ENGL 5067, Methods of Teaching College Composition (MA & PhD)

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, and getting to read some outlandish poetry! This course also serves as the prerequisite for the spring ENGL 5303 Medieval British Literature course; 5302 will prepare students to study a Middle English corpus (such as the Canterbury Tales, the Gawain poems, Arthurian romances, or another set of poems) in the spring. Taking this Middle English sequence (both courses) fulfills one language requirement.

Requirements fulfilled: Philology Sequence for Foreign Language Requirement; British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; BHDH; MRSC

ENGL 5309, Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Romanticism and Criminal Justice

This course surveys the British Romantic Period (1780–1830) with a focus on consequential changes effected in criminal justice during this revolutionary and tumultuous time. Because of the period's significant paradigm shift in criminal justice, it is not surprising for us to see spectacular violence and crime, public punishments, legal proceedings, and courtroom scenes represented in popular culture and literature. We will read Wollstonecraft's Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, Godwin's Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb William, Mary Shelley's Falkner, P. B. Shelley's The Cenci, Inchbald's Such Things Are, Byron's Manfred, and Robinson's Nobody as well as diverse poetry and nonfiction selections. From the literature, we will explore the forces shaping and reflecting the period's reforms in criminal justice, including crime detection and prevention, female criminality, and debates over punishment and rehabilitation. We will discover how this important paradigm shift shapes the cultural foundations upon which our own systems of justice rest and how it informs our contemporary challenges with prison and policing reforms, social justice inequities, the #MeToo Movement, civil unrest portrayed in movies such as She Said (2022) about the Harvey Weinstein scandal and Women Talking (2023) about sexual assaults on women.

Requirements fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction or Drama; LSJE

ENGL 5325, Studies in American Fiction: Nomadology in the Novels of Melville and Twain

In this course we will examine major novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain in light of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theory of nomadology (in Nomadology: The War Machine), a strategy and practice of opposition to and deconstruction of conventional ideologies. Over the semester we will follow the parallel novelistic careers of Melville and Twain as they develop their concerns with some of the major issues in nineteenth-century America. Both novelists engage with and critique: capitalism and social class, in Redburn and The Prince and the Pauper; race and authority, in Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and cultural change and destruction, in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Finally, as somewhat of a metafictional conclusion to their careers, they produce apocalyptic, experimental fictions, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.

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

ENGL 5327, Studies in Multicultural American Literature: Contemporary Native American Literature

This course will explore creative and scholarly works in 20th and 21st century Indigenous and Native American literature. We will read novels, a semi-fictional memoir, and graphic narratives/comics along with extensive scholarship. All our primary texts are created by Native American, First Nations, indigenous authors and/or artists from somewhere in the Americas. Among the goals we will work toward are: Identifying what we mean by “indigenous” and what are some characteristics of indigenous literatures; gaining a more complicated understanding of and appreciation for the diversity and complexity of Native American intellectual and cultural productions; developing a historically-nuanced grasp of some of the major issues, questions, and concerns that run throughout Indian Country today, specifically the relationship between cultural production, federal policies, and contemporary movements toward Native sovereignty and self-determination; consistently work to hone close, critical reading skills applicable to a variety of mediums, forms, genres, and intellectual/professional contexts; develop capacities to engage in thoughtful, critical debate around questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, citizenship, and belonging.

Requirements fulfilled: American Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction or Film; LSJE; FMS

ENGL 5340, Research Methods

This course explores the joys and the challenges of research. It is an introduction to the methods, processes, and procedures for graduate-level research in English, for students pursuing MA and PhD degrees in English with concentrations primarily in Literature, Linguistics, and Creative Writing. Students will investigate the uses of archival, bibliographic, and web-based sources in graduate-level scholarship.

Using a suite of research methods, we will ask: how do we arrive at and refine a research question? What are the different strategies for and the scholarly debates around the close reading of a text? How do we choose and complicate theoretical lenses? How do we cultivate a network of research collaborators? How do we select the right venue for our research? How do we build a research portfolio that clearly articulates both short-term and long-term goals? How do we tailor our research for different audiences in and outside academia? How do we perform research across media and across disciplines? How do we acquire funding for our research? What are alternative modes of research dissemination that can reach the public? What does it mean to be an ethical researcher? What are practices to queer and to decolonize research methods? Through short exercises and longer writing assignments, students will acquire the tools necessary to be effective, considerate, and nimble researchers able to work within and beyond the humanities.

The course will feature conversations with artists and scholars pursuing interdisciplinary research. It fulfills a foundation course requirement for masters and doctoral students in English while also providing a strong base in research methods for students working across the humanities.

Requirements fulfilled: Foundation Course

ENGL 5340, Research Methods

This seminar introduces incoming MA students to a range of research methods and methodologies utilized in humanities-based studies, including the vast array of digital, material, and archival resources available to researchers. The course focuses on the process of research in order to better prepare students for the kind of work expected at the graduate level. Students will develop a significant research project in their selected area of specialization that will include a book review, annotated bibliography, conference-length presentation, and research paper. This section is reserved primarily for new onsite MA students.

Requirements fulfilled: Foundation Course

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. As part of the course, students will pay particular attention to post-1700 British reading and publishing practices in relation to specific texts like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Graham Rawle's Woman's World. A primary principle of this course will also be learning by doing in a hands-on way. Students will have the opportunity to work with Special Collections materials, work in the English department Letterpress Studio, and engage with a variety of technologies of textual production.

Requirements fulfilled: Core requirement for BHDH Certificate; British Literature; Period: Later; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5342, Critical Methods: Cultural Studies, Literary Theories, Readings

“Critical Methods” is a graduate course designed to survey a range of approaches to reading texts critically. Bring in theory explicitly, some naively assume, and you lose the so-called magic of reading; however, theory is always already there. We may gain from being fully aware of our discursive approaches to reading texts, our critical methods, and deliberate in articulating them as such, as methodology statements. Our group will compare APA and MLA industry standards; traverse relevant fields in ‘English Studies'; and explore recognized ‘schools' of criticism predominant over the last four decades or so; and yet, we will place emphases on significant patterns within, across, and among these models. Our aims and objectives will emphasize professional development. We'll use one required book, Culler's Literary Theory from the outstanding Oxford-VSI series, and an electronic reserve of readings in OneDrive. Formal requirements: assigned readings & several in-class ‘teaching demo' presentations; one short (5–7 pp.) research essay; one class research presentation; and scaffolding through these assignments, one culminating article-length (19+ pp.) article/seminar paper. A course-long ‘journal' will track lessons over the term and be the basis of a final exam. It's also likely we will take advantage of some asynch activities in Blackboard.

Requirement fulfilled: Foundation Course

ENGL 5380, Special Topics in Literary Studies: Afro-Asian Solidarity - Literatures of Decolonization

The middle decades of the twentieth century were marked by the simmering tensions of the Cold War as well as the revolutionary energies of anti-colonial movements across the African and Asian continents. Moving between a long history of empire and more contemporary forms of imperialist globalization, this seminar examines the rise and legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity movements in the 1950s and 60s. We will read literary and critical texts by prominent African and Asian anti-colonial thinkers who contributed to the Afro-Asian Writer's Union journal such as Abdel-Aziz El-Ahwani, Abdel-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Yehia Haqqi, Breyten Breytenbach, and Peter Abrahams alongside scholarly work by Samir Amin, Edward Said, Laleh Khalili, Vijay Prashad, Christopher Lee, and Andrew Rubin in order to gain a better understanding of the impact of these forces on the cultural and literary output of decolonizing nations. We will further consider how these texts draw on literary forms to convey the lived experience of a global modernity shaped by the twin forces of anti-colonial revolution and imperialist globalization. What lessons do they teach us about our contemporary struggles and about global solidarity? How do the literatures of the Global South challenge some of the assumptions of Cold War historiography and nationalist discourses?

Requirements fulfilled: CLGT; Period: Later; Genres: Fiction or Non-Fiction

ENGL 5392, Teaching College Literature: Teaching Without Borders: Literature, Culture, Practice

We live in times when disciplinary boundaries are being breached in English departments across the United States. Our teaching of literature must necessarily reckon both with the particularities of our discipline and the generalities of our students' and institutional expectations. This course will begin with an overview of some of the borders and boundaries we encounter while teaching: between different temporal and geographical ‘areas' of literary study; literature, culture, and criticism; ‘high' and ‘popular' literary forms; delivering and receiving learning; and the theories and practices of teaching.

Beginning with bell hooks's manifestoes on teaching critical thinking, moving on to models of cross-cultural teaching, and concluding with some recent examples of how cultural analysis can be successfully deployed in the college literature classroom via Jack Halberstam, Jodie Archer, and Matthew Jockers, 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 (or in opposition) to it; b) practical: exploring the different methodologies such as lecturing, discussions, and workshops; c) use of technology: becoming familiar with PowerPoint, Excel, and various learning management systems used by institutions; and d) hands-on experience: creating syllabi, developing lesson plans, teaching philosophies, grading papers, and visiting your professors' classrooms.

Required Texts:

• Elaine Showalter. Teaching Literature. Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.
• Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon Press, 2012.
• bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking. Routledge, 2010. (Please don't buy, available to read from the library)
• Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers, The Bestseller Code. Penguin, 2016.
• David Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. Princeton University Press, 2020. (Please don't buy, available to read from the library)

Requirements fulfilled: PhD Foundation Course