ENGL 2305 - Introduction to Poetry

This course fulfills the TTU CORE CURRICULUM requirement in CREATIVE ARTS.

In this class we will examine poetry as an art. What painting does for vision, what music does for sound, what dance does for the movement: that is what poetry does for language. Poetry is the art of language. Poetry is the earliest literature, and it is from poetry that the other literary arts have developed—drama, song, rhetoric, fiction, stand-up comedy, and rap. Poetry is important. One of the important things it does is connect a person, an individual—you—to larger orders. Such orders are: the political, the family, the religious, the natural, and so on; including all the ways these orders affect each other. Poetry also explores the individual person; in your greatness (“I contain multitudes,” writes Walt Whitman) and in your smallness (“I’m nobody. Who are you?” writes Emily Dickinson). It seeks words for the wonder, the fear, the strangeness of your own existence (“You are an I,” writes Elizabeth Bishop). Poetry is the oldest literature. Constantly reborn, it thrives today. It flourishes in Ivy League universities; it flourishes in urban streets. In this class we’re going to learn to read poems masterfully; and thus, to read anything masterfully. This class will introduce you to the art of poetry, from the oldest poem in our language to very contemporary poems.

Requirements: This class is a face to face lecture, with discussion. There are no formal written essays for this course. There will be a multiple choice midterm and final exam. The main requirement is that you read, re-read, and carefully pay attention to the assigned poems. Because this class involves learning reading and interpretation skills, attendance is mandatory and strictly enforced. We’re going to explore, together and individually, self and world; we’re going to learn, as William Carlos Williams says, “to get the news / from poems”; and all the while, following the advice of Horace, we’re going to let delight lead the way.

ENGL 2310 - Lit, Social Justice and Environment: Ruined Landscapes of Cli Fi

In this course, we will study landscape, space, and place as concepts that shape the ways we think about the natural world, or “the environment.” As we explore how the environment has informed fiction and non-fiction narratives about humanity’s place in the natural world, we focus our attention on perceptions, policies, and ways of life that shape identity and patterns of belonging. We begin by discussing early forms of “nature writing” and move into the 21st century to consider the thriving genres of Climate Fiction (Cli Fi) and dystopia that reflect some unsettling realities of climate change. Some questions that will frame our discussions include: how has the nature of our humanity altered in our age of commodification, cybernetics, and catastrophe? Can the environment withstand our relentless abuse of it? How do social justice concerns inform dystopia, Cli Fi, and environmental writing? In our attempt to answer these questions (and others) we will develop critical perspectives integral to becoming competent thinkers, readers, writers, and conscientious citizens for the planet. Course readings are drawn from literature, philosophy, ecology, film, and cultural studies and include authors like Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler, and Rebecca Roanhorse.

Prerequisites: ENGL 1301, ENGL 1302.

Fulfills core Language, Philosophy, and Culture, requirement; Fulfills Multicultural requirement.

ENGL 2322 - Global Literature II

What does it mean to be human? What qualities can be considered human, and what does it mean to be inhuman, barbaric, and monstrous. Is there an objective truth that we can all agree upon or are all truths relative and subjective? These questions have vexed many literary scholars, philosophers, and ordinary people in our contemporary moment. This course will examine these questions through the lens of literature. We’ll be reading a variety of non-fiction, fiction, drama, and poetry written throughout the 20th and 21st century from Europe, through Africa, to Asia.

Tentative texts:

• • Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis (Britain)
  • The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (India)
  • Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka)
  • Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
  • Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

Prerequisites: 1301 and 1302.

Fulfills the Multicultural requirement

ENGL 2324 - British Literature II: The Woman Question

This course surveys British literature from Romanticism to the present day with a focus on depictions of female characters and an examination of issues faced by women, both fictional and real. This course is foundational for English major and minors, and its prerequisites are English 1302 and English 1302 or equivalent credit.

We will read diverse genres from all periods, including Elizabeth Inchbald’s play The Wedding Day, Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, John Keats’s “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” and William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” from the Romantic period. From the Victorian period, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Christina Rosetti’s ‘Goblin Market,” and Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” From modern and contemporary periods, we will read Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play The Grace of Mary Traverse, Buchi Emecheta’s novel Second Class Citizen, Alice Oswald’s “Wedding,” and Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning.”

Our activities will include quotation explication responses, primary-source essays, and ample discussion. Explore the Woman Question in later British literature in a learning community facilitated by feminist pedagogy.

ENGL 2326 - American Literature II: Outliers and Outcasts

In American literature since the Civil War many authors have focused on those whose conditions, ideologies, and ethnicities situate them on the fringes of mainstream American culture. To explore these issues, we will read works from various genres—poetry, drama, and fiction—and periods—from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. Some of the authors we will study include Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Lorraine Hansberry, Allan Ginsberg, and Charles Johnson.

Requirements fulfilled: American Literature; late period.

ENGL 2382 - Heroes and Anti-heroes

Have you ever wondered what makes your favorite superhero so compelling? From Batman to Superman, from Wasp to Wonder Woman, these fictional characters have qualities of the “good guy” or “good gal,” as the case may be. However, part of what makes them heroic is also the journey they are on. It is not just who they are but what they do that makes them heroic.

This course introduces students to the critical study of heroes, antiheroes, and villains from multiple genres, periods, and traditions, with attention to aesthetics, ideas, and values. Together, we will explore a rich suite of texts including the book and film versions of The Wizard of Oz, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

We will begin our exploration with traditional heroes—brave, determined, compassionate, altruistic, and resilient. We will study some of the traditional myths that form the basis for our modern-day heroes, and we will examine the hero’s journey as an integral part of what makes the hero who she or he is. But what would a hero be without a villain? Dastardly, conniving, and sometimes downright evil, the villain is the character we love to hate—but also the character without whom our hero would have no purpose! After all, who is Superman without Lex Luther, Batman without the Joker, Catwoman, and the Riddler? Finally, we’ll dip our toes into the study of the complex antihero—a protagonist who is not a villain but who conspicuously lacks the qualities of a traditional hero. The antihero, arguably the most complex of our three figures, compels us to ponder the value of human flaws and contradictions.

ENGL 2388 - Introduction to Film Studies: Reading Movies

We can watch a movie?—yes. Sometimes, we might invite a friend or date to go see a movie?—yes. Some great times can arrive in chilling with a favorite movie, friends, and a bucket of popcorn. Yes! This course takes those experiences and pleasures we can have watching movies to the next level by ‘reading’ movies, studying cinema, and understanding how and why some movies matter so much to many of us.

This course introduces students to key concepts in the history and aesthetics of cinema across fictive-narrative, documentary, and avant-garde modes, and it equips students with critical reading skills. That is, in this course this term, we’ll be ‘reading’ movies, carefully considering their storytelling models, and making comparisons across eras, schools, and movements. Students will be able to apply foundational concepts [cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound, narrative structure, character & story] and critical strategies [recognizing art-industrial models & marketing trends, ideology, genre, authorship, and aesthetic and stylistic comparisons] to read, analyze, interpret, discuss, & write about a representative sample of film & media texts. Together we will consider several recognized eras and ‘schools’ of cinema history and the contexts from which many of our most significant films and cultural expressions arrived and remain influential. Students will consider how cinema has and does reflect and inform our human condition and the behaviors, ideas, and social values especially from the very late 19th century, through the 20th century, and to today.

This course fulfills 3 credit hours toward the university’s LPC-Language, Philosophy, and Culture Core requirement and the College of Arts & Sciences English Literature requirement.

ENGL 3301 - Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

This course aims to provide undergraduate students an introduction to and survey of the leading critical issues and theories across ‘literary studies.’ Since the 1970s, studies in English have grown increasingly transdisciplinary—certainly taking up cultural studies, cinema, popular culture and entertainment arts, mass-culture expressions, and more. The objects of interpretation, ‘texts,’ have broadened and afforded many interconnections. Thinking about how we read can bring theory to better practice and help us read more carefully and smartly and think with acuity and fresh insights. In this course we will consider carefully how we and others read, analyze, and interpret texts, and then we can compare approaches and their results. We will practice with a relatively wide range of types of texts, and we will practice clear communication of our ideas in speech and in writing.

Requirements fulfilled: Theory

ENGL 3302 - Medieval British Literature: The Beowulf Manuscript – Monsters, Monks, and Vikings

In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, a group of monastic bishops, with the aid of King Edgar, began a series of reforms to remove monasteries from lay control and put them back under the Benedictine Rule; at Edgar’s death, however, there was also a large pickup in Viking raiding in England which continued until the accession of Canute to the English throne. This course will examine the five major texts of the Beowulf manuscript – Beowulf, Judith, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and the fragmentary Passion of St. Christopher – to examine the connections of church and state in the Benedictine Reform and their effects on the compilation of this manuscript about monsters. To provide literary context, we will also read Old English homilies and sermons by Ælfric, Wulfstan, and anonymous homilists; The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius; selections from The History against the Pagans by Paulus Orosius; the saints’ lives of St. Margaret, St. Juliana, and St. Elene; the Liber Monstrorum (Book of Monsters); selections from St. Augustine’s City of God about monstrosity; and other texts. Questions to be considered: did the English see the Viking raids as divine punishment for English social and religious failures? Why did the Reform produce so many literary texts in addition to religious texts? How did church and state interact during the period in question? Since all five works in the manuscript deal with literal or figurative monsters, how do discussions of monsters and the Other inform this period?

Requirements fulfilled: 3000-level; literature before 1600; nonfiction; poetry.

ENGL 3309 - Modern British Literature

“Make it new,” Ezra Pound declaimed, and Modernist artists from Picasso to Virginia Woolf made it so. Faced with a technological world more like the one we live in than the ones their parents knew, Modern writers sought innovative forms to capture the experience of living in a cosmopolitan, industrialized world. This world offered opportunity, such as votes for women and struggles against imperialism, but it also offered disconcerting change as societies moved away from their agrarian pasts into a new world whose structure and meaning they did not yet understand. World War I was a modern war; the wristwatch was a modern invention. Modern people experienced a radical, exciting, terrifying shift in the world as the 20th century was born. In this course, we will read major works of the period, setting them into their sociohistorical context.

ENGL 3311 - British Victorian Literature

This course will introduce students to literature from the Victorian era (1837-1901), a time of profound transformation in Britain, marked by rapid industrialization, shifting social norms, and evolving concepts of morality and identity. Students will explore a range of literary forms, from novels and poetry to dramatic works by canonical authors such as Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens, to name a few. They will also examine how the historical and cultural contexts, such as the rise of the British Empire and scientific progress impacted literature at the time. By the end of the course, students will have developed a nuanced understanding of Victorian literature through close readings, critical reading and writing, research, and more.

Requirement Fulfilled: British Literature; Later Period; Genre (Fiction or Drama or Poetry)

ENGL 3312 - Film and Media History: Women in Film History

This course will examine women’s work in the history of cinema from an international perspective. We will consider women’s roles in every element of film production, from writers to costume designers, sound editors to stunt performers. With case studies ranging from the 1890s to the present day, students will discover how feminist historiography has challenged dominant narratives about the cinema’s evolution as a medium, while also learning how to conduct their own historical research. The course will examine women’s cinema in relationship to broader social phenomena, including second and third wave feminism, LGBTQIA activism, and anti-racist movements. We will consider women’s work in many modes and genres of filmmaking, including documentary, animation, and experimental film, while also considering the history of women as film viewers, critics, and creators of film culture.

ENGL 3324 - Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Novel from Romanticism to Realism

Nineteenth-century American literature is most generally dominated by two literary movements, romanticism in the first half of the century and realism in the second. Romanticism is characterized by adventure, imagination, and idealism, while realism focuses on representing the whole of society and on promoting social justice and equity. We will read an discuss a variety of novels exhibiting these concerns, by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others.

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, early period; genre, fiction.

ENGL 3325 - Contemporary American Lit: Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre

This course introduces students to a range of multi-media texts that can be classified as “weird westerns,” a hybrid genre that involves identifiably “western” texts that also include elements of speculative fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, time travel, etc. In this team-taught class (with Dr. Sara Spurgeon from TTU and Dr. Michael Johson from the University of Maine) we will examine the ways authors, filmmakers, and game makers have reimagined the western. How do weird westerns function both to reinforce the traditional depiction of race and gender in the American West and to challenge how race and gender typically operate? Why does the genre of the western move so easily into outer space (the final frontier), a post-apocalyptic future (like The Last of Us), or supernatural horror (like Native American author Stephen Graham Jones’ western werewolf novel, Mongrels)? And why do American filmmakers, novelists, and game makers continue to obsessively recreate westerns?

Requirements fulfilled: American Literature; Period: Contemporary; Literature, Social Justice, and Environment minor

ENGL 3338 - Global South Literatures

In this course we examine literary and cultural works that deal with the Global South, broadly understood as a constellation of neocolonial sites marked by political and economic inequality. We explore some of the shared problems across these spaces and attend to the ways that the texts of the Global South speak to one another by focusing on styles and genres ranging from social realism to magical realism and the dictator novel. Possible readings include works by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Egyptian novelist and short story writer Naguib Mahfouz, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, British-Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif, and American filmmaker Stephanie Black. This course satisfies the multicultural requirement.

ENGL 3382 - African American Literature

This course will examine the development of African American literature from the slave narratives of the nineteenth century to postmodern fiction at the turn of the twenty-first. We will begin with a discussion of critical approaches to African American literature, and then proceed chronologically through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among our topics for interrogation and discussion will be: the influence of oral and musical traditions on the development of African American writing; the intervention(s) into traditional constructions of the American canon that Black literature inaugurates; the ways that African American writers redress stereotypes and white supremacist representations of Black Americans; and the “alternative” histories that African American literature proposes alongside America’s dominant historical records.

ENGL 3387 - Multiethnic Lit. Subtitle: Multiethnic Speculative Fiction

In this class, students will explore the dimensions of different genres that often overlap but fall under the umbrella term “speculative fiction.” These genres include science fiction, utopian and dystopian fictions, horror and gothic forms, and magical realism. Because this class centers on works of speculative fiction by US multiethnic and multicultural authors, the texts we study are associated with movements for social, political and environmental justice. Some questions that will form our discussions include: How do multiethnic authors create meaning from alternative narratives of “belonging” in the US? How are ideas about race, ethnicity, class, and gender conceived within speculative forms, and to what ends? How do multiethnic artists challenge and reimagine genres to critique contemporary ideas about technology, indigeneity, and identity and how can these ideas help us to find our own unique voices? Some authors we discuss include Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado and Octavia E. Butler. This course fulfills the TTU multicultural requirement.

ENGL 3388 - Film Genres: Crime Stories in Global Genre Cinema

This course will focus on crime cinema as a global phenomenon, including police procedurals, film noir, true crime, and gangster genres, tracing their evolution through studies of industries, audiences, and film criticism. Students will develop skills in both formal analysis and historical research that are specific to film studies, while also learning about film aesthetics, narrative structures, technologies, authorship, performance styles, and institutions from censorship boards to award shows. Focusing primarily on the intersections of major film industries, including the US, Germany, France, India, Japan, and Hong Kong, topics will include the influence of German industrial practice in American film noir, the role of French film criticism in establishing genre definitions, the global presence of Hong Kong fight choreography, the popular fascination with True Crime, and the ways cross-cultural remakes transform the conventions of national cinemas. We will also discuss censorship practices and the power relations they reproduce when they deem material obscene, socially harmful, or artistically valid.

ENGL 3391 - Literature and War

When we think of literature and war, we think of two areas of life that have nothing in common. After all, literature is about writing, reading, the imagination, and contemplating beauty, while war is about action, violence, bombing, murder, and death. What I want to propose is that the two have much in common. After all, when we talk about war, it also has to be imagined, written about, thought through—in short, it has to be described. This course will look at the issue of war through the lens of literature and the various perspectives that people bring to it. We’ll be reading over a vast number of wars—from World War I and II through America’s conflict in Vietnam to the civil wars in India (India’s partition), Nigeria, and Sri Lanka. We’ll also be using an array of literary genres—from poetry, through fiction and short stories, to non-fiction.

Trigger warning: This course will deal with a lot of violence including torture, murder, genocide, rape, necrophilia, etc. Be prepared to read and watch difficult material. If you cannot do so, I advise you not to take this course.

Prerequisites: 3 hours of 2000 level English courses

Fulfills the Multicultural requirement

ENGL 4301 - Studies in Selected Authors: Jane Austen and Mary Shelley

Austen and Shelley were shaped by similar cultural and gender restrictions, and both responded to those strictures in unconventional ways. In this course, we will examine the fascinating lives and literature of these two remarkable women. Austen has often been cast as a respectable “old maid,” and Shelley has been portrayed as a promiscuous woman who engaged in “free love.” Let’s see whether we can confound these pejorative and incomplete understandings of these women.

We will explore the ways their writings engaged with the revolutionary and gender politics of the Romantic age. Both women’s writings were inflected with gothic trappings, and both writers were iconoclastic in their treatment of woman’s place in the world.

We will read short fiction by both women, Austen’s Lady Susan and Shelley’s Mathilda. We will read their novels, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park and Shelley’s Frankenstein and Faulkner.

Our learning activities will include short, primary-text-based essays, discovery activities of an extra-literary resource and literary criticism, a final critical essay, and discussions generated by an engaged learning community informed by feminist pedagogy.

ENGL 4311: Studies in Poetry: Aubades—Poems to the Dawn

“Poems to the Dawn”—the genre conjures up scenes of secret rites, mythic lore, longing and loss. From its origins in medieval France to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and from the erotic lyrics of John Donne to the atheistical aesthetics of Philip Larkin, aubades have fired the Western literary imagination with visions of faith, rebirth, the search for God, love, and lust. Over the course of the semester, we will study the history of this poetic form and learn how it works, paying close attention to innovative authors, emergent and divergent literary traditions, and the changing nature of romantic relationships over the centuries. Through studying the aubade, we will become experts in the art of poetry—in the craft of its composition, the rich history of its forms, and the adaptability of its aesthetic qualities.

This is also a course in academic professionalism, and as a senior capstone, the class will function much like a graduate seminar. Each participant will develop a specific research project, laid out at first by a proposal, researched with an annotated bibliography, and culminating in a final research paper.

Required Texts:

• • John Donne, Poems
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, A. H. H.
  • Dylan Thomas, Poems
  • Sylvia Plath, Poems

ENGL 4321 - Studies in Literary Topics: Holidays, Holy-Days, and Holy Smoke!: Pilgrimage in the Global Middle Ages

This course will introduce students to the preeminence of pilgrimage—that is, journeying to a holy place to be forgiven or cured, or to conquer—through historical and literary enactments of pilgrims and their excursions in the European Middle Ages. People visited, and read about visiting the spaces, where the holy happened—where Jesus or was born, where Muhammad destroyed idols, or where miracles occured. In this course, we will read stories of pilgrims, including Chaucer’s famous Canterbury characters, the violent ‘pilgrimage’ of the crusade romance Richard Coeur de Lion, and the uber-popular travelogue Mandeville’s Travels. We will consider how pilgrimage was both a popular undertaking and a potent metaphor for life’s journey. Through entanglement with the Crusades, pilgrimage also offered a way to articulate desires to explore faraway places and possess power over them. Assignments will include weekly responses, a comparative essay between a European and non-European medieval text, a research presentation, and final research paper.