ENGL 5067 Methods of Teaching College Composition

This course is designed as a practicum for GPTI teaching first-year writing at Texas Tech University. This course will introduce teachers to methods and practices of teaching writing and provide scaffolding for their first three semesters teaching first-year writing. We will use class time to discuss teaching activities, to introduce you to theories of learning, writing, and rhetoric, to solve problems related to teaching and learning, and to help you build your teaching philosophy.

ENGL 5302 Translating Middle English Literature

This course introduces students to the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology, and prosody of Middle English. This course also introduces students to Middle English manuscript studies. The term Middle English encompasses an array of regional dialects that coexisted in England roughly between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the standardization of English in 1430. Class time will be spent translating and pronouncing Middle English, transcribing from manuscript facsimiles, and discussing related issues in translation, manuscript context, and literary interpretation. By the end of the course, students will be able to comprehend and read aloud Middle English poetry that ranges widely in dialect, form, and genre. This course will be of interest to literature students as well as to linguistics and creative writing students interested in form, prosody, book history, and the theory and praxis of translation.

Requirements Fulfilled: Philology Sequence, British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; Book History/Digital Humanities Certificate, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5306 The Renaissance Bible: Three Perspectives

Defending the new science of a heliocentric universe, Galileo declared, “the Bible teaches one how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” His perspective was part of a larger transformation at the time in how the Bible was read. With the rise of historical (or “higher”) criticism, the Bible's knowledge of nature, accounts of miracles, and promises of an afterlife came under scrutiny—yet, the Bible remained the crucible of culture, a moral standard, and the foremost shaper of worldview and ideology. Through the works of three intellectuals—Hobbes, Spinoza, and Milton—we will probe the nature of this paradox and chart the ramifications of the historical-critical method. Topics for discussion will include: how did Jewish scholarship influence Christian ideas of the Bible? How did mastery of sacred languages (Hebrew and Greek) offer new tools for interpretation? What strategies were invented for reconciling scriptural truth with scientific fact? This is also a class in academic professionalism, as we learn about presenting at conferences, publishing articles, and navigating the job market. The semester concludes with a paper/portfolio on a subject in your own area of specialization—e.g., Creative Writing, American lit, LSJE, etc.

Requirements Fulfilled: British literature, Period: early; Genre: Poetry; Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5313 The English Novel from Marriage Plot to Modern Woman

This course will undertake an idiosyncratic history of the English novel by exploring works by women addressing themes of marriage and independence. Our study will begin in the 18th century with Frances Burney's Evelina, dally in the scenic byways of Jane Austen, visit those threatening and sexy Yorkshire moors, and wind up in the 20th century with some bold ideas about women's possibilities. Course work will feature the graduate-school usual: a class presentation, a seminar paper, a class mini-conference, some ongoing writing work on Blackboard to help us develop our thoughts for the long writing assignment.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5317 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: The Empire Codes Back

Postcolonial writers have consistently written back to Empire and power. One strategy employed is to re-code the canon in ways that indicate the racial, gendered, and class assumptions of works such as William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This course will examine a few such instances to analyze how postcolonial authors disrupt conventional understandings of genre, plot, and audience, subvert normative gender codes, contest monochromatic racialization, and how their works are placed within textual and digital codes of revisionary literary histories. Our focus will be on a selection of texts which may include some of the following: Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism; Patience Agbabi's remixing of Chaucer in Telling Tales and the Global Chaucers blog, an “online archive and community for post -1945, non-Anglophone Chauceriana;” Aimé Césaire's rewriting of Shakespeare in Une Tempête; Derek Walcott and J.M. Coetzee's versions of Robinson Crusoe in Pantomime and Foe; revisions of Bronte's work in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Dorothea Smartt's Reader, I Married Him and Other Queer Goings on; scathing critiques of Conrad in Chinua Achebe's “An Image of Africa” and Sven Lindquist's Exterminate All the Brutes. Our attempt to understand revisionary literary history cognizant of the Eurocentrism and coloniality of traditional literary periodization will be aided by influential DH projects such as Postcolonial Digital Humanities, Women Writers Online, and Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present.

Requirements Fulfilled: Comparative Literature, Globalization, and Translation (CLGT); Period: Later; Genre: Non-Fiction

ENGL 5323 Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Occasion of the Poem

Occasional poetry seems straightforward: it is verse that commemorates a public or social occasion. However, this class will examine how these poems constellate a number of concerns involving print culture, poetic professionalism, and geography, as well as the assumptions structuring race, class, and gender. Occasional poems speak to the duration of figures, ideas, and verse forms; we will investigate how such verse works to make visible overlooked histories, people, and counter-narratives. Considering that gendered and raced “others” did not have full and equal access to the American public sphere in the nineteenth century, this class will focus on how women, Black, and Native authors used poetic memorials to assert their belonging. We will also use occasional poems to contextualize other nineteenth-century verse forms and to better understand the processes of canonization in subsequent decades and centuries. In so doing, students will be introduced to a broad range of authors, texts, and critical methodologies. Requirements for the class include in-class presentations, weekly Blackboard posts, a research proposal, and a final written assignment.

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, Period: Early; Genre: Poetry

ENGL 5327 Studies in Multicultural American Literature: Indigenous Futurisms

This course will explore creative and scholarly works in the emerging field of Indigenous Futurism. We will read novels, short stories, graphic stories/comics, and watch several short films. All our primary texts, both literary and filmic, are created by Indigenous authors, artists, and/or filmmakers from somewhere in the Americas. Among the questions we will consider are: Why has speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, alternative history, futurism, etc.) traditionally been so closely associated with white, Western, male authors and narratives of invasion and conquest? What happens when authors from a culture which has already survived an alien invasion and conquest claims speculative fiction to tell their own stories? Why are we currently experiencing a groundswell of publications in speculative fiction by authors/filmmakers of color, including native/tribal peoples?

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, Period: Later; Genre: Fiction or Film; Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE)

ENGL 5335 Principles of Language

Language touches every aspect of our lives. From reading the morning paper to decrypting secret codes, the subconscious knowledge of language is uniquely human. In this course we'll ask what it means to have a command of language—do animals have it? Infants? How can analysis of its structure help us understand literary or poetic works?

By examining the structures of the world's languages, we will discover why linguists believe in a “universal grammar” in spite of the world's rich linguistic diversity. We'll also learn how to make the sounds of the world's languages—from French nasal vowels to the clicks of Africa's Bantu languages.

This course is suited to anyone interested in language, literature, how the mind works, or the characteristics that make us uniquely human.

Requirements Fulfilled: Philology/Methods Sequence; Linguistics Graduate Certificate

ENGL 5341 Histories and Theories of the Book

This course begins with an overview of material text production across history and cultures, examining early writing and publishing technologies. We'll move through the transition from scribal to print cultures and the hand press period, through the nineteenth century industrialization of print, and end with digital texts. Students will learn about the relationships between texts and their material embodiments, from stone to screen, papyrus to paper, codex to Kindle. Throughout the course we will also consider books (or scrolls, or a stylus, or a ball point pen, or a printing press, etc.) as technologies, and study them within the context of current theories of technology and culture. A primary principle of this course will also be learning by doing in a hands on way. Pandemic permitting, students will have the opportunity to work with Special Collections materials, to work in the English department Letterpress Studio, and engage with a variety of technologies of textual production.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Novel; Core requirement for the Book History and Digital Humanities Certificate

ENGL 5343 Studies in Literary Criticism: World Fabulation from Metamorphosis to Science Fiction

This section of Studies in Literary Criticism will survey a range of celebrated 20th- and 21st-century prose fictions, mostly in translation, by renowned authors from Austria, Poland, Colombia, Argentina, India, and China. Our focus will be on their literary interest as fabulations that encode their scenes of cultural origin, that is, as allegories or refractions of historical events. In these narratives, it may be that the story world and its events depart, a little or a lot, from historical settings or realistic expectations, only to have these contexts slip through in disguise. If the telling of the tale turns back on itself to undermine its own pretense to natural verisimilitude, that metafictional device comes with a cultural timestamp. These fictions may be placed in various genres, such as metamorphosis, metafiction, magical realism, speculative fiction, and science fiction. Fabulation is a convenient general designation that underscores the common element in these genres: Each offers a kind of modern fable in which the resources of myth and fantasy process the stresses of modern and contemporary society, while refreshing our current ideas about the past, present, and future of the Earth, technology, or human possibility. We will consult some critical writings on fabulation by Robert Scholes and Ronald Bogue and rehearse some basic concepts of narrative theory to gain purchase on the craft of these fabulous fictions.

Texts: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; Stanislaw Lem, Solaris; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome; and Cixin Liu, The Three Body-Problem.

Assignments: weekly short class reports, a midterm essay, and a final essay.

Requirements Fulfilled: CLGT Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5351 Fight the Power! - Building and Destroying Empires through Global Film and Media

“The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”

This Winston Churchill quote underpins this course about global film and media's role in the building of empires. We examine traditional imperialism, founded on conquest and military colonization, along with neo-imperialism founded on soft power defined as a nation's cultural and economic influence. We ask: how is the media a tool to colonize the minds of potential subjects? How does the media permit audiences to fight the power and to imagine futures where empires are destroyed?

To answer these questions, this interdisciplinary class situates global media against political theory as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. For instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's conception of empire founded on a transnational enemy permits us to see Iron Man (2008) as a critical allegory of the United States' War on Terror. Reading Donald Duck comics against Chilean criticism of Disney's ideology reveals how Hollywood acts as a weapon for cultural imperialism. Franz Fanon's and Homi K. Bhabha's writings on the fractured psychology of the colonized creates solidarities between the oppressed in The Battle of Algiers (1966) who resist French colonialism and those in The Handmaiden (2016) who buck against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Finally, we bring Shoshana Zuboff's study of surveillance capitalism's imperial roots to the Japanese horror film, Pulse (2001). Through its tale about a haunted internet browser, we glean how corporations like Facebook and Google may be replacing nation states as the drivers of empire.

This cross-media course introduces students to a variety of theoretical lenses and to global film and media studies, more generally. Coursework includes conversations with featured artists and scholars. Students will write article-length research papers wherein they pair close readings with archival research to investigate how empires of the mind are created, maintained and, ultimately, subverted.

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