Graduate Course Offerings, Spring 2020

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ENGL 5303: Studies in Medieval British Literature; Camelot and Gomorrah: Playing the Poems of the Pearl Poet

Dr. Julie Nelson Couch
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50 p.m.
CRN: 49653
Onsite

This course introduces students to all four poems of the fourteenth-century manuscript, London, BL, MS Cotton Nero A.x, the manuscript that contains the only extant copy of the famous romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While the other poems in the manuscript are more overtly religious in nature— a dream vision of heaven, a retelling of Jonah and the whale, and a retelling of Sodom and Gomorrah—all four share complex poetic alliterative structure and are thought to be written by the same poet. We will read all four poems in the original Middle English. We will analyze the poems in regard to form and content and place them in their social context at the end of the fourteenth century, considering cultural and ideological concerns which underlie these narratives. We will apply game theory and consider gaming structures in the four poems as part of our study of the manuscript's cultural and theoretical contexts. We will consider how the manuscript context shapes the reception of these poems and the ways in which the Pearl poet engages with his reader on the manuscript page, by examining the digital facsimile of Cotton Nero A.x.

Prerequisite: English 5302, Translating Middle English, Fall 2019.

Assignments: research project, oral presentation, conference-length paper, annotated bibliography

Primary Text: Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 5th ed. Liverpool University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780859897914.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foreign Language/Methods (Option 3), British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; Book History/Digital Humanities Certificate, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5306: Milton in Popular Culture

Dr. Ryan Hackenbracht
Wednesday 6:00 - 8:50 p.m.
Onsite CRN: 57468
Distance CRN: 57469

This course examines the role of John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, in shaping popular culture, from the Sci-Fi film noir Blade Runner to the dystopic fiction of Margaret Atwood and the rap lyrics of Eminem. Much of what we think we know about angels and God comes not from the Bible but from Milton, whose creative rewriting of Genesis and the fall of Satan and his angels has for centuries inspired authors to rethink the nature of humanity, God, and right and wrong. Our discussions will cover such topics as: Milton and proto-feminism; the conflict between religion and science; the epic tradition, then and now; gender and women's roles in society; political theory and sovereignty; and the place of the supernatural in secular and pre-secular society. Readings will include:

Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd

viewing of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner

viewing of Darren Aronofsky's Noah

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

William Blake, Milton: A Poem and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation

C. S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew and Perelandra

Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5313: Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature: Fulcrums of Modernism: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

Dr. Jen Shelton
Thursdays 6:00-8:50 p.m.
Onsite CRN: 60694
Distance CRN: 61897

This course will examine two central figures of modernism, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. These writers make an interesting side-by-side study because they are almost exactly contemporaneous: Woolf was born three days before Joyce, and died just over a month after him. Both figures have been used by critics and theorists of modernism to describe the qualities of modernist writing in ways both benign and prescriptive. We will definitely read important works including Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, but we will also branch out into experimental writing including The Waves and Finnegans Wake, as well as contemplating Woolf's role in theorizing modernism as it was coming into being and the role of critics including Ezra Pound in the temporarily successful erasure of Woolf from the canon of modernist writers. Plan on informal writing each week, discussion leadership in class, and a seminar paper to wrap things up.Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5324: Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature; In Desolation: The American Southwest

Dr. Cordelia Barrera
Tuesday 6:00 - 8:50 p.m.
Onsite CRN: 49658
Distance CRN: 57991
(Hybrid)

The American Southwest is a border territory where cultures meet, mix, and blur—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, Latinx, 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, Cormac McCarthy, 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 Environment (LSJE)

ENGL 5327: Studies in Multicultural American Literature: Transpacific American Literature

Dr. Yuan Shu
Wednesdays 6:00pm - 8:50pm
Onsite: 51679
Distance: 61846

Following the paradigm shift in American studies from the transatlantic to the transpacific, this course investigates how transpacific movements have informed and reshaped American literary imagination from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Beginning with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Jack London's Tales of the Pacific, we examine how the American waling experience and the changing constructions of the South Pacific serve as an extension of the American westward movement and expansion of Anglo-American capitalism into the Pacific, which encompasses Pacific Islands, Oceania, and the Asia Pacific. We then scrutinize Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters as an alternative way of approaching American experiences, from the Asia Pacific to North America and from the west coast to the east coast, which foregrounds the process of American nation-building and empire-building. Meanwhile, we also focus on how the Cold War unfolds in the transpacific spaces, with special attention to David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, and Viet Nguyen's The Sympathizer. We conclude by exploring two speculative fictions on our planetary and technological futures with transpacific twists—Karen Yamashita's Through the Arch of the Rain Forest and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. In addition to the fictional works named above, secondary critical texts will include: David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism and Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field.

Requirement Fulfilled: American Literature; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5334: History of the English Language: Who Owns English? Authority in a Worldwide Language

Dr. Brian McFadden
Thursdays 6:00pm - 8:50pm
Onsite CRN:56192
Distance CRN:60695
Hybrid

We will be examining the history and development of the English language from its origins in Anglo-Saxon/Early Medieval England through the high Middle Ages and the Early Modern period to Modern English and issues and controversies of the present day; this entails studying the internal history, external history, and the development of its morphology, phonology, semantics, and syntax, in addition to an examination of orality and literacy and the effects of developing methods of textual production on the language. We will also be reading short pieces written at different times through English history (e.g. Ælfric of Eynsham, Alfred the Great, Chaucer, Milton, Sidney, Johnson, Swift, Jefferson, Orwell) to gain a historical perspective on how authors perceived the language in which they were writing and how they claim authority to define and use the English language for their social and political ends. The earlier parts of the course will be highly technical and mechanical; as the course progresses, there will be more opportunity for discussion and development of current topics of interest to the student. The requirements will be a dialect project examining how different people read the same passage, a seminar paper on a topic of interest to the study of English as a language, a prospectus at midterm in order to give me an idea of what you wish to discuss in the essay, and an oral presentation on one of the texts to be discussed in class.

Primary texts: Gramley, The History of English: An Introduction; Knowles, A Cultural History of the English Language; Orwell, 1984; Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary; McCrum, Globish; George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion; Wilton, Word Myths; plus additional reading assignments via Dropbox.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foreign Language/Methods (Option 2 or 3), Linguistics Specialization; Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5338: Syntax

Dr. Min-Joo Kim
Tuesdays/Thursdays 12:30 – 1:50 p.m.
Onsite CRN: 60696
Distance CRN: 61350
Hybrid

Syntax is a sub-discipline of linguistics that is concerned with sentence structure. This course aims to introduce fundamental principles of theoretical syntax and prepare students to take more advanced courses in syntax or apply the acquired knowledge to conduct research in other areas of linguistics or related disciplines such as applied linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies. Students will learn about how to analyze morpho-syntactic data drawn from various languages, how to formulate plausible hypotheses based on linguistic data, and how to compare and evaluate different theories and/or hypotheses. No prior linguistics training will be necessary to take this course, however, and classes will be organized around lectures and discussions on select topics, which will include but will not be limited to syntactic categories, phrase structure, X-bar syntax, Case, and wh-movement.

Requirement Fulfilled: Linguistics Specialization, Graduate Certificate in Linguistics, Foreign Language/Methods (Option 2)

ENGL 5351: Film & Literature: ‘A Sense of Dread as Everyday Life Continues': Mediating Trauma in Global Film and Media

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef
Tuesday 9:30 - 12:20 a.m.
CRN: 32443
Onsite

In a personal interview, Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi described the profound effect of creating documentaries about the 3/11 Earthquake in Japan. Speaking with survivors of the disaster inspired him to strive to capture “a sense of dread as everyday life continues” in both his documentary and later fiction films. The filmmaker's testimony inspires this course's key question: how can artists capture the shockwaves of trauma? This course brings together myriad histories, films and media from across the world as we seek an answer. Our attentions will move between allegorical representations of the Ground Zeroes of 9/11 and Hiroshima, and beyond to visions of the Holocaust and to war mediated through a distancing drone sight. Our theoretical lenses will be similarly expansive, shifting from Sigmund Freud to Cathy Caruth. The course acts as a thorough introduction to trauma studies as well as its intersections with global film and media studies. Coursework will sometimes be complemented with conversations with the week's featured artists. Students will write article-length research papers wherein they will pair close readings with archival research to explore art marked by the sense of dread inspired by personal and cultural trauma.

Requirements Fulfilled: Film & Media Studies; CLGT; Period: Late; Genre: Film

ENGL 5355 Studies in Comparative Literature; Thinking with the Globe: Comparative Literature, Globalization, and the Global South

Dr. Nesrine Chahine
Monday 6:00 - 8:50 p.m.
Onsite CRN:53179
Distance CRN: 50202
Hybrid

This course interrogates the shifting definitions of Comparative Literature in the North American academy in order to arrive at a comparative methodology that allows us to grasp structures of global inequality, the stakes of South-South globalisms, and the impact of deregulated environmental devastation on a global scale. We will investigate these key issues through various comparative paradigms including, but not limited to, major and minor transnationalisms, theories of the anthropocene and postcolonial Eco-criticisms, and inequality in relation to systems of law as well as capital. Possible readings include texts by Joseph Slaughter, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, David Harvey, and Shu-mei Shih. The course will culminate in a research paper that will be presented in the Comparative Literature Symposium.

Requirements Fulfilled: CLGT; Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE); Period: Later; Genre: Non-fiction; Methods Course for Comparative Literature Specialization

ENGL 5362: Rhetorical Analysis of Texts

Dr. Lisa Phillips
Thursday 6:00 - 8:50 p.m.

Remember when you were a kid and you and your best friend argued about what she said to you earlier that day? You'd say, "I know what I heard," placing complete trust in both your sense of hearing and your ability to remember. Your friend would say, "Well, I know what I said, placing complete trust in her own ability to remember what she said and in her ability to use language to say what she meant. Remember the faith you had in the truth your own senses reflected to you? When did that change? Or hasn't it? The work of the senses is rhetorical. What you see is what you've been persuaded to believe as correct. What you hear, what you are able to hear, is what you've been persuaded to believe as correct. The work of the senses is also culturally and ideologically informed. What smells, tastes, or feels good to you might be repugnant to someone else.

This course will interrogate the trust we hold in our senses as a way of responding to the course's driving questions: how do we work to persuade the senses? How do our senses persuade us? What is the relationship between "truth" and the senses? Fact and the senses? Culture and the senses? (Dis)Ability and the senses?

My take on ENGL 5362: Rhetorical Analysis a.k.a. "Rhetorics of the Senses" will provide you an introduction to the practice of rhetorical criticism via sensory rhetorics—the scope of rhetoric is broad, including both discursive and nondiscursive symbols. Rhetorical analysis, more generally, is an everyday activity that you can use to evaluate how you and others respond, reject, accept, and make sense of the world.

We conceptualize sense as meaning when we say things like, "He has no common sense," or "She's not making sense." We call the most recent mass shootings "senseless," and we wonder about those we perceive to, quite bluntly, have "no sense." How, then, do we make meaning with our senses and analyze using our senses?

Together, we'll explore how and why sensory rhetorics—how we talk about them, how we conceptualize them, and how we represent them—persuade us to maintain an assortment of beliefs that are steeped in cultural ideology while examining how such rhetorics provide embodied metaphors for everything from knowing (knowing-as-seeing) to characterizing something negative. (That food stinks.)

Course Purpose
The course will provide you a general introduction to the practice of analyzing texts, broadly conceived. Think of this as a "how-to" class that addresses questions like: how do rhetorical scholars select artifacts to study? And, how do they conduct rhetorical analysis once they've selected them? While the contextual/theoretical focus pivots on sensory rhetorics, we will also consider enduring issues or tensions in rhetorical criticism: the purpose of criticism, the relationship between method and object, the role of theory, the influence of the critic, formal vs. eclectic or generative criticism, adapting methods to serve new contexts, combining methods, the relationship between discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis, and others.
Because good criticism cannot be reduced to a cookie-cutter formula, we will downplay the idea of criticism as a step-by-step procedure and emphasize instead issues and questions that rhetorical analysis unearths. By the end of the course, you should be able to work through these issues effectively as you develop sound and insightful rhetorical analyses.

ENGL 5364: History of Rhetoric

Dr. Steve Holmes
Monday 6:00 - 8:50 p.m.

Survey of history and theories of rhetoric with an emphasis on 20th and 21st century foundations (and anti-foundations) of rhetorical theory. This course will survey key figures and concepts in areas such as Burkean & epistemic rhetoric, poststructuralism, postmodernism, affect, critical theory, and posthumanism. In turn, the course builds toward offering a more narrow focus on how these key figures and concepts have intersected with material/embodied rhetorics.

*5364 is repeatable for credit as long as the topic is different.

ENGL 5366: Teaching Technical and Professional Communication

Dr. Amy Hanson
Thursday 6:00 - 8:50 p.m.

English 5366 is a course that will prepare you to teach technical and professional writing as an introductory (survey) course for students across the disciplines. It will introduce you to the theoretical and pedagogical knowledge you will need to teach technical and professional writing successfully. English 5366 will also ask you to consider critical issues related to teaching technical communication. From this foundation, it will progress to more practical concerns ranging from what to teach in a technical writing introductory class, how to teach this information in both face-to-face and online settings, and why to teach it.

In addition to technical writing pedagogy, you'll write a variety of technical documents as you prepare a lesson, review textbook components, develop assignments, observe master teachers at work, and report your findings and experiences. You'll conclude the semester by producing a teaching portfolio that showcases your preparation for teaching technical communication. The portfolio will include a syllabus and weekly schedule for an introductory course, a lesson plan with instructional materials, a teaching philosophy, and an instructional video appropriate for online teaching.

ENGL 5370: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry

Dr. Bill Wenthe
Wednesday 9:00 - 11:50 a.m.
CRN: 57933
Onsite

Mainly a writing workshop, this seminar will also incorporate reading and thinking about issues in contemporary poetry (which, to my mind, includes all poetry ever written). To this end, we will be reading poems and essays on poetry in addition to your own poems. I should mention that students, too, are encouraged to bring their own interests and concerns to the materials we read, and to approach me before the semester begins, or during the semester, with your interests or questions. Whether discussing your own or other poems, we will range from the smallest inner workings of syllables and phrases, to the question of the place of the human in the universe, in the belief that the two concerns are connected. We will pit fun against mortality, on the field of the page. The course requires diligence, in the root sense of the word,* which will lead to the completion of a final portfolio of poems revised and “finished” to the best of your ability, and an eight-to-ten-page introductory prose statement.

Enrollment is open to anyone in the department. Those in the creative writing program do not need to submit material beforehand; those in other areas who are interested in taking the class should submit a group of poems to Dr. William Wenthe (william.wenthe@ttu.edu), along with your contact information, for permission to enroll.

*Diligent: “in origin present participle of dīligĕre to value or esteem highly, love, choose, affect, take delight in (doing)”

Requirement fulfilled: Poetry Workshop

ENGL 5370: Creative Writing Nonfiction Workshop: The Lyric Book-Length Essay

Dr. Leslie Jill Patterson
Mondays 6:00-8:50PM
Onsite CRN: 32540
Distance CRN: 57931
Hybrid

In prose, the lyric form is most frequently used for "the meditation"—whether a contemplation of one's personal life, a researched subject, or both. Writers embrace the form when they wish to cover a topic from as many angles as possible or, as Pam Houston says, "throw as many balls into the air as he or she can manage to juggle." During the course of writing, the "topic" expands, explodes even. Texts that incorporate a lyric structure dive down many rabbit holes; they are texts of discovery. In this course, students will study and write lyric book-length essays. We will begin the class with a quick examination of lyric short-form essays—segmented flash, lyric memoir, researched but elliptical essays. Then we will spend the remainder of the semester reading lyric book-length essays; we'll learn how to research them, how to write one, and how to find which publishers are hunting them (there are a lot!). By the end of the semester, students will have an 80- to 100-page workshopped draft of a lyric novella-length essay.

Required Texts:

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (eds. Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton);Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Jane Alison).

Possible Texts:

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Mark Doty); throughsmoke (Jehanne Dubrow); Excavating Memory (Elizabeth Mosier); High Heel (Summer Brennan); Grace (Daphne A. Brooks); 300 Arguments (Sarah Manguso); When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back (Naja Marie Aidt); Bluets (Maggie Nelson); Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (Carole Maso); The Voyager Record (Anthony Michael Morena).

Requirement fulfilled: Non-fiction Workshop

ENGL 5372: Technical Reports

Dr. Ken Baake
Tuesday 6:00-8:50PM

This course focuses on the report—the primary work place document that creates knowledge and supports decision-making. Our class will examine reports of various types: information reports, analytical reports, feasibility studies, recommendation reports, empirical research reports. We will consider proposals as part of the document cycle that leads to reports. In the workplace, proposals seek approval or funding for a plan or activity. Reports provide information on the progress of such activities, or on the status of research.

All writing in some way tells a story, and so it is with reports and proposals. A proposal from a social service agency seeking money to expand a program for the poor must tell the story of the people it hopes to serve. A report on a study of sub-atomic particles conducted by physicists using a particle accelerator tells the story of those particles, even though they exist only for nano seconds. Narrative is intrinsic to reports and proposals.

As is typical in any graduate technical writing class, we will approach this topic from a theoretical and applied perspective. We will analyze existing documents using rhetorical theory and we will produce reports and proposals based on primary and secondary search. The class will involve reading and response in Blackboard and a report project in which students address a decision they are facing in their lives.

Our main text will be Houp, Pearsall, Tebeaux, Dragga. Reporting Technical Information. Oxford University Press.

ENGL 5373: Instructional Design for Technical Communication

Dr. Craig Baehr
Thursday 6:00-8:50PM

This graduate level course provides an overview of the processes involved in developing instructional content for professional settings, including user and task analysis, learning theories, asynchronous and synchronous learning activities, and assessment methods. Additionally, it covers several theoretical applications, including developing instructional architectures, instructional design principles, user experience methods, and practical use of learning objects and other instructional tools. Coursework will involve developing an instructional design portfolio, learning styles assessment, midterm examination, instructional project, and a few short assignments.

ENGL 5375: Document Design

Dr. Jason Tham
Wednesday 6:00-8:50PM

This course covers fundamental principles of document and information design. Over the course of the semester students will learn practical and theoretical skills related to desktop publishing, visual communication, and publication production. Using industry-standard software applications, students will learn to create, from scratch, visually attractive and functional documents that are used across academic, scientific, technological, and general business contexts.

ENGL 5377: Seminar on Risk

Dr. Rob Grace
Tuesday 6:00-8:50PM

Risk communication is the process by which stakeholders communicate information about potential hazards to facilitate the identification, assessment, and management of environmental, health, and safety risks. This course introduces fundamental theories of risk communication and, in particular, examines community-based, participatory design approaches to risk communication praxis in contexts such as emergency management, epidemic preparedness and response, and environmental conservation. Throughout the course students will read, discuss, and complete assignments that examine the nature of risk, how people assess, perceive, and seek information about risk, and how the design and communication of hazard-related information can coordinate risk assessment and management practices among community stakeholders.

More broadly, this course will be helpful to students who want to examine the relationship between communication design and decision-making in contexts involving controversy and uncertainty, and/or participatory approaches to communication (co)design that facilitate community engagement in matters of collective concern.

Engl 5380: Advanced Problems in Literary Studies: Translation Theory and Practice—Prose

Dr. Curtis Bauer
Monday 9:00-11:50 a.m.
Onsite CRN: 54916
Distance CRN: 56195
Hybrid

This course is extremely important for us—poets, fiction writers, dramaturges, linguists, literary critics, technical writers…all—in the grand scheme of an education in the arts. We must not only be aware of basic grammatical, syntactical and phonological nuances, but also a writer's craft, literary tradition and contemporary literary contexts. This course will be a combination seminar/workshop in which we will read and discuss translation theory and then put it to practice by translating literary texts—written in prose—from a foreign language into English. Literature in its original language is not a static, fixed entity whereby the translator need only extract its core and carry it over into the new language. Nor is the work as it enters the new language arriving at a fixed destination. It is more like a moving target, constantly subject to change in whichever stage of transformation it may currently occupy. Translations deaden over time, because they are marked by the literary conventions of their translators. To translate is to fully read; it is “a kind of reading, the assumption or transformation of one personal idiom into another,” writes Mark Strand. The act of translation, as you will hear from its various practitioners in essays and articles, intensifies our comprehension. Translation is good for writers (notorious skimmers) because we must parse, research, say out loud. We make conscious, clear decisions about words and idioms and sounds and rhythms. Further, we discover that the process is not about us, our egos, or what we want to say. We kneel at the altar of the other, not the altar of the self. Here's the idea: that by discovering the other, we find ourselves. And we become better writers through the writing of others.

Requirements Fulfilled: Comparative Literature; Genre: Fiction and Non-Fiction; Foreign Language/Methods (Option 2)

Engl 5380: Advanced Problems in Literary Studies: Celebrity Poets and the Poetics of Celebrity in the 19th-Century U.S.

Dr. Elissa Zellinger
Monday 2:00-4:50 p.m.
CRN: 32565

Poetry was ubiquitous in the nineteenth-century U.S. and, as a result, poets reached heights of fame that seem impossible today. This class will examine the interrelationship and reciprocity between celebrity and poetry. If poetry was believed to be the record of personal emotions, how then did poets navigate mass media networks that presumed to transform private thoughts into public records? And how did poets perform privacy to their advantage? In order to answer these questions and more, this class will examine publishing practices, discourses of professionalism, legal precedents (such as copyright and coverture), private letters, and media such as photography, print, and sound recording. Requirements for the class include in-class presentations, weekly Blackboard posts, a research proposal, and a final written assignment. The syllabus is designed to introduce students to a broad range of authors, texts, and critical methodologies.

Requirement Fulfilled: American Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; Book History/Digital Humanities Certificate

ENGL 5380: Feminist Thought and Theories (Cross-Listed with Women's & Gender Studies 5310)

Dr. Marjean D. Purinton
Friday 9:00- 11:50 AM
CRN: 61182
Onsite

In this seminar, we will use cross-disciplinary approaches to explore a broad range of theories that make up a body of scholarship termed "feminist theory" or "feminist thought." We will read excerpts from long works and from both historically derived and contemporary feminist theorists, recognizing and interrogating the assumptions underpinning these writings. We will discuss fundamental question these theories raise about the origins of sex and gender differences, the nature and origins of feminism. We will explore the formations and intersectionalities of race, class, sexuality, ability, age, nationality as categories of oppression and empowerment.

Our learning activities will include in-class role-playing scenarios and group work, periodic short essays that engage with feminist theory, a book report and presentation based on a monograph of feminist thought, and ample provocative discussion informed by feminist pedagogy. We will conclude the course with a critical, research-based project emanating from pre-existing work that we will, in the course of the semester, expand, inform, and enrich with feminist theories. Textbooks will include:

Kolmar, Wendy and Frances Bartkowski, ed. Feminist Theory: A Reader. 4th edition. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2012.

Nicholson, Linda, ed. The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Thought. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Tong, Rosemarie Putnam. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction. 5th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2017.

Requirements Fulfilled: Genre: Non-Fiction; Women's Studies Certificate

ENGL 5384: Rhetoric of Scientific Literature

Dr. Scott Weedon
Wednesday 6:00- 8:50 PM

ENGL 5384 asks what are the contributions of rhetoric to the work and understanding of science? How does rhetoric motivate, disseminate, and create the conditions for scientific knowledge? How, in effect, is science rhetorical? The course will begin with foundational answers to these questions by looking at research of scientific texts and practices from rhetorical studies and similar work in other fields. Having established a basis for understanding the relations between rhetoric and science, the class will then focus on a case study of the evolving relationship between rhetoric and cognitive science. The case study will include critical studies of cognitive science, cognitive approaches to rhetorical topics, interviews with humanist scholars working with cognitive science, and an examination of a research movement developed by cognitive scientists and rhetorical scholars towards a neuroscience of rhetoric (Jack & Appelbaum, 2010). The case study will illuminate through readings and interviews the intersections between rhetoric and science and the promises and limits of interdisciplinarity.
The course will appeal to students interested in science and technical communication, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research, rhetorical theory, and researching scientific, medical, and technical fields.

ENGL 5386: Digital Rhetoric and Social Justice

Dr. Jennifer Nish
Monday 6:00- 8:50 PM

This course focuses on digital rhetoric and social justice. As we explore the intersection of these two topics, we will focus especially on contemporary scholarship and social issues. As we engage with the reading material, we will:

Interrogate narratives about technology use that have excluded or misrepresented the work of people of color, women, and activists; Explore how themes and concepts important to digital rhetoric such as circulation, attention, multimodality, anonymity, and interface have been applied and theorized in relation to activism, embodiment, culture, and oppression; Consider how rhetorical concepts (e.g., metis, counterpublic, listening, and refusal) have been used to study activists and activist rhetoric; Investigate how specific activists and movements (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) have used digital media for social justice work; Examine the methods scholars use to study the rhetoric of activists, movements, and marginalized communities in digital contexts.

ENGL 5388: Usability Research

Dr. Brian Still
Wednesday 6:00- 8:50 PM

*satisfies research or theory requirement

ENGL 5389: Field Methods

Dr. Beau Pihlaja
Monday 6:00- 8:50 PM

What do we do when we want to study something that can't be re-enacted in a laboratory, dissected analytically from detailed, constrained experimental conditions? This question is incredibly important for researchers who study everyday language and language-in-use. Historically scholars of technical communication and rhetoric have called upon the methods of anthropology, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and interviews. These methods remain crucial to the discipline's ability to study our technical writing, design, and rhetoric as it's practiced in uncontrolled conditions. The technical communication and rhetoric's long-standing relationship with usability testing and now user experience architecture have moved to fuse the traditional ethnographic methods with the experimental insights of user-centered and participatory design research.

Our class will survey and practice those methods most common to field research, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and participatory design research. We will also contextualize those methods relative to the debates and concerns the field has had about replicability, generalizability, and the relationship of qualitative research methods to quantitative methods as equally "empirical." We will also pay close attention to the ethical implications of this mode of research, attending to the potential risks and rewards of conducting research of language-use outside a lab, in public spaces, even in digital, online, and new media contexts.

ENGL 5390: Writing for Publication (Creative Writing Edition)

Dr. Katie Cortese
Wednesdays, 6:00 – 8:50PM
Onsite CRN: 61179
Distance CRN: 61180
Hybrid

This course will facilitate the generation, revision, polishing, and submission of new and previously drafted multi-genre creative works to journals, presses, and contests for potential publication. Students will develop and critique new material early in the semester, but are also expected to bring a body of previously drafted and

revised work into the class to hone and submit. While the number of individual items will vary by student and genre, the material should comprise anywhere from a minimum of fifteen pages (i.e., poetry or flash prose chapbook) to a maximum of seventy-five pages (novella, long essay, long poem, or a chapbook of essays or stories). In addition, students will engage in a range of other writing projects intended to support their professional development, potentially completing: a) an interview with the writer of their choice, b) a book review, and c) a residency, grant, or fellowship application, among other such endeavors. Several times throughout the semester, Skype interviews will be held with agents, editors, publishers, and other such literary professionals. The required text, The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman, will be supplemented by timely articles on such subjects as working with editors, targeting publishers, querying agents, writing synopses, submitting to contests, creating an author website, maintaining a social media presence, writing craft articles, and other aspects of building a writing career.

Requirements Fulfilled: Professional Development Course; Creative Writing Workshop

ENGL 5390: Writing for Publication(Literature and Linguistics Edition)

Dr. Scott L. Baugh
Thursdays, 6:00-8:50 PM
Onsite CRN:57479
Distance CRN: 50212
Hybrid

This course, part-workshop and part-seminar, primarily aims to provide our graduate students structure and support for publishing scholarship in English studies. Practical activities—writing exercises, resource inventories and reports, procedural overviews, conference-style presentations—aim at this primary goal of preparing a manuscript for submission to a target journal. A greater aim of this seminar, moreover, concerns how an early-career scholar establishes a professional profile (identity, research/teaching/service agendas, & promotion) and effectively hones a publication agenda.

Requirement Fulfilled: Professional Development Course

English 5392: Teaching College Literature

Dr. Roger McNamara
Tuesdays, 6:00-8:50 PM
Onsite CRN: 32586
Distance CRN: 57478
Hybrid

Teaching can be the most wonderful and exhilarating experience, but it can also be devastating when students do not respond. It can make your day, or it can destroy it. While all teachers are exposed to both ends of the spectrum, we can minimize negative experiences if we are prepared, not only in the material that we are teaching, but in how we imagine our classes—from thinking about the objectives and skills that we'd like impart, through the pacing of the course and different teaching (pedagogical) methods that we use, to those non-verbal and interpersonal skills such as thinking about classroom space and developing one's presence.

This course will help prepare you to be effective teachers through four broad areas: a) theoretical: an overview of the history of literary studies so that you can more consciously position yourselves as teachers in relation to it; b) practical: exploring the different teaching (pedagogical) methodologies such as lecturing and class discussions; c) use of technology: becoming familiar with PowerPoint, Excel, and Blackboard, as well as using Skype or Zoom to teach; and d) hands-on experience: creating syllabi, developing lesson plans, grading papers, and visiting your professors' classrooms.

Requirement Fulfilled: Pedagogy Course

Department of English

Address

P.O. Box 43091 Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
Phone
806.742.2501
Email
english@ttu.edu