Section Descriptions for Upcoming Courses

Taught by: Dr. Dorothy Todd

Section Description: This course offers an introduction to the works of Shakespeare. We will begin by considering Shakespeare’s language and use of verse while we examine his Sonnets. We will build on our attention to his language as we move to his plays, during which time we will encounter the three major genres of Shakespeare’s plays—comedy, tragedy, and history. We will consider these plays through multiple scholarly and theoretical frameworks including theater history, textual history, historical biography, character analysis, source studies, and performance. The semester will conclude with a group project that brings together these different scholarly approaches through the development of a packet of theatrical materials relating to one of Shakespeare’s plays.

Proposed Readings: 

King Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, The Tempest

Taught by: Dr. Noah Peterson

Section Description: This course will examine the development of literature about King Arthur and his Round Table knights from the Middle Ages to the present. We will interact with texts written in Latin, Middle English, Old French, Middle High German, and modern English as well as modern films. We will discuss texts ranging from canonical pieces of literature to modern adaptational engagements with the Arthurian legend. We will examine “classic literature” and films both serious and comedic in our quest to understand the longstanding appeal and function of the Arthurian legend throughout the centuries. Particularly, in this short summer semester, we will be focusing on the Holy Grail. The Grail was added to the Arthurian story in the late 12th century and instantly became a touchstone of interpretation for various writers.

Proposed Readings: Readings will include texts from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Sir Thomas Malory; as well as the opera / film Parsifal and the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Perceval le Gallois, Excalibur, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Fisher King

Taught by: Dr. Apostolos Vasilakis

Section Description: In this course we will focus on science fiction literature spanning from the 19th to the 21st century. Starting with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein we will read some of the most important writers and works of the genre and will explore the evolution of the genre. We will discuss how these stories satisfy the human desire and imagination to explore other worlds, space, time, and our relationship to the other. We will see how these stories question our (often fixed) perception of what is human and inhuman, shape or influence our understanding of technological progress, and redefine the relationship between the fictional and the real.

Proposed Readings: 

Shelley: Frankenstein
Forster: “The Machine Stops”
Zamyatin: We
Capek: R.U.R.
Lem: Solaris
Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Le Guin: The Dispossessed
Delany: Nova
Okorafor: Binti

Taught by: Dr. Kalani Pattinson

Section Description: In this course, we will survey adolescent and young adult literature (YA lit) from the twenty-first and latter half of the twentieth century, though we will briefly discuss well-known older works for context. We will explore:
A variety of forms (novels, short stories, and poems) in the various genres of historical fiction, realistic fiction, fantasy, and science-fiction.
Works by authors from a variety of continents and ethnicities.
How these works both express notions of the nature of adolescence and shape those notions within a culture, paying particular attention to characters’ growth into virtuous, compassionate, wise(r) adults
Conceptions of justice, power, language, and communication.
In our explorations, we will apply principles of literary analysis to the texts that we read, but we will not discuss teaching practices (this is not a course focused on pedagogy). Students will read assigned texts, write brief daily responses, longer papers, and complete multimodal literary arguments. 

Proposed Readings: 

"Araby" by James Joyce -
Queen of the Tiles by Hanna Alkaf -
Feed by M.T. Anderson -
The Boy Lost in the Maze by Joseph Coelho -
Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis -
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher -
Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller by Joseph Lambert

Taught by: Dr. Emily Johansen

Section Description: We interact with the environment constantly, yet, when we think about “environmental literature,” we’re often thinking about novels and media that, on one hand, focus on nature or wilderness or, on the other hand, emphasize climate change. In other words, there tends to be a cognitive disconnect between our everyday environmental engagement and the capital-E Environment implied in environmental literature. This section of ENGL 202 considers how writers and filmmakers grapple with this very question, teaching us ways to read to landscapes that might seem, on one hand, homogenous, or, on the other, contaminated (and thus, no longer, “natural”). These texts ask how we imagine ourselves to be affected by the places we live—and how we affect them. Through examining an array of novels, essays, and films, we’ll consider how “a sense of place and a sense of planet,” in Ursula K. Heise’s words, helps us to recognize how the “environmental” is simultaneously local and planetary—and all the various levels in-between.

Proposed Readings:

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
Hernan Diaz, In the Distance
Percival Everett, Watershed
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest
Selected articles by Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, William Cronon, Donna Haraway, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Anna Tsing.

Taught by: Dr. Robert Stagg

Section Description: This course offers an introduction to the work of William Shakespeare. We'll begin by getting a handle on Shakespearean language before proceeding act by act through two major tragedies he wrote around the middle of his career ('Macbeth' and 'Othello') as well as discussing in broader terms three plays that could be said to characterize other genres in Shakespeare’s career ('Antony and Cleopatra', 'The Winter’s Tale', 'Twelfth Night'). Interspersed will be consideration of the many different ways we might think about Shakespeare: in terms, for example, of theatre history, adaptation, historical biography, the early modern world, textual bibliography.

Taught by: Dr. Apostolos Vasilakis

Section Description: 

This course will examine some of the major texts of world literature, directing our analyses around a core group of central ideas. Reading and analyzing the texts in this focused manner, we will investigate the evolutions and transitions in the literary tradition, spanning from the ancient world through the 14th century. During this course we will see how a number of writers from different cultures (Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante) situate their stories within their own historical reality, and how they address and explore questions about what it means to be human, to make choices, to love, to act, to be.

Proposed Readings: 

Homer: The Odyssey
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Sophocles: Oedipus the King
Vyasa: The Bhagavad-Gītā
Virgil: The Aeneid
Dante: The Inferno

Taught by: Dr. Avery Blankenship

Section Description: In this course, we will investigate the American sense of freedom and nationhood from its founding moment to its most divisive. In its early years, American literature defined itself as a body of work trying to separate from its English influences and to develop a sense of its own national identity. By the Civil War, American literature was not only fully cemented as a distinct body of work, but literature became central to America’s mid-nineteenth-century attempt to redefine what freedom and nation mean. In order to cover this movement from one definition of freedom to another, we will read both literary works in the form of novels and short stories as well as other objects of literary production such as pamphlets, cookbooks, and speeches.

Proposed Readings: 

Taught by: Dr. Christopher Manes

Section Description: This section of American Literature: Civil War to Present focuses on expressions of the American literary tradition from late romanticism to realism, modernism to post modernism, and experimental styles leading to influences and discussions of contemporary authors and where their work fits into these literary movements. Writers include traditional and non-traditional poets, playwrights, and fiction authors examined for their contributions to, and reexaminations of, the American literary experience: for example, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hart Crane, Susan Glaspell, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Alan Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Mark Doty.

Taught by: Dr. Marian Eide

Section Description: 

This course familiarizes students with approximately two and a half centuries of British literary history through a sampling of periods and genres (poetry, novel, drama, short story, letter, and journal). We will be particularly interested in the rise, spread, and decline of the British Empire and the effects of empire on culture and thought. Additionally, we will consider revolutions in governance, philosophy, and technology. The literature of this period is deeply engaged with history and society, planting roots that anchor contemporary thought.

Proposed Readings: 

Novels:
Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Caryl Phillips: A Distant Shore~

Journal:
Dorothy Wordsworth:
“Grasmere Journals”

Drama:
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Short Stories:
James Joyce: Dubliners
Virginia Woolf: A Haunted House & Other Stories

Taught by: Dr. Claire Carly-Miles

Section Description: Introduction to the speculative and marvelous genres of literature; survey of different genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, utopian, or fairy tale; examination of different methodological approaches and historical contexts.

Proposed Readings:

● Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 ed.) Penguin. 0143131842; 978-0143131847
● Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Collected Short Stories (2006 but stories’ pub dates 1971, 79, 84, 87 and two new stories)Seven Stories 1583226982; 978-1583226988
● Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Vintage 038549081X; 978-0385490818
● Nnedi Okorafor, Binti (2015) Tordotcom 0765385252; 978-0765385253
● Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017) Tordotcom 9780765397539; 978-0765397539
● Martha Wells, Artificial Condition (2018) Tordotcom 1250186927; 978-1250186928
● Anne Leckie, The Raven Tower (2019)Orbit 0356507025; 978-0356507026
● Fran Wilde, A Catalog of Storms, Collected Short Fiction (2025) Fairwood Press 1958880310; 978-1958880319
● Selected fairytales from the 19th Century
● Selected poems and stories by James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula K. LeGuin, and others

Taught by: Dr. Juan Alonzo

Section Description: The study literature provides myriad possibilities for us as readers think critically and make sense of the world we are living today, how we got here, and where we are going. Literature continually engages with a constantly transforming, modernizing world, and in the social and humanistic sciences, we call this phenomenon the experience of “modernity.” Yet the experience of the modern world is not new, it can be traced back even to the time of Shakespeare, who along with other writers responded to transformations in society by imagining new worlds.

The fall 2026 section of ENGL 303—Approaches to English Studies will introduce students to key concepts and issues in literary studies through authors who have engaged with their socio-historical placement in ways that allow us to appreciate their art and apprehend ideas specific to their cultural milieu. Significantly, these authors have also engaged with the literary traditions into which they were born. The previous edition of this course began with “The Tempest” (1611) and moved quickly to contemporary literature as we examined how different authors and different time periods have thought through what it means to be “modern,” what it means to contend with social transformation as they were living it. Readings for this section of ENGL 303 are not yet final but will also cover a broad historical scope. Some of the authors under consideration include Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Juan Rulfo, Américo Paredes, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Fernando Flores, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Jesmyn Ward.

Finally, as part of our introduction to English Studies, we will also focus on key concepts/tools of literary understanding: historical context, intertextuality; modernity. Through the application of these concepts/tools, we will comprehend how literature simultaneously creates and questions tradition, how literature produces and interrogates knowledge, and how literature allows us to understand ourselves and society.

Proposed Readings:

Readings for this section of ENGL 303 are not yet final but will also cover a broad historical scope. Some of the authors under consideration include Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Juan Rulfo, Américo Paredes, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Fernando Flores, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Jesmyn Ward.

Taught by: Dr. Kevin O'Sullivan

Section Description: This class explores the use of the georgic mode in the literature of England before mass industrialization. Most closely associated with the Latin poet Virgil, georgic poetry contemplates humankind’s relationship to the natural world as it is negotiated and signified by the necessity for personal labor. Rather than being denoted as a specific form or genre, the georgic is a literary mode, a feature which affords it both flexibility and elusiveness. Throughout the semester, we will analyze how English authors adopted the examples of their classical forebears to meet the needs of their own moment, participating in an ongoing tradition that married practical agrarian didacticism with social and moral criticism. Our study of the georgic mode will be largely occupied by considering the value of labor: What is the work to be done? Why do we do it? What are the benefits of our labor and who receives them? How does our individual labor impact the world around us? In concert with our analysis of the English georgic tradition, these same questions will also guide our exploration of the major topics and methodologies animating work in the field of English studies today.

Proposed Readings: Proposed readings include texts by: Hesiod, Virgil, Varro, Seneca, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, John Philips, Christopher Smart, John Gay, and Robert Dodsley (as well as their critics).

Taught by: Dr. Mary Ann O'Farrell

Section Description: This class is an introduction to English studies organized around a topic (school fiction), a process (thinking self-consciously about what we do when we read, discuss, and write about literature and other kinds of texts), and a set of practicalities (issues involved in being an informed English major at Texas A&M).

Here's why the focus on school: The hothouse, small world nature of school has made it an appealing setting for fiction interested in exploring issues related to learning and to coming into identity--vulnerability and exposure, exclusion and belonging, the thrill of knowing and the painful surprise of not knowing, and the discovery that one has a relation to personal and to institutional forms of power. This section of English 303 will explore the riches of literary and visual works focused on the experience of school.

Proposed Readings: 

Texts we will read include such novels as the first of the Harry Potter books, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. We'll also think about school's appearances in other popular cultural texts.

Taught by: Dr. Jason Crider

Section Description: This course explores the history of writing interfaces and word processing software from the perspective of media studies and digital rhetoric. Students will be introduced to concepts and theories from media archaeology, environmental and digital humanities, data infrastructure studies, human-computer interfacing (HCI), and more as they explore and experiment with hardware and software such as mechanical keyboards, open-source writing software, haptic media interfaces, augmented reality platforms, and experimental computer interfaces. Students will practice writing project proposals, learn how to do research in the history of writing and computing, get hands on experience with block printing and a printing press, as well as create their own personalized writing interface.

Taught by: Dr. Tyler Shoemaker

Section Description: Our focus will be on the problem of use: What, if anything, is literature for? What might it mean to speak of literature’s usefulness, or its value? What happens to categories like fiction, figuration, judgment, and even imagination when they are instrumentalized in terms of use? What, in turn, is the use of literary criticism? To what ends does it work?

We will trace these questions across six major periods of literary criticism, spanning from ancient Greece through the emergence of critique. Topics include imitation and mimesis, metaphor and figurative language, defenses of both poetry and criticism, taste and judgment, affect, imagination, ideology, and more.

Taught by: Dr. Emily Johansen

Section Description: In Keywords, one of the foundational texts of what we now call “cultural studies,” Raymond Williams notes repeatedly that “culture” is a phenomenally difficult word to define. “Politics” seems similarly difficult to pin down. Yet both words are extraordinarily important in their ability to shape our experience of the world—and, even more so, when they’re used together in some capacity. In this section of 309: Cultural Politics, we will consider some of the different uses of these words—and how cultural critics interrogate how they operate in order to make sense of how we understand the world in which we live. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with a variety of definitions of these words and the different methods of understanding the world they offer and move on to examine how they interact with three other keywords for modern life: space; work; environment. Looking at a mix of theoretical and fictional texts, we will work to become more effective readers of cultural texts. 

Proposed Readings: Articles by Walter Benjamin; Michel de Certeau; Stuart Hall; Ursula K. Heise; Doreen Massey; Annie McClanahan; Tiziana Terranova; Anna Tsing; Raymond Williams. Films: Manufactured Landscapes; Modern Times; Parasite.

Taught by: Dr. David Wilton

Section Description: In this class you will journey back in time, starting with the language we speak today and passing through the language of Shakespeare, the Middle English of Chaucer, the Old English of the Beowulf poet, to the tongue’s Indo-European roots. Learn how an obscure tongue spoken on a cold, rain-swept island in the North Sea grew to become the global lingua franca.

Taught by: Dr. Kevin O'Sullivan

Section Description: This course will provide a survey of the intellectual and artistic movement known as the English Renaissance, focusing in particular on literature written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Discussions will begin with a broad investigation of the term ‘Renaissance,’ positioning the innovations that took place in England in proximity to analogous advances on the European continent. Throughout the semester, students will read broadly from authors working in three major literary forms—poetry, drama, and prose—and interrogate how these reflect the period of immense social, religious, and political upheaval during which they were composed. Together, we will seek to understand the relationship between these works and the wider culture of textual transmission in which they participated as well as the place of literature in an increasingly varied landscape of intellectual production.

Proposed Readings: Thomas Wyatt; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; George Gascoigne; Edmund Spenser; Philip Sidney; Mary Wroth; Anne Locke; Mary Sidney Herbert; Anne Askew; Thomas Kyd; Christopher Marlowe; and others.

Taught by: Dr. Katie Adkison

Section Description: We’ll be reading six plays, organized loosely into three pairs that speak to each other in thematically interesting ways (though, certainly, all the plays share various thematic and topical resonances with each other). First, we’ll begin with the anonymous medieval morality play, Everyman, to explore norms in English theatre before the rise of the early modern public playhouse, and then well consider the inheritance of those morality plays in the public playhouse with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Next, we’ll consider the period’s interest in metatheatricality and performance as themes in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. And finally, we’ll conclude with questions of women’s roles, both as they are represented on stage and as they informed women’s relationship to theatre itself in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (written for women to read/perform in the privacy of their homes). 

Taught by: Dr. Portia Owusu

Section Description: This course focuses on African American literature prior to 1930. It is divided into two parts: the first explores early African American literature and culture, including works by enslaved Africans in the Americas and the development of Black traditions such as vernacular forms. The second examines the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and its influence into the 1930s, a major Black arts movement centered in Harlem, New York. The course also considers how this period influenced later writers and how historical context and social differences have shaped Black literature. Overall, the course aims to develop an understanding of the formal, thematic, and historical significance of early African American literature within the broader American literary tradition.

Taught by: Dr. Noah Peterson

Section Description: 

This course centers on the development of the Arthur story in poetry, fiction, and film, from its inception in early medieval Britain through the twentieth and twenty-first century. Reading these texts in relation to specific historical, political, and cultural contexts, we will discuss topics such as the following: Arthur as a model for rulers, the role of Arthurian narrative in shaping the ideals of "chivalry," and contemporary approaches to the Arthurian material. This course reveals how wider social forces shape the philosophical outlooks and aesthetic sensibilities of writers who use the Arthur story and helps students develop an appreciation for what the study of literature can teach us about ourselves and our shared humanity.

Proposed Readings:

Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature; The Buried Giant; Excalibur; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; The Green Knight

Taught by: Dr. Tyler Shoemaker

Section Description: This section of ENGL 334 steps through the major periods of English-language science fiction, beginning with the genre’s origins in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and ending with contemporary authors such as Ted Chiang and N.K. Jemesin. In between, we will read from Golden Age magazines in the 1930s-40s, New Wave writers in the 60s-70s, and cyberpunk in the 80s. Topics include the mind-body problem, mortality and immortality, artificial intelligence, language and cognition, theories of technology, dystopia, environmentalism, and others.

Proposed Readings: 

Mary Shelley, E.M. Forster, Orson Welles, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Ridley Scott, William Gibson, Alfonso Cuaron, Ted Chiang, N.K. Jemesin

Taught by: Dr. Michael Collins

Section Description: Course Description: Credits 3. 3 Lecture Hours. Production of advanced complete poems; peer workshops; extensive reading. May be repeated 1 time for credit. Prerequisite: ENGL 235; junior or senior classification or approval of instructor.

Section Description: This course aims to build skill in poetry writing and in the judgment of poetry writing. Seminar members will deepen their familiarity with writing and assessing various forms, styles and conventions of poetry. Each week we will analyze a poem or group of poems that exemplifies a certain technique or strategy, or a certain philosophical approach to writing poetry. A part or all of some classes will be devoted to workshop discussions of poems class members write. By the end of the semester, in addition to a portfolio of poems, seminar members will also produce a critique of a poem or poet.

Proposed Readings: 

1. Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

2. Rita Dove. The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Taught by: Dr. James Francis

Section Description: This course explores how sustained collaborations between directors and cinematographers shape the visual language and storytelling strategies of genre cinema. Through a semester-long examination of selected director-cinematographer partnerships, we will analyze key elements of film form—including mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, editing, and narrative structure—to understand how style develops across genre cinema and how it informs viewer experience. Students will conduct close visual analysis, engage in discussion regarding the intertextuality of film, and write critically on how genre elements develop together across multiple films within a shared authorship, situating individual films within a broader genre context.

Adopting a thematic approach within genre studies, the course focuses on films associated with cinema fantastique (science fiction, fantasy, and horror). By examining recurring stylistic patterns across director-cinematographer unions, students will investigate how these creative relationships contribute to the evolution of genre aesthetics, visual motifs, and narrative frameworks.

Proposed director–cinematographer pairings include: Darren Aronofsky & Matthew Libatique; Guillermo del Toro & Guillermo Navarro; Lucio Fulci & Sergio Salvati; John Carpenter & Dean Cundey; David Cronenberg & Mark Irwin; Joe Dante & John Hora; Alex Garland & Rob Hardy; Brian De Palma & Stephen H. Burum.

Students interested in Advanced Film for Fall 2026 have an opportunity to help shape course content and assessment methods by participating in the following anonymous survey by 5:00 PM on March 30th, 2026: https://qfreeaccountssjc1.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1AN0zvgc7PNahhk  

Proposed Readings: 

Darren Aronofsky & Matthew Libatique: mother!, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, Noah

Guillermo del Toro & Guillermo Navarro: Hellboy, Cronos, Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone

Lucio Fulci & Sergio Salvati: Zombie, City of the Living Dead, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond

John Carpenter & Dean Cundey: Escape from New York, Halloween, The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing

David Cronenberg & Mark Irwin: Scanners, The Fly, The Brood, The Dead Zone

Joe Dante & John Hora: Gremlins, Gremlins 2, Explorers, The Howling, Matinee

Alex Garland & Rob Hardy: Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, Men

Brian De Palma & Stephen H. Burum: Mission to Mars, Mission Impossible, Snake Eyes, Carlito's Way, Raising Cain

Taught by: Dr. Sally Robinson

Section Description: In this section, we will focus on American narratives of crisis. We will discuss literary responses to the Vietnam war, 9/11, and other large-scale crises; how ecological and environmental conditions affect literary form; how individual authors link personal to national (and even global) crises; and how private and personal experience is always tied to public and political systems and events. Each of our authors takes an imaginative approach to representing how individuals negotiate their relationship to historical and traumatic events, with particular attention to howl writers and artists respond to those events. Our discussions of these novels will necessarily involve paying attention to social differences and how those differences condition an individual’s relationship to national (and international) crisis; this means we will discuss issues of gender, race, and class (because all Americans are located in relation to gender, race, and class hierarchies), but no one will be expected to adopt any particular view or opinion on these issues. On the contrary, the novels themselves offer complex representations of how gender, race, and class differences are experienced by a wide range of complicated characters, including white men and women, Arab American men and women, Asian American men and women, Native American men and women, and African American men and women. Throughout the course, students will also learn about actual historical events as well as imagined ones, with the aim of enriching our sense of how American novelists shape public understandings of the things that matter in our lives. 

Proposed Readings: 

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Joan Didion, Democracy (1984)
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1991)
Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)
Amy Waldman, The Submission (2011)
Louise Erdrich, The Future Home of the Living God (2017)
Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts (2022)

Taught by: Dr. Jason Crider

Section Description: This course serves as an overview of some of the major theories and theorists of rhetoric in the 20th and 21st centuries. What is the relationship between rhetoric and culture? Rhetoric and (post)modernity? How does rhetoric function as a method of literary interpretation or cultural criticism? How does rhetoric function differently in oral, textual, and digital contexts? How has rhetoric been traditionally theorized and taught as an academic discipline? Students will explore a broad range of rhetorical theories over the course of the semester and practice applying them to their contemporary moment.

Taught by: Dr. Matt McKinney

Section Description: 

The following is a synopsis of the learning approach we will take in this course and our subject
theme, which is the rhetoric of American culture.

The Task
Everything you read, every show you watch, every conversation you have has a feeling, a tone, a
shape about it that influences how you respond, how you feel about it, and what you do
afterwards. This elusive character is what we’re trying to get at by bringing together these two
words “Rhetoric”and “Style.” Can we systematically and rigorously examine this underlying
sense of language, this shaping of responses, this variety of rhetorical power underlying our
communication?

The Approach
This course will deploy three different tactics for helping us make Style more concrete and to
help us learn to deploy stylistic choices for particular rhetorical effects:
1. Analysis: practice assessing a text's style, how it meets its rhetorical situation, and its
effects and effectiveness.
2. Imitation: practice producing a style in order to get a feel for stylistic elements,
exploring personally their effects, and experimenting with producing them.
3. Critical Engagement: Applying stylistic concepts and evaluating stylistic choices
through ethical engagement with modern GenAI technology (see GenAI policy below)
Our approach will combine an intuitive development of style (getting a feel for it) with a more
analytic and conceptual comprehension of stylistic form (dissecting through terms, grammar,
etc.),with the understanding that some will favor one over the other, but all will benefit from both
approaches.

The Focus
Both Rhetoric (as the study of persuasion) and Style (as the study of the shape of
communication) do not deal with any one topic. To help focus our examination of style, we will
use a common theme: American history and culture.
We are using this because:
● It is a topic familiar to everyone;
● There is an incredible variety in ways of writing about American culture and values;
● Many periods in American history (including the present) have greatly altered and
complicated the rhetorical context in which we speak about American culture.
● A whole variety of emotional responses are associated with speaking about our
relationship to American culture(s) and character(s). People get emotional about this
topic. They get defensive. They wax poetic. They get annoyed, frustrated, tired, excited
(then bored and lose interest). Sometimes writing about American culture is political;
sometimes it’s personal; sometimes it’s both. Sometimes there is an agenda; sometimes
the writer is just trying to capture an experience. Our texts will include this whole array:
from poetry to speeches to court documents to scholarly texts, we’ll consider how
different stylistic modes work within this same constellation of concerns.

Whatever your opinions and feelings about American culture(s), values, norms, taboos, historical
events, and your relationships with each—these will all set the stage for reflecting on style and
rhetorical effects. At the same time, to effectively analyze the rhetoric and style of these writings,
we’ll need to reflect on the variety of ways people approach these topics, getting a bit of distance
from our own opinions and feelings so that we can examine all of the possible stylistic choices
involved. Following this attitude, we will all be respectful of the different avenues for
communicating about American culture while all learning to untangle their relation to stylistic
elements.

Taught by: Dr. Jason Harris

Section Description: 

By the end of this course, you will:

1. Analyze sample screenplays and films to extrapolate helpful strategies and gain a sense of industry standards as well as creative variations.
2. Evaluate screenwriting career plans and keep working journal of goals and steps.
3. Learn screenwriting format and practice with screenwriting software.
4. Write a logline and a treatment to help focus your screenplay and prepare for the agent, contests, and marketing stages.
5. Complete a spec screenplay whether for an episode, short film, or full feature length script.

Proposed Readings:

● Hauge, Michael. Writing Screenplays that Sell. Collins Reference, 2011.
Thanks to the support of Texas A&M University Libraries, you can access the following course materials for free: Writing Screenplays That Sell: The Complete Guide to Turning Story Concepts into Movie and Television Deals
● Snyder, Blake. Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. Michael Wiese Productions, 2005. ISBN: 10-1932907009.
● Trottier, David. The Screenwriter’s Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script. 7th ed. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2019. Print. ISBN: 978-1935247210
● We’ll have other supplemental materials to read, which are free, such as the fifth chapter “Screenplay” from the OER Images in Motion: Exploring Visual Storytelling and there will be a few screenplays available online, and we will view and discuss film clips and entire films to enhance our engagement with screencraft.

Taught by: Dr. Katayoun Torabi

Section Description: In this class, students will examine the Bible as both a collection of disparate texts and as a unified whole, with a particular focus on how the rhetorical strategies of its many authors, narrative structures, and character development in the Bible have all influenced various readings of the text through time. Through guided in-class exercises, small and large group discussions, and written assignments, students will examine ethical issues surrounding politics, religion, nationhood, and community in the Bible and understand them in their own historical and cultural moments. Students will also think about how their own responses to Biblical narratives are rooted in their personal understanding of society and culture, and to reflect on the wider implications of how they and others approach this foundational text. Materials for this course include written texts and such visual and audio representations as paintings, video clips, films, poetry readings, and music. This course is cross-listed with RELS 360.

Proposed Readings:

Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, by Carroll, Robert.

Taught by: Dr. Grace Heneks

Section Description: Horror is not static. It changes as our fears change. This course introduces students to foundational horror theory, drawing on concepts from Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, before tracing the genre’s evolution across literature, film, and television. Beginning with Gothic works like Carmilla and moving through films such as Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, and Get Out, we will explore how horror mutates in response to cultural anxieties about empire, the body, technology, and social control. Along the way, we will encounter vampires, zombies, slashers, and more—asking not just what scares us, but why, and what those fears reveal about the world around us.

Proposed Readings:

Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu
The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
Short stories by: Kipling, Wells, Lovecraft, Taylor, Oria
Films including: Bram Stoker's Dracula, White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, Scream, Alien, Cabin in the Woods, Get Out, Upgrade, The Long Walk, Gaia, and Sinners

Taught by: Dr. Margaret Ezell

Section Description: In this large lecture survey of writings by women in English, we will concentrate on women living and working in the “early modern” period, roughly 1550 through the American and French Revolutions. The survey starts with one of the most important and iconic women in history, Queen Elizabeth 1 (1533-1603), her poetry, speeches, and letters. We will end the survey with two women from very different social backgrounds at the end of the eighteenth century, the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) who was brought to Boston as a slave when a child, and the novelist and essay writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), often referred to as the “first English feminist.”  In between we will read women’s poetry, drama, diaries and household books, and fictions. These are by women who wrote for their friends and family, to earn a living, and to God alone, including aristocratic women such as Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish, housewives, and authors of best sellers such as Dorothy Leigh (The Mother’s Legacy), and Aphra Behn, the first professional woman playwright.  We will look at women’s  participation in manuscript culture as well as their increasing presence in the world of professional and commercial authorship.  Graded assignments will include two comprehensive exams, weekly reading comprehension quizzes, and short skills exercises.

Taught by: Dr. Ira Dworkin

Section Description: An exploration of the development of theAmerican novel; study of representative novels, topics and relevant histories from the early national period through the antebellum era until the end of the century. Instructors teaching this class will choose texts, assessments and approaches that represent current scholarship and satisfy course learning objectives.

Proposed Readings:

Weeks 1-2: Catharine Marie Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827) (Perusall)
Weeks 3-4: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851) (Perusall)
Weeks 5-6: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) (Perusall).
Weeks 7-8: John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) (Perusall)
Week 9: Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1852) (Perusall)
Week 10: Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855) (Perusall)
Weeks 11-12: Read: Martin Delany, Blake (1859-62) (Harvard University Press, library ebook)
Weeks 13-14: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885) (Perusall)
Week 15: Mark Twain, Puddn’head Wilson (1893) (Perusall)

Taught by: Dr. Maura Ives

Section Description: 

Christmas in Literature and Popular Culture
Even if you aren’t a fan of 20th century Christmas films – and even if you’ve never celebrated Christmas – you probably recognize at least one of these quotations and characters:
• “Bah humbug!” -- Ebenezer Scrooge
• “Maybe Christmas ... means a little bit more.” --The Grinch
• “I’m sorry I ruined your lives and crammed 11 cookies into the VCR.” – Buddy the Elf
• “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” – Charlie Brown
You also already know that the Christmas holiday has inspired hundreds of literary works, films, and songs, not to mention an abundance of things to do and see and purchase during the holiday season. The celebration of Christmas has become embedded in cultural narratives about (among other things) identity, community, tradition, and redemption; it has been redefined as a domestic holiday as well as a public festival and religious observance; and it has been celebrated and disparaged as a liminal experience – one that disrupts the patterns and hierarchies of normal life to allow for chaos, transcendence, joy, and the comfort of nostalgia.
How did these things happen, and what do they mean? To answer that question, we will draw upon concepts from a variety of disciplines to study the history and literary representation of Christmas, starting with its origins in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke through its designation as a federal holiday in the late 19th century and beyond. We will read the two most influential literary treatments of Christmas in the English language -- Clement Clarke Moore’s “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – along with lesser-known literary works by a variety of writers in a variety of genres (including science fiction) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will also examine how Christmas has been portrayed in visual and material culture, including Christmas-themed advertising, war propaganda, holiday music, greeting cards from the 19th century to the present, and the continuing reinvention of the holiday in film and television.

Taught by: Dr. Dorothy Todd

Section Description: This course will focus on sixteenth and seventeenth century performances that occurred outside the commercial theater. We will examine drama performed in universities and in the Inns of Court, accounts of processions and investitures, royal progresses performed for Queen Elizabeth I, court masques, and the annual mayoral shows in London. We will also consider how these performances function to create unique understandings of London as a city and of England as a nation in the increasingly global world of the early modern period. Throughout the course, we will interrogate performance outside the theater as a form of meaning-making that exists both as a historical practice and as a phenomenon that we continue to encounter today.

Proposed Readings: London Mayoral Shows, Royal Progresses, Court Masques, Ballads

Taught by: Dr. Jessica Howell

Section Description: This section of ENGL 395 focuses on the “poetry of embodiment.” Together, we will closely read poetry that explores embodied experiences such as childbirth, aging, medical treatment, and being together with the natural world. We will consider how poetic form expresses these experiences in unique ways. Readings include works by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sylvia Plath, Ada Limón, and others. The class defines “poetry” and the “poetic” broadly enough to encompass diverse texts, including material poems that can be planted in the ground, or a poem-play such as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. We will also read authors’ own works wherein they explore their embodied creative process. Students will practice close reading and study elements of poetic form, write argumentative essays, and compose their own poetic experiments. We will also discuss how poetry plays a role in literature and medicine studies.

Taught by: Dr. Avery Blankenship

Section Description: Jean Brillat-Savarin, the famous French gourmand, once wrote: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.” Food has played a central role in American identity since the country’s founding: the infamous inaugural Thanksgiving meal, the tossing of imported tea into the Boston harbor, the dinner which determined the location of our nation’s capital. In this course, we will explore the relationship between narratives of food and eating within American literature and culture. We will discuss food as a form of connection, as a tool of control, and as part of the larger American mythos of the culinary melting pot. From the haute cuisine of fine dining to the folk traditions of the hearth, we will ask: what is literary America eating and what does that say about who we are?

Proposed Readings: 

Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley

Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat

The Menu (2022) (Film)

Ratatouille (2007)(Film)

Taught by: Dr. Sally Robinson

Section Description: Margaret Atwood is one of the most prolific authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. She has pioneered numerous genres (comedy, historical fiction, dystopic fiction, personal narrative, adaptation), and has spoken often about the place of literature in our world. In this course, we will read eight of Atwood’s novels, spanning the period between 1969 to 2005. We will read chronologically, but this also means reading through Atwood’s many experimentations with literary form. Atwood writes unsentimentally about women and about feminism; her work explores the complex negotiations required for women living in a world dominated by men and male-created institutions. Women in her novels are victims, aggressors, murderers, artists, writers, mothers, daughters, friends, and lovers. The novels treat political as well as personal themes, as Atwood places her protagonists in complex situations including political coups, prison, post-apocalyptic landscapes, reproductive dystopias, and even ancient Greece. For each novel we read, I will select a critical article so that students will get a strong will learn about the scholarly conversations her work has generated. 

Proposed Readings: 

The Edible Woman 1969
The Testaments 2019
Bodily Harm 1981
The Handmaid’s Tale 1985
Alias Grace 1996
Oryx and Crake 2003
The Penelopiad 2005

Taught by: Dr. Nancy Warren

Section Description: This  section focuses on a range of Chaucer's writings taught in Middle English.  We will read a wide selection of The Canterbury Tales as well as other works, including The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women among others.  In addition to learning Middle English grammar and vocabulary, students will analyze texts in relation to their cultural environments as well as in relation to critical developments in medieval literary scholarship.

Taught by: Dr. Katayoun Torabi

Section Description: Are you interested in how computers affect our understanding and study of cultural heritage: literature, history, art, religion, philosophy, etc.? Do you want to learn how to use open-source software to analyze source material, make arguments, and present your ideas to the public? If so, this cross-listed course is for you. Whether you want to make more engaging class presentations, pursue a career that engages the public online, or develop technical skills that will set you apart, this course will help you do that. You will learn about how computers are used to conduct humanities research and the impact of technology on different fields of study. You will also use digital tools to visualize literary analysis, create digital maps, and analyze social networks. There is no disciplinary prerequisite, no extensive technical skills are required for the course, and no one disciplinary approach will be favored. This course is cross-listed with Digital Humanities 433 and History 433.

Proposed Readings: The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship by Johanna Drucker, 2021

Taught by: Dr. Elizabeth Robinson

Section Description: This course analyzes the seminal tales of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, his “English” myth.  It explores topics including the nature of heroes/heroism, good and evil, the created races (Elves, Dwarves, Men etc.), the supernatural and the ways in which the Christian myth “is absorbed” in the larger myth, significant themes, and the roles of women.  The course draws upon relevant scholarship, and is informed by consistent reference to Tolkien’s letters, his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” and his poem, “Mythopoeia.” 

Proposed Readings: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

Taught by: Dr. Sarah Potvin

Section Description: How do digital technologies affect how we write, read, and think about texts? This section of ENGL460 will consider how texts are shaped by technologies – whether printing presses, word processors, websites, audiobooks, or LLMs. Students will read, reflect, experiment, and build, with a goal of interpreting and contributing to the current moment in digital authoring. Section assignments include group presentations, weekly writing labs, and the production of a final digital artifact.

Taught by: Dr. Katie Adkison

Section Description: Our topic this semester is “Women’s Speculative Writing.” Engaging in fantastical and/or futuristic world building, philosophical and/or scientific thought experiments, and sociopolitical, psychological, and historical analyses across a variety of genres, women’s speculative writing shares one key attribute: it asks “what if” questions. What if women wrote for themselves and each other, rather than for men? What if the scientific revolution included women’s perspectives? What if the archive of women’s poetry examined the materials on which poems are written? What if humans had to cohabitate and breed with an alien species to survive outer space? What if you could download your bad memories to a computer so you didn’t have to live with them? What if women were more physically threatening/powerful than men? What if Barbie were real? This class will read widely, across a variety of texts and genres organized around such “what if” questions: feminist theory, early modern prose romance, poetry, short stories, a sci fi novel, pop music, and the 2023 summer blockbuster film Barbie. We will explore the speculations opened by each text about what might, could, would, or should be. 

Proposed Readings: Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World; Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems;
short stories by Kate Chopin, Jamaica Kincaid, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, N.K. Jemisin, and Gina Chung; Naomi Alderman's The Power; select poetry, pop songs, and nonfiction about girlhood; and Greta Gerwig's Barbie

Taught by: Dr. Michael Collins

Section Description: Crime, detection, trial, punishment, rehabilitation, freedom: This is the familiar cycle of justice in the United States and many other nations. The whole of this cycle, as well as the legal and theoretical framework in which the cycle unfolds, is the subject matter of the interdisciplinary subfield of literary criticism and legal studies that is known as “Law and Literature.”
A well-known judge, Richard Posner, traces the contours of the field when he writes (in his 1986 essay, "Law and Literature: A Relation Reargued"), of the frequency with which law as a subject appears in literature, and of the literary character of many written judicial opinions, plus the fact that laws and legal documents must be interpreted, just as works of literature must be.
This class will explore works that represent, theorize, or condemn all of part of this cycle of justice--including the complexities of selected laws, cases and rulings -- as the authors, lawyers and judges we read explore the intricacies of injustice and its opposite. At a larger level, this class will explore the impact of legal systems on societies like that of the United States.

Proposed Readings: Possible readings range from Plato's The Last Days of Socrates (a collection of dialogues translated by Harold Tarrant and Hugh Tredennick), to Jodi Picoult's novel A Spark of Light, to Linda Bates' memoir Shakespeare Saved My Life, to Ann Bausum's Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, to Stephen Breyer's Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America's Schools.

Taught by: Dr. Margaret Ezell

Section Description: 

Aphra Behn (c. 1640-1689) was not only an important figure in the history of women’s writing but also a remarkable figure in the emerging world of professional, commercial authors in England, which developed over the last few decades of the seventeenth century. We will be looking at her life and career against a backdrop of extraordinary historical events through which she lived and witnessed—the English Civil War, the Puritan Interregnum, and the libertine backlash against Puritanism displayed by the court culture of King Charles II during the Restoration. The English Civil War had raised questions about who was in power and what was the true origin and nature of that authority, which during Behn’s lifetime spread from politics and government into debates over domestic politics and the family, in particular touching the nature of marriage. The expanding English colonial world meant encountering new peoples and cultures abroad, which fascinated English readers. Little is known about Behn’s early life, but it is clear that she earned her living through professional writing from the 1670s until her death, with successful plays written for the first professional actresses on the English commercial stage, new types of fiction called “novels,” as well as being an editor and translator.

This seminar will involve hands-on workshops on how literary texts were created, read, and circulated in earlier times. Graded assignments will include 2 short response essays, 2 skills exercises, and a substantial research essay on a topic of your choice coming out of the semester’s materials.

Proposed Readings:

Behn, Aphra—Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman ( Oxford World’s Classics*) ISBN: 978-0-19-953876-8

Behn, Aphra—The Rover and Other Plays, ed. Jane Spencer (Oxford World’s Classics*)

ISBN: 978-0-19-954020-4

Behn, Aphra—The Widow Ranter, ed. Adrienne Eastwood (Broadview Press)

ISBN: 9781554815739

Files and links to electronic texts on Canvas

 *Evans Library has all of the World’s Classics texts available as ebooks for free but they can be tricky to find.

Taught by: Dr. Laura Mandell

Section Description: In this class, we will examine the explosion of “big data” and explore techniques for understanding it. We will discern the most important components of data literacy as well as techniques for visualizing data. We will ask, what is the relationship between elements of our cultural heritage (literatures of the past and present) and “data”? What is the relationship between AI and data? Bias and knowledge work? How does the knowledge we have as English majors help us to “read” data visualizations? Assignments will include responses to the readings and a final paper that involves creating or analyzing a knowledge visualization graph.

This course exposes English majors to the workings of the digital world enabling critical thinking about digital globalization as well as instilling comfort with the tools used in 21st-century workplaces (working in teams with designers and programmers, for example, and working with AI).

Proposed Readings:

Readings include Donna Haraway, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Johanna Drucker, Sofiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Timnit Gebru, and more.