ENGL 1320-001—Cultures of Medieval Chivalry

TTh 11:00-12:20. Dallas Hall 306. Wheeler.   2016: HC, LL, OC   CC: LAI

What is more exciting than the stories of quests and adventures that shape masculine life and heroic literature? We share these stories when we probe the development of chivalric mentalities in the literature, history, and cultures of the Middle Ages, from the flowering of chivalry as ideal and practice in twelfth-century Western culture to its persistent presence in the current moment.  Readings and movies include background sources as well as adventure tales of real medieval noble heroes—Rodrigo de Vivar (The Cid, poem and movie) and William Marshal—and those of legend—Lancelot, Yvain, Gawain, and more. Stories from the legends of King Arthur (such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur) provide a mirror through which we can see chivalric education and variation, chivalric seduction and betrayal, chivalric rejection and renewal, and persistence of chivalric ideas in our own lives. This lecture/discussion course requires two structured in-class debates, a mid-term, and a final exam.

ENGL 1330-001—World of Shakespeare

MWF 11:00-11:50. Dallas Hall 306.  Rosendale.      2016: LL   CC: LAI

Time to (re-)introduce yourself to our language’s greatest writer. In this course, you will meet Shakespeare’s princes, tyrants, heroes, villains, saints, sinners, lovers, losers, drunkards, clowns, outcasts, fairies, witches, ghosts, and monsters. You’ll watch and listen as they love, woo, kiss, charm, hate, curse, mock, fool, sing to, dance with, get drunk with, sleep with, fight with, murder, and haunt each other. You will visit Renaissance England, a place and time as strange, troubled, exciting, delightful, fearful, thoughtful, political, magical, bloody, sexy, and confused as your own. You will read poetry you will never forget, about important issues and ideas, and will better understand and enjoy it. 

Our introductory survey will cover plays in all of the major Shakespearean genres: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, as well as some nondramatic poetry. Background readings, lectures, and films will contextualize Shakespeare’s achievement within Renaissance society and life (and death), engaging the religious, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic debates of that glorious but tumultuous age. 

ENGL 1365-001H—Literature of “Minorities”

TTh 2:00-3:20. Dallas Hall 115.  Levy.         2016: LL, HD   CC: LAI, HD

This course explores questions of individual and collective identities from historical, literary, and contemporary social perspectives.  We look closely at the many categories that have come to constitute identity in the US, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and the myriad terms/categories that have come to constitute our cultural conversation about identity, including: “Nation” “Whiteness,” “Blackness,” “White Supremacy,” “Identity Politics,” “Queerness,” “Pluralism,” etc.   We examine the ways these identities can be both self-selected and imposed, fixed and/or flexible, transformative an/or disruptive.

Authors will include W.E.B. DuBois, Nella Larson, Philip Roth, Ayad Akhtar, Bharati Mukherjee, and Yuri Herrera. 

Assignments: one paper, a midterm and a final.

ENGL 2102-001—Spreadsheet Lit: Excel

W 3:00-3:50. Hyer Hall 106.  Dickson-Carr, Carol.

This course introduces Excel 2019 as it is commonly used in the workplace. Students will learn to organize and analyze data, use and link worksheets, create tables & charts, and communicate the results of their analyses in clear, readable prose. Laptops required real-time in the classroom with the latest version of Excel. Students will take the Excel Associates Exam for certification by the end of the semester.

ENGL 2102-002—Spreadsheet Lit: Excel

M 3:00-3:50. Hyer Hall 106.  Dickson-Carr, Carol.

This course introduces Excel 2019 as it is commonly used in the workplace. Students will learn to organize and analyze data, use and link worksheets, create tables & charts, and communicate the results of their analyses in clear, readable prose. Laptops required real-time in the classroom with the latest version of Excel. Students will take the Excel Associates Exam for certification by the end of the semester.

ENGL 2302-001—Business Writing

TTh 12:30-1:50. Virginia-Snider Hall 203.  Dickson-Carr, Carol. 2016: IL, OC, W  CC: W

This course introduces students to business and professional communication, including various writing and speaking tasks. It covers the observation and practice of rhetorical strategies, discourse conventions, and ethical standards associated with workplace culture. The course includes active learning, which means students will attend events on campus and off and conduct a detailed field research project at a worksite. Please note that this course may not count toward the English major requirements and that laptops are required in class. Writing assignments: summaries, analyses, evaluations, letters, reports, memoranda, and individual and collaborative research reports, both oral and written. The priority goes to Markets & Cultures majors. The second and third priorities are graduating seniors and Dedman students, respectively. Text: Kolin, Philip C. Successful Writing at Work, 11th ed. or later.

ENGL 2302-002— Business Writing

TTh 2:00-3:20.  Virginia-Snider Hall 203.  Dickson-Carr, Carol. 2016: IL, OC, W   CC: W

This course introduces students to business and professional communication, including various writing and speaking tasks. It covers the observation and practice of rhetorical strategies, discourse conventions, and ethical standards associated with workplace culture. The course includes active learning, which means students will attend events on campus and off and conduct a detailed field research project at a worksite. Please note that this course may not count toward the English major requirements and that laptops are required in class. Writing assignments: summaries, analyses, evaluations, letters, reports, memoranda, and individual and collaborative research reports, both oral and written. The priority goes to Markets & Cultures majors. The second and third priorities are graduating seniors and Dedman students, respectively. Text: Kolin, Philip C. Successful Writing at Work, 11th ed. or later.

ENGL 2311-001—Introduction to Poetry: Meeting Our Makers

TTh 8:00-9:20.  Dallas Hall 101.  Wilson.     2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

The word “poetry” comes from the Greek meaning “to make.” In this course we will traverse a geographically, chronologically, spiritually, and stylistically diverse array of works by “makers” whose poetry gives us new ways of seeing the world. From love poems written in fourth century China and epic tales from ancient Europe and the Middle East through Black poets in twentieth-century America to Instagram poets and songwriters in the twenty-first, we will encounter beautiful, bewitching, and challenging worlds. Over the course of the semester we will become comfortable and familiar with poetry: we will get to know these makers, to understand and appreciate their craft, and revel in the pleasure that great poetry (or sometimes even bad poetry!) can bring. Additionally, we will experience form through writing and recitation. To add in some workplace skills for our digital age, we will create a physical and digital exhibition about “Making Poetry.”

ENGL 2311-002—Introduction to Poetry: Contemporary American Poets

MWF 9:00-9:50.  Harold Clark Simmons Hall 107.  Rivera.  2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

By focusing on contemporary American poetry, this course celebrates writers from the margins, writers within academia, and workaday journey poets who experiment with both form and content to document myriad lyrical impulses. Their poetic efforts form a type of call-and-response dialogue that widens concepts of inclusiveness in ways that many view as threatening. In this course, we will annotate, read, discuss, argue the merits and failures of the poems. acquiring shared language with which to discuss poets and their work. As we embrace these newer voices, we will attempt a radical reimagining of what we consider poetry.

ENGL 2311-003H—Introduction to Poetry

MWF 10:00-10:50.  Dallas Hall 120.  Newman.  2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

Why bother with poetry? It offers nothing practical or profitable. It’s made of words, but conveys no information. Reading it probably does not make us better people. An individual poem may refuse to offer a “message”; resist efforts to summarize it; and strike us as pointlessly simple or maddeningly opaque.  Furthermore, reading poetry demands a focused attention that we may find hard to provide. No wonder poetry sometimes seems alien to us, and provoked even one poet to confess: “I, too dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” This course proceeds from the conviction that learning to read, talk, and write about poetry sharpens our awareness of how language works, and perhaps even more important, may afford pleasures that grow on us slowly—or all at once. Texts: Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, plus other poems to be determined. Assignments: three to four short papers of increasing length; a presentation; a recitation; possible brief discussion board postings; occasional short exercises; final exam. 

ENGL 2311-004—Introduction to Poetry

MWF 12:00-12:50. Dallas Hall 137.  Caplan.  2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

Poetry is language that sounds better and means more,” the poet Charles Wright once observed. “What’s better than that?  This class will train the students to hear the many sounds and the many meanings that great poems articulate. We will gain the skills and the vocabulary to analyze poems more precisely by reading and discussing a wide range of poetry and by writing formal exercises. Finally, we will have the pleasure of hearing two leading poets visit our class via Zoom.

In short, we will spend the semester considering language that sounds better and means more, and, as the poet put it, what’s better than that? 

ENGL 2312-001—Introduction to Fiction : Fatness in American Fiction

MWF 9:00-9:50. Annette Caldwell Simmons Hall 225.  Dinniene. 2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

We live in an era in which the meaning of bodily fatness is hotly contested. Is fatness a disease? A moral failing? Simply one of many bodily types? These questions have been raised since at least the seventeenth century, and continue to be taken up today, by the media, the medical industrial complex, police, government, the fat liberation movement, and more. American authors have reflected these debates in their works, to varying ends. This class considers contemporary American fiction, including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Susan Stinson’s Martha Moody, to see how authors respond to popular notions of the meaning of the fat body. Students will read and analyze assigned texts to understand how authors use narrative to tell stories of fatness that affirm, complicate, and/or resist dominant notions of normative bodies that often take the meanings of fatness and thinness for granted. Some questions we will consider: Why and how do our authors use fatness to create meaning in their texts? How do they affirm or challenge popular notions of the fat body as a marker of race, gender, class, morality, (dis)ability, and national identity? What do our authors want us to do with what we read and learn? Assignments: several short essays, some of which will contribute to a collaborative podcast or to a longer paper at the end.

ENGL 2312-002—Introduction to Fiction

MWF 9:00-9:50. Dallas Hall 120.  Hennum.   2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

ENGL 2312-003—Introduction to Fiction: The Global Novel

TR 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 102.  Hermes.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

This course will consider fiction that reflects and responds to the increasing interconnectedness of our globalized world—stories and novels written about, from, and across places outside the U.S. and Britain, including South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. How do writers of global literature balance precise, local specificity with the imperative to connect to a “universal” audience? What is the work’s relation to a shared cosmopolitan ethos? What do terms like globalization, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, and world literature mean in the first place?

With these texts and concepts as our foundation for discussion, we will build a set of tools for analyzing and writing about literature, including close reading, awareness of genre, and familiarity with important elements of fiction. We will think deeply about not just what texts say, but how they say it. Finally, reading these works of fiction will help us see our contemporary world in new ways, and better understand our place in it. Readings may include Jean Rhys, Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Mohsin Hamid, Han Kang, and Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

ENGL 2312-004—Introduction to Fiction: Black Southern Writers

MWF 10:00-10:50.  Dallas Hall 153.  Rivera.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

The South has long held sway in the cultural imagination of the United States.  Dogged by such lingering images and ideas as slavery, Jim Crow, Gone with the Wind, and Larry the Cable Guy, the region cannot seem to escape a past riddled with caricatures.  In this course we will examine works by Black fiction writers from the South. We will analyze the complexity of their characters, their invocations of place, and their allusions to culture and collective memory. We will see how their explorations of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation trouble old stereotypes and create a place of more than just moon pies and mint juleps. The South, a site of American trauma, has managed to provide a home for writers who love their homeplace fiercely yet remain keenly aware of its faults.  Writers studied include Alice Walker, Crystal Wilkerson, Ernest Gaines, Jesmyn Ward, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Zora Neale Hurston, De'Shawn Charles Winslow, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, and Rivers Solomon.

ENGL 2312-005—Introduction to Fiction: The Real Fake

MWF 11:00-11:50.  Dallas Hall 357.  Cassedy.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

A typical American spends about 1,000 hours a year reading and watching made-up stories in books, TV, and movies. Why do we spend so much time with fake stories instead of true facts? This has never been an easy question to answer, and there have always been some people who think that fiction is bad, because it’s a lie. Yet we keep consuming it. Is fiction necessary because it’s pleasurable? Because it’s educational? Because it tells the truth — maybe a truer, darker, or broader truth than nonfiction will allow? In this class we’ll read fictional stories from the 14th to the 21st century that tackle the “why fiction?” question. We’ll study what these stories have to say about the purpose of fiction, and how they exemplify (or fail to exemplify) their own theories of storytelling. Likely texts include Boccaccio, The Decameron; Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides. Three essays and a final.

ENGL 2312-006—Introduction to Fiction

MWF 2:00-2:50.  ULEE 228.  Ryberg.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

ENGL 2312-007—Introduction to Fiction: Diverse Voices in Fiction

T 6:00-8:50.  Dallas Hall 105.  González.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

Examines how underrepresented and marginalized communities are represented in contemporary fiction, including people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and individuals with disabilities. We will analyze both mainstream and contemporary literary fiction to consider how these representations reflect social realities and cultural contexts. It aims to develop students' skills in literary analysis, critical thinking, and creative engagements with fiction while also fostering an understanding of social justice issues and the importance of representation in literature. Texts include The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin. Assignments: 2-3 analytical essays, creative exercises, and a research project.

ENGL 2313-001—Introduction to Drama

TR 5:00-6:20.  Dallas Hall 157.  Garelick.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

Modern drama reshaped our understanding of home and family, bodies and relationships, and what it means to have a personality or be a ‘character.’  This class examines the arc of modern drama, which began in the 19th century and stretched into the 20th, looking at the classic, often startling plays—from several countries—that revolutionized the stage forever, and which continue to be produced the world over. These include: Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a story of a young woman trying to break out of her narrow social world; Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a re-examination of middle-class marriage; Chekhov’s Three Sisters, about a family undergoing personal and economic crisis; and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one of the most famous plays of the twentieth century, about the comforts of friendship; the terrors of solitude; and the profound struggle of daily life.  In addition to reading the plays, you will watch film and video clips of performances, and learn to ‘read’ the rich variety of interpretations and choices made by actors and directors. Possibilities exist for brief, in-class performance for interested students (acting ability NOT required!). Taught in combined lecture/seminar format. Students will write two short papers plus periodic one-paragraph reading responses. Midterm and take-home essay-form final. 

ENGL 2313-002—Introduction to Drama: A History of Western Drama in Three Acts

MWF 10:00-10:50.  Dallas Hall 115.  Moss.  2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

From Antigone to Hamilton, the most memorable reflections on human nature and the most provocative critiques of social and political life have taken dramatic form, presented onstage before mass audiences. This trans-historical success is largely the result of the unique nature of drama, which alone fully unites the arts: writing, speech, gesture, and costume at a minimum, but often incorporating song, dance, and related arts, as in ancient Greece or the modern musical. Thanks to drama’s popular appeal, theaters and the troupes acting in them have always been at the heart of Western culture, from the choruses of the Festival of Dionysus to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in London’s Globe to Broadway and its stars. At the same time, drama has lent its powerful voice to social protest and revolution, especially in the twentieth century, as traditional power structures crumbled and empires fell. The course is divided into three “Acts”: the rise of tragedy and comedy in ancient Greece and Rome, the coming-of-age of English drama during the Renaissance, and the radically experimental and socially critical drama of the modern period. Smaller “Interludes” provide short introductions to medieval and eighteenth-century English drama, and the syllabus closes with a brief glimpse of present-day American theater. Additionally, we will be honing our critical writing skills throughout the semester, with three class sessions devoted to the topic.

ENGL 2315-001—Introduction to Literary Study: Pomp and Circumstantial Evidence

TR 12:30-1:50.  Dallas Hall 105.  Dickson-Carr, D. 2016: CA, W   CC: LAI, CAA, W

ENGL 2315 is an introduction to the pleasing art of literary study and to the English major. We will read, contemplate, and discuss poetry, essays, plays, short stories, and novels from different nations and literary traditions to enjoy their many rich complexities. We will begin with different ways of defining literature and literary study, then proceed to examine how and why we read various genres. We will discuss frequently the roles that literature may play in shaping our world. In addition, we will discover and discuss a few of the more prominent issues in contemporary literary studies. By the end of the course, the student should be able to read and write critically about literary works. This skill will serve each student well in other courses in English, but will apply equally well in other disciplines. Our topic, “Pomp and Circumstantial Evidence,” refers to the many moments in our readings in which individuals—whether poets, kings, fools, heroes, or villains—wrestle with and confront the same issues that we will discuss: the sublime; the gap between what we perceive and reality; facts versus fantasy, illusion, or delusion; the eternal and pleasurable challenge of interpretation. Assignments: regular writing (in class and on your own); two critical papers; several short benchmark reading exams.  NOTE: We will watch a few selected films outside of regular class time. Tentative texts:  James, The Turn of the Screw; Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates; Shakespeare, King Lear; Wisława Szymborska, Poems: New & Collected, 1957-1997; Derek Walcott, Omeros; selected poems by Caroline Crew, Kay Ryan, et al.

ENGL 2315-002— Introduction to Literary Study: Strange Passages

MWF 9:00-9:50.  Dallas Hall 343.  Fanning.   2016: CA, W        CC: LAI, CAA, W

This introduction to the discipline of literary studies proposes that we think of literature as a kind of “estrangement device”—a medium meant to shake us out of our ordinary habits of thinking. Over the course of the semester, our minds will warp and bend as we navigate a labyrinth of “strange passages,” covering methods of interpretation and analysis in selected texts spanning a range of historical periods and genres, including lyric poetry, satire, sci-fi/weird fiction, and literature of the absurd. A sampling of authors and texts: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; stories by Franz Kafka and Flannery O’Connor; George Schuyler’s Black No More, and science fiction by Vonnegut, LeGuin, and/or Phillip K. Dick. 
Assignments: short weekly response papers; 3-4 essays approximately 4-5 pages each; a final exam. 

ENGL 2315-003— Introduction to Literary Study

TTh 2:00-3:20.  Dallas Hall 152.  Roudabush.   2016: CA, W        CC: LAI, CAA, W

ENGL 2318-003— Literature and Digital Humanities: An Introduction

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 101.  Wilson.     2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAA, W

What is digital literature? What is the relationship between technology and the humanities? How can technology advance our understanding of language, literature, and culture? These are some of the large-scale questions that we will explore in this course. We rely on technologies such as digital maps, e-books, search engines, and databases every day, and understanding them and being able to work with them is a vital part of preparing for professional life. This course offers a hands-on introduction to using these technologies in academic research to analyze literature, and as well as enhancing your skills in academic work, the skills you learn are of immediate value to employers in the job market.

ENGL 2390-001—Introduction to Creative Writing: Introductory Poetry Workshop

M 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 152. Brownderville.          2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

     Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote that poetry “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel what we perceive, and to imagine that which we know.” Ezra Pound, more succinctly, instructed his fellow poets to “make it new!” Pound believed that poets should make the world new—and make poetry new—by presenting life in bold, original verse. 

     In this course, students will write and revise their own poems, respond both verbally and in writing to one another’s work, and analyze published poems in short critical essays. In-class workshops will demand insight, courtesy, and candor from everyone in the room, and will help students improve their oral-communications skills. As this is an introductory course, prior experience in creative writing is not necessary. Students will be invited to imagine how their own voices might contribute to the exciting, wildly varied world of contemporary American poetry.

ENGL 2390-002—Introduction to Creative Writing: The Shapes of Fiction

W 2:00-4:50.  Dallas Hall 343.  Farhadi.  2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

In this course, we’ll read a variety of fictional genres and styles to analyze the particular decisions writers use to give their stories shape.  While structure will be our entry point, we’ll also focus on the smaller scale choices writers make in order to develop characters, further plot, and stimulate, satisfy, and subvert expectations in the service of providing a compelling read.

Throughout the course we’ll use critical and creative assignments to develop our craft vocabulary.  Students will write their own full-length short stories, which we’ll workshop in the second half of the semester.

ENGL 2390-003—Introduction to Creative Writing: The Moves Writers Make

TTh 12:30-1:50.  Dallas Hall 120.  Hermes.                    2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” 
― Anton Chekhov
This course will explore the foundational aspects of creative writing in poetry and fiction. To prepare ourselves to write our own stories and poems, we will begin by reading published work along with craft essays that talk about how great writing gets made. These readings are meant to provide artistic models and stimulate discussion about craft. Together, we’ll identify the “moves” successful pieces of writing make and practice incorporating them in our own creative work. During the second half of the course, we will discuss your original creative work in a whole-class review commonly referred to as a workshop. If our workshop conversations are successful, you will learn from each workshopped piece whether you are the writer or the reader, because each story or poem will present particular challenges in writing that all of us face in our work. With engaged participation, we will have an opportunity to sharpen both our critical and creative skills.

ENGL 2390-004—Introduction to Creative Writing: The Moves Writers Make

TTh 2:00-3:20. Dallas Hall 120.  Hermes.   2016: CA, W    CC: CA, CAC, W

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” 
― Anton Chekhov
This course will explore the foundational aspects of creative writing in poetry and fiction. To prepare ourselves to write our own stories and poems, we will begin by reading published work along with craft essays that talk about how great writing gets made. These readings are meant to provide artistic models and stimulate discussion about craft. Together, we’ll identify the “moves” successful pieces of writing make and practice incorporating them in our own creative work. During the second half of the course, we will discuss your original creative work in a whole-class review commonly referred to as a workshop. If our workshop conversations are successful, you will learn from each workshopped piece whether you are the writer or the reader, because each story or poem will present particular challenges in writing that all of us face in our work. With engaged participation, we will have an opportunity to sharpen both our critical and creative skills.

ENGL 2390-005—Introduction to Creative Writing: Love Letter Poems

MWF 12:00-12:50.  Dallas Hall 343.  Lama.            2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

Letters are one of the most intimate forms of human communication. A letter privately reveals the sender, the recipient, and their relationship. But what happens if a third person “eavesdrops” on it? And what if that’s precisely the intent of the writer? The Epistolary Poem is a letter-poem where the author intends it to be read by this third person, “the eavesdropper,” in addition to, sometimes even instead of, the addressee. In this class, using the fundamental concepts and skills of creative writing and poetry such as image, metaphor, sound, lineation, and form, we will write letter-poems to our loved ones, a stranger, the dead, the future, and finally to ourselves. 

In the first half of the semester, informed and inspired by the great poets that have come before us--Agha Shahid Ali, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Czeslaw Milosz, to name a few--we will learn the basic concepts and skills and write poems. In the second half, we will workshop them, giving and receiving thoughtful and generous feedback, culminating in a final portfolio. The final portfolio will consist of three significantly revised poems, guided by the knowledge that revision is a long and thoughtful form of writing which often results in radical changes and not just fixing of a few grammatical errors. You may have a considerable amount of experience in creative writing or very little to none. The only prerequisite for this class is that you’ve an interest in writing (and reading, of course)—and the willingness to put in a sincere amount of effort into your craft, for in my humble opinion talent alone—without sustained labor and dedication—has rarely, if ever, produced a great artist.

ENGL 2390-006—Introduction to Creative Writing

TTh 11:00-12:20.  Dallas Hall 105.  Rubin.  2016: CA, W  CC: CA, CAC, W

An introductory workshop that will focus on the fundamentals of craft in the genre of fiction writing. Students will learn the essential practice of "reading like a writer" while developing their own work and discussing that of their classmates.

ENGL 2390-007—Introduction to Creative Writing

TTh 3:30-4:50.  Dallas Hall 153.  Smith.      2016: CA, W  CC: CA, CAC, W

This workshop-heavy course focuses on the craft, structure, and thematic elements of developing short stories. Students will create and critique short literary narratives focused on the elements of fiction. By the end of the semester, students will complete a portfolio including two short stories.  

ENGL 2390-008—Introduction to Creative Writing

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Hyer Hall 102 .  Hawkins.      2016: CA, W  CC: CA, CAC, W

ENGL 3310-001—Research and Critical Writing for Literary Studies: The World and the Text

MWF 1:00-1:50.   Dallas Hall 138.  Newman.

ESPECIALLY RECOMMENDED FOR SOPHOMORE AND JUNIOR ENGLISH MAJORS
This course, designed as preparation for more advanced work in the major, explores several key questions: What is a text? What are some of the approaches thoughtful critics have taken in recent years to the analysis of texts? How do we as readers make sense both of texts and of their critics? How, in practice, do we progress from the reading to the written analysis of texts? Our guiding question this semester will be: Do literary texts reflect the world, construct alternative worlds, or in some way create the world?  Employs a combination of lecture, discussion group activity, and writing exercises with the goal of refining critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. 
Texts: still under consideration, but will likely be drawn from the following: Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; poems by Natasha Tretheway and others; possible short play; Bennett and Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory as a read-along textbook. 
Assignments: Several short papers and exercises, including discussion-posts; 2 papers (one 3-4 pp., one multi-source paper of approx. 7-8 pages; possible midterm exam or short quizzes. 

ENGL 3320-001—Topics in Medieval Literature: Fact or Fiction? Paradigms of Truth in Medieval Literature

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Clements Hall 325.  Amsel. 2016: HFA, W  CC: LAI, W

Are you ready to explore fact and fiction in the literature of the Middle Ages? How is it that we make history? And, how do we discern truth? Sounds familiar to us because we are still grappling with questions of real truths vs. fake truths in our everyday lives. This course examines real and imagined medieval histories and legends, including stories of King Arthur and Joan of Arc, so we can learn about medieval paradigms still present in contemporary culture, literature, films, other types of media.
Assignments include: Case Study Reading Responses and Final Research Paper on medieval themes in contemporary culture and media. 
Readings include: Joan of Arc: Her Story by Régine Pernoud and Marie Véronique Clin, Le Mort D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, and The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.

ENGL 3347-001—Topics in American Lit Age Rev: The Ethics of Democracy: A Moral Paradox

TR 3:30-4:50.  Dallas Hall 101.  Torres de Veneciano.   2016: HFA, W  CC: LAI, W

This class will read some of the most important prose writers from the late-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. These writers trained their pens to ethical matters, including the cultivation of character and personality, the tone of social manners, the pursuit of political and social equity, gender and racial equality, and the end of slavery. Such topics, central to literature in the formative period of American democracy, persist in their relevance to this day. Authors we will read include Jane Addams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, José Martí, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Sojourner Truth, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

ENGL 3355-001—Transatlantic Encounters III: Possible Futures: Feminist Theory and Speculative Fiction

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 106.  Boswell.   2016: HFA, GE, W  CC: LAI, HD, W

What do feminist theory and speculative fiction have in common? Both genres engage with our culture through imaginative critique, using the “possible future” to envision the ways our world could change for the better—or the worse. Feminist thought has often turned to fiction to imagine “what if” and to engage with ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. In this course, we will examine a variety of speculative texts alongside works of feminist theory. By making our world and assumptions strange to us, these speculative fictions offer a kind of testing ground for many ideas in feminist theory. This course will examine the underlying systems that have shaped our concepts of sex, gender, race, and other categories. Students will end the semester by giving a researched oral presentation over a literary work or film of their choosing.  

ENGL 3362-001—African-American Literature: Criticism, Irony, Satire, and the Future

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 156.  Dickson-Carr, D.          2016: HFA, HD, W  CC: HD, W

At the heart of African American literature lies a spirit of dissent, with authors taking a critical look at American culture as they show the many complexities within African American communities and cultural products. In many cases, wit, satire, and irony—that is, critical humor—help African American authors and their works to raise important and challenging questions for us to explore and answer. This course takes as its premise that argument, opposition, dissent, and an ironic, satirical spirit are the foundation of African American literature and literary study. Dispensing with the myth of a monolithic, homogeneous African American community, we will focus on critical issues and debates within African American literary and cultural history. Our goal will be to examine how these debates appear in the literature, whether implicitly or explicitly. We will begin in Colonial times and move briskly through history, touching upon works that best illustrate our topic. In the process, we will read and analyze autobiographies, short stories, poems, novels, comic strips, graphic novels, and films.

Assignments will include three critical papers, one requiring research; a midterm; a final; in-class

and take-home writings. Tentatively, we will read selections from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; short stories, essays, and novels by Paul Beatty, Ralph Ellison, Percival Everett, George S. Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, Mat Johnson, ZZ Packer, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, and Toni Morrison; watch such films as Bamboozled, Sorry to Bother You, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and more.

ENGL 3363-001—Chicana/Chicano Literature: Borders, Barrios, and Beyond

TTh 11:00-12:20.  Dallas Hall 152.  González.         2016: HFA, HD, W  CC: HD, W

Chicana/Chicano Literature: "Borders, Barrios, and Beyond" examines the literary production of Mexican Americans and Chicanas/Chicanos in the United States. By analyzing novels, poetry, and essays, students will explore themes such as identity, belonging, migration, and resistance, and how they are shaped by borders, both physical and metaphorical. Required readings includeThe House on Mango Streetby Sandra Cisneros,Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizaby Gloria Anzaldúa,Bless Me, Ultimaby Rudolfo Anaya,The Devil's Highwayby Luis Alberto Urrea, andAlways Runningby Luis J. Rodríguez. The course aims to encourage critical engagement with Chicana/Chicano literature and to deepen students' understanding of the experiences and histories that shape these communities. 

Assignments: short analytical exercises, a presentation, 2-3 essays, a creative assignment, and a multimedia piece.

ENGL 3390-001—Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry and Song

W 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 152.  Brownderville.         2012: CA2, W   2016: HFA, W   CC: W

When songwriter Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, poets and songwriters across the world fiercely debated the appropriateness of the decision. The debate wasn’t only about Dylan and his Nobel Prize. It was really about the relationship between poetry and song. Do song lyrics qualify as “literature”? Are poetry and song distinct art forms, or are they variants of the same form?

This course, which will explore these fascinating questions, will be a cross between a creative-writing workshop and a discussion seminar. In addition to writing songs and poems of our own, we will talk about songs, poetry that partakes of song tradition, and the historical relationship between song and poetry. Along the way, we will study a large array of poets and songwriters such as Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief), Lucki, Joanna Newsom, Hugh Lupton, The National, Benny the Butcher, Lucinda Williams, Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Tom Waits, and William Butler Yeats. Students will introduce each other to music, producing playlists for the purpose of class discussion. Students need not have musical training or musical skill, though Meadows students focusing on songwriting and performance are encouraged to take the class. Projects will vary in accordance with students’ interests and abilities: some might write song lyrics or lyric poems, and others might compose songs and perform them for the class.

ENGL 3390-002— Creative Writing Workshop: Screenwriting

Th 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 138.  Rubin.         2016: HFA, W   CC: W

In this course students will present their own screenwriting as well as critique that of their classmates. Alongside these workshops we will analyze exemplary models of the form and study film clips to understand the ways compelling dialogue is written and satisfying scenes are structured. Readings will include such classics as Casablanca and Chinatown as well as newer scripts like Lady Bird and Get Out. ENG 2390 is a prerequisite for this course although Meadows students with a background in dramatic arts are encouraged to seek the permission of the instructor.

ENGL 3390-003— Creative Writing Workshop: Character Development and Plot

TTh 11:00-12:20. Dallas Hall 102.  Smith.    2016: HFA, W   CC: W

This workshop-heavy course focuses on the craft, structure, and thematic elements of developing short stories. Students will create and critique short literary narratives focused on the elements of fiction, with primary focus on character development and plot structure. By the end of the semester, students will complete a portfolio including two short stories.

ENGL 4333-001— Shakespeare: Fathers and Daughters, Husbands and Wives

MWF 12:00-12:50.  Dallas Hall 156.  Moss. 2016: HSBS,  IL, KNOW, OC, W

At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Tempest, the elderly wizard Prospero declares to his daughter Miranda, “I have done nothing but in care of thee.” So what does she do, and is it for him? While single women (sometimes disguised as boys) drive most Shakespearean comedy, his tragedies and late romances almost always center on the strong, complex, painful attachments of socially subordinate women to domineering men. The outrageous demands of fathers and jealous tirades of husbands elicit a range of extravagant responses from Shakespeare’s embattled female characters, from angelic chastity to bloody vengeance to Machiavellian calculation to playing dead for decades. In this course, we will follow the unequal dance of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines, alongside contextual readings on gender roles and domestic life from a variety of Renaissance genres, as well as modern criticism.

ENGL 4360-001—Studies in Modern and Contemporary American Literature: Escape Artists Under Fugitive Law

TTh 2:00-3:20.  Dallas Hall 137.  Pergadia.             2016: HFA, IL, OC

From Henry Box Brown to Harriet Jacobs, Boots Riley to Jordan Peele, Margaret Garner to Sethe, Black escape artists fill the history and imagination of African American art. How do Black escape artists, from those who escaped fugitive slave catchers to those who composed under slavery and carceral capitalism, offer a map and history for how we got trapped, here, in this America, on this sinking ship, this the sunken place, this afterlife of chattel slavery? And how do we find the keys to get out, to build classrooms, multi-racial coalitions, cities, countries, contacts, loving contagions that abolish the schoolteachers who have colonized our minds, settled us into sunken worlds through ships we think of as a part of the American dream that turn instead to the Middle Passage? This course traces escape artists, broadly conceived. We explore escape artists through the African American literary tradition and interrogate how to build classrooms and pedagogy that abolish the Schoolteachers of the world, teaching them to read history not from the master’s pen but from Sethe’s song. How, the course asks, do we imagine making art and building worlds for Toni Morrison’s Pecola, for Jesmyn Ward’s Jojo? 

Assignments: weekly in-class writing prompts, two multi-media projects, weekly discussion posts, and an in-class group presentation. NOTE: there will be film screenings outside of regular class time. Tentative texts: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Octavia Butler, Kindred, Jordan Peele, Us, Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, visual art by Kara Walker, Glen Ligon, et al.

ENGL 4369-001— Transatlantic Studies III: LGBTQ+ Writing Before and After Stonewall

TTh 12:30-1:50.  Dallas Hall 138.  Bozorth.             2016: HD, IL, OC   CC: OC

The Stonewall Riots of June 1969 marked the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the decades since have seen the “coming out” of lesbian, gay, and trans literature as well.  We’ll read some of the most influential works by UK and US queer writers from the 1960s to the present, considering the aesthetic, psychological, social, political and other elements.  Among issues we’ll explore:  the ongoing fascination of stories about growing up, coming out, and sexual discovery; the search for a queer ancestry and the creation of personal and collective histories in textual form; spiritual meanings of queer sexuality, love, drag, disco, and sequins; tensions (and harmonies) between sexual identity and race, ethnicity, and gender; personal and political challenges posed by HIV/AIDS.  We’ll consider how artists adapt aesthetic forms to grapple with such things, whether in a coming-of-age novel, memoir, film, or stage play.  If this class were a movie, it would get an NC-17 rating:  this course requires an adult capacity to think, talk, and write explicitly about sex and the body in an academic context.  We will use a Discussion Board to post question and topics for class consideration, and students will collaborate on leading class discussions, reflecting their interests and research outside of class.  Writing assignments:  shorter and longer analytical papers, including a final research-based paper, totaling 20 pages. Probable texts:  Alison Bechdel, Fun-Home; Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man; Cleve Jones, When We Rise; Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; Mark Merlis, An Arrow’s Flight; Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

ENGL 4397-001—Distinction Seminar

MWF 1:00-1:50.  Dallas Hall 137.  Cassedy

Open by invitation. (Address questions about invitations to Prof. Tim Cassedy.)

This course is required for students pursuing Distinction in English, and its purpose is to help you envision and design a critical or creative project that you will undertake in the spring semester to complete the Distinction program. Your Distinction project is the most extensive and ambitious project that you are likely to undertake in college — and whether a creative writing project or a literary critical project, it will involve considerable planning, research, and preparatory writing. This course will introduce you to advanced research and project management strategies employed by professional writers and critics; provide frequent opportunities for you to share your ideas in progress and draw on your classmates’ collective insights; and yield a detailed plan for the research and writing that you will undertake in the spring with a faculty member of your choice. The syllabus will be partly student-generated, using scholarship and creative writing located by members of the class and relevant to their projects.

ENGL 6310-001—Advanced Literary Studies

F 12:00-3:00.  Dallas Hall 120.  Sudan         

ENGL 6311-001—Survey of Literary Criticism and Theory

W 2:00-4:50.  Dallas Hall 138.  Pergadia.

This course introduces graduate students to some of the central debates in cultural and literary theory through foundational texts that formulate or complicate our understanding of the subject. Students will learn how to write and speak about theoretical texts and how to recognize the theoretical assumptions that underlie acts of interpretation. Theoretical approaches include: structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial theory; critical race studies, and posthumanism. As we begin to disentangle the meanings of what we mean when we say “I,” we will inevitably analyze the relationships between the subject and subjection, ideology and power, language and authorship, theory and politics. To this end, we will consider the synergy between theories of the subject and contemporary feminist and postcolonial interventions. We will ground our analyses within particular literary, visual, and theoretical works, learning how to read cultural production as theory, rather than “applying” theory to selected texts.  The course is geared towards developing skills of close-reading and critical writing. 

ENGL 6312-001—Teaching Practicum

F 1:00-3:50.  Dallas Hall 157.  Stephens.     

English 6312 (Teaching Practicum) is designed to prepare graduate students in English seeking a Ph.D. to teach first-year writing at the college level and, in a larger sense, to design, prepare for, and teach college English classes at any level. During the fall semester, in addition to all of the texts assigned on the WRTR 1312 syllabus, students will read and write critical responses to composition theory and the classroom (excerpts from Lindemann’s A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers). Students will also read and discuss Engaging Ideas; The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (John C. Bean); these texts provide students with an overview of the history of rhetoric and methods for fostering critical thinking and writing. Students will also critically assess, review, and present contemporary criticism of rhetorical pedagogy. Finally, students will keep abreast of current issues in Composition Studies and Academia by reading recent online articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

ENGL 6320-001— Medieval Literature

T 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 157.  Wheeler

How is passion (sexual and sacred, love and hate) represented, valued, suppressed, repressed, and transgressed in medieval prose and poetry? How are such representations culturally embedded and historically expressed? We will survey varieties of textual representations of emotions (especially desire and joy) from a few major medieval literary texts that still resonate in our contemporary cultures. We will grapple with the historical, material, and aesthetic contexts of the works themselves. The huge repertoire of chivalric texts from the Middle Ages to the current moment gives central focus to our study.
Process: Since this is a proseminar, my aim is to introduce you to a broad range of texts and some contemporary theoretical frameworks in which we may consider them while remaining sensitive to their own historical and cultural contexts. Each student will develop a strong set of weekly commentaries and take responsibility for amplifying the class resources and the directions in which we wander off our pre-established tracks. This syllabus is thus to some degree provisional.

Texts:
Andreas Capellanus On Love, trans. P.G. Walsh (Bristol Classical Press) ISBN: 978-0715616901;
Chanson de Roland, bi-lingual text ed. and trans. G. Brault, student edition (Pennsylvania State University Press pb, 1984).
Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. D.D.R. Owen ISBN 978-0345277602;
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans/ed Faletra (Broadview) ISBN: 978-1-55111-639-1;
Heldris of Cornwall. Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992) ISBN 978-0870135439;
The Mabinogion, trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford University Press) ISBN-13: 978-0199218783;
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; [and] Sir Orfeo, trans. J.R.R. Tolkien (Del Rey) ISBN: 978-0345277602
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, on-line Harvard edition.
Malory, Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. PJC Field (Boydell and Brewer).

ENGL 6330-001— Early Modern British Literature: Eminent Non-Shakespeareans, 1500-1700

CANCELED

ENGL 7374-001— Problems in Literary History: Poetics

M 2:00-4:50.  Dallas Hall 138.  Caplan.

This class will consider the much-debated question of what defines the art of poetry. We will examine this question historically, with close attention to shifting modern and contemporary arguments. The readings will include canonical statements by poets such as William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, as well as recently published scholarship. Together, they will clarify the rancorous debate and its literary and cultural consequences.  
Several of the assigned authors (Jonathan Culler, Stephanie Burt, Jahan Ramazani, and others) will meet with the class via Zoom and visit the SMU campus for the conference on poetic form that will be held here in March 2024. We also will consider the poetics that governs the contemporary moment by reading recent poetry collections such as Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Tradition. (Jericho Brown will participate in the March conference and give a reading.). The poet Maggie Millner will meet the class via Zoom to discuss her celebrated new collection, Couplets: A Love Story. Finally, we will review poetic techniques (meters, forms, etc.) so the students will gain a solid grounding in them. In short, the class will train the students in a subject and methods to understand poetic and generic thinking. 

MAY & SUMMER SESSION 2023 COURSES

MAY & SUMMER 2023 SESSION

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

ENGL 2302-0011— Business Writing 
M – F  2:00-3:50. Umphrey Lee 242.  Dickson-Carr, C.     2012: IL, OC W     2016: IL, OC, W   CC: W
This course introduces students to business and professional communication, including various writing and speaking tasks. It covers the observation and practice of rhetorical strategies, discourse conventions, and ethical standards associated with workplace culture. The course includes active learning, which means students will attend events on campus and off and conduct a detailed field research project at a worksite. Please note that this course may not count toward the English major requirements and that laptops are required in class. Writing assignments: summaries, analyses, evaluations, letters, reports, memoranda, and individual and collaborative research reports, both oral and written. The priority goes to Markets & Cultures majors. The second and third priorities are graduating seniors and Dedman students, respectively. Text: Kolin, Philip C. Successful Writing at Work, 11th ed.
 
ENGL 2315-0011—Introduction to Literary Study: Pomp and Circumstantial Evidence
M – F  10:00-11:50. Dallas Hall 138.  Dickson-Carr, D.     2016: LL, W  CC: LAI, W
ENGL 2315 is an introduction to the pleasing art of literary study and to the English major. We will read, contemplate, and discuss poetry, essays, plays, short stories, and novels from different nations and literary traditions to enjoy their many rich complexities. We will begin with different ways of defining literature and literary study, then proceed to examine how and why we read various genres. We will discuss frequently the roles that literature may play in shaping our world. In addition, we will discover and discuss a few of the more prominent issues in contemporary literary studies. By the end of the course, the student should be able to read and write critically about literary works. This skill will serve each student well in other courses in English, but will apply equally well in other disciplines. Our topic, “Pomp and Circumstantial Evidence,” refers to the many moments in our readings in which individuals—whether poets, kings, fools, heroes, or villains—wrestle with and confront the same issues that we will discuss: the sublime; the gap between what we perceive and reality; facts versus fantasy, illusion, or delusion; the eternal and pleasurable challenge of interpretation. 
Assignments: regular writing (in class and on your own); two critical papers; several short benchmark reading exams.  NOTE: We will watch a few selected films outside of regular class time. Tentative texts:  James, The Turn of the Screw; Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates; Shakespeare, King Lear; Wisława Szymborska, Poems: New & Collected, 1957-1997; Derek Walcott, Omeros; selected poems by Caroline Crew, Kay Ryan, et al.
 
ENGL 2311-0012—Poetry 
M – F  10:00-11:50. Dallas Hall 149.  McConnell.     2016: LL, W  CC: LAI, W
In 1910, the poet William Henry Davies complained, “What is this life, if full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare.” In thee levity - three years since then, changes in lifestyle and advances in communication technology—from television to texts to tweets—have nearly destroyed our capacity for standing and staring. Poetry is the antidote. Poetry yields itself slowly. It demands that we silence distractions and pause in our frantic rushing from place to place. In this summer course, we will pursue an immersive, meditative program of standing and staring at a huge range of texts, from medieval Finnish epic to twenty-first-century Instapoetry. We will read poems carefully and insightfully so that we can truly understand and appreciate our objects of study. There are precious few opportunities in this hectic life to stand and stare, and this course is one of them. The authors we include William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Countee Cullen, Pablo Neruda, Stevie Smith, and the astoundingly prolific Anonymous.
 
ENGL 3367-0012— Ethical Implications of Children’s Literature 
M – F  12:00-1:50. Dallas Hall 102. Stephens. 2016: HFA, KNOW, HD, W   CC: HD, OC, W
This course exams children’s literature with an emphasis on notions of morality and evil, including issues of colonialism, race, ethnicity, gender, and class. To better comprehend the influences and effects of literature for young people, we’ll discuss and research scholarly criticism and popular reception along with the stories. We begin with an examination of moral codes within folk and fairy tales and then move to picture books, focusing on the implications of book bans and changing cultural attitudes toward traditional concepts and values of family and community. The course culminates in an exploration of YA dystopian literature as vehicles for re-envisioning discrimination, class inequities, and personal responsibility. Because of the abbreviated nature of the summer course, students are strongly encouraged to read the course texts before the beginning of the term.
 

MWF 10:00-10:50. Dedman Life Science 131. Dickson-Carr, D., 2012: CA1, HC1, OC   2016: HC, LL, OC    CC: LAI

This introductory survey of selected 20th-century novels and short stories emphasizes both ideas of modernity and the historical or cultural contexts that generate these ideas. We study speculative fiction, which comprises such genres as science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and post-apocalyptic fiction, among others. All of the works we study either imagine possible futures or reimagine the past. We will look at speculative fiction’s history, place the works we read and their authors in historical contexts, and examine how different authors build worlds that allow us to understand our own.

Coursework includes regular quizzes, written midterm and final exams, two short response papers, and participation.

ENGL 1365-001—Literature of Minorities

T 6:00-8:50. Dallas Hall 116.  Levy.                 2012: CA1, HD     2016: LL, HD   CC: LAI, HD

The course interrogates questions of individual and collective identities from historical, literary, and contemporary social perspectives. We look closely at the many categories that have constituted identity in the US, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and the myriad terms/categories that have come to constitute our cultural conversation about identity. These include: “Nation” “Whiteness,” “Blackness,” “White Supremacy,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Identity Politics,” “Queerness,” “Pluralism,” etc. We examine the ways these categories have been deployed to assert and marginalize identity, seeing identity as both self-selected and imposed, fixed and flexible, located and displaced, secure and situational. In addition, we examine the status of “minority” literature as a category within the American literary and cultural canon, and critique the ways in which this imposed status has been used to diminish the craftsmanship and aesthetic reach of literature written by women, LGBQT authors and peoples of color.

ENGL 2102-001—Spreadsheet Lit: Excel

W 3:00-3:50. Hyer Hall 106.  Dickson-Carr, Carol.

This course introduces Excel 2019 as it is commonly used in the workplace. Students will learn to organize and analyze data, use and link worksheets, create tables & charts, and communicate the results of their analyses in clear, readable prose. Laptops required real-time in the classroom with the latest version of Excel. Students will take the Excel Associates Exam for certification by the end of the semester.

ENGL 2102-002—Spreadsheet Lit: Excel

M 3:00-3:50. Hyer Hall 106.  Dickson-Carr, Carol.

This course introduces Excel 2019 as it is commonly used in the workplace. Students will learn to organize and analyze data, use and link worksheets, create tables & charts, and communicate the results of their analyses in clear, readable prose. Laptops required real-time in the classroom with the latest version of Excel. Students will take the Excel Associates Exam for certification by the end of the semester.

ENGL 2302-001—Business Writing

TTh 12:30-1:50. Virginia-Snider Hall 203.  Dickson-Carr, Carol. 2012: IL, OC, W     2016: IL, OC, W  CC: W

This course introduces students to business and professional communication, including various writing and speaking tasks. It covers the observation and practice of rhetorical strategies, discourse conventions, and ethical standards associated with workplace culture. The course includes active learning, which means students will attend events on campus and off and conduct a detailed field research project at a worksite. Please note that this course may not count toward the English major requirements and that laptops are required in class. Writing assignments: summaries, analyses, evaluations, letters, reports, memoranda, and individual and collaborative research reports, both oral and written. The priority goes to Markets & Cultures majors. The second and third priorities are graduating seniors and Dedman students, respectively. Text: Kolin, Philip C. Successful Writing at Work, 11th ed.

ENGL 2302-002— Business Writing

TTh 2:00-3:20.  Virginia-Snider Hall 203.  Dickson-Carr, Carol. 2012: IL, OC, W     2016: IL, OC, W   CC: W

This course introduces students to business and professional communication, including various writing and speaking tasks. It covers the observation and practice of rhetorical strategies, discourse conventions, and ethical standards associated with workplace culture. The course includes active learning, which means students will attend events on campus and off and conduct a detailed field research project at a worksite. Please note that this course may not count toward the English major requirements and that laptops are required in class. Writing assignments: summaries, analyses, evaluations, letters, reports, memoranda, and individual and collaborative research reports, both oral and written. The priority goes to Markets & Cultures majors. The second and third priorities are graduating seniors and Dedman students, respectively. Text: Kolin, Philip C. Successful Writing at Work, 11th ed.

HIST 2306-001H—The Kids Are Alright: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Childhood and Adolescence

TR 12:30-1:50. Dallas Hall 116.  Levy & Deluzio.    2016: KNOW, HC    CC: HC, W

Note: this course counts towards the English major or minor as a 2000-level elective. Intended for students in the University Honors Program.

The Kids Are Alright examines from historical, literary, and other disciplinary perspectives key issues associated with American youth. The course explores childhood and adolescence as flexible social constructs that reflect – and respond to – larger forces of historical change. Among the questions we will seek to answer are these: At any given historical moment, what were the prevailing expectations for girls and boys growing up and how did those expectations resonate with broader cultural hopes, longings, and anxieties? How were young people shaped by prevailing expectations for growing up and how did they play a role in shaping those expectations and the wider society in return? What has changed and what has stayed the same regarding how children were viewed and treated and how they lived their lives over the course of U.S. history, and with what consequences for children’s lives in the present? We will consider children and adolescents in a variety of contexts: in the family, at school, at work, and at play, as well as examine their roles and influence as objects of reform, consumers, social activists, and cultural icons. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the multiple paths of growing up in the United States, especially to the ways in which experiences and representations of childhood and adolescence have been shaped by the categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class.

ENGL 2311-001—Introduction to Poetry: Lifting the Veil

TTh 2:00-3:20.  Dedman Life Science 132.  Condon.         2012: CA2, W     2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

“Poetry,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were unfamiliar.” He’s right: poetry reveals the unexpected beauty and strangeness in the ordinary landscapes, people, and emotional situations we encounter every day. Yet, the famous stereotype of poetry suggests that the genre doesn’t reveal anything without a lot of decoding on a reader’s part—that the poem is the veil that hides a complicated message. In this course, we will explode this stereotype by learning about poetic characteristics and devices that are meant to delight readers, not confuse them. Each week we will focus on a different poetic technique or form—image, repetition, the sonnet—and discuss how poets across the centuries have used them to bring us pleasure, making something as mundane as grass seem suddenly breathtaking and strange. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one long paper, several short reflections, a poetry recitation, and regular participation in class.

Course Text: Helen Vendler, ed., Poems, Poets, Poetry, Compact 3d ed

ENGL 2311-002H—Introduction to Poetry

MWF 1:00-1:50.  Dallas Hall 157.  Caplan.   2012: CA2, W     2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

“Poetry is language that sounds better and means more,” the poet Charles Wright once observed. “What’s better than that?” This class will train the students to hear the many sounds and many meanings that great poems articulate. In addition to writing critical essays, we will compose formal imitations, write brief analyses of particular elements of the assigned poetry, and perform a poem from memory. We also will have the pleasure of having two poets visit our class via Zoom to discuss their work with us. In short, we will spend the semester considering language that sounds better and means more, and, as the poet put it, what’s better than that?

ENGL 2311-003—Introduction to Poetry: American Poetry Since 1960—Legitimate Dangers

MWF 12:00-12:50.  Dallas Hall 137.  Rivera.            2012: CA2, W     2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

Typically, most students in the United States view legitimate poetry as that of fixed forms or the work of established writers accepted into the traditional canon of American literature. However, contemporary American poetry continues to inundate readers with an ever-widening corpus that includes and celebrates writers from the margins, writers within academia, and workaday journey poets who experiment both with form and content to document myriad lyrical impulses. These poetic efforts form a type of call-and-response dialogue that widens concepts of inclusiveness—which many view as threatening. In this course, we will annotate, read, discuss, argue the merits and failures of the poems in addition to acquiring a system of shared language with which to discuss poets and their work. As we engage with the unending font of American poets, we will attempt a radical reimagining of what we consider poetry. We will attempt to embrace these newer voices—as we look to a more capacious understanding of exigencies of the human condition within contemporary American poetry.

ENGL 2312-001—Introduction to Fiction

TTh 8:00-9:20. Dallas Hall 101.  STAFF. 2012: CA2, W    2016: LL, W   CC: LAI, W

ENGL 2312-002—Introduction to Fiction: Dangerous Novels

TTh 9:30-10:50. Clements Hall 325.  Sudan.           2012: CA2, W    2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

ENGL 2312-003—Introduction to Fiction: The Global Novel

MWF 11:00-11:50.  Dallas Hall 157.  Hermes.  2012: CA2, W    2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

This course will consider fiction that reflects and responds to the increasing interconnectedness of our globalized world—stories and novels written about, from, and across places outside the U.S. and Britain, including South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. How do writers of global literature balance precise, local specificity with the imperative to connect to a “universal” audience? What is the work’s relation to a shared cosmopolitan ethos? What do terms like globalization, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, and world literature mean in the first place?

With these texts and concepts as our foundation for discussion, we will build a set of tools for analyzing and writing about literature, including close reading, awareness of genre, and familiarity with important elements of fiction. We will think deeply about not just what texts say, but how they say it. Finally, reading these works of fiction will help us see our contemporary world in new ways, and better understand our place in it. Readings may include Jean Rhys, Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Mohsin Hamid, Han Kang, and Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

ENGL 2312-004—Introduction to Fiction

MWF 12:00-12:50.  Dallas Hall 156.  Sae-Saue.  2012: CA2, W    2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

This course is an introduction to fiction with an emphasis on U.S. ethnic novels.  The primary goals of the class are that students learn to recognize a range of narrative elements and to see how they function in key U.S. fictions.  Each text we will read represents a specific set of historical and social relationships and they imagine particular U.S. identities. We will investigate how fiction constructs cultural identities, comments on determinate historical moments, and organizes human consciousness around social history. In doing so, we shall ask: how does fiction articulate political, social, and cultural dilemmas? And how does it structure our understandings of social interaction?  As these questions imply, this course will explore how fiction creates and then navigates a gap between art and history in order to remark on U.S. social relationships. We will investigate how literary mechanisms situate a narrative within a determinate social context and how the narrative apparatuses of the selected works organize our perceptions of the complex worlds that they imagine. As such, we will conclude the class having learned how fiction works ideologically, understanding how the form, structure, and narrative elements of the selected texts negotiate history, politics, human psychology, and even the limitations of literary representation.

ENGL 2312-005—Introduction to Fiction: The Global Novel

MWF 12:00-12:50.  Dallas Hall 153.  Hermes.  2012: CA2, W    2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

This course will consider fiction that reflects and responds to the increasing interconnectedness of our globalized world—stories and novels written about, from, and across places outside the U.S. and Britain, including South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. How do writers of global literature balance precise, local specificity with the imperative to connect to a “universal” audience? What is the work’s relation to a shared cosmopolitan ethos? What do terms like globalization, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, and world literature mean in the first place?

With these texts and concepts as our foundation for discussion, we will build a set of tools for analyzing and writing about literature, including close reading, awareness of genre, and familiarity with important elements of fiction. We will think deeply about not just what texts say, but how they say it. Finally, reading these works of fiction will help us see our contemporary world in new ways, and better understand our place in it. Readings may include Jean Rhys, Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Mohsin Hamid, Han Kang, and Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

ENGL 2313-001—Introduction to Drama: Modern Drama and the Reinvented Self

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 102.  Moss.  2012: CA2, W    2016: LL, W    CC: LAI, W

From Antigone to Hamilton, the most memorable reflections on human nature and the most provocative critiques of social and political life have taken dramatic form, presented onstage before mass audiences. This trans-historical success is largely the result of the unique nature of drama, which alone fully unites the arts: writing, speech, gesture, and costume at a minimum, but often incorporating song, dance, and related arts, as in ancient Greece or the modern musical. Thanks to drama’s popular appeal, theaters and the troupes acting in them have always been at the heart of Western culture, from the choruses of the Festival of Dionysus to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in London’s Globe to Broadway and its stars. At the same time, drama has lent its powerful voice to social protest and revolution, especially in the twentieth century, as traditional power structures crumbled and empires fell.

The course is divided into three “Acts”: the rise of comedy and tragedy in ancient Greece, the ascendance of Shakespeare and his company in Renaissance England, and the radical left-wing and anti-imperialist theater of the mid-twentieth century. Smaller “Interludes” provide short introductions to medieval and eighteenth-century English drama, and the syllabus closes with a brief glimpse of the theater and film of present-day America. To facilitate a sense of contemporary drama’s continuity with ancient and early modern precursors, most of the works we will study toward the end of the semester respond directly to plays covered by the first half of the syllabus. Additionally, throughout the semester, we will be honing our critical writing skills, with three class sessions devoted to the topic.

 Course Requirements: In keeping with drama’s multimedia essence, coursework will take the form of daily posts to the class discussion board, one shorter paper with a required revision, one longer paper incorporating secondary research, and a brief oral presentation or performance.

ENGL 2315-001—Introduction to Literary Study: Race in the English Renaissance and Beyond

MWF 2:00-2:50.  Dallas Hall 152.  Atkinson.           2012: CA2, W    2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAA, W

This course introduces the discipline of literary study by tracing literary representations of race and “the Other” from the Renaissance to the present. Drawing on a variety of texts – plays, poems, essays, and true accounts – we will consider how beliefs and attitudes from the early modern period have been revisited, refined and questioned by modern authors. The work of this class will be to examine how literature represents evolving perceptions of racial and cultural difference and to think about how literature can be a tool of self-reflection, both for the cultures who produce it and for us as modern readers. This work will be accomplished through analytical reading and writing, which we will used to develop nuanced and thoughtful interpretations. 

Possible texts include Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Major assignments include two short papers and one long, with weekly short reflections. 

ENGL 2315-002— Introduction to Literary Study: On the Road (again): Road Narratives from Homer to Kerouac

TTh 11:00-12:20.  Dallas Hall 102.  Rosendale.     2012: CA2, W    2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAA, W

This course will survey one of literature’s oldest, best, and most useful tricks: the journey.  What is it that has made travel so irresistible to 3000 years of Western writers?  What range of different uses have they made of this deeply resonant metaphor, and what possibilities has it offered? How are later road narratives in conversation with earlier ones?  (And why, until quite recently, have so few of them been written by women?)  From ancient Greece to 20thC America, we will read epics, novels, poems, plays, and other kinds of texts to better understand the depth and variety of a mechanism so pervasive that you may hardly have noticed it.

ENGL 2390-001—Introduction to Creative Writing: The Shapes of Fiction

TTh 11:00-12:20.  Dallas Hall 152.  Farhadi.     2012: CA2, W    2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

 In this course, we’ll read a variety of fictional genres and styles to analyze the particular decisions writers use to give their stories shape.  While structure will be our entry point, we’ll also focus on the smaller scale choices writers make in order to develop characters, further plot, and stimulate, satisfy, and subvert expectations in the service of providing a compelling read.

 Throughout the course we’ll use critical and creative assignments to develop our craft vocabulary.  Students will write their own full-length short stories, which we’ll workshop in the second half of the semester.

ENGL 2390-002—Introduction to Creative Writing: Short-Form Creative Writing

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 120.  Smith.  2012: CA1, W   2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

This course focuses on the craft, structure, and thematic elements of developing flash fiction stories. Students will create and critique short literary narratives focused on the elements of fiction. By the end of the semester, students will complete a portfolio including two short stories.

ENGL 2390-003—Introduction to Creative Writing: The Art of Listening

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 156.  Lama.            2012: CA1, W   2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

“Poetry always begins and ends,” remarks W.S. Merwin, “with listening.” In this class, we will learn to listen—to the sky, the earth, the body, the live language, the song in language, the language in song. Through recitations, we will explore the lyre of the lyric in our own throats. In addition to sound, we will practice other fundamentals of poetry such as the line, image, metaphor, and form through creative assignments and workshops. We will imitate and emulate the great poets from classical to contemporary with the goal of finding our own voice and music. “The quieter you become,” says Rumi, “the more you hear.” In this class, we will learn to be quiet but also ecstatic. 

ENGL 2390-004—Introduction to Creative Writing: Short-Form Creative Writing

TTh 12:30-1:50. Dallas Hall 351.  Smith.     2012: CA1, W   2016: CA, W  CC: CA, CAC, W

This course focuses on the craft, structure, and thematic elements of developing flash fiction stories. Students will create and critique short literary narratives focused on the elements of fiction. By the end of the semester, students will complete a portfolio including two short stories.

ENGL 2390-005—Introduction to Creative Writing: The Moves Writers Make

MW 3:00-4:20.  Dallas Hall 152.  Hermes.              2012: CA1, W   2016: CA, W   CC: CA, CAC, W

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

― Anton Chekhov

This course will explore the foundational aspects of creative writing in poetry and fiction. To prepare ourselves to write our own stories and poems, we will begin by reading published work along with craft essays that talk about how great writing gets made. These readings are meant to provide artistic models and stimulate discussion about craft. Together, we’ll identify the “moves” successful pieces of writing make and practice incorporating them in our own creative work.

During the second half of the course, we will discuss your original creative work in a whole-class review commonly referred to as a workshop. If our workshop conversations are successful, you will learn from each workshopped piece whether you are the writer or the reader, because each story or poem will present particular challenges in writing that all of us face in our work. With engaged participation, we will have an opportunity to sharpen both our critical and creative skills.

ENGL 2390-006—Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Creative Nonfiction

Th 2:00-4:50.  Dallas Hall 137.  Rubin.        2012: CA1, W   2016: CA, W  CC: CA, CAC, W

An introductory workshop that will focus on the fundamentals of craft in the genre of fiction writing. Students will learn the essential practice of "reading like a writer" while developing their own work and discussing their classmates'.

ENGL 2390-007—Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry Unbound—How Dare We! Write

MWF 1:00-1:50.  Dallas Hall 137.  Rivera.   2012: CA1, W   2016: CA, W  CC: CA, CAC, W

This course is designed for beginning writers or those who have never had the opportunity to study creative writing in a classroom setting while also applying and synthesizing the use of literary and rhetorical devices. More experienced writers may gain insight from reevaluating both their work and the creative work of others. No matter how advanced a writer’s skills become, the journey-artist still strives to improve the fragile braid that is content, communication, and craft. Students will learn the fundamental elements of poetry in addition to critiquing their work as well as that of others via marginalia and facilitated dialogue. Instrumental to this class is the required idea journal in which students will accumulate ideas, complete artistic exercises, and draft poems. Final grades are largely dependent upon the amount of writing, revising, and rewriting one does throughout the semester. Students should be willing to hone their poems by testing various techniques, styles, formats, and aesthetics. By experimenting with what they have written and what they have internalized about writing as process, students will develop a small portfolio and a better understanding of what being a practicing writer means.

ENGL 3310-001—Research and Critical Writing for Literary Studies

MWF 10:00-10:50.   Dallas Hall 120.  González.       CC: WIM

This foundational course presents students with the process of researching and writing critically about literary texts, the many forms a literary text might take, and the critical methods that have been established in the discipline of English upon which successful interpretation and analysis is based. Engaging with literary texts in this way creates new knowledge, underscores the significance of these texts, and helps us understand the many contexts in which these works of literature exist. Students will examine exemplar literary texts across media through an array of critical lenses while refining their research and critical writing skills. Several short papers, one presentation, one exam, and one research paper will create the core of the student assessment.

ENGL 3346-001—American Literary History I

TTh 2:00-3:20.  Hyer Hall 200.  Cassedy. 2012: CA2, HC2, W   2016: HFA, HSBS, W  CC: LAI, W

“America”: it’s not just a place, but also a set of concepts and ideas. The place has always been here; the concepts and ideas had to be invented. This course is an introduction to the texts and stories through which the meanings of “America” and “Americans” were invented, from the first European contact to the Civil War, as seen through major literary works of the period. Readings to include texts by Benjamin Franklin, Susanna Rowson, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Phyllis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horatio Alger, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

Three essays, a midterm, and a final.

MDVL 3351-801: The Pilgrimage

Th 11:00 – 12:20. Dallas Hall 306. Wheeler.     2016: KNOW, LL, W    CC: LAI, W

A look at the medieval world through one of its own literal and metaphorical images, investigating the music, art, monuments, and literature of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages.

Students seeking credit towards the English major or minor must contact Prof. Beth Newman, Director of Undergraduate Studies, once they have enrolled, and include their SMU ID numbers.

ENGL 3360-401—Topics in Modern and Contemporary American Literature: Women in Popular Culture

TTh 11:00-12:20.  ONLINE.  Garelick.   2012: CA2, HD, OC, W  2016: HFA, HD, OC, W  CC: LAI, W

(Offered as online course with some synchronous meetings)

Popular culture (including film, television, magazines, music, social media, the worlds of fashion and shopping, and more) floods us daily with images that shape our understanding of the world—including our notions of gender, sexuality, class, race, social and economic life. Often, we are so saturated with these images that we stop even noticing them, even while we continue to absorb their influence. In this

class, we shall seek to read popular culture consciously and thoughtfully, to examine the way its illusions and myths about women, its female avatars and characters shape our world view. We shall consider the historical roots of these images, how the images have (or haven’t!) changed over time, and what they reveal to us about ourselves.

This class will range widely over genres and time periods, going back two thousand years to the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, moving through 18th and 19^th century folk and fairy tales, and continuing up to the present day. We will look at popular genres—such as television shows and films—alongside literary, critical, or theoretical texts.

ENGL 3362-001—African-American Literature

TTh 12:30-1:50.  Dallas Hall 105.  Pergadia.  2012: CA2, HD, W  2016: HFA, HD, W  CC: LAI, HD, W

This course surveys the history of African American aesthetic forms from the nineteenth century to the present. We will engage the debates that animated contestations over black literary form, including the role of the realist aesthetic, naturalism, modernism, folklore and dialect, Pan-Africanism and diasporic alliances. We will identify connections between literary texts and historical contexts – slavery, reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the civil rights movement, mass incarceration – but will also consider the autonomy of art, the hybrid literary forms emerging from a Black aesthetic tradition, and worlds remade through the word. Primary texts may include: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); W.E.B. Du Bois, Data Portraits (1900); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929); Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014); Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017); Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You (2018).

ENGL 3364-401—Women and the Southwest: Mujeres Fatales and the Fates of Feminism in Mexican America

TTh 2:00-3:50.  ONLINE.  Torres de Veneciano.  2012: CA2, HD, OC  2016: HFA, HD, OC  CC: LAI

Offered as online course with some synchronous meetings)

This course reads the femme fatale as a figure of certain powers of provocation, as both threatening and target of threat. We borrow the term from visual media to help us identify and unfold the dualities and duplicities informing seven archetypical figures of Mexican culture. They are at once mythical and historical: Coatlicue, la Malinche, la Virgen de Guadalupe, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, la Llorona, la Calavera Catrina, and Frida Kahlo.

We take the concept of fatales in the sense of fate or destiny and applies it critically to reading the inscription and reception of these seven figures. We will examine the destinies that befell these figures and the alternate destinies they imply. Destiny is understood here as social inscription and therefore patriarchal and discursive. We will weave visual historical, literary critical, postcolonialist, and poststructuralist methodologies in conducting feminist readings of select literature and visual art.

Our feminism therefore will be more rhetorical-practical than historical—a form of feminist praxis conducted by critically reading (analyzing) the discursive constructions of culture, gender, and patriarchy. This course is very much interdisciplinary in its ways of teaching and learning. Students will learn to interweave and apply conceptual and interpretive methods from critical prose and poetry, visual art analysis, feminist practice, historical contextualization, mythology and its psychoanalytic receptions, and philosophies of destiny. Using these methods, we will analyze and interpret texts (prose, poetry) and visual cultural material (art, film, video, advertising).

Short essays; final exam.

ENGL 3367-001—Ethical Implications of Children’s Literature

MWF 9:00-9:50.  Dallas Hall 115.  Stephens.       2012: CA2, HD, KNOW, OC, W       2016: HFA, HD, KNOW, OC, W   CC: LAI, HD, OC, W

ENGL 3390-001—Creative Writing Workshop

T 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 137.  Rubin.           2012: CA2, W   2016: HFA, W   CC: W

An advanced workshop devoted to the craft of creative nonfiction, this class will apply the tenets of fiction writing to the construction of the personal essay. In addition to participating in regular workshops, students will study nonfiction masterpieces by such authors as Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin, along with the work of brilliant contemporary essayists currently expanding the form.

ENGL 3390-002— Creative Writing Workshop: The Art of Voice

TR 11:00-12:20. Dallas Hall 115.  Condon.   2012: CA2, W   2016: HFA, W   CC: W

Find your voice! the old writer says to the young writer, as if a signature artistic sound were as simple to locate as a spare house key hidden inside of a ceramic toad. But what if I told you that it is that easy? Voice, though it has a reputation for being elusive, is an ultimately simple idea: that the way we talk in a poem is what blesses our speakers with personality. In this course, we will experiment with many kinds of voices, from the colloquial to the authoritative, with the goal of creating dynamic and captivating speakers interesting enough to hold our audience’s attention. You will be expected to discuss and analyze your peers’ poems and poetic choices, as well as your own. One characteristic of poetry is its translation of human experience into art that lasts. Often, these experiences raise challenging questions. You should be prepared to read and respond respectfully to poetry that addresses sensitive material. Other requirements include a final portfolio of revised poems with an accompanying introduction to the work. All reading supplied on Canvas.

Course text: The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland

ENGL 4330-001—Renaissance Writers: Poetic Occasions

TTh 12:30-1:50.  Dallas Hall 120.  Moss.      2012: IL, OC   2016: IL, OC   CC: OC

In the Renaissance, everything from falling in love to falling into sin to falling off your horse called for a poem, and by focusing our readerly attention on the occasions for poetry, we can begin to comprehend the sheer variety of the early modern period’s lyric modes and forms. Certain occasions, such as aristocratic weddings, the celebration of a famous person, or the urgent need for a short, devastating insult prompted poets—especially those in the humanist tradition—to translate or adapt classical subgenres like the epithalamium, ode, and epigram. Devout Catholic and Protestant poets, on the other hand, generated an astonishing mix of fresh tones and forms as they sought a language both dignified and humble enough to address heaven (or angry enough to condemn the heresies of opposing Christian sects). In an age of church censorship, royal spy networks, and public executions, many English poets turned to allegory and the broad social critiques of satire to express displeasure with the monarchy, the church, and the patriarchy. Perennial occasions like love, sex, drinking, and death, meanwhile, drove poets to innovate so as not to sound endlessly cliché, with astounding (and still-quotable) results. Poets to be discussed include famous names like Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton, as well as ought-to-be-famous names like George Gascoigne, Mary Sidney, Robert Southwell, Mary Wroth, Aemelia Lanyer, Henry Vaughan, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn.

Written work for the course includes two papers (one shortish, one longish), weekly discussion posts, and a creative exercise. Students are expected to recite poetry and present in groups.

ENGL 4339-001—Transatlantic Studies I: A Is For American: New Media in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850

TTh 9:30-10:50.  Dallas Hall 101.  Cassedy. 2012: IL, OC   2016: IL, OC 

In this course, we will study the spread of print and other new communication technologies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a "media shift" that anticipated the electronic communications revolution that we are living through now. How did people who lived through the early modern communications revolution make sense of it? How did new media technologies affect the emergence of new American and British identities? We’ll study the social and technological developments that made written expression and mass communication available to unprecedented audiences, with special attention to print, literacy, newspapers, and diaries. Readings to include fiction and poetry by Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, Hannah Foster, Washington Irving, and Phyllis Wheatley, and autobiographical writing by John Marrant, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and John Gilchrist.

Weekly response papers; lively class discussions; seminar paper.

ENGL 4360-001—Studies in Modern and Contemporary American Literature: Contemporary American Poetry

MWF 11:00-11:50.  Dallas Hall 357.  Caplan.           2012: CA2, IL, OC   2016: HFA, IL, OC

This class will study the work of the most exciting poets writing today. We will examine how they create art with our moment’s particular resources: the language, technologies, pleasures, and anxieties that mark contemporary life. They reinvigorate older forms and invent new ones. They write love poetry, mixing intense longing and keen ambivalence, and political poetry fueled by anger, fear, and, more faintly, hope. We will closely read several recent collections and enjoy Zoom conversations with their authors. Likely assigned poets include Denise Duhamel, Erica Dawson, Randall Mann, Claudia Rankine, and Albert Goldbarth.

Short essays and responses, a midterm exam, and a take-home final.

ENGL 4360-002—Studies in Modern and Contemporary American Literature : Literature at the US-Mexico Borderlands

MWF 2:00-2:50.  Dallas Hall 156.  Sae-Saue.           2012: CA2, IL, OC   2016: HFA, IL, OC

This course will explore how novels, plays, and poems produced during and after the US annexation of northern Mexico (now the US Southwest) have communicated social, political, and economic dilemmas of nation making, including matters of race, class, gender, and citizenship.

Primarily, we will look at texts produced by Mexican Americans, Chicana/os, and Native Americans in order to examine American life in the region from an ethnic perspective. We will begin by looking at texts written in the 19th century and conclude having examined contemporary works in order to explore their various formal qualities, and the competing ethnic, political, and national ideologies they articulate. 

ENGL 6330-001— Early Modern British Literature: Eminent Non-Shakespeareans, 1500-1700

T 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 138.  Rosendale

Time to fill in some important gaps!  This course is essentially a high-level survey of important early modern writers who wander in the shadow of Shakespeare—extraordinary talents that might, had they been not been contemporaries of the sweet swan of Avon, been the greatest figures of another era.  Living and writing in an era of profound religious, political, and social change, these authors still speak to aftertimes in surprising and compelling ways about sex, politics, agency, form, subjectivity, progress, epistemology, economics, God, aspiration, authority, identity, gender, desire, truth, representation, ethics, social organization, reading, good & evil, and much more.  Each week we will focus on a small number of writers and carefully think about their work in its own time; we will also consider that work’s significance in the intellectual, political, literary, and critical times to come, including our own.

ENGL 6370-001—African American Literature: Contemporary Narratives of Slavery

W 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 137. Pergadia

Since the nineteenth century, the slave narrative has been central to the U.S. imagination and a genre that some scholars claim as foundational to American literature itself. After the 1960s, novelist, filmmakers, and visual artists repeatedly turned to and reimagined this form, an act that both commemorates legacies of slavery and comments on power dynamics of the present. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), for example, rewrites the story of a fugitive slave and speaks to the political history of the Reagan era. This course centralizes the “contemporary narrative of slavery,” a genre of writing that resurrected and reimagined the history of slavery. These postmodern works are often anachronistic, experimental, irreverent. They defy strict genre labels, pushing aesthetic form to lodge their critiques. After studying the canonical works of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, we’ll turn to contemporary imaginative works that remember, memorialize, and recreate the experience of American slavery—from works as varied as the novels of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, the visual artwork of Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon, the films of Jordan Peele and Boots Riley, to The 1619 Project. Students will gain an understanding both of the lives of Americans in bondage and how those lives transformed into stories that continue to shape national consciousness and animate aesthetic forms.

ENGL 7311-001—Seminar in Literary Theory: Narratology and Narrative Theory

M 2:00-4:50. Dallas Hall 138.  González     

This course is a graduate-level exploration of the expansive field of Narrative Theory, from its Aristotelian roots to recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience. As we trace our way through the major movements of this field, we will apply our understanding of these theoretical positions to a number of exemplar texts. We will consider developments in Narrative Theory from Barthes, Chatman, Booth, Todorov, Genette, Richardson, Rimmon-Kenan, Cohn, McHale, Phelan, Herman, Prince, Warhol, Fludernik, Ryan, González, Palmer, Aldama, Hogan, and many others. At its core, this journey through Narrative Theory will make you more cognizant of the structural and dynamic features that undergird how narratives are created, how they are experienced, and how they persist in our changing world. Students with specific thematic or scholarly interests are encouraged to integrate them into the coursework whenever possible. Students should plan to engage in and at times lead productive discussions based on the theoretical and commonplace readings; develop ideas via questions posed in response to the readings; hone the skills presenting before an academic audience, continue to develop writing via short, analytical essays, and write a final seminar paper aimed at publication in a peer-reviewed journal or section of a dissertation. We will continually test our theoretical readings against two works of fiction: Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.

ENGL 7372-001—Seminar in Transatlantic Literature: Enclosures

Th 2:00-4:50.  Dallas Hall 138.  Sudan.

We will identify and analyze the material and figurative implications of “enclosure” from the late seventeenth century through to the virtual demise of the second British empire (including the effects of the idea that this demise is “virtual”). I have purposely used the plural form of “enclosure” in order to engage the myriad of meanings this term evokes, particularly its oppositional definitions. We will identify the ways in which the quotidian activity of the intellectual life of the Enlightenment--seeing, sensing, reading, understanding, knowing—may be understood as acts of “enclosure.” What are the implications for the emergence of aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific truth, method, and form in the Enlightenment, especially when juxtaposed with the legal history of “enclosure”?

ENGL 7374-001—Problems in Literary History: The Realist Novel in Practice and Theory

TTh 12:30-1:50.  Dallas Hall 138.  Newman.

The words “realist” and “realism” enter Anglophone writing about literature decades after the emergence of the mainstream Victorian novel in the 1840s, meaning that this mode of writing was identified and theorized after the fact. Precise definition remains elusive—as we shall see.

We will read several novels spanning from Austen to Hardy or Woolf, some of which, like George Eliot’s Middlemarch, are iconically “realist,” others exemplifying realism more problematically. We will also read some important critical and theoretical statements about realism drawn from the twentieth century and from contemporary scholarship. Finally, we’ll consider the relationship of the nineteenth-century realist canon to the problematic of secularization—that is, to recent scholarship that has engaged with contemporary critiques of the secularization thesis, which has either explicitly or tacitly undergirded most humanities and social sciences scholarship throughout the twentieth century.

Texts will be drawn from the following: Austen, Northanger Abbey; Dickens, Oliver Twist (or an alternative); E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Collins, The Moonstone; Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Eliot, Middlemarch; Ward, Robert Elsmere; Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; essays by Auerbach, Barthes, Bersani, Lukács, Freud, Jameson, and more recent theorists of realism. End of semester seminar paper (approx. 15 pages + bibliog.), presentation and write-up, posts to discussion board.