ENGL 2323.001 British Literature I

Dr. Julie Nelson Couch
TR 12:30-1:50 PM
CRN: 39525

This course offers a survey of the literature of England, from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, from beheading women to dissenting women, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Frances Burney, from battle to love, from poetry to plays. In this course, students will learn to interpret and write about literature, and literature will provide students exciting access into past cultures.

Fulfills sophomore ENGL and ENGL Major distribution requirement.

ENGL 2326.001 American Literature II

Dr. Michael Borshuk
TR 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM
CRN: 39527

In this course we will explore American literature from the Civil War through to the late 20th century. In order to focus our examination, we will investigate the ways in which American writers interrogate national identity and consider the relationship (both culturally and politically) of the United States to the rest of the world. Our discussions will contemplate these ideas with specific attention to articulations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and with an eye to the myriad ways American writers have used expressive style to register a distinctly American character.

ENGL 3308 British Romantic Literature

Dr. Marjean Purinton
TR 12:30-1:50PM
CRN: 13461

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 slave, 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. Literature itself joined the socio-political turbulence by redefining content, style, form, and readership with experimental and innovative expressions. It is, for example, the period of the Gothic and the beginnings of science fiction. Women writers challenge sexist notions of literary production and consumption. Popular literary forms displace conventional genres, as readers demanded novels, for example, as much as they did poetry. And poetry is recast in the language of the common person and for the common readers.

Following the American and French Revolutions and prior to the British Empire, this era reflects remarkable transformations that underpin both modern and post-modern thought. You will be amazed at the connections between Romanticism and contemporary culture and writing.

We will survey representative and diverse literary selections from British Romanticism that address these historical and cultural issues. Our learning activities will include short, primary-source essays; a brief annotated bibliography; group work; a researched , analytical final essay; and ample discussion. Because my scholarship and my pedagogy are informed by feminist theory, you will encounter a learning environment with de-centralized authority and an invitation to participate in your own learning/discovery process.

English 3309.001 Modern British Literature

Dr. Jen Shelton
TR 11-12:20
CRN: 33008

“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.

ENGL3325.002 Modern and Contemporary American Literature: from Postmodernism to Post-9/11 Globalism

Dr. Yuan Shu
TR 11:00-12:20 PM
CRN: 13554

This course explores how contemporary American authors articulate their visions and senses of American culture and society in response to the social, political, economic, cultural, and technological changes in the U.S. and around the globe since the 1960s. Beginning with an examination of the postmodernist concept, we read texts that engage formalistic experimentation and innovation and feel the ways in which these authors negotiate and represent our changing senses of humanity in our culture and society. We then scrutinize the writing of ethnic minorities and women and explore the new critical vigor and sensibilities that they have brought to U.S. literature and culture. As a gesture of conclusion, we finally investigate work that reflects a sense of post-9/11 globalism in the U.S. in the twenty-first century.

Requirements: Two essays, five quizzes, a midterm, and a final.

ENGL 3338 Global South Literatures: Hemispheric Latinx Literatures

Dr. Daniel Hutchins
TR 12:30-1:50 PM
CRN: 35483

This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. Engaging texts from colonial times to the present day, we will ask ourselves how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, essays and films that are now referred to as distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce Latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality impact Latinx literature and other artistic forms.

ENGL 3386. Literature and Science

Dr. Bruce Clarke
TR 2:00-3:20 PM
CRN: 33017

Our introduction to planetary science will be David Grinspoon's Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future (2016). Grinspoon treats astrobiology in relation to the concept of the Anthropocene, showing how the scientific study of life in the universe can help us to better grasp how human activities on this planet have shifted the Earth system into a regime that may constitute a new geological epoch. Within this nexus of scientific and environmental concerns we will read four major works of science fiction, the celebrated Polish author Stanislaw Lem's last novel Fiasco (1986), the Chinese author Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (2006), and two works by American authors, Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier (2011) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015). Course work will consist of several class presentations and writing assignments culminating in a class project and a final essay.

ENGL 3388 FILM GENRES: HOLLYWOOD STAPLES

Dr. Wyatt Phillips
Section 002 (TR 9:30-10:50 AM)
CRN: 13998
Section 003 (TR 11:00-12:20 PM)
CRN: 34222

This course will investigate three of Hollywood's most dominant genres. Starting with WESTERNS and MUSICALS, the class will arrive at today's Hollywood titan: the COMIC-BOOK SUPERHERO FILM. How did these film genres develop? What led to their domination? How did they transform over time? How do issues of culture, audience, industry, and technology impact these genres? How are they changed outside of Hollywood? Why did the first two ‘die' and how and where have they survived? This course will explore these questions and more! Both canonical films and lesser-known gems will be featured.

ENGL 3392 African American Literature

Dr. Michael Borshuk
TR 2:00-3:20PM
CRN: 35486

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 problematic representations of black Americans; and the “alternative” histories that African American literature proposes alongside America's dominant historical records.

English 4301 Studies in Selected Authors: Shakespeare and the Scene of Female Eloquence

Dr. Matthew Hunter matthew.hunter@ttu.edu
TR 9:30-10:50am
CRN: 14706

From Juliet to Cleopatra, from Portia to Volumnia, Shakespeare's celebrated capacities of expression are concentrated most often in women whose place in the world is precarious at best. Why should the eloquence of women be of such abiding interest to Shakespeare and his audiences? This seminar poses this question in order to draw together two objects of longstanding interest for scholars of Shakespeare's work: Shakespeare's remarkable mastery of the arts of language and his enduring fascination with the performance and the politics of gender.

Over the course of our readings, we will consider both of these topics in detail, placing them in the context of Shakespeare's historical moment, the England of the 1590-1620. We will analyze the ways Shakespeare depicts women on the stage, and we will place those depictions in conversation with early modern discourses on gender, femininity, and social power. Along the way, we will supplement our readings with plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, for whom female eloquence was no less interesting as an object of theatrical exploration.

English 4321.003 Literature of the Great War

Dr. Jen Shelton
TR 12:30-1:50
CRN: 39531

The First World War was the first modern war, but the tactics the armies used were based on 19th century ideas of warfare. Thus, the Great War — the first time the whole globe was involved in simultaneous conflict — entailed great suffering and loss of life, but also required shifts in ways people and nations thought and wrote about war. Ideals of honor and glory, long associated with literature of warfare, seemed quaint when contrasted with the maelstrom of destruction that ensued when accurate, high-explosive artillery, flamethrowers, poison gas, and machine guns encountered the frail human forms of soldiers and noncombatants. In this course, we will read a variety of texts from multiple genres — some well-known, such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and others less familiar, including war memoirs and diaries, poetry and songs. Fall 2018 marks the centenary of the end of the Great War; the class will take advantage of public commemorations of the war's ceasefire in November 1918.