGuane, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Lynn Venable, Carol Amen, and Paul Thomas Anderson, among others), and the remainder of class time in a workshop environment where students submit their work to a class critique. Our workshops will be run in a civil, encouraging manner meant to assist each writer with revising their works. We will all be working as a team to create publishable works of art. Fiction created for this class will be submitted to Penn State Abington’s literary and arts magazine The Abington Review for publication in the 2024 edition of the magazine.
English 165N: Work and Literature
Professor Rigilano
If you get a job out of college, work eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, and retire at age 65, at that point you will have spent roughly one third of your adult, waking life at work. And that is just paid work. Add in housework, childcare, and other forms of unpaid labor and the share of your waking hours devoted to work creeps closer to one half. And those calculations may actually underestimate the influence work has over your life. What you do will determine where you live, how you live, and, perhaps, whether you believe you have ultimately done something meaningful with your life. With work playing such an outsized role in a life, you may as well understand it as best you can.
In this interdomain course, we will consider a broad array of literary texts that take up the issue of labor, as well as philosophical, sociological, ethnographical, political, and cultural studies that address labor from scholarly points of view. From Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), whose titular character prefers not to work, and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (2016), whose protagonist identifies with the role of the worker a bit too much, to excerpts of Karl Marx’s magisterial Capital and Studs Terkel’s illuminating oral history, Working (1974), students will read and discuss essential texts across genres and disciplines. Students enrolled in the course will engage in class discussions, take exams, and write essays as they explore the variety of ways both labor and literature can help them understand the place of work in culture and society.
English 201: What Is Literature
Professor Naydan
What is literature and how does it work? How do literary texts differ from supposedly non-literary ones? What forms does literature take and why do those forms matter? And how do we go about investigating the wide range of possible meanings that literary texts may have? This course will focus on these among other questions about the nature and features of literature. It will familiarize students with theories and practices that are foundational to studying different kinds of literary texts and contexts. Specifically, we will focus on post-1945 U.S. literature written in different genres, namely a novel, a novella, a memoir, a play, short stories, and poetry. Authors will likely include Alison Bechdel, Don DeLillo, Martín Espada, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ling Ma, Claudia Rankine, and Philip Roth. We will also read a handful of brief works by critical theorists to gain insight into the different kinds of lenses we might bring to literary works and the world. Through reading and writing about literature and critical theory, we will acquire technical vocabularies used by literature scholars and literary historians. We will also develop an understanding of how literary works operate and how responsible scholars can and do make meaning of them.
English 211: Introduction to Writing Studies
Professor Lee-Amuzie
This course introduces students to the most salient issues and theories in writing studies. Students explore contemporary theories and issues about writing in order to understand writing as a skill and a complex object of study in various professional contexts.
English 215 Introduction to Article Writing
Professor Cohen
Share your perspectives on campus and community issues! In this course, you will research, compose, edit, and publish articles for our digital news outlet The Abington Sun.
Students in ENGL 215 will be expected to conduct primary research--conducting interviews and analyzing data, in order to generate ideas for stories of interest to our campus community. Students will pitch their story ideas weekly to an audience of their peers, and decide collectively with editors which stories will move forward.
Over the course of the semester, each student should plan to produce and publish several news articles and feature pieces, improving writing skills in a hands-on process as they work to publish well-researched, impactful articles. Subjects for articles range from politics to current events, sports and arts and culture. Feel free to browse past topics at The Abington Sun.
If you like to write, are interested in learning and writing about current events, and want to see your work published, ENGL 215/415 is the place for you! If you haven’t worked with us before, you should enroll in ENGL 215. If you’re a veteran of our writing staff who wants to further hone your skills, you should register for ENGL 415.
English 223N: Shakespeare: Page, Stage, and Screen
Professor Nicosia
“He was not of an age but for all time!” Ben Jonson, a poet and playwright, wrote these words to celebrate the life and work of William Shakespeare. This course is designed to introduce students to Shakespeare and his world. Students of all levels are welcome and no prior experience is required or assumed. We will read six of Shakespeare’s plays, including some of his most celebrated. As we read these plays, we will analyze their genre, dramatic structure, and language as well as how they engage with social and political issues of Shakespeare’s time and our own. We will consider issues of performance, film adaptation, and publication history through interactive assignments.
English 228 Introduction to Disability Studies
Professor Cohen
Introduction to Disability Studies provide an introduction to and discussion of the ways scholars talk about representations of dis/ability, as well as the work that those representations do in our culture. My aim for the course is that we are all better able to recognize and interpret that work and how it shapes our awareness and expectations of ourselves and the people we share space with. To that end, we will be reading some writing in the fields of both Rhetoric and Disability Studies as well as reading and viewing representations of illness and disability in popular media. Class discussion will necessarily include difficult topics, including stigma, illness, and death. Though some of these discussions and representations are potentially troubling, part of the work of the course will be to understand how the stories we encounter shape our thoughts and feelings on these topics.
English 415: Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Professor Cohen
Share your perspectives on campus and community issues! In this course, you will research, compose, edit, and publish articles for our digital news outlet The Abington Sun.
Students in ENGL 415 will build on the skills they learned in ENGL 215 to conduct primary research--conducting interviews and analyzing data, in order to generate ideas for stories of interest to our campus community. Students will pitch their story ideas weekly to an audience of their peers, and decide collectively with editors which stories will move forward.
Over the course of the semester, each student should plan to produce and publish several news articles and feature pieces, improving writing skills in a hands-on process as they work to publish well-researched, impactful articles. Subjects for articles range from politics to current events, sports and arts and culture. Feel free to browse past topics at The Abington Sun.
If you like to write, are interested in learning and writing about current events, and want to see your work published, ENGL 215/415 is the place for you! If you haven’t worked with us before, you should enroll in ENGL 215. If you’re a veteran of our writing staff who wants to further hone your skills, you should register for ENGL 415.
English 422: Fiction Workshop
Professor Jimmy J. Pack Jr.
In our Fiction Workshop, we will focus on developing longer works of fiction, either chapters in a novel, a whole novella, or longer short stories (25 pages or more). We will begin by reading a collection of short stories and then we will read a novel, giving critical literary analysis to both. The rest of the semester we will focus on student work, both in a workshop environment and in one-on-one meetings. These meetings, combined with student feedback, will help students with the revisions to their work. The final for the class will consist of a minimum of 50 pages of fiction—either a set of short stories or two to three chapters of a novel.
English 428: Asian American Literatures
Professor Kopacz
This course will introduce students to Asian American literary and cultural productions from the mid-twentieth century to the current moment. We will examine the relationship between the social and historical contexts in which Asian American literature and culture have been produced and the impact of these productions have had on our understanding of ‘Asian American’ as political identity and community formation. Throughout the semester, we will explore what it means to develop social, cultural, and political identities as the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, national origin, disability, and citizenship. To do so, we will engage texts written by and about people of Asian descent in the United States through close readings of novels, memoirs, poetry, graphic novels, film, and TV shows.
English 444: Shakespeare
Professor Nicosia
Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of eating. But Shakespeare’s works do more than make note of Renaissance food culture. In this class we will think about Shakespeare’s plays and poems on the page, on the stage, and in the kitchen through an array of writing, research, and embodied humanities exercises. This course is cross-listed with ENGL 487W: Senior Seminar and students may not enroll in both courses simultaneously.
English 453: The Victorian Novel
Professor Walters
In this course we will read a wide variety of novels composed during the Victorian era, a period marked by tremendous social upheaval and cultural change. This era witnessed the abolition of transatlantic slavery, the violent expansion of the British empire, the industrial revolution, and a marked shift in the status of women. These monumental events also influenced the creation of some of the most canonical works of British literature. Given this, throughout our readings in this course we will consider these social factors that helped actively to form the nineteenth-century novel. We will read a variety of novelistic genres, such as the romance, the sensation novel, the science fiction novel, and the gothic text. We also will examine the conventions of Victorian novelistic prose, itself, in this class. As we consider the novel form as a genre, we will evaluate how its attendant thematic devices, such as point of view and narration, underpin—and sometimes disrupt—the conventions of novelistic realism.
English 462: Reading Black, Reading Feminist
Professor Sims
This course examines Black feminist theory and thought, chronicling the inception of a distinct Black feminist identity in the late twentieth century and examining how the coining of intersectionality fundamentally changed how we understand identity today. We will focus on representations of gender, class, race, and sexuality in literature, film, and academic texts by Black American women from the 1980 to today. This course will also analyze how the Black feminist tradition has engaged issues of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and heteronormativity.
English 487W: Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Senior Seminar)
Professor Nicosia
Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of eating. But Shakespeare’s works do more than make note of Renaissance food culture. In this class we will think about Shakespeare’s plays and poems on the page, on the stage, and in the kitchen through an array of writing, research, and embodied humanities exercises. This course is cross-listed with ENGL 444: Shakespeare and students may not enroll in both courses simultaneously.
