ENGL 5302 Translating Middle English Literature

This course introduces students to the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology, and prosody of Middle English. This course also introduces students to Middle English manuscript studies. This course will be of interest to literature students as well as to linguistics and creative writing students interested in form, prosody, book history, the theory and praxis of translation, and reading outlandish poetry! The term Middle English encompasses an array of regional dialects that coexisted in England roughly between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the standardization of English in 1430. Class time will be spent translating and pronouncing Middle English, transcribing from manuscript facsimiles, and discussing related issues in translation, manuscript context, and literary interpretation. By the end of the course, students will be able to comprehend and read aloud Middle English poetry that ranges widely in dialect, form, and genre. This course also serves as the prerequisite for the spring ENGL 5303 Medieval British Literature course; 5302 will prepare students to study a Middle English corpus (such as the Canterbury Tales, the Gawain poems, Arthurian romances, or another set of poems) in the spring. Taking this Middle English sequence (both courses) fulfills one language requirement.

Requirements Fulfilled: Philology Sequence (foreign language requirement), British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; Book History/Digital Humanities Certificate, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5305 Studies in Shakespeare: The Question of Shakespearean Tragedy

While there has been no shortage of theorizations of the tragic, Shakespeare's tragedies have long been esteemed deficient, limited, or at least unusual iterations of the genre when compared with their Greek predecessors. Shakespeare's tragedies, for instance, have been censured for their impropriety, their distracting moments of humor, their extravagancies of language, their inconsistencies of timing and plausibility, and their interest in character over plot. This graduate course asks if there is—or can be—a theory of Shakespearean tragedy. Is there a thematic, or poetic, or narrative concern that unites all of Shakespeare's tragedies, or are they too multifarious in their concerns to organize under a single theory? Readings will range from early Shakespeare to late and draw together a range of philosophers and literary critics.

Requirement Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Drama

ENGL 5315 Studies in British Fiction: Children’s Literature

This course examines the development of British children’s literature from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, a period that witnessed the emergence of children’s literature as a distinct and influential genre. We will investigate how texts such as Oliver Twist, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and others shaped notions of childhood, morality, and national identity at the time. Through engagement with critical perspectives—including children’s literature scholarship, postcolonial theory, and gender studies—students will analyze how these works address anxieties surrounding race, nationhood, and evolving conceptions of innocence and experience in a rapidly modernizing Britain.

Requirement Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5323 Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Novel from Romanticism to Realism

In general, the major intellectual and literary movements in nineteenth-century American literature and culture follow a course from romanticism to realism. According to literary scholar and critic M. H. Abrams, romanticism “favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of literature . . . deriving from a worldview in which objects are charged with a significance beyond their physical qualities.” He contrasts this with realism, which “represent[s] complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a developed social structure, and undergo plausible, everyday modes of experience.” Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “Discourse in the Novel,” we will examine these qualities in the following novels: Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

Requirement Fulfilled: American Lit; Period: Early; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5324 Studies in 20th Century American Literature: In Desolation - The American Southwest

The American Southwest is a border—a fact best exemplified by the term “frontier,” which means “border” in Spanish. The region brings to mind open spaces, American exceptionalism, and historical clashes between cowboys and Indians. A frontier spirit thrives here; but the landscape is a palimpsest that holds histories and stories of earlier worlds and ways of living. There is ambiguity in the desert landscapes of the southwest. As we deconstruct this historical ambivalence, we will discuss contemporary American ideologies found in “western” stories and mythologies alongside multiethnic Borderlands texts to understand how frontier and Borderlands texts are inextricably mixed. We will explore issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality to better understand ideas of national identity that shape the Anglo, Latine, and American Indian cultures of the region. In our efforts to capture the essence of landscape, region, and place we’ll discuss novels, essays and short stories by Mary Austin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Stephen Graham Jones, Larry McMurtry, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rudolfo Anaya, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others.

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, Period: Later; Genre: Fiction; Literature, Social Justice, and Environmental Studies (LSJE)

ENGL 5341 Histories and Theories of the Book

This course offers an overview of material text production across history and cultures, beginning with scribal and print cultures and the hand-press period, through the nineteenth-century industrialization of print, and end with digital texts. We will study the relationships between texts and their material embodiments, from stone to screen, papyrus to paper, codex to Kindle, attending to books (or scrolls, or a stylus, or a ball-point pen, or a printing press, etc.) as technologies that shape meaning and readers’ responses. We’ll also study the historical development of ideas about authors and authorship, readers and reading, publishers and publishing, and legal developments. As part of the course, we will pay particular attention to post-1700 British reading and publishing practices in relation to specific texts like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. Students will have the opportunity to work with Special Collections materials, to work in the English department Letterpress Studio, and engage with a variety of technologies of textual production.

Requirements Fulfilled: Core requirement for the Book History and Digital Humanities Certificate; Later British

ENGL 5355 Comparative Literature - VacciNations: Global Blackness, Health, Humanities and Society

The Black body is culturally encoded as physical prowess, sexual fantasy, moral transgression, violence, magical musical artistry. These ascriptions are easily at hand for everyday use. Much as one would use a tool or instrument to execute some need or want. - Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

Transnational poet, novelist, and black lesbian activist Dionne Brand invokes the history of slavery and the black diaspora –the door of no return – to explain reified ascriptions of race and sexuality. Brand’s analysis echoes what Aimé Césaire referred to as la chosificiation or the reification of colonial subjects that continues in global postcoloniality. This course examines reified black embodiments primarily via markers of race, gender, sexuality, and health but also, nationality, religion, language, and class. A famous example from South Africa is the enslaved Xhosa subject Sarah Baartman, whose racialized sexuality became the subject of medical examination, public curiosity, and bodily violation in gruesome ways. We will learn about ubiquitous practices of enforced medicalization and health disparities from the 19th century onwards to 20th and 21st century medical apartheid and vaccine discourse on AIDS and the COVID pandemic. These are the starting points for this course that moves across South Africa to South Asia to the United States to span health, humanities, sociology, and literature.

Texts may include:

Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biography

• Judith Butler. What World is This: A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022)
• Lauren Beukes. Afterland (2020)
• Clifton Crais, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2008)
• Barkha Dutt, To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID (2022)
• Saidiya Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
• Abraham Verghese. My Own Country (1994)

Narrative Medicine, Sociology, Anthropology

• W.E.B. DuBois. The Philadelphia Negro (1899).
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
• Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007).
• Rita Charon. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (2017)

Essays from Journal of Health Studies, Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lancet, Health and Social Behavior etc.

Requirements Fulfilled: CLGT, Non-Fiction, Women and Gender Studies Certificate, Methods

ENGL 5357 Teaching Film & Media Studies

This course—part-workshop, part-seminar, and thoroughly pragmatic—aims to provide graduate students (in English & the humanities) structure, support, practice, and resources for teaching film studies as well as related audio/visual and multimedia materials. Those with primary interests and experience in literature or a related field but very strong interests in cinema are welcome and surely will expand their teaching repertoire. Practical activities—including short writing & reading exercises, resource inventories, textbook analyses—facilitate this primary goal of teaching film studies and how to refine, diversify, and enrich one’s pedagogy and techniques. We will emphasize global cinema history and aesthetics, aiming toward critical studies, and will also discuss technical, ethical, and legal aspects of bringing media into onsite and online classrooms. Rather than a final seminar paper, assignments will amass as a cumulative portfolio. A broader aim of this seminar, moreover, concerns ‘professional development’ for career teachers and teaching-scholars (secondary and college-level especially). We will discuss research agendas framed largely through Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) initiatives and community engagement.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foundation Course (with the DGS approval); Genre: Film

ENGL 5392 Teaching College English

In this course, we will examine theories, challenges, debates, and pedagogies of teaching literary studies at the collegiate level. Although this course credentials PhD students to teach 2000-level courses for the English department at Texas Tech University, we welcome any graduate students seeking to enrich their pedagogy in literature classes. At a time when the relevance of studies in the Humanities is variously challenged, we will examine what it means to teach literature in the twenty-first century and consider ways we can communicate the value of teaching literature at the undergraduate level to non-academic publics. We will generate practical teaching materials and documents useful to delivering a literature class: course descriptions, learning activities/assignments, course syllabi, teaching philosophy statements, and brief lesson presentations.

This course fulfills the PhD Foundation Course requirement for LCWL.