ENG

100-Level Courses

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ENG 101 - ACADEMIC WRITING AND RESEARCH (4 CREDITS)

Intensive instruction in academic writing and research. Basic principles of rhetoric and strategies for academic inquiry and argument. Instruction and practice in critical reading, including the generative and responsible use of print and electronic sources for academic research. Exploration of literate practices across a range of academic domains, laying the foundation for further writing development in college. Continued attention to grammar and conventions of standard written English. Successful completion of ENG 101 requires a C- or better. Credit for ENG 101 is not allowed if the student has already fulfilled the first-year writing requirement.

Prerequisite: Placement via English department guidelines.

200-level Courses

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ENG 202 - DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES IN WRITING (3 CREDITS)

Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.

ENG 220 - STUDIES IN GREAT WORKS OF WESTERN LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)

Catherine Mainland
Readings, in English translation, of Western literary masterpieces from the3 beginnnings of literacy in the Middle East and Europe towards the present, including such authors as Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Blake, Dickinson, Tolstoy, Rilke, Proust, Kafka and Borges.

ENG 251 - MAJOR BRITISH WRITERS (3 CREDITS)

Brian Blackley
Significant British authors chosen from among such figures as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Pope, Austen, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Borwning, Bronte, Dicketns, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf and Yeats. Credit will not be given for both ENG 251 and either ENG 261 or 262. Section: 001Q

ENG 261 - ENGLISH LITERATURE I (3 CREDITS)

Jim Knowles
This course is an introduction to English literature of the medieval and early modern periods, covering a 500-year period from the late twelfth century to the late seventeenth century. We will read a selection of major writers and texts from the Anglo-Norman period (Marie de France), the Middle English period (the Gawain poet, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe), the English Renaissance (Shakespeare), and the seventeenth century (Donne, Herbert, Milton). Our approach to reading and discussing these texts will be twofold. First, the aesthetic approach to reading asks us to recognize these poems and plays as works of art with transhistorical value and enduring appeal. Secondly, the historical approach to reading literature asks us to understand the same texts as cultural objects which are deeply embedded in the times, places, and circumstances of their creation. Part of our task will be to recognize how and when our own twenty-first-century moral and aesthetic impulses (what we find beautiful or moving or offensive) diverge from (or converge with) those of the writers we are studying. Over the course of the semester, students will acquire the necessary vocabulary and technical skills needed to analyze literary texts on their own terms and to situate texts within their original cultural contexts. For CHASS majors, fulfills Literature I requirement. Fulfills GEP Humanities credit.

300-Level Courses

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ENG 308 - ECOFEMINISM AND LITERATURE

Barbara Bennett
In this course we will cover the beginnings and evolution of Ecofeminism. We will focus especially on how literature has played a role in disseminating the philosophy of Ecofeminism. Students will do several presentations and write short papers. The class will be student-driven and progressive in nature.

ENG 326 - HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (3 CREDITS)

Erik Thomas
ENG 326 will cover the known history that lies behind the English language, from Indo-European to the present day. After an introduction to linguistic terminology and writing systems, the course explores Indo-European, some of the controversies surrounding it, and structures of it that are important to understanding later developments. It then discusses Proto-Germanic and Ingvaeonic Germanic, how they relate to Indo-European and Old English, and the cultural setting associated with them. Next, the coverage of Old English includes its linguistic structure, the Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions, and an introduction to Old English literature. With Middle English, the course examines the impact of the Norman invasion and other factors on the language and how English ultimately prevailed over French, accompanied by a glimpse at Middle English literature. The Modern English period begins with the Great Vowel Shift and covers various innovations in linguistic structure, as well as the standardization of English and the development of American English. Students also analyze a period play from late Middle or early Modern English, affording them a view of both linguistic and literary developments.

ENG 330 - SCREENWRITING (3 CREDITS)

Tommy Jenkins
Through lectures, film clips, screenplay examples, collaborations, writing exercises, and sharing of students’ work we will explore the craft and art of screenwriting. Students will learn about structure, characterization, creating dynamic dialogue, subtext, subplots, theme, exposition, etc. utilizing established screenplay formats. The course will involve studying great films and scripts, participating in critiques, and the writing and revising of original material. At the end of the semester the students should have a clear understanding of cinematic storytelling techniques and will have a work-in-progress
screenplay. Section: 001

ENG 331 - COMMUNICATION FOR ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (3 CREDITS)

Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.

ENG 332 - COMMUNICATION FOR BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT (3 CREDITS)

Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.

ENG 333 - COMMUNICATION FOR SCIENCE AND RESEARCH (3 CREDITS)

Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.

ENG 335 - LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT (3 CREDITS)

Erik Thomas
Language Development examines the stages of language acquisition by young children and the mechanisms and hardware that children use to learn language.  It begins with models of child language acquisition and an examination of the brain structures involved in language.  It then proceeds through different age levels, from birth to early grade school, examining how children learn vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structures and the phonology of their language at each step.  The course concludes with discussion of the early steps to literacy.

ENG 377 - FANTASY (3 CREDITS)

Brian Blackley
A survey of representative works in the genre of fantasy examining characters from Beowulf to Bilbo Baggins. Primary focus on the heroic quest, including the search for revelation/transformation, the demands and types of leadership, the value of supporting figures (the wise old man, the good mother/goddess, the helper), and the supernatural/magical as key to success in the supreme ordeal. Prior reading of works by J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling recommended (due to reading load) but not required. There will be two tests, multiple quizzes and an essay.

ENG 390 - CLASSICAL BACKGROUNDS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)

Jim Knowles
Thomas Hardy opens his elegiac sequence “Poems of 1912-1913,” written for his recently deceased wife, with a Latin epigraph: veteris vestigia flammae—the “traces of an old flame.” In their original context in Virgil’s Aeneid, these words are spoken by Dido, Queen of Carthage, to express her burning desire for the Trojan hero who arouses feelings in her that she thought were long dead. Centuries before Thomas Hardy, however, English literary tradition had made a habit of copying, borrowing, and
stealing from ancient Greek and Latin sources. This course studies a selection of the ancient flames that have burned most brightly in the English literary imagination. We will read texts by Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, and Boethius. Student projects will do the work of connecting these precursor texts with their British and American followers, including but not limited to: Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Stevens, Eliot, and Pound. All Latin and Greek texts will be read in translation. Course fulfills the GEP Humanities requirement and the Global Knowledge co-requisite. For CHASS majors, course fulfills the Literature II requirement.

400-Level Courses

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ENG 410 - STUDIES IN GENDER AND GENRE (3 CREDITS)

Barbara Bennett
This course will focus on the most contemporary women writers of the South. We will cover such authors as Lee Smith, Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones and Dorothy Allison.

ENG 416 - ADVANCED REPORTING (3 CREDITS)

Christa Gala
The purpose of the course is to prepare the student for in-depth writing of multiple topics (depending on the student's choosing), including local, state and national government; criminal justice and the courts; business and economics; science and health matters; coverage of education, science, religion and sports; and opinion and personal essay. Students will write two stories and will include statistics and multiple sources. We'll also cover public records, interviewing skills, and tone and pacing of writing through lecture, readings and robust discussion. Enhance your knowledge of the world around you, and
learn how to write in-depth about your subject.

ENG 490 - STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)

Timothy Stinson
This course examines monsters from the classical and medieval eras as depicted in medieval art and literature. The medieval imagination gave rise and form to a vivid pantheon of mythological creatures, including ogres, trolls, elves, and faeries, whose popularity remains unabated in contemporary literature and film. Our survey will include familiar monsters such as werewolves, dragons, and minotaurs, as well as a host of exotic monsters seldom encountered today, including dog-headed men (canocephali) and one-footed monopods. We will consider how medieval monsters represented marginalized groups, including non-Christian and non-European others, as well as how they addressed and embodied the deepest human anxieties over death and the afterlife, the boundaries of the human and animal, and human bodies and sexuality.

ENG 491 - AI, LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS AND WRITING (3 CREDITS)

David Rieder
This course will be a theoretical and a project-based introduction to text-based and multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). The focus will be on the ways in which LLMs are transforming writing practices, and how you might incorporate them into your future work in writing and persuasive/rhetorical communication. This is an introductory course. Students do not need prior knowledge or technical experience to entroll, albeit curiosity and an interest in learning some hands-on, technical methods for working with LLMs is important. The theoretical content of the course will focus on 1) a technical overview of LLMs (some of. eh math behind them; how they work), and 2) current debates and discussions about the futures of writing and rhetoric in an era of LLMs. The project-based, technical content of the course will focus on strategies for writing compelling prompts, aka prompt engineering, and the basics behind fine tuning an LLM. Some of this work will be done in the Python programming language, but no prior coding experience is required.

ENG 491H: WRITERS ABOUT WRITING

Laura Severin

GRAD

500-Level Classes

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ENG 511 - THEORY AND RESEARCH IN COMPOSITION (3 CREDITS)

Kristi Cole
Theory and Research in Composition introduces the landmark works and various (sometimes competing) theories of composition that shape scholarly and pedagogical practices in the contemporary field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies. To help us construct a map of the complex theoretical terrain, we will consider the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which particular practices and theories have emerged and been valued. Further, we will consider questions such as:

• How do theoretical assumptions lead scholars and teachers to adopt particular practices, reject others, and appear to be blind to still others?
• Conversely, how do certain kinds of literate, composition, and pedagogical practices give rise to, support, challenge, or undermine certain theories?

This course is themed around the major contemporary pedagogical theories which together attempt to discover how writing works:

• Increasing genre awareness, rhetorical knowledge, and use of multimodalities,
• Exploring language variation and multiliteracies by context,
• Developing information literacy through primary and secondary research,
• Reflecting on writing processes and labor, and
• Collaborating to create and revise texts.

In order to address these theories, we will work together to familiarize ourselves with the range of voices and theoretical assumptions underlying the teaching of writing, understand various histories of the field of composition studies, become acquainted with major journals and resources in the field of composition, and apply knowledge of the field’s history, theory, and research in analyzing new contexts, developing new pedagogical insights, and raising new questions for research.

ENG 513/798 - EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN COMPOSITION

Chris Anson
This course offers an introduction to basic principles of research design and to a range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods used to study writing processes, products, and contexts. Recommended for students who have had at least one prior graduate course in composition or technical communication, the course examines the empirical methods cited in the professional literatures of these fields. The course is intended to help students (1) develop a basic understanding of research design needed for reading and evaluating published research in composition and related fields; and (2) assess the goals and limitations of various methods in order to select methods and designs appropriate to their own research questions. The course is especially useful for those
anticipating research-based dissertations or MA capstone projects. Coursework includes data analysis projects and design critiques, a brief presentation of a research method and a summary of a published research study, and a research proposal, including a review of relevant prior research. Requirements will differ for master’s and doctoral students. Doctoral students should register for the affiliated ENG
798 section.

ENG 513/798 satisfies the following requirements in departmental programs:

• M.A. concentration in composition and rhetoric: research methods or rhet/comp elective.
• M.S. technical communication: theory and methods.
• Ph.D. communication, rhetoric and digital media: quantitative or qualitative methods option (depending on the focus of projects), or may be taken as an elective.

ENG 530 - 17TH CENTURY LITERATURE IN CONTEXT: GENDER, RACE AND EMPIRE (3 CREDITS)

Margaret Simon
This course introduces you to the poets, politicians, historians, and cultural figures of seventeenth-century England. We'll read the work of well-known writers like Ben Jonson and John Donne, but we'll also spend a lot of time encountering authors you've likely never heard of, particularly women writers and non-elite individuals writing for a growing print market. We'll especially consider the production of English literature within a global context. How, for example, can we think of the many English advancements in the seventeenth (more women writers, scientific advancement, travel and exploration, and social legislation), with all of their positive connotations, during a period that saw the brutal establishment of England's settler plantations and the trade in enslaved peoples? How were English scientific advancements, and other intellectual developments, often informed by unacknowledged non-Western scholarship? We'll consider how we can best interpret the signal works of an era and culture that often suppressed the voices of anyone outside of a male English elite. With trips to the library's Special Collections and work with texts in their original print and manuscript forms, we will consider what we can learn about both well-known and marginalized voices through archival research and non-canonical literature. This class will include traditional research papers, as well as a multi-modal final project.

COM 541 - QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS IN APPLIED COMMUNICATION

Ryan Hurley
Introduction to research methods in applied communication. Knowledge of design, implementation and analysis of various quantitative research methods.

ENG/COM 554 - CONTEMPORARY RHETORICAL THEORY (3 CREDITS)

Kenneth Zagacki
Contemporary rhetorical theory covering the 20th and 21st centuries. Conceptual connections and disruptions of the classical tradition and its successors; relationship between rhetorical theory and philosophical trends, institutional histories, socioeconomic circumstances and pedagogical needs. Attention to current issues such as the revival of invention, rhetorical agency and ethics.

COM 562 - COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE (3 CREDITS)

Ariel Seay-Howard
Examine persuasive theories and methods including compliance gaining techniques. Evaluate effectiveness of public communication campaigns directed at social change.

ENG 570 - 20TH CENTURY BRITISH PROSE: OTHERS AND OUTSIDERS (3 CREDITS)

Laura Severin
Our course will focus on the theme of “Others and Outsiders” as a means of discovering the dominant literary approaches of the period, modernism and postmodernism. We will examine how these literary approaches both shape and reflect evolving notions of British identity throughout the period. We will read: James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (1916), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Zadie Smith’s White
Teeth (2000), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), as well as additional critical readings. Students will also have the opportunity to select their choice of novel for the final paper. Assignments will include three journal entries, a long paper (10-12 pages) completed in several stages (topic proposal, annotated bibliography, draft, and final), and a final presentation. MA students in all concentrations and MFA students are encouraged to enroll. This course fulfills the British Literature after 1660 requirement in the MA in Literature and a literature requirement in other degree programs.

ENG 577 - LITERATURE, SOCIETY AND SELFHOOD IN JAZZ AGE AMERICA (3 CREDITS)

Jennifer Nolan
As the social historian of the Jazz Age, and the father of that term, few authors’ works provide a better entry point into the literature and culture of the Roaring ‘20s than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. In this course we will examine how Fitzgerald’s prose represents, comments upon, critiques and challenges social expectations and cultural norms emblematic of his era, alongside works by his contemporaries, like Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Nella Larsen. This
class will examine the many echoes of this period that resonate in our current moment, including considerations of privilege, identity, American exceptionalism and Americans’ relationships to and with the rest of the world. Though the impact and reach of popular magazines is often left out of classrooms and scholarly conversations about American literature, as one of the primary vehicles of mass culture in the 1920s, they played a fundamental role in its publication, circulation, reception, and interpretation, and our journey will take us into their pages as well. This class will also introduce students to some of the methods used and arguments made in current scholarship on the literature of this period, and students will have the opportunity to conduct research into a scholarly conversation about a topic of their choosing.

COM 579 - CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION (3 CREDITS)

David Berube
An exploration of the communication successes and failures surrounding climate3 change an dpublic opinion. Topics addressed include: agenda setting, media effects, framing, data visualizations, fear responses, naming, risk communication and theory, argumentation and refutation, and persuasion as well as issues and current events related to the challenges associated with communicating climate change to multiple stakeholders.

ENG/COM 581 - VISUAL RHETORIC: THEORY AND CRITICISM (3 CREDITS)

Victoria Gallagher
Application of visual theory to rhetoric and of rhetorical theory to visual forms of communication. Discussion and analysis may include advertising, photography, news and informational media, political communication, instructional material, scientific visualization, visual arts, public commemorative artifacts, internet and other digital media.

ENG 583 - "MULTIMODAL COMPOSITION IN PRACTICE" (3 CREDITS)

Kristi Cole
In this course, we will begin by exploring the term “literacy” and extending the definition beyond the reading and writing of printed texts. Scholars, educators and professionals across disciplines recognize the importance of digital literacy and composing in multiple modes for citizenship, education, information-sharing and community-building. In the field of composition studies, many scholar-teachers continue to research the impact that evolving technologies hold for the processes of reading and writing, identity construction and community-building, as well as the extent to which composition
instructors must pay attention to these processes in order to keep writing courses relevant in an increasingly multimodal society. With a focus on practice, pedagogy, and the implications of AI, students will harness a multimodal understanding of reading and writing to experiment with the major theoretical, historical and pedagogical issues relevant to multimodal composition, as well as a variety of digital writing technologies in the practices that shape multimodal literacies and digital identity. The class will use a variety of online tools and open educational resources, as well as foundational and cutting-edge readings from scholars in writing studies, TESOL and literacy studies.

COM 598 - SPECIAL TOPICS IN COMMUNICATION

Rory Weintraube
Public Communication of Research
Strategies to help researchers communicate their work effectively to a varietuy of audiences and provide them with opportunities to practice and give/receive feedback. The course will cover introductory science communication skills, approaches for presenting effectively and using compelling visuals, communicating controversial topics and counteracting mis/disinformation and science conspiracy theories, among other topics.

Roy Schwartzman
PRopaganda
Tracing relationships between public relations and propaganda, this course explores how and why manipulative, misleading and irrational messages gain persuasive force. Key case studies cover actual compaigns and techniques that succeed or fail, emphasizing communication that fuels prejudice against specific target populations (e.g., Muslims, Jews, African Americans, women, immigrants, transgender people, etc.) The project-based approach involves monitoring current campaigns as well as designing campaigns to counteract prejudice.