GRADUATE LEVEL ENGLISH COURSEWORK

This course establishes the academic foundation for graduate English studies at CSU-Global Campus. Students will learn the process for developing academic approaches to teaching composition in high school and college based on the current pedagogies within the composition and rhetoric academic community. Besides learning the basic foundations of academic inquiry, students will learn the critical differences between current composition theories and pedagogies in the context of how this discipline has evolved since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Based on the theories they learned in this class, students will concentrate on developing practical solutions to often confounding problems of teaching students how to write in the digital age.

In this course, students will learn how to use the various theoretical lenses to develop coherent criticism of a literary text. An emphasis in this course will be not only to teach selected theoretical perspectives, but for students to write literary criticism based on the appropriate methodology that specifically pertains to that theory. The various theoretical lenses will include New Criticism, New Historicism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism, African American, Feminism, Marxism, Reader Response, Psychoanalytical, Gay and Lesbian, Ecocriticism, and Postcolonial.

In this course, students will learn the process for developing approaches to teaching the history and theory of rhetoric in high school and college based on traditional theories within the English literary community. Students will learn the historical development of rhetoric from origins in ancient Greece to the digital age of the 21st century. Students will study Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero from the classical period, the further development of rhetoric during the medieval period, especially as was influenced by Cicero, the emergence of humanism and Aristotelean scholasticism in the Renaissance, the enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries that was influenced by John Locke and empiricism, the development of modern rhetoric in the 20th century to include influential thinkers such as Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, and Marshall McLuhan.

In this course, students will study the different literary genres and styles from a range of global or world literature perspectives, including reading the traditional masterpieces, such as Homer's The Odyssey; and a post-colonial reading, such as in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Students will develop various approaches of reading, especially in how different cultures develop literature that is both unique to primary English-language readers while, at the same time, literature that is compellingly similar. This course will try to bridge cultural differences while at the same time we will emphasize our similarities. Prerequisite: ENG501. Course not eligible for Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) credit.

In this course, students will study British Romanticism as a major intellectual, literary, and cultural movement, reading the works of the major writers of that period. Although the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1789 traditionally marks the beginning of the English Romantic period, several English writers had already been demonstrating impulses that would be then be more formalized by writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge. The course themes will include: the Romantic ideas about nature, revolution and democratic government, the dominance of feelings and emotion over reason and logic, the importance of the common man, how art and literature should reflect the natural world, and how traditional literary forms were stretched and transformed into new modes of expression during the British Romantic period. Prerequisite: ENG501. Course not eligible for Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) credit.

This course will cover the two major literary movements that occur during this period: Modernism and Post-Modernism. Students will discuss how the various writers who lived and wrote during these two periods both represent and contradict the definitions of these major literary movements. In a literary period where contradiction is a major thematic and stylistic approach, few writers in the modern America will ever fit into a neat package. Also discussed in this class is the emergence of diverse voices on the American literary scene. As the 20th century drew to a close and the beginning of a new century has developed: minority and previously marginalized writers have emerged as the dominant voices of the new American literature. Prerequisite: ENG501. Course not eligible for Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) credit.