ENGL 2307, Intro to Fiction

Re-animated corpses. Stolen purses. Plane crashes. Homicidal identity thieves. Time travel. Post-apocalyptic cannibals. Literary fiction has never been a boring affair. Spanning three centuries and two continents, this course will enable students to understand and analyze the fundamental characteristics of fiction—everything from the plot-story distinction to different types of narration—and to consider how these elements help shape meaning. In addition, we will also consider how fiction shapes broader social and political questions: Are new scientific or technological advances always good? Was the “American Dream” ever achievable? How has our understanding of the world changed in the aftermath of 9/11? Above all, we'll think about how fiction serves as a storehouse of attitudes for how we want to live our lives.

Requirements fulfilled: Language, Philosophy, and Culture Core.

ENGL 2323, British Literature I: The Battle of the Sexes, 449-1800

This course will teach the basics of reading texts critically, writing examinations and essays, citation and research, and the examination of early English literature and culture. The question driving this course: while men often appear to dominate medieval and early modern culture, how have women asserted and reasserted themselves as authors and as human beings in that time? We will discuss such texts and authors as Beowulf, Judith, The Husband's Message and The Wife's Lament, Dream of the Rood, the lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, and Shakespeare, as well as various shorter lyric poems and prose pieces by both male and female authors through the 18th century; we will see that what is often depicted as a battle for control yields in fact reveals many cases where the feminine equals or overcomes the masculine, and that the need for some kind of balance and harmony is constantly demanded (if not always achieved).

ENGL 2325, American Literature Survey I (Beginnings to 1865)

This course surveys American literature from its beginnings to the Civil War (1865). We will explore major literary works from Native American oral traditions to slave narratives, from colonial writings to captivity testimonies, and from Revolutionary ideals to the early national imaginary, culminating in the American Renaissance. Writers covered will include Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Rowlandson, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman.

Through close reading, critical analysis, and class discussion, we will examine how early American literature informs and shapes American national identity and imagination, with special attention to the themes of Puritanism, democracy, individualism, slavery, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. The course emphasizes critical thinking, historical context, and the evolution of American literary and cultural traditions.

Requirements fulfilled: American Literature; Early Period; Genre: Poetry and Fiction

ENGL 2383, Bible as Literature

“Till heaven and earth pass,” Jesus declared in the Gospel of Matthew, “not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law,” and two thousand years later, the Bible continues to be the most enduring book in the world. Yet the Bible is written in different genres across many centuries. Our objective in this course is to learn about those genres and to develop an appreciation for the forms, styles, and modes of Biblical writing. Our exploration of the Bible will cover cosmogony, epic, Hebraic poetry, prophecy, gospels, and apocalypses. As we shall see, attention to scriptural aesthetics—the beauty of the Bible’s language, the brilliance of its imagery, and the complexity of its symbolism—offers us an exciting new way of reading the most influential book in history.

Requirements fulfilled: Language, Philosophy, and Culture Core.

ENGL 2388, Don’t Believe Your Eyes: Introduction to Film Studies

“Suddenly something somewhere scrapes loudly, the picture lurches and you don’t believe your eyes.”

So wrote Maksim Gorky upon first experiencing the wonders of the Lumiere Brothers’ Cinematograph in 1896. His stunned response to the motion picture grounds our investigation into the medium as we ask: how do movies draw us in, hypnotize us, and even deceive us? This Introduction to Film Studies offers a salient overview of film history and film theory. It considers television and video games to underline that Film Studies encompasses far more than just cinema. Guest filmmakers will reveal, step by step, how an idea is brought to the screen. Guest scholars will share insights into how they understand and interpret a film.

Our attentions will move from silent film to sound, from avant-garde cinema to Hollywood blockbusters. We will study influential film directors (like Alfred Hitchcock), foundational cinematic genres (like film noir, the Western, and the Superhero film) as well as different national cinemas. To sense how even the brightest films can touch on troubling histories, we will analyze Disney cartoons and the anime of Japan’s Studio Ghibli. Finally, we will explore documentary and mockumentary to perceive the contradictions of a form that promises a glimpse of “real life” through highly conventionalized, artificial tropes.

Spirited dialogue and collaboration lie at the center of this 8-week asynchronous class. Students converse with each other on Canvas discussion boards, and the course lectures are built upon student questions. Assignments include short creative and analytical work around the featured films and media. A final adaptation assignment, to be done individually or as a group, will demonstrate students’ understanding of the different genres we have studied. Moreover, they will experience what it is like to be in front of and behind the camera.

Following this class, students will be ready to pursue more advanced film and media courses, and, ultimately, they will see film with sharper, more critical eyes.

Note: Enrollment is now open to all online students. On-site students will only be able to enroll 30 days before classes start. If you are on-site and interested in enrolling, please email the instructor (fbenyous@ttu.edu). He will send you a reminder when enrollment opens up to the general student population.

ENGL 2391, Introduction to Literary Studies

This is a writing-intensive course, designed to give extensive practice in writing critical essays about literature. Through reading, discussing, and writing about a small group of texts, students will build close reading skills, engage in both formal and thematic analysis of literary texts, learn research practices and proper use and citation of sources, and develop the kind of critical vocabularies essential to successful participation in the English major. All students will be responsible for participating in class discussion, completing and revising writing assignments, and reading and commenting on each other’s writing. This course fulfills the Humanities requirements for TTU’s Core Curriculum. Prerequisite: ENGL 1301, 1302.

ENGL 3304, Medieval and Renaissance Drama

This course introduces students to some of the major concerns and developments of English drama as it transformed, throughout the early modern period, into the country’s signature form of popular entertainment and cultural reflection. Over the course of the semester, we will use a single genre—tragedy—to track important changes within theatrical production on the early modern stage. By the end of the term, students will be able to appreciate the historical and material conditions underpinning the production of major tragedies from the period. They will also be identify the key concerns and formal features of Renaissance tragedy as a genre. Finally, they will have a deep appreciation for the dramaturgy, the language, and the thematic preoccupations of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, and other important playwrights of the English Renaissance stage.

Requirements fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Drama; MRSC

ENGL 3307, Eighteenth-Century British Literature: Eighteenth-Century Identities

A lot changed in eighteenth-century Britain, and as a result, the ways people thought about their identity changed, too. In this class, we’ll look at the ways literature wrestled with nation, race, gender, and identity. For one thing, Britain itself came into being as the union of England, Wales, Scotland, and eventually Ireland. This Britain also developed overseas colonies – and lost some of them – and turned itself into an empire trading all over the globe. This global trade, in turn, included the business of buying and selling people – the transatlantic slave trade – and as that trade grew, Britons developed beliefs about skin color to justify their acts. The economic changes brought about by increased trade also affected women’s roles and proper behavior. We’ll read literary texts in which writers think through what nation, race, and gender mean. What did it mean to be British as Britain came to see itself within a larger world? What did skin color mean when some people were enslaved and some were not? What did it mean to be a man or a woman when the understanding of what made the sexes different was changing? The course will include close reading, essays and research, and exams.

ENGL 3308, British Romantic Literature

The British Romantic Period (1780-1830) was a time of social upheaval, political change, religious uncertainty, familial disruptions, class destabilizations, scientific and educational revolutions, explorations, commercialism, industrialization, and colonial activity. At the heart of all tensions was the question of human rights—for women, for slaves, for the working poor, for the disabled, for the elderly, for the colonized.

It was a revolutionary time when literature challenged and championed the prevailing attitudes, customs, laws, and lifestyles. This era reflects remarkable transformations that underpin both modern and postmodern thought, and you will be amazed as the connections between Romanticism and contemporary culture and writing.

We will survey representative and diverse literary selections from British Romanticism that address the period’s historical and cultural issues. Our learning activities will include secondary-source discovery activities, short critical essays, and discussion generated by an engaged learning community informed by feminist pedagogy.

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. This course fulfills Communications Literacy and Writing Intensive requirements. This course will be offered asynchronously for the full TTU Online semester (15 weeks).

ENGL 3313, Film & Media Studies Topics: Blockbusters or bust!

blockbuster (noun): a mainstream movie with big stars, expensive budgets, and notable extravagance; a popular, immense, and highly successful thing

Taking as our cue several notable changes to the movie industry since the 1970s and the ‘rise of blockbusters,’ we will consider and discuss a range of mainstream, independent, and experimental films and media, and we will focus on reading them. In several of the Hollywood standards, we find conventions—which are predictable, reiterative, new but strangely already familiar, sometimes surprising and spectacular, and resoundingly affirmative. This course will use questions surrounding ‘industrial location,’ narrative, genre, and aesthetics in order to offer an introduction to undergraduate film/media studies and reading movies. Starting with Jaws, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Avatar, and Titanic, our movies likely will also include Black Panther, The Lion King, Toy Story, Nomadland, Nostalghia, Y Tu Mamá También, Masculine Feminine, Crash, Gravity, 1917, Inception, Interstellar, Jurassic Park, Coco, Ready Player One, Scott Pilgrim, Frozen, Her, The Revenant; we will consider franchises like the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Marvel series. And more coming attractions!

ENGL 3323, Early American Literature: The Revolution and Early Republic

With the Revolution Americans began to define themselves as an emerging culture distinct from their colonial past. We will begin with Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who famously asked, “What then is the American, this new man?” We will then read and discuss narratives by revolutionaries—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Ethan Allen—who were instrumental in forming the new nation. Finally, we will examine novels by Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown, authors who detail life and values in the Early Republic.

Requirements fulfilled: American Literature, Early Period; genre: Fiction, Nonfiction

ENGL 3328, Introduction to American Studies

What is American Studies? How has it evolved in recent decades? Why does it matter today? This course not only approaches American Studies as a discipline with its own theory and methodology but also explores its themes in its recent development. We begin by examining the genealogy and the changing definitions of American Studies since its formation in the 1950s. We then focus on major issues, trends, and themes in the field, which involve race, gender, sexuality, and nation-building in theoretical terms on the one hand, and which also engage Hollywood, popular culture, and the US military interventions overseas as its subject matter on the other hand. As American Studies has recently witnessed a paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific, we both read speculative and graphic fiction that have transnational connections and study popular culture that has global implications for Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema, Japanese manga and anime, and K-pop.

Requirements fulfilled: American Literature; Late Period; Genre: Poetry and Fiction

ENGL 3372, History of the English Language

This course will examine the development of the English language from its origins in Early Medieval England through changes in the later medieval and Early Modern periods to the attempts to codify the language in the eighteenth century and the development of modern language study in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine both the internal history (the linguistic changes that occur within the language over time) and the external history (the effects of social and political events on the language) of English in order to answer such questions as: Why do English words often resemble words from other languages? Why are there so many “irregular” verbs in English? Why don’t we spell words as they sound? Why aren’t we supposed to split infinitives or put a preposition at the end of a sentence when other Germanic languages do? We will also examine contemporary issues in English to see how the language has implications for our political and social lives. We will also learn to use online tools such as the Oxford English Dictionary to assist in language research. Texts will include Gramley, The History of English: An Introduction; Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner, Tolkien and the Ring of Words; McCrum, Globish; Wilton, Word Myths; and various PDF documents to be delivered online.

ENGL 3388, Film Genres: Science Fiction

This course will approach science fiction cinema from multiple perspectives, encompassing political, aesthetic, historical approaches to studies of film genre. The goals of the course are to broaden students’ knowledge of science fiction while also complicating their understanding of the concept of genre. Students will develop skills of formal analysis specific to film studies, explore a variety of theoretical approaches to cinema, and become familiar with cinemas from multiple countries and time periods. As a genre, science fiction is notable for the ways it expresses contemporaneous social and philosophical concepts, and students will be encouraged to question how media texts serve as expressions of larger cultural phenomena. The course will also address science fiction’s relationship to the history of special effects, sound design, and industrial trends in the global film industry.

ENGL 3390, Literatures of the American Southwest

This course introduces students to a variety of twentieth and twenty-first century texts from the region currently referred to as the American Southwest. We will explore the Southwest through an award-winning western novel, a foundational Native American novel from the 1970’s, a fantasy/sci fi set in a future Navajo Reservation, and a Mexican-American coming-of-age novel. We’ll also read four scholarly essays about the region, its history, and our novels. Some questions we will consider as we read include: What common themes run through these works? How do different cultures describe the landscape of the Southwest? The relationship they feel exists between themselves and this region’s history? Between themselves and the other cultures of this region? We will attempt to answer these questions through lectures on the readings, class discussions, a series of analytical Worksheets, and short essay assignments. Prerequisites: 3 hours of 2000-level English courses. Writing required.

ENGL 4301, Tell Me the Truth: History and Mythmaking in the Works of Richard Slotkin

In the course of research I will find a story that seems to embody everything that I am most concerned with, but which cannot be fully developed in a scholarly mode. I will use that as the basis for fiction. —Richard Slotkin

This course explores the complex relationship between historiography and historical fiction through the lens of Richard Slotkin’s scholarship and creative works. As a distinguished cultural historian and accomplished novelist, Slotkin offers a unique vantage point for examining how historical narratives are constructed, contested, and reimagined across disciplinary boundaries. Throughout the semester, we will navigate the porous borders between history as academic discipline and history as creative interpretation, focusing on paired readings of Slotkin’s fiction and scholarship—Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln with selections from The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution, and The Return of Henry Starr with selections from Gunfighter Nation.

For Slotkin, foundational myths shape national identity and historical consciousness. We will consider how his histories, like Gunfighter Nation, investigate the role of mythic narratives about the “Old West” in shaping historical understanding about the United States. In parallel, we will study his fiction, such as The Return of Henry Starr, which self-referentially thematizes this same mythology. Our examination of Slotkin’s work will be supplemented by a selection of scholarship about the relationship between historiography and historical fiction.

Our course therefore addresses fundamental questions about historical knowledge and representation: How do historians and novelists approach the past? What constitutes “evidence” in historical versus fictional accounts? In what ways do mythic narratives and cultural memory shape both historical fiction and the academic discipline of history? How might fiction uncover historical “truths” that traditional scholarly approaches cannot? In response to these questions and our readings, students will write several short analytical reflections about truth, fact, history, evidence, and myth. Across the semester, following Slotkin, students will choose a historical event, person, or phenomenon to explore in two ways: first in the form of a primary research project and then in a fictional adaptation of that research.

ENGL 4311, Hafez to Ryōkan: Religious Poetry of Iran, England, Japan

This course explores the religious poetry of six major poets from the premodern era: John Donne, John Milton, Christina Rossetti, Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ, Matsuo Bashō, and Taigu Ryōkan. We will ask questions about similarities and differences between poets and religious traditions—such as, how does Herbert’s sense of Christ-like humility compare to Ryōkan’s Buddhist emphasis on self-emptying? How does Bashō’s enlightenment upon arriving at Shinto shrines compare to Donne’s ruminations on his Good Friday journey? Ultimately, each student will become a masterful reader of premodern poetry, as well as an informed scholar of literary traditions in the global premodern world. We will learn about the sonnet and its Petrarchan genesis, the hokku (haiku) and its renga origins, the Ignatian genre of meditation, and the Japanese custom of travel verse—among other poetic modes and traditions.

All texts will be in English translation. Assignments will include: a paper proposal (300 words), reading quizzes, annotated bibliography of 12 sources, a rough draft of the final paper, and a final research paper of 12 pages.

Requirements fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; BHDH; MRSC

ENGL 4313, Studies in Fiction: Beyond Dystopia

Thomas More literally wrote the book on utopia in 1516, and in 1868 John Stuart Mill coined “dystopia” as the antithesis of More's beautiful nowhere-land. This course will explore some dimensions of utopian and dystopian thinking, focusing on the impulses that drive each. Some questions that will form the basis of our discussions include: How does our increasing dependence on science and technology have the potential to transform into frightening methods of control, censorship, conformity, and isolation? Are our virtual connections/lives/memories displacing our sense of the “real”? How has the nature of our “humanity” altered in this “post-human” age of commodification, cybernetics, and catastrophe? Will the environment withstand our relentless abuse of it? In our attempt to answer these questions (and others) throughout the semester, we will develop critical perspectives that are an integral part of becoming competent thinkers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world. We will study Works by: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick and Rebecca Roanhorse, among others. Final Assessment is made on the basis of participation in daily assignments/group work and class discussion; weekly quizzes, presentation of ideas, theory, and critical analysis in written essays; thoughtful and coherent presentation of ideas in group oral report.

ENGL 4314, Studies in Nonfiction: War, Military Culture, and Nonfiction Media

This course will explore historical and critical approaches to non-fiction film and media centered on themes of war and military culture. In addition to studying documentaries, we will also address non-fiction texts such as radio broadcasts, podcasts, newsreels, training and recruitment films, amateur filmmaking (such as veterans’ home movies), reenactment culture, and other contemporary forms. We will also address the complex relationship between non-fiction narratives and their fictional counterparts in popular culture. Activities will include analyses of individual films, oral history interviews with veterans and military families on their experiences of media in military culture, and discussion of the audio/visual collection at TTU’s Vietnam Center and Archive.

ENGL 4315, No Escape: Horror Movies in the City and Beyond

In 1933’s King Kong, the titular giant ape is brought to New York City in chains—he is brought to Broadway, becoming an object of spectacle for the gaping crowds. Film scholar James Snead describes the film as an “allegory of the slave trade… and of various other forms of exploitation and despoilment.” Snead finds in the monster movie gestures towards the fears of an emancipated Black America as represented by the Harlem Renaissance and even, with its climax at the very top of the Empire State Building, a critique of American Capitalism. How the scholar uncovers, in King Kong, anxieties about the city and the wider American experience, emblematizes the ‘against-the-grain’ approach of this class which asks: what kind of subterranean views of cities like New York City, of suburbs, and of frontiers and their taboo/unseen histories emerge when we look deep into the shadows of the horror genre?

New York, the Big (or Rotten?) Apple, will be a core focal point of our study. We will move across the city as well as across film and media history, plunging from the heights of King Kong’s looming skyscraper to Greenwich Village where murderers lurk among our neighbors (Rear Window). We will move from the macabre world of a cruel, sometimes demonic upper class (American Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby) to the gay cruising scene of the 1980s menaced by slashers who may be hiding in the dancing crowd (Cruising). Other units will focus on international cities like Tokyo, sensing how the threat of nuclear annihilation has been represented (Godzilla) as well as, more recently, the threat of a ghostly, deadening internet (Pulse). We will linger in spaces beyond the city too, in suburbs haunted by masked killers (Halloween) and in rural spaces close to our homes that explode with exterminating violence (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

With its emphasis on space, the course will offer a holistic view of an iconic yet always changing New York City with recorded footage from featured sites like the Empire State Building—sites that we will see from a monster’s eye in the films that we discuss. It will mobilize archival resources collections around the featured films, so students can appreciate how critics perceived these films’ representations of their cities. To further frame how horror can be a space to explore unsung histories and the impacts of ongoing cultural traumas, acclaimed artists will be invited into the virtual classroom. Grounded in Texas Tech’s resources yet offering a fundamentally global view, profoundly interdisciplinary, and punctuated by artist perspectives, the class will ultimately offer students tools to perform theoretically incisive research exploring how the horror genre unflinchingly faces a culture’s most unsettling realities. Powerfully and productively, we will learn, horror permits no escape from what audiences would prefer not to see.

ENGL 4321, Studies in Literary Topics: Children’s Literature in Britain and the World

In this course, we will be focusing on what makes children’s literature for children. To do so, we will be asking questions such as, What are the characteristics of children’s literature? When did children’s literature become a genre? What makes it for children rather than for adult readers? How does its intended audience shape its form, content, and style? To investigate these questions, we will learn about the history and development of children’s literature, especially the role that oral storytelling traditions and fairytales played in that process; read primary texts from both the western and non-western world; and critically engage with novels for children and young adults from Britain, America, and the rest of the world, spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Most importantly, we will be examining the ideologies embedded in the texts, as well as ideologies that guide our culture, particularly in terms of children and the literature they read.

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