Course Descriptions

Taught by: Dr. James Francis

Course Description: When did you receive your first phone? This may seem like an innocuous question, but that purchase/gift changed parts of you forever. How you communicate with people, what you do to pass the time, the way you seek information, etc. are all aspects of living that shifted when that piece of technology was introduced into your life. Many people voice concern and wonder about our interactions with such innovations and we typically have power and control over how much we use them. On the other hand, consider something less tangible, something we have no power or control over: the unknown. What situations plague or energize your mind regarding the present and/or the future? You might be surprised how that individual thought represents a social apprehension. Cultural sensibilities--positive, negative, indifferent--of time, technology, transhumanism, and the unknown never really fade away; they evolve to fit moments of human growth and development, and some of them are ever present. The exploration of our collective curiosities, fears, and anxieties is the foundation for our course, and we will conduct this investigation through classic and modern science fiction, Gothic literature, and horror narratives of various literary forms (poetry, short fiction, novel(la), and film). The situations narrated in literature allow us to explore, analyze, and discuss how our personal experiences mirror and/or differ from those of fictional stories based on our cultural backgrounds, gender identities, religious beliefs, geographic environments, and much more. This course serves as an introduction to the modes of reading and writing common to the discipline of English, and as such we will practice analyzing literary and filmic elements, enhancing communication and persuasive skills, and interpreting narrative forms, content, and themes to understand their connection to real-world issues we encounter as humankind experiences time, technology, transhumanism, and the unknown throughout history. And hopefully, even though this is a college course with assignments and grades, we can have a bit of fun along the way.

Proposed Readings: "There Will Come Soft Rains", Under the Skin, Frankenstein, Fahrenheit 451, "The Machine Stops", Predestination, Starship Troopers, Her, Brave New World, The Platform, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long", Black Mirror

Taught by: Dr. Kevin O'Sullivan

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the life and work of William Shakespeare. Our readings will begin with a selection of Shakespeare’s poems, which we will use to acquaint ourselves with the language and literary culture of early modern England. We will then proceed to an in-depth analysis of selected plays, representing work from a variety of dramatic genres (comedies, histories, and tragedies). Throughout the semester, we will consider why Shakespeare’s works continue to resonate with audiences more than four centuries after they were first produced. To facilitate that dialogue, our readings will be supplemented by analyses of recent film adaptations of the plays we read. As part of the Honors section of this course, students will be expected to complete additional critical readings and assignments.

Proposed Readings: Selected sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Othello, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale

Taught by: Dr. Kevin O'Sullivan

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the life and work of William Shakespeare. Our readings will begin with a selection of Shakespeare’s poems, which we will use to acquaint ourselves with the language and literary culture of early modern England. We will then proceed to an in-depth analysis of selected plays, representing work from a variety of dramatic genres (comedies, histories, and tragedies). Throughout the semester, we will consider why Shakespeare’s works continue to resonate with audiences more than four centuries after they were first produced. To facilitate that dialogue, our readings will be supplemented by analyses of recent film adaptations of the plays we read. As part of the Honors section of this course, students will be expected to complete additional critical readings and assignments.

Proposed Readings: Selected sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Othello, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale

Taught by: Dr. Susan Stabile

Course Description: As part of Texas A&M University’s core curriculum in Creative Arts, this course focuses on the appreciation and analysis of imaginative literary and visual artifacts through the idea of bricolage (French for “tinkering”). A form of art-making, as sociologist Levi Strauss explains, it is “making creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand regardless of their original purpose.” Bricolage, in short, is the “art” of recycling—to find and borrow, destroy and create, adapt and assemble, restore and even repair. Our particular focus will be on the “aesthetics of the everyday”: literature and art as recycling existing materials into new and unexpected forms: recombination (i.e., collage & assemblage), de-creation and adaptation (i.e., erasure, redaction, detournment, & modification ); borrowed templates (i.e., “hermit crab” essays); and activism (i.e., environmental art).

We will consider the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics as well as the neuropsychology of creativity in both theory and practice through daily creativity exercises, handwritten journaling, and innovative projects, challenging the false dichotomy of the discrete and double-sided brain that opposes critical and creative thinking. Engaging models of divergent thinking—key to problem-solving, collaboration, and innovation across the humanities and STEM—students will experiment with what Albert Einstein called “combinatory play”: “the essential feature in productive thought, such play is “the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another.” Playing the violin to crack open his theory of relativity. Combinatory play, along with divergent thinking, then, is a mode of bricolage: taking two already existing yet unrelated things and putting them together to generate new ideas, while staying open to the generative possibilities of disruption, messiness, and what creative Adam Grant (professor of management and psychology) calls pre-crastination.

Taught by: Dr. Robert Stagg

Course Description: How do poems respond to paintings, and paintings to poems? What do literature and music have in common? Can a short story be like a sculpture, or a novel like a garden? This course will consider the various connections (and disjunctions) between literature and the other arts, across time periods and national borders.

Taught by: Dr. Vanita Reddy

Course Description: This course introduces students to the historical scope of Asian American literature and culture, including attention to visual media. Reaching across the twentieth into the twenty first century, we will engage questions of genre and aesthetics, and how they are shaped by and shape the political and historical contexts under which “Asian American” as a racial category gains (and loses) traction. We will examine the construction of Asian Americans as “model minorities,” “perpetual foreigners,” “terrorists,” refugees, immigrants, and, most recently through the renewal of anti-Asian violence engendered by the COVID 19 pandemic, as the new “the yellow peril.” We will learn about histories related to immigration and exclusion, detention, movements for social change, and the impact of immigration laws, imperial wars in Asia, settler colonialism, and colonial and postcolonial diasporas on Asian American literature and culture.

Proposed Readings: • Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) (selections) • John Okada, No No Boy (1957) • Flower Drum Song, Dirs. Rodgers and Hammerstein (1957) • Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior (1977) • Mississippi Masala, Dir. Mira Nair (1991) • Fae Ng, Bone (1993) • Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (2000) (selections) • Randa Jarrar, A Map of Home (2008) • Viet Nguyen, The Refugees (2017) (selections) • Never Have I Ever (select episodes), Dir. Mindy Kaling (2021)

Taught by: Dr. Marian Eide

Course Description: Catalogue: Literary works from the late 18th century to the 21st century by authors in Great Britain and its colonies.) 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 the various revolutions in governance, philosophy, identity, and technology. This literature of this period is deeply engaged with history and politics, planting deep roots for our own contemporary thought.

Proposed Readings: All readings will be available on Canvas. Authors include: William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rosetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot.Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Caryl Phillips.

Taught by: Dr. James Francis

Course Description: "The science fiction-horror text is no stranger to literary criticism; in its written and visual forms, scholars have unpacked the ways in which the hybrid genre often tackles and represents shared sociocultural—including religious, political, and economic—terrors and apprehensions through thematic, symbolic, and metaphorical story elements. When we examine a specific time period and the sci-fi horror narratives produced during that era, we discover that the texts serve as historical time markers, responding to global concerns that link our transnational humanity and perspectives in remarkable ways. From early written works to the 1950s-1970s heyday period of sci-fi horror film texts (mostly adaptations), examining narratives from this time span will allow us to consider how past anxieties transition into fears of the early 21st Century zeitgeist. As an introduction to the English major, we will engage with various types of narrative forms (poem, short story, novel, fiction film, television) that confront science and horror as natural aspects of everyday living and genres (separate and combined) that fascinate us and therein develop strategies for reading, interpreting, researching, and writing about the narratives to gain a communal understanding of representative concepts in literature, rhetoric, and creative writing."

Proposed Readings:

“There Will Come Soft Rains”, “The Machine Stops”, “The Colour Out of Space”, “Empire of the Ants”, “Button, Button”, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long”, Starship Troopers, afrAId, The Last Man on Earth, Her, Enemy Mine, Demon Seed, Carmilla, Black Mirror, Frankenstein

Taught by: Dr. Regina Mills

Course Description:

Taught by: Dr. Mary-Ann O'Farrell

Course 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).

 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 and watch include such novels as the first of the Harry Potter books, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, and such films as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Clueless.

Taughty by: Dr. Andrew Pilsch

Course Description: This course will use the figure of the unreliable narrator to introduce key methods and principles of literary study. Given the course theme, how do we read a text when the surprise is spoiled in advance? What other ways of reading might be possible? We will read some criticism on the unreliable narrator (likely Wayne C. Booth, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and William Riggan) as well as a range of texts that utilize different aspects of unreliable narration, likely including Turn of the Screw, Gone Girl, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The question of unreliability and genre will also be important.

Taught by: Dr. Apostolos Vasilakis

Course Description: This course will focus on the history of literary criticism and theory from antiquity to the present time. During the course we will read (among others) authors like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Lessing, Marx and Freud, Wittig and Cixoux, Said and Fanon, and discuss not only the evolutions and transitions in literary theory and criticism, but most importantly how theory has changed the way we think about literature; its own means of materiality; and our understanding of culture, history, and language.

Proposed Readings: 

Taught by: Dr. Dorothy Todd

Course Description: From the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 to the regicide of King Charles I in 1649, the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the seventeenth century in England was a period of profound political upheaval. Expanded trade networks and colonial ventures, a newfound emphasis on scientific inquiry, and the rise of Puritanism also shaped England in the seventeenth century. Literature from the period, unsurprisingly, reflects these upheavals and changes; new genres emerge, popular literature finds an increased readership, religious literature takes a turn to the personal, and women writers’ works circulate more widely. In this course, we will examine a variety of texts such as metaphysical poetry, pamphlets and ballads, travel writing, political and religious treatises, and estate poetry to consider how England shaped, and was shaped by, the changing world of the seventeenth century.

Proposed authors include:

Aemilia Layner

George Herbert

John Donne

Ben Jonson

King James I

Hester Pulter

Margaret Cavendish

John Milton

Francis Bacon

Samuel Pepys

Taught by: Dr. Noah Peterson

Description: 2025 marks the 540th anniversary since William Caxton first printed Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur in 1485. It is no exaggeration to say that every post-medieval Arthurian project has largely been a response to Malory's text and the "noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin" found within his book of King Arthur and the noble Knights of the Round Table. This course will include placing the Morte within its historical and literary context and involve detailed reading and discussion of the entirety of Malory’s text supplemented by contemporary scholarly approaches to Malory’s Arthurian project. Topics will include medieval texts and adaptation; religion and the medieval / modern reader; the complex construction of “chivalry”; gender and race as they appear in Malory’s text; the geography, landscape, and space that the characters navigate; the blended Romance / Chronicle prose style of Malory; and the modern, world-wide reception and response to Malory’s Morte Darthur including films which are inspired by the text.

Proposed Readings: Le Morte Darthur; selections from The History of the Kings of Britain, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur; several 20th and 21st century films

Taught by: Dr. Elizabeth Robinson

Course Description: Beginning with a brief look back at early texts that influenced the development of the fantasy novel, this course primarily explores modern fantasy, a genre which begins to come into its own in the 19th century. We will explore the work of George MacDonald, one of the major early fantasy writers, the work of the three giants of modern fantasy, J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Ursula LeGuin, and the satiric/humorous fantasy of Terry Pratchett. Finally, we will read a YA novel by Garth Nix and Susanna Clarke's most recent novel. We will explore fantasy novels written for adults, for young adults, and for children.

Proposed Readings:

• George MacDonald, Phantastes

• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

• C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

• Ursula LeGuin, Wizard of Earthsea

• Garth Nix, Sabriel

• Susannah Clarke, Piranesi

• Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Taught by: Dr. Sara DiCaglio

Course Description: How do rhetoric, health, and gender intersect? This course looks at the intersection of gender and health as a rhetorical object—something that is crafted and shaped through specific choices in language, writing, and other modes of discourse. Whose bodies fit into definitions of health? How do questions of disability, gender, and other modes of identity show up, get shaped by, or drop out of these definitions? What's the impact of these questions on our lived experiences of gender and health? Looking at a wide range of sources--pop culture, health pamphlets, commercials, policies, activism, spaces, social media, etc--this course will help students to understand how to use strategies of rhetorical analysis to better understand the ways gender and health are shaped in discourse. We will attend to a variety of texts and moments in cultural discourse, focusing on how literacy, expertise, and knowledge work in relation to one another in the creation of ideas about gender and health. The course is designed to be welcoming to students from a wide range of backgrounds; those with backgrounds in health will find new ways to attend to the impacts of language and rhetoric on those ideas about health, those interested in gender will have opportunities to think about how constructions of health relate to those questions, and those interested in rhetoric or the English major in general will see how language comes to impact the every day through our specific case study.

Proposed Readings:

Taught by: Dr. Jason Harris

Course Description: Credits 3. 3 Lecture Hours. “A different topic for fiction writers or poets each term; may include historical development of genres; connection between biography and artistic production; study of writers' theories of the art of fiction or poetry. Prerequisites: ENGL 235; junior or senior classification.” Uncanny, Disquieting, Weird, and Dreadful Tales:

The short prose works we will read and write in this course will be characterized by their ability to disturb expectations of normalcy via offering startling visions that challenge the complacent status quo of consensus reality. Some writers in our class may choose to focus on the fantastic story of supernatural horrors while others may prefer to dwell in realism but defamiliarize mundanity through carefully rendered prose that captures the chaotic spaces between rational perceptions. And yet other writers may wish to inhabit an interstitial creative space—defying rigid categorization and conjuring a spell of irreducible disconcertion. Our readings will include stories of the weird, horror, magical realism, uncanny folklore, and the literary fantastic. Your work will culminate in a portfolio of three revised new short stories.

Required Book List:

Cisco, Michael. Pest ‎ ISBN 978-1955904308

Jackson, Shirley. Dark Tales. ISBN: 9780143132004

Joshi, S. T. Ed. American Supernatural Tales. Anthology 2007. ISBN 9780143105046

Murakami, Haruki. The Strange Library. 9780385354301

Vandermeer Jeff and Ann, The Weird. TOR, 2011. ISBN: 9780765333629

Taught by: Dr. Lowell White

Course Description: This course will explore the darker side of contemporary life in the United States, focusing on noirish stories that are aware of history and tread the line between Mystery and Horror. The Horror can result from real paranormal creatures or from human activities, or from metaphorical concepts. The Mysteries can result from crime, ranging from shoplifting to murder, or from the open-ended idea of the ineffable. The writers will focus on their character’s chance encounter with whatever darkness they encounter out there in the world....

Proposed Readings:

Gran, Sara. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. 978-0547747613

Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 978-0143039976

Percy, Benjamin. Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. 978-1555977597

Hynes, James. Publish or Perish. 978-0312186968

Taught by: Dr. Joan Alonzo

Course Description: This course examines Latinx representation in U.S. film during the 20th and 21st centuries. We will focus on recent Latinx cinema production (broadly defined to include film, video, television and streaming), but we will necessarily start with the longer history of Latinx representation, including the creation of derogatory stereotypes about Latinx peoples in early films. Once we establish a historical and theoretical basis for understanding Latinx representation, we will concentrate on the ways Latinx peoples, particularly members of Chicanx communities, have narrativized their histories and experiences in the United States.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Chicanx/Latinx cinema became an extension of social movements for liberation and was expressive of a desire for self-representation. We will explore themes and concerns that animate the Latinx experience in the U.S., including the critique of stereotypes, the experience of immigration, the presence of the border, notions of identity, the importance of education, and discussions about gender roles and sexuality. These themes carry over to the 1980s feature films and into the present. We will also be attentive to: demands for the greater accessibility and increased representation of Latinx peoples in the film industry; the need for the inclusion of Latinx characters in television streaming and superhero movies; the growing impact of established stars as activists within film, television and other areas of cultural expression.

The course will incorporate analysis of the elements and methods of narrative film, including narrative structure, film genres, character types and stereotypes, editing techniques, framing and composition, and camera movement. We will examine how film technique is used in the representation of race and ethnicity, and we will use our understanding of technique and racial representation in the analysis of film.

Films vary from semester to semester. Below is a sampling of movies students have studied in previous semesters: "I am Joaquin" (1969) "La Bamba" (1987) "Selena" (1997) "Amores Perros" (2000) "Y Tu Mamá También" (2001) "Sleep Dealer" (2008) "Machete" (2010) "The Infiltrators" (2019) "In the Heights" (2021)

Proposed Readings: Critical essays and book chapters will be available on Canvas.

Taught by: Dr. Jason Crider

Course 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 historical moment.

Proposed Readings:

Taught by: Dr. Ray Leonard

Course Description: This course opens with a provocation: the logic of conquest, violence and exclusion that allowed Europeans to settle the Americas -- and to construct a mythological “American Identity” -- did not fade out with the end of American territorial expansion; it is a structure that underwrites the very concept of America itself. Over the course of the semester, we will compare contemporary and early nineteenth-century Native American writings, paying attention to the ways that both contemporary and historical Native authors resisted an American cultural and legal system that sought to define what a “real Indian” is and should be. Our readings will traverse many genres – autobiography, science fiction, and horror, just to name a few. We will also spend considerable time on the strategies and tropes that have defined “the Indian” in popular American media, from the works of James Fenimore Cooper up to Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves. In doing so we will face tough questions: what does it mean to be Indigenous? Can one lose one’s indigeneity? Can someone become Indigenous? As we will see, the history of colonialism in North America is defined by a struggle over representation, and as such this course will be deeply invested in the ways that literature and rhetoric frame the relationship between Native Americans and the American empire.

Proposed Readings: 

Tommy Orange, There, There (2018)

Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman (1990)

William Apess, A Son of the Forest (1829)

Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (1984)

Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians (2020)

Taught by: Dr. Melissa McCoul

Course Description: Maybe you grew up reading Harry Potter or Holes, Nancy Drew or the Narnia stories. Maybe you were a comic-book kid. Whatever your personal predilections, you probably already have a pretty good sense of what children's literature is. But as soon as you try to define it, you'll find that safe-seeming category becomes slippery. In this course, we will begin to tease out the boundaries of this capacious category called “children's literature.” What counts? Who decides? What differentiates writing for children from writing for adults? Why should we, as adults, read children’s literature? In this course, we will explore a range of children’s literature in English, including picture books, poetry, contemporary novels, historical fiction, and fantasy. Our task is to think critically about what these books can tell us about how we (and others) understand childhood, how those definitions have changed over time, and how these books participate in larger movements of history, culture, and literature.

Proposed Readings: 

Taught by: Dr. Juan Alonzo

Course Description: ENGL/HISP 362 is part of a two-course Latinx literature sequence, when paired with ENGL/HISP 262—Introduction to Latinx Literary Studies. While 262 serves as a broad introduction, 362 is a Topics Course. The topic of this section is Chicanx literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through the close reading of fiction, poetry, essays, and historical documents, we will become familiar with the history of Mexican American or Chicanx peoples and develop a critical understanding of their aesthetic production. Some of the historical sites and themes on which we’ll focus include the U.S.-Mexico War of 1848, the Chicano Movement, immigration, citizenship, home, and issues of race, gender, sexuality and class. To enrich your understanding of Chicanx literature, the primary texts will be supplanted with historical documents and contextual readings, as well as other theoretical, socio-political and critical essays that will help you better understand the development of this literature. Your most important tool will be a willingness to engage deeply and think critically and independently.

The reading list for spring 2025 is not yet finalized.** In recent semesters, students have read:

George Washington Gómez, by Américo Parades And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, by Tomas Rivera Woman Hollering Creek, by Sandra Cisneros Brownsville, by Oscar Casares Selected poetry, short stories, and critical essays

**Please note: the reading list will almost certainly be different for spring 2025.

Taught by: Dr. Landon Sadler

Course Description: Description Horror Studies. (3-0). Credit 3. History, theories and major subgenre developments of contemporary horror studies in film and literature. Prerequisites: Junior or senior classification. Cross-listed with FILM 366. One major subgenre development we will focus on is the turn toward so-called "elevated horrors," a contested term used more often by fans and critics than by scholars and artists to describe works that emphasize psychological depth and social critique over "cheap" jump scares, gratuitous violence, and clichéd tropes. How did "elevated horrors" come to be, what values underpin them, and what do they say--accurately and not--about horror's past, present, and future?

Proposed Readings: Get Out, Talk to Me, The Babadook, I Saw the TV Glow, Talk to Me, The Substance, X, Prey, Host, and M3GAN

Taught by: Dr. Sally Robinson

Course Description: WOMEN, WRITING, AND CONSUMER CULTURE

In this course, we will explore the complex symbolic relationship between women and consumerism. Within patriarchal cultures, women’s hunger for food, for men, for material goods is very often considered problematic; we hear about women who love too much, who shop too much, who eat too much. Even as women are often represented as out of control consumers, they also find themselves represented as the objects of consumption; women and the female body are used to sell products, women’s individual identities are often consumed by others’ needs and desires, women are frequently represented as objects to be owned, purchased, used. How have women writers approached these issues? Do novels by women critically revise, or uncritically accept, what we might call a male-oriented or masculinist take on questions of female appetite and desire? How do race and class impact how women relate to consumer culture, and how consumer culture positions women?

Proposed Readings: 

Jane Austen, Emma 1815

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret 1862

Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1925

Nella Larsen, Passing 1929

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye 1970

Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman 1969

Harry Jaglom, director, Eating: A Serious Comedy about Women and Food 1990

Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate 1992

Alisa Valdez Rodrigues, The Dirty Girls Social Club 2003

Taught by: Dr. Mary Ann O'Farrell

Course Description: Our course will focus on the history and development of the British novel and on the many pleasures to be taken in reading it. We will also consider some preoccupations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as thought out in the novels we read. Some of our interests in class discussion and as readers will include: money and marriage, manners and style, publishing and reading practices, bodies and things, majority and minority of character, business and politics, spinsters and bachelors, ways of knowing, work and words, laughter and blushes and tears.

Proposed Readings: Readings will likely include works by such authors as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, and the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour: A Tale.

Taught by: Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya

Course Description: An understanding of the canon of British literature, both traditionally and non-traditionally defined; an understanding of the origins and development of the novel form; an understanding of the British empire and its cultural consequences; an understanding of some major cultural trends of the twentieth century; an understanding of and familiarity with the British novel (1870–2024).

Prospective Readings:

 Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch.

Lewicka, Marian. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Max, Beerbohm. Zuleika Dobson.

McEwan, Ian. On Chesil Beach.

Taught by: Dr. Whitney Sperrazza

Course Description: This course explores the history of medicine through the lens of literary texts written during the early British empire (1550-1750). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, plants, animals, insects, and human bodies were transported across the Atlantic as part of England’s colonial project. The period’s poetry, prose, and drama functioned as both a space to investigate completely new things and a space to test interactions between new and old things. What is this new plant and how do we test its effect on the human body? How might new medicinal knowledge challenge or expand old ways of practicing medicine? In this class, we’ll study medicinal recipe books, travelogues, and botanical treatises alongside more traditional literary texts in order to better understand how the history of medicine shaped and was shaped by the literary market.

Taught by: Dr. Robert Stagg

Course Description: 'Studies in Shakespeare' provides advanced study of a significant topic in Shakespeare - this semester, we will be thinking about "late Shakespeare". In the first, most basic and yet most important, instance we will be reading various plays that have been considered "late" in Shakespeare's writing career, from 'The Tempest' and 'The Winter's Tale' to 'Cymbeline' and 'Macbeth'. But we'll probe beyond this to think about "lateness" as an artistic category: do artists, whether writers or painters or musicians, have "late phases" or "late styles", and what can this mean for them and for us? And what about "early Shakespeare", putatively late Shakespeare's opposite? Can we characterize a writer's works by their date of composition (or, in the case of a dramatist, by their date of performance)? If so, how do we establish the likely chronology of writing by an author dead some four hundred years ago, and why might such efforts matter (or not matter)? Answers will not be straightforwardly dispensed at the end of our seminars, but we'll have some fascinating discussions en route.

Taught by: Dr. Elizabeth Robinson

Course Description: 

Speaking of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien writes:

[A] basic passion of mine . . . was for myth and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world . . . I am not ‘learned’ in the matters of myth and fairy-story, however, for in such things . . . I have always been seeking material, things of a certain tone and air, and not simple knowledge.  Also . . . I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought . . . nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.  Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing (Letters 144).

 Thus, Tolkien goes on to explain, he began to create “a body of more or less connected legend” (The Silmarillion) which tells the tales of the First, Second, and Third Ages of Middle-earth.  The Hobbit (written for children) follows, and is important to the sequel, The Lord of the Rings, as it brings the “One Ring” out of the darkness of Gollum’s cave, of time, and of history.  The Lord of the Rings concludes the cycle and recounts the end of the Third Age and ushers in the Fourth Age, the age of Men, which is where Tolkien ends his mythic cycle about Middle-earth.

 While Tolkien creates his great mythic cycle partly to create an English mythos, it is also “fundamentally a religious and Catholic work” in which “the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism” (Letters 172).  The centrality of the Christian myth to Tolkien’s work is made abundantly clear in his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories” in which he sets out the concepts of Recovery, Escape, Consolation, and Eucatastrophe, “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale)” to define what we today consider genre fantasy (On Fairy-Stories 153). Creating such fantasy, Tolkien argues “remains a human right: we make . . . because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker (“On Fairy-Stories” 145).

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 (ISBN 9780544338012) 

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Boxed Set (ISBN 9780547928180) or individually:

The Hobbit (ISBN 9780547928227) 

The Fellowship of the Ring (ISBN 9780547928210) 

The Two Towers (ISBN 9780547928203) 

The Return of the King (ISBN 9780547928197)

Taught by: Dr. Jason Harris

Course Description:

Taught by: Dr. Sarah Potvin

Course Description: How has the shift from print to electronic publication changed our understanding of authorship and our experience as readers? How do emerging AI technologies further challenge our assumptions about the practices that produce texts? This course approaches digital authoring practices through historically and theoretically informed reflection, experimentation, and building. We will explore the work of textual production through creative engagement with digital publication and critical inquiry into the tools and platforms that shape our experiences as authors, editors, and readers. The course aims to increase digital literacy and does not require or anticipate advanced knowledge of digital technologies; beginners are welcome.

Taught by: Dr. Laura Mandell

Course Description: Based in Feminist and psychological theories, this course explores the relationship between politics and great art in women's writing. We will be examining in novels written by women from 1813 to 2023 the problem of "Othering," which is to say, projecting onto others -- usually those who are oppressed in some way -- all the qualities, capacities, and actions that one hates about human beings. In The Second Sex (1949, trans. 1953), Simone de Beauvoir argued that woman is seen as "the Other" by men and even by themselves. Later, the concept as derived from Jean-Paul Sartre was taken up by the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan whose work was popularized by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose in their edition of essays by Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (1982). We have come to recognize "othering" people, whether idealizing or demonizing them (usually both) as instrumental in racism, classism, and imperialism, from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to Chandra Talpade Mohanty's groundbreaking essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1984). The academy tends to discount the aesthetic value of political writing, seeing it as "bad art." Here, we are going to examine efforts by women novelists to expose oppression and its baneful political effects, testing the notion proposed by Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects that works objecting to Western culture's process of othering those who are different just is great art.

Proposed Readings:

 Jane Austen, Emma; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments; Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other.

Taught by: Dr. Mike Collins

Course Description: Crime, detection, trial, punishment, rehabilitation,parole: 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 frameworks 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.” As a way of introducing “Law and Literature,” and its subfield “Law as Literature” (which investigates the literary aspects of judicial opinions and other legal texts), this class will explore works that represent, theorize, or critique all of part of this cycle as the authors 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. Although the list of texts to be read has not been finalized, previous versions of this class have focused on texts by authors such as fiction writers Louise Erdrich and  Walter Mosley and nonfiction writer Sarah Weddington, one of the lawyers who brought the case of Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court.

Taught by: Dr. Joshua DiCaglio

Course Description: 

This course takes the Space Race as a central moment that we can use for advanced study of rhetoric and literature. The amount of attention, effort, and narratives generated for and by this transformation make the Space Race an excellent case study in how and why we need more careful and extensive understanding of language and culture. Just as Vietnam was the first televised war, the Space Race was the first coordinated and on-going experiment in the cooperation between science, public relations, and mass market media, which led to a widespread conversation on the value of modern technology, the goals of man, and the direction of society. All this rhetoric and effort occurred alongside the Cold War, fears of Nuclear annihilation, Vietnam, the first whispers of ecological crisis, and increasing impatience with racial disparities highlighted by the Civil Rights movement. Now corporations speak of a future of on Mars and making humanity an “interplanetary species,” while we now have an actual Space Force and working shuttles run by independent parties. It is difficult to understand this current moment without first examining the original rhetoric and narratives that made space travel possible and a goal worth pursuing.

In this course we will look at the rhetoric around space in order to reopen these political, personal, and social questions as they manifested in the 1960s, as well as their legacy for today. We will consider some of the cultural and rhetorical artifacts that set the stage for thinking about space then spend some time looking at the media events and reactions of the actual Space Race, both in their original form and in more recent representations of them. We will then turn to reflections on the value of Space travel, which will lead us to the current rhetoric around NASA, the trip to Mars, and space photographs.

Proposed Readings:

Setting the Stage:

Cicero, Dream of Scipio

Lucian, A True Story

From the Earth to the Moon (film/book)

Kennedy Speech

Sputnik coverage

Poole, Earthrise (Chapter 1-2)

Fuller, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

2001: A Space Odyssey

Chelsey Bonstell paintings

Racing to the Moon

Edgar Mitchell, Way of the Explorer

From the Earth to the Moon (documentary)

Media events on moon landing

Tribbe, No Requiem for a Space Age (selections)

Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog

What was that?!?

Mitchell, Way of the Explorer (chapter 4-5)

White, the Overview Effect

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (episode 1)

Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

Poole, Earthrise (chps 3-4)

Afrofuturism in Sun Ra, Parliament/Funkadelic

Challenger Explosion coverage

Maybe Again?

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (selections)

Space X and Virgin Galactic coverage

Interstellar Contact Gravity

Taught by: Dr. Britt Mize

Course Description: 

Taught by: Dr. Sally Robinson

Course Description: From at least the middle of the 19th century, American culture has been attempting to come to terms with the ever-increasing dominance of consumerism in all aspects of life. Literature, film, and a wide range of nonfiction writing has represented, criticized, made fun of, and celebrated the forms and practices of consumer culture. Whether the topic is profligate shopping, reality television, advertising, brand activism, food trends, neoliberalism and the “marketization” of everything, commercialized religion, or the “Disneyfication” of literature and history, representations of consumerism always raise questions about cultural value. In this class, we will read fiction and nonfiction and view films that actively engage in questions about the meanings of consumerism. Some attack consumerisms as “fake;” some celebrate it as empowering; some rely on gender and class stereotypes to categorize “high” versus “low” culture; some imagine consumer culture as a vast conspiracy aiming to control individuals; and some worry about what kind of people consumer culture makes us. Throughout the course, we will challenge commonsense ideas about the meanings of consumerism, with the goal of arriving at a more complex picture of how culture and commerce, art and commodities, interact with and influence each other; and how writers and filmmakers have created narratives to respond to the threats and promises of consumer culture.