ENGL 2306 Introduction to Drama: Assassins, Gangsters, and Psychopaths - Quentin Tarantino and His Bloody Influences

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef

Section 160 (TR 12:30-1:50 PM) CRN: 38500

Before the hero of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) embarks on a rescue mission to save his love enslaved in a plantation, he is told: “Don't break character.”

How his life-or-death mission rests on his convincing acting reveals Tarantino's interest in drama. His films ask: how can theater protect us from the violence we experience and insulate us from the suffering we inflict on others? To answer this question: our course introduces students to Tarantino's cinema and its influences from the screen, stage, and prose. For instance, we position Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) against Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (1973), sensing similarities in these films about sword-wielding women out for vengeance. We look at his adaption of Jackie Brown (1997) against both the original Elmore Leonard novel and Jack Hill's Blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown (1974) about a mother who fights against a drug syndicate. We see how the grotesque Western The Hateful Eight (2015) pays homage to John Carpenter's alien invasion film The Thing (1982). In both, no one can be trusted.

By reading works of adaptation studies and genre theory, we learn how the filmmaker adapts other's language to fit his own and how he weaves together different film types. Engaging with studies on war, genocide, and slavery will reveal how Tarantino pushes us to confront traumatic histories we may not want to face. The course also doubles as an introduction to Global Cinema. To track his inspirations, we move from Hong Kong action cinema and Italian Spaghetti Westerns to masterpieces of the 1960s French New Wave.

To reinforce the fundamentals of drama, our cross-media course strongly emphasizes student-directed learning. Classes feature guest speakers, student presentations, and a host of creative exercises, culminating in a group adaptation and in-class performance of an iconic Tarantino scene for the stage. Ultimately, students gain new appreciation for the dynamic staging and unforgettable dialogue of Tarantino's bloody pulp fiction.

ENGL 2308 Intro to Nonfiction: Literature, Social Justice, and Environment

Dr. Sara Spurgeon

Section 007 (TR 3:30-4:50pm) CRN: 39061

What do Native American protests at Standing Rock have to do with climate change?  How is police violence in Ferguson, Missouri connected to lead-poisoned children in Flint, Michigan? What does the experience of growing up Black in inner-city Baltimore have to do with American attitudes toward National Parks?  And what does any of this have to do with literature?  It turns out that the ways we think about race, sexuality, violence, human rights, and the environment have always been entangled.  Literature can help us see these connections and what they mean to us in our everyday lives.  In this class we will develop your critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through examination and analysis of non-fiction texts including essays, a memoir, poetry, films, blog post, and scholarly articles. 

ENGL 2383 Bible as Literature

Dr. David Roach

Section 160 (TR 9:30-10:50am) CRN 41937

"Till heaven and earth pass," Jesus declared, "not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law," and two thousand years later, the Bible continues to be read, studied, and taught in cultures across the world. Our objective over the course of the semester is to learn and develop an appreciation for the forms, styles, and modes of Biblical writing. We will explore such genres as cosmogony, Jewish epic, history, Hebraic poetry, prophecy, wisdom literature, gospels, epistles of St. Paul, and apocalyptic writings. We will discuss topics like covenant, grace, justice, mercy, sacrifice and the scapegoat, redemption, and service. Examining the Bible's beautiful language, brilliant imagery, and complex symbolism offers us an exciting, new way of understanding the most popular book in human history. This course fulfills the Language, Philosophy, and Culture Core Requirement.

English 3304 Medieval and Renaissance Drama: Bodies on Stage

Dr. Matthew Hunter

Section 001 (TR 11:00am-12:20pm) CRN: 13420

This course introduces students to the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods by considering the how early modern theater holds up bodies for the pleasure, consumption, examination, and revulsion of its audiences. Cutting across authors both Shakespearean and non-, it understands theater as a technology that treats bodies as spectacles and also as objects of scrutiny. Discussions will accordingly focus on the relationship of early modern plays to race, gender, and sexuality. How does early modern performance construct gender? How does desire make its mark on the performing body? What is the relationship between theatre history and race in early modern England? Does theatre uphold norms of embodiment or undo them? Pursuing these lines of thought will require us to consider anew the relationship between performance and embodiment. 

ENGL 3328 Introduction to American Studies

Dr. Yuan Shu

Section 001 (TR 9:30-10:50 am) CRN: 41940

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 wars, Hollywood, and popular culture 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 cyberpunk fiction and graphic novel that have transnational connections and study popular culture that have global implications for Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema, Japanese manga and anime, and K-pop.      

ENGL 3392 African American Literature

Dr. Michael Borshuk

Section 001 (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.

ENGL 4301 Studies in Selected Authors: The Works of J.R.R. Tolkein

Dr. Brian McFadden

Section 001 (TR 12:30-1:50pm) CRN: 14706

Note: This class entails a great deal of reading.  Students are strongly encouraged to read at least The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings before the start of class (if you haven't already….)

With the release over the last two decades of the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, there has been a renewed interest in the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Tolkien was a noted medieval scholar and philologist, but he was also a World War I veteran and a modern author writing The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings between the 1930's and the 1950's, and his Silmarillion was left unfinished at his death in 1973.  Although his work reflects a number of postwar themes – distrust of technology, the senselessness of war, the loss of heroes, the passing of a perceived golden age – it also reflects a great deal of his personal and professional study of classical and medieval language, myth, religion, and literature, and it appeals to readers and scholars of both medieval and modern literature.  This course will examine Tolkien's major fantasy works – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion – in addition to many of his medieval sources, some of which he translated: Beowulf, the Exeter Book riddles, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, the Prose and Poetic Eddas, the Volsunga Saga, and the Kalevala.  The course will also examine some of Tolkien's scholarly works, such as “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-Stories” to illuminate the use of the marvelous or the monstrous in medieval literature.  Likely topics of discussion: What literary traits did Tolkien share with the World War I generation of authors?  How did Tolkien's scholarship provide an impetus for his creative fiction?  What did Tolkien feel that language was invented for narrative, and why did he feel he had to invent languages in which to tell his stories?  What is “sub-creation”?  Why does the children's-story tone of The Hobbit shift to the serious epic quality of Lord of the Rings?  What does the genre of fantasy fiction allow an author to do that realistic fiction does not, and why is fantasy not always treated as a serious literary genre? How has Tolkien influenced later writers of fantasy? How did Tolkien's Catholicism shape his depiction of a world that is for the most part without explicit religious practice or belief?  How do twentieth-century attitudes toward gender and race influence Tolkien's work?

ENGL 4315 Studies in Film and Media: Texas Films and Filmakers

Section 001 (TR 9:30-10:50am) CRN: 35488

This course will look at the long history of films and filmmaking in Texas. Using literary studies of regionalism (and nationalism) as our starting point, we will interrogate and expand upon these in relation to cinema. The course will employ a range of theoretical and methodological lenses to complement practices of textual analysis and close reading, including cultural studies, identity politics, border studies, auteur theory, and media industry studies. In addition, the course will consider how exhibition cultures promote production and vice versa. Can we argue, via regionalism, for a symbiotic relation between reception culture and production culture and, if so, what are the mechanisms that foster that relationship? What role specifically do state film commissions, local film societies, and regional film festivals play? Classroom discussion will be augmented through conversations with Texas-based filmmakers and film programmers. The course will culminate in a significant research paper. Films will include a selection of short films (documentary, narrative, and experimental) and such narrative features as Giant (1956), Days of Heaven (1978), Paris, Texas (1984), Fandango (1985), Lone Star (1996), Selena (1997), Spy Kids (2001), Pit Stop (2013), Boyhood (2014), Hell or High Water (2016), and Never Goin' Back (2018). 

ENGL 4321 Studies in Literary Topics: Literature of the Great War

Dr. Jen Shelton

Section 002 (TR 11:00am-12:20pm) CRN: 39530

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.