Spring 2023 Course Descriptions - 5 Groups

Instructor: Julie Weng

Course Description: This course introduces students to critical theory—modern and contemporary strands of philosophy that affect our ways of viewing language, culture, and literature. Over the course of the semester, we will use our textbook, alongside a selection of primary critical readings, to apply various theoretical frameworks to literary texts. This in-class practice of viewing literature through different lenses will prepare you to become a stronger thinker, researcher, and writer about literature. 

Required Texts: TBA

Format: Lecture, Discussion

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: julie.weng@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment

Instructor: Simon Lee

Course Description: This course familiarizes students with the concepts, critical practices, and methods central to research across the various branches of English. It surveys the development of literary and critical theory, inviting participants to consider how methodologies of the past produce critical frameworks for the present. In addition, the course will take up issues of genre and form, it will cover the kinds of terminology used within the field, and it will offer a number of practical strategies for interpreting texts, conducting research, and composing sophisticated scholarship that emphasizes the value of the arts and humanities in society. That is to say that the course will address the sociopolitical implications of the English discipline as well as the kinds of forces that act against it. 

Required Texts: 

The main text will be:

• Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature. 5th ed. ISBN: 9780190855697

A secondary text will likely be:

• Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say / Say I Say. 4th ed. ISBN: 9780393538700

There'll be additional texts (probably five or so) that may or may not include:

• Auster, Paul. City of Glass. ISBN: 9780190855697
• Porter, Max. Lanny. ISBN: 9781644450208
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. ISBN: 9780190855697

Format: In-person, fully synchronous.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: simonlee@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 239, by appointment

Instructor: Graeme Wend-Walker

Course Description: Why is literature important? What place does it have in a world where “text” often means something short and thoughtless? Is literature for more than entertainment? How else might we respond to it? What implications does it have for how we live, for how we understand the world around us? How do we form and evolve our ideas about literature and the world? If we want to treat it seriously, what kinds of tools, strategies, and resources are available to help us with that? What advantages and shortcomings might these have? And how do we then communicate our ideas to others? How do we write meaningfully and persuasively about literature? This course will consider multiple kinds of literary text from multiple angles, all with the intention of enriching our experience of it and sharpening our capacity to productively engage with it.

Required Texts: Texts are likely to include: novels; a film; and a variety of texts provided in-class, from short stories and poems to advertisements and on-line materials, as well as materials sourced by the students.

Format: Lectures, student presentations, discussion.

Evaluation: Student presentations, essays, exams, and short exercises including reports, quizzes, and discussions. 

Instructor Contact: graeme@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 240, by appointment. 

Instructor: Dr. Scott Mogull

Course Description:

This course concerns writing in technical professions. It emphasizes planning, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading proposals, reports, instructions, and other forms of professional communication for a variety of audiences. This is a fully online/asynchronous course. No textbook required. All readings are available through Canvas.

Required Texts: None

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: mogull@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: 

Instructor: Dr. Scott Mogull

Course Description:

This course concerns writing in technical professions. It emphasizes planning, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading proposals, reports, instructions, and other forms of professional communication for a variety of audiences. This is a fully online/asynchronous course. No textbook required. All readings are available through Canvas.

Required Texts: None

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: mogull@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: 

Instructor: Sean Rose

Course Description: Writing-intensive course focused of the techniques, practice, and strategies of communicating expert, technical knowledge to non-expert readers in a variety of "real-world" scenarios. Documents like a letter, email request, extended definition, proposal, completion report, and research-based website will be made.

Required Texts: 

• Practical Strategies for Technical Communication 3rd ed. by Mike Markel    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 131936229X ;  ‎

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: sgr24@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Sean Rose

Course Description: Writing-intensive course focused of the techniques, practice, and strategies of communicating expert, technical knowledge to non-expert readers in a variety of "real-world" scenarios. Documents like a letter, email request, extended definition, proposal, completion report, and research-based website will be made.

Required Texts: 

• Practical Strategies for Technical Communication 3rd ed. by Mike Markel    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 131936229X ;  ‎

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: sgr24@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Sean Rose

Course Description: Writing-intensive course focused of the techniques, practice, and strategies of communicating expert, technical knowledge to non-expert readers in a variety of "real-world" scenarios. Documents like a letter, email request, extended definition, proposal, completion report, and research-based website will be made.

Required Texts: 

• Practical Strategies for Technical Communication 3rd ed. by Mike Markel    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 131936229X ;  ‎

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: sgr24@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Amanda Scott

Course Description: This is an advanced course designed specifically to study the special demands of technical writing. The course will emphasize and help you develop the skills necessary to solve complex workplace problems, initiate and complete communication projects, and even challenge and revise outdated or ineffective communication processes and documents. As you work through course projects, they will also gain experience collaborating with others on writing, revising, and editing their work to meet professional standards. Most importantly, students will consider the ways in which accepted communication practices might be made more ethical and inclusive. Thus, throughout the semester you will be asked to analyze technical processes, documents, and other artifacts—written, visual, auditory—to understand technical communication’s unique impact on race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity, and further, consider how technical and professional communication may be enhanced to better serve all citizens. 

Required Texts: TBA 

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: aes126@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Amanda Scott

Course Description: This is an advanced course designed specifically to study the special demands of technical writing. The course will emphasize and help you develop the skills necessary to solve complex workplace problems, initiate and complete communication projects, and even challenge and revise outdated or ineffective communication processes and documents. As you work through course projects, they will also gain experience collaborating with others on writing, revising, and editing their work to meet professional standards. Most importantly, students will consider the ways in which accepted communication practices might be made more ethical and inclusive. Thus, throughout the semester you will be asked to analyze technical processes, documents, and other artifacts—written, visual, auditory—to understand technical communication’s unique impact on race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity, and further, consider how technical and professional communication may be enhanced to better serve all citizens. 

Required Texts: TBA 

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: aes126@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Pinfan Zhu

Course Description: This course prepares students for workplace writings. Specific genres include: instructions, proposals, memos, reports, job letters and résumés, Web design, use of graphics, and document design.  Students also learn how to analyze audiences and use rhetorical strategies to target them. Communicating with cross-cultural audiences is also one of the focuses. Other skills students will learn in the course are skills used throughout the writing process from invention to editing and research skills. The course is writing intensive but also teaches students oral presentation skills and some application software skills. Students have to participate in group discussion, web board response, online research, and in-class exercises.

Required Texts: 

• Practical Strategies for Technical Communication 3rd ed. by Mike Markel    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 131936229X ;  ‎
• Bedford/St. Martin's; Third edition (May 29, 2020)

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jf48@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH M18, TR 8:30am - 9:30am

Instructor: Pinfan Zhu

Course Description: This course prepares students for workplace writings. Specific genres include: instructions, proposals, memos, reports, job letters and résumés, Web design, use of graphics, and document design.  Students also learn how to analyze audiences and use rhetorical strategies to target them. Communicating with cross-cultural audiences is also one of the focuses. Other skills students will learn in the course are skills used throughout the writing process from invention to editing and research skills. The course is writing intensive but also teaches students oral presentation skills and some application software skills. Students have to participate in group discussion, web board response, online research, and in-class exercises.

Required Texts: 

• Practical Strategies for Technical Communication 3rd ed. by Mike Markel    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 131936229X ;  ‎
• Bedford/St. Martin's; Third edition (May 29, 2020)

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jf48@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH M18, TR 8:30am - 9:30am

Instructor: Joanna Collins

Course Description: The study and practice of writing in technical and professional occupations. In this writing-intensive class, students will learn to analyze audience needs for information and practice writing clear communications. This course also covers informative visuals, document design, and website/online publishing. 

Required Texts:

• Mike Markel & Stuart Selber Practical Strategies for Technical Communication: A Brief Guide. 4th edition E-book ISBN: 9781319382704 Paperback ISBN: 9781319245023 

Format: In-person. 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jcollins@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Joanna Collins

Course Description: The study and practice of writing in technical and professional occupations. In this writing-intensive class, students will learn to analyze audience needs for information and practice writing clear communications. This course also covers informative visuals, document design, and website/online publishing. 

Required Texts:

• Mike Markel & Stuart Selber Practical Strategies for Technical Communication: A Brief Guide. 4th edition E-book ISBN: 9781319382704 Paperback ISBN: 9781319245023 

Format: In-person. 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jcollins@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Connor Wilson

Course Description: This course prepares students with skills for workplace writings. It emphasizes planning, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading various forms of professional communication including resumes and proposals. The course is writing and computer intensive and requires active participation.

Required Texts: 

• Practical Strategies for Technical Communication 3rd ed. by Mike Markel    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 131936229X ;  ‎

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: cw1515@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 251

Instructor: Shannon Shaw

Course Description:

This course concerns writing in technical professions. It emphasizes planning, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading proposals, reports, instructions, and other forms of professional communication for a variety of audiences. (WI).

Required Texts: Technical Communication by Mike Markel and Stuart Selber 13th Edition.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: ss54997@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: 

Instructor: Jaime Armin Mejía

Course Description: Since this Writing and Rhetoric course allows for focusing on a special topic, we will focus on writing essays analyzing Mexican food and experiences related to it by examining readings related to this subject. The topic of Mexican food, whether about its preparation, presentation, or consumption, holds great potential for students to engage their rhetorical skills. The class will discuss the assigned readings about Mexican food and culture to highlight the rhetorical dimensions used to hold food-related topics as central issues. The class will also have in-class and out-of-class peer-responding sessions to review and proofread each other’s drafts prior to submitting final drafts. We’ll be discussing Taco USA, which is a collection of essays by noted Chicano cultural critic, Gustavo Arellano. His essays trace the history and spread of what is generally known as Mexican food throughout the US. We’ll also discuss Denise Chávez’s A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, which has the author discussing her always interesting life. In addition to our reading of Arellano and Chávez’s books, there will also be other readings and possibly videos. You’re encouraged to follow Arellano and Chávez on Facebook. 
The main principle Arellano advances is that there is no such thing as authentic Mexican food, not even in Mexico, and you would do well to remember that key point. Mexican food is so diverse that saying a particular version is authentic will inevitably get you to eat your words. Another key point to keep in mind is the notion of appropriation, which has become quite a controversial topic when related to all things Mexican, yet it’s an issue worthy of our analysis. And when food becomes a central rhetorical trope, issues related to identity often also inevitably come up. Whether it’s cultural or political identity, when analyzing how people situate themselves to food and its consumption and production, issues related to identity always arise. 

Required Texts: 

• Taco USA by Gustavo Arellano, ISBN-13: 978-1439148624
• A Taco Testimony, Denise Chavéz:  ISBN-13: 978-1887896948

Format: see below

Evaluation: There will be three essay assignments (20%, 20%, 30%, respectively, with 30% for attendance), each five pages (about 1500 words) in length (each with at least three images inserted), with the last paper due on the day of the final exam period. The first essay will be an essay which reports on food from a local Mexican restaurant and analyzes the food from that place, based on the Arellano chapters to show how you use the rhetorical appeals writers can use to highlight food-related subjects. The second essay will be based on topics specifically related to assigned readings from Arellano and Chávez. The third essay will be more robust and will be an extension and a return to the analysis conducted in the first two essays. It will involve an analysis of the rhetorical dynamics found when one’s identity conflicts with tropes used to construct an understanding of one’s relationship with food and its cultural aspects. 

Instructor Contact: jm31@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 135, Tue/Thu 11:00am - 12:30pm

Instructor: Dr. Rebecca Jackson

Course Description:

In this workshop-based course, students will read and write several genres of creative nonfiction, such as the personal narrative, critical personal narrative, food writing, travel writing, etc. Students will select one or two genres they'd like to focus on and spend the semester drafting and revising in these genres. Writing workshops will play a central role in this course, so students should be comfortable sharing their own writing and commenting on others' writing.

Required Texts: The Best American Essays 2022, Ed. Alexander Chee and Robert Atwan.

Format: In Person

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: rj10@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 245

Course Description: Writing-intensive course focused on the craft and generation of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. We will read a lot and write more. First half of class is focused on learning craft, second half is a workshop where students present and critique their own writing.

Required Texts: 

Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway, 4th Edition

Format: Lecture based, Face-to-face

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: sgr24@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Roger D. Jones

Course Description: This course covers modern western poetry from 1900 through 1950, with a focus on major poets, important movements of the period, technical innovations in poetry, and where and how the work of the period follows in the traditions of earlier periods.

Required Texts: Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, pt 1

Format: In Person

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: rj03@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH M22

Instructor: Suparno Banerjee

Course Description: This course introduces students to Russian fiction in English translation. Starting from the 19th century, Russia produced some of modern western literature’s most important and influential writers whose thematic and stylistic impact can be seen in future generations all over the world. This course will cover fictions by some of those authors along with authors who are not so well known outside of Russia. We will focus on the selected works’ historical, socio-cultural, and literary implications inside and outside Russia. The types of texts we will cover include works of classic realism, as well as science fiction, fantasy, and folklore.

Required Texts: 

Possible texts may include:

• Chandler, Robert ed. Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida
• Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment
• Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
• Strugatsky, Arkady & Boris. Roadside Picnic

Format: Lecture and discussion. 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: sb67@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment.

Instructor: Dr. Katie Kapurch

Course Description:

This course examines myths in various contexts, such as ancient and/or contemporary cultures, mythic patterns in modern literature, and myths produced in popular culture.

Gods and Goddesses (and Icons). This section generally focuses on myths that feature the interactions of gods and goddesses, and we frequently consider the significance of iconography (food objects in particular). This course is offered through the Department of English, so we also turn our attention to literary and cinematic texts that are conscious or unconscious adaptations of myth (or otherwise use mythic tropes). Students will read myths in their primary forms, but there are occasions to consider some contemporary texts as well. The last part of the course considers folklore and fairy tales relevant to myth.

Required Texts: None

Format: Asynchronous online.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: kk19@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Dr. James Reeves

Course Description:

How does mythology shape our understanding of what it means to be human? How do myths from different times and places portray race, gender, the gods, and so forth? Why is myth so persistent? Does it still have a place in our “modern,” secular world? And what are myths in the first place? 

In this course, we will attempt to answer such questions by focusing on two specific strands of mythology: creation myths and eschatological myths (myths about the end of the world). We will read myths from around the globe, and we will consider the ways in which myths are constantly reworked and recycled over time. My hope is that by the end of term we will have a much better grasp of what mythology is and that we will recognize the many surprising ways mythology continues to inform our lives today.

Required Texts: Students will need to purchase Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology; all other course readings will be available online.

Format: TBA 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jreeves@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 212, MW 10:00am - 11:00am

Instructor: Graeme Wend-Walker

Course Description: So far as we can tell, myths have been a part of every culture throughout history. They resonate through our own, both as stories informing our sense of reality and as rich sources of inspiration for literature, the arts, and popular culture. 

This is a literature class, so the emphasis here is on mythology as literature and on literature’s use of mythology. Having said that, the study of literature can encompass many other fields, such as history, sociology, psychology, and archaeology. There are many ways of approaching myths. They can tell us about real historical events, the values of a given society, what it means to be human, how the universe came into being, how cultural customs and rituals came into being, rules of social behavior, or the path to self-knowledge. Students will learn to consider myths from all of these perspectives.

This course will focus on four regions/time periods: The Classical mythology of Ancient Greece and Rome; Old Norse mythology; the mythology of East and Southeast Asia (primarily China and Vietnam); and African myths (primarily from West Africa—Uganda and Nigeria, specifically—but also the Congo and the African diaspora). Significant time will also be allowed for the discussion of myths from other times and places.

Required Texts: 

• Thury, Eva M. and Margaret K. Devinney. Introduction to Mythology: Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths. Fourth Edition. Oxford UP: 2017. 

Other texts will be provided, including a film (tba).

Format: Lectures, discussion, and student presentations.

Evaluation: Exams, essays, student presentations, and short exercises including reports, quizzes, and discussions.

Instructor Contact: graeme@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 240, by appointment. 

Instructor: Emily Banta

Course Description: This course traces the emergence and development of an African American literary tradition by examining the wide-ranging contributions of Black writers, orators, and public actors from the mid-eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. We will explore the diversity of Black literary production in this early period, moving beyond the genre of the slave narrative to consider poetry, sermons, essays, political tracts, short fiction, plays, and novels. Along the way, we will ask how Black writers marshal literary forms to grapple with the central political and cultural conflicts of the early United States: slavery and its enduring legacies, the ongoing struggle for citizenship and equal rights, and the imaginative horizons of freedom.

Required Texts: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: rbw58@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment.

Instructor: Dr. Flore Chevaillier

Course Description:

Course Guiding Statement:
This course surveys US literature from the Civil War to 1930 in various genres, sub-cultures, interpretative modes, and mindsets. This class will engage you in critical thinking and writing and will invite you to learn more about American literature and literary analysis. We will study literary devices as they function within the context of a literary work through close textual readings, lecture, and class discussions. In the process, you will perfect your skills of careful reading, sound researching, and convincing arguing.

Course Goals:
• To learn how literary techniques function in literature. 
• To evaluate each author’s work in terms of narrative style and descriptive technique, language, tone or mood, and literary conventions. 
• To learn about the literary, intellectual, historical, and social contexts in which fictions are written. 
• To think about the relationship between the stories we read and contemporary society.
• To improve critical thinking and writing skills.

Required Texts: Texts will be accessed through Canvas. We will read fiction and poetry by the following authors: Whitman, Dickinson, Chopin, London, Stein, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, Cummings, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hughes, McKay, and others to be determined. 

Format: Lecture. Small-group work. Online instruction. Student presentations 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: fc@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Dr. John Blair

Course Description: A survey of American literature from 1930 to the present. Writers to be studied include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, W. C. Williams, Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyaka, Toni Morrison, and others. Readings will be placed into historical social, and cultural context and discussed in terms of both meaning and importance.

Required Texts: TBA

Format: Lecture/discussion. 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jblair@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 216, MW 12:30pm - 2:00pm

Instructor: Ruben Zecena

Course Description: This course explores “U.S. Literature” through the perspectives of multi-ethnic, queer, and feminist writers/cultural producers from 1930 to the present. Questions that the course is concerned with include, what is U.S. literature? What are the possibilities of imagining the nation otherwise? What can we gain from approaching the central topic of difference in the study of U.S. literature and culture? Audre Lorde writes, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” In the spirt of engaging difference in our lives, literature, and culture, the course will cover a diverse set of texts that participate in but also exceed the limits of U.S. literary canons. 

Required Texts: Tentative texts include:

• Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita
• Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
• Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God

Format: TBA 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: rzecena@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Steve Wilson

Course Description: This course explores developments in American novels from the early decades of the twentieth century to modern times, examining the ideas, forms and approaches employed by American writers as they contributed to the elements that comprise and problematize the concept of an American identity.

Required Texts: I Await the Devil’s Coming, Mary MacLane; In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck; The Color Purple, Alice Walker; The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros; The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac; Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena Viramontes.

Format: Primarily discussion, with occasional in-class group work.

Evaluation: Three in-class essay exams of roughly four pages each.

Instructor Contact: sw13@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 349, MW 9:30-10:30 and by appointment

Instructor: drea brown

Course Description:

In a 2020 call for papers on Black Horror and the Afrogothic, Tashima Thomas explains these genres a way of examining the everyday horrors experienced in Black life. How, “constructions of the monstrous, the villainous, the mad and the haunted—take on wholly different valences when they are studied within the context of blackness, particularly under the modern colonial project.” In this course we will explore imaginings of Blackness as specter and spectacle, and how Black writers reckon with the traumatic impact of horrific histories, limited images of representation, and lean into these genres as a means of resisting erasure and reconstructing ideas of self and community.

Required Texts: A few tentative texts:

• Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
• Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark
• The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Ghost Summer, Tananarive Due
• Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons
• Ganja & Hess, Bill Gunn
• Tales from the Hood, Spike Lee
• Night of the Living Dead, George A Romero,
• The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith
• Horror Noire, Xavier Burgin

Format: Discussion/Lecture

Evaluation: Class discussion, reading quizzes, low/high stakes writing assignments, group presentations, co-facilitation

Instructor Contact: drea.brown@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Suparno Banerjee

Course Description: This course will explore the inter-relationship between British imperialism and cultures of the colonized spaces. We will examine fiction as a product of this colonial/imperial interaction. We will read works by British authors and responses to such colonial discourse by authors from the “Empire”—India, Nigeria, Sudan, the Caribbean etc.

Required Texts: 

Possible texts may include:

• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
• Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to North
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: 1818 Text
   

Format: Lecture and discussion. 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: sb67@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment.

Instructor: Julie Weng

Course Description: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” ~ James Joyce, speaking about Ulysses (qtd. in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 521)

Perhaps no modern writer has been more influential than James Joyce. His works have been banned, parodied, and translated. They have been taught in university classrooms, read aloud in pubs, and adapted into films. They have even become recent bestsellers in China. In academic criticism, scholars point to Joyce’s texts to delineate the boundaries of modernism and postmodernism, to consider the power of literary form to capture individual human consciousness, and to demonstrate the flexibility and playfulness of the English language itself. Regarding his genre-bending “novel” Ulysses alone, TS Eliot called it “the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Ford Madox Ford affirmed the cataclysmic shift caused by the novel, saying that “Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, Ulysses does.” Virginia Woolf offered the text more critical words, writing, “Never did any book so bore me.” And yet her most celebrated novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is often read as an homage to Ulysses. 

This course will study the major writings of James Joyce. We will grapple with his artistic development over the course of his writing career, including his increasingly explosive experiments with literary form. We will also position Joyce’s works within an Irish historical context, considering their commentary on Ireland’s status as a colony of Great Britain. Pervading all of our class discussions will be a focus on the individual human and the sympathy Joyce solicits for his flawed protagonists. Indeed, Joyce challenges us to forge a new concept of what it means to be the hero(ine) of a story. 

Required Texts: TBA

Format: Lecture, Discussion

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: julie.weng@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment

Instructor: Dr. James Reeves

Course Description:

The Man in the High Castle. Minority Report. A Scanner Darkly. Blade Runner. Total Recall. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams... 

These films and television shows reflect the profound impact Philip K. Dick has had on Hollywood and on science fiction in general. Filled with androids, aliens, parallel universes, talking pigs, and gods that communicate via pink laser beams, PKD's strange, surreal novels and short stories continually confront large existential questions and force us to consider what exactly it means to be human. In this class, we'll read several of PKD's works to interrogate his impact on the development of science fiction, to investigate science fiction's relationship to other literary genres, and to examine why, exactly, PKD's work became such a cultural sensation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Required Texts: Exact reading list TBD, but we will read novels and short stories by the prominent sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, including (potentially): The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and more.

Format: TBA 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jreeves@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 212, MW 10:00am - 11:00am

Instructor: Ruben Zecena

Course Description: This course explores the ethnic/racial formations of Chicana/o/x communities through the intersecting dynamics of gender and sexuality. It will cover topics such as borderland identities, queer and feminist reclamations of la familia, alienation,  social belonging, and more. Through close reading and textual analysis, we will explore a range of genres including novels, film, photography, and young-adult literature. In particular, we will pay attention to how the authors, characters, and subjects of these texts grapple with different meanings of Chicana/o/x identity formation.

Required Texts: Tentative texts include:

• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
• What Night Brings by Carla Trujillo
• Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
• Their Dogs Came with Them by Helena Maria Viramontes

Format: TBA 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: rzecena@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment. 

Instructor: Sara A. Ramirez

Course Description: Chicanx Narratives and Social History considers narratives produced by people of Mexican descent living in the United States. As such, the course offers students an opportunity to enhance their multicultural competence and meets the requirements for an elective in the Latina/o Studies minor.

Under the guidance of Dr. Ramírez, this section of ENG 3344 will take inventory of Chicanx narratives of borderlands identity. We begin with Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and lectures about the violent colonization of the people of what is now known as the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. We will then read Erika L. Sánchez’s popular novel Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter to examine the ways in which present-day Mexican and Chicano cultures perpetuate the negative effects of (settler- )colonialism. Our attention then shifts to oft-ignored issues within and amongst Chicanx communities, including gender roles, women’s sterilization at the hands of the U.S. government, and anti-Blackness upheld in Chicanx scholarship. In a final unit, we look to works crafted by ire’ne lara silva and Rios de la Luz, whose narratives bring us face to face with historical and generational trauma. 
 

Required Texts: 

• Various texts on Canvas
• Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: La New Mestiza. 4th ed., Aunt Lute, 2012. 
• de la Luz, Rios. Itzá. Broken River Books, 2017. 
• Grise, Virginia. blu. Yale UP, 2011.
• Pelaez López, Alán. Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien. Operating System, 2020.  
• Sánchez, Erika L. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Knopf, 2017.

Format: Lecture and student-led learning. Attendance is mandatory. 

Evaluation:     

1. Participation (20%) 
2. Small group discussions and reflections (20%)
3. Literary Analysis 1 (20%)
4. Literary Analysis 2 (20%)
5. Final Project (20%)

Instructor Contact: julie.weng@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: By appointment

Instructor: William Jenson

Course Description: This course is the second in a two-course sequence, 
designed to examine the richness and diversity of the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. The course offers a multicultural focus by studying the region’s people, institutions, history, and physical and cultural ecology. An intercultural and interdisciplinary approach 
increases awareness of and sensitivity to the diversity of ethnic and cultural traditions in the area.  Students will discover what distinguishes the Southwest from other regions of the United States, as well as its similarities, physically and culturally. The images, myths, themes, and perceptions of the region will be examined in light of historical and literary texts.

Required Texts: 

• Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
• Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 by David Montejano
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: wj13@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: Brazos 220, R 12:30pm - 1:30pm

Instructor: Dr. John Blair

Course Description: An advanced seminar for writers of fiction and creative non-fiction which will involve intensive workshopping of students’ own work and a broad review of contemporary published fiction and the process of achieving publication. Both literary and genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, YA, Horror, etc.) are welcomed and encouraged.

Required Texts: TBA

Format: Workshop. 

Evaluation: Because this is a creative writing class, grades are necessarily subjective and will be based primarily on effort, participation, and willingness to learn.

Instructor Contact: jblair@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 216, MW 12:30pm - 2:00pm

Instructor: Dr. John Blair

Course Description: An advanced seminar for writers of fiction and creative non-fiction which will involve intensive workshopping of students’ own work and a broad review of contemporary published fiction and the process of achieving publication. Both literary and genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, YA, Horror, etc.) are welcomed and encouraged.

Required Texts: TBA

Format: Workshop. 

Evaluation: Because this is a creative writing class, grades are necessarily subjective and will be based primarily on effort, participation, and willingness to learn.

Instructor Contact: jblair@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 216, MW 12:30pm - 2:00pm

Instructor: Susan Morrison

Course Description: This course focuses on issues of difference and identity as seen through gender, race, religion, and ethnicity in the European Middle Ages through to the fifteenth century.  We will take as our starting point scholar Geraldine Heng's contention that "race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content." These differences include the body, but also religious identity, sexual orientation, geographical origin, and class, among other topics. Reading texts in their historical, social and cultural contexts, we will ask literary critical and theoretical questions of these texts and see how they are integral to study of the medieval period.

Required Texts: 

• Richard Coeur de Lion. Ed. and trans. Katherine H. Terrell. Broadview. 2019. ISBN-13: 978-1554812783
• The Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. Penguin.1990. ISBN-13: 978-0140445329
• The Poem of the Cid. Dual Language Edition with Parallel Text. Trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry. Penguin. 1985. ISBN-13: 978-0140444469
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translated by Simon Armitage. Norton. 2008.  ·  ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393334155 ·  ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0393334159 
• John Mandeville. The Book of Marvels and Travels. Translator Anthony Bale. Oxford: Oxford UP (Oxford World’s Classics), 2012.  ISBN-10: 0199600600 ISBN-13: 978-0199600601
• Material on CANVAS under Files

Format: Primarily discussion, with mini-lectures on background material by instructor and students' oral reports.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: morrison@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH M12, by appointment

Instructor: Susan Morrison

Course Description: In this course, we will explore a number of texts of varying genres, including saints’ lives, romance, allegory, and visionary literature.  Two themes will recur throughout the semester:  pilgrimage and gender.  Pilgrimage was a highly important activity in the Middle Ages.  How this practice was undertaken physically and mentally is reflected in much medieval literature, most famously in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and The Book of Margery Kempe, neither of which is a focus for this class. We will see how pilgrimage pops up, either literally or symbolically, in later work generated in England.  
Not all literature produced in England after the Norman Conquest was written in Middle English.  Indeed, Anglo-Norman and Latin works predominated for some time after 1066.  Among the works we will examine include the Anglo-Norman saint’s life of St. Catherine, written by Clemence of Barking, one of the first women writing after the Norman Conquest so far as we know.  We will read the life of Christina of Markyate, abused by her parents and living in a tiny closet for four years to escape their cruelty.  We’ll read literature written FOR women by men, including selections from the Rule for Anchoresses. One of the earliest works we’ll examine is Saint Patrick’s Purgatory by Marie de France, better known, perhaps, for her Lais or short romances.  We’ll read the runaway “bestseller,” John de Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels and excerpts from William Langland’s Piers Plowman. We look forward into the early 17th century, by seeing how Shakespeare’s play, All’s Well That Ends Well, picks up on the theme of pilgrimage in this poignant pilgrimage play written after the Reformation. Our last text is the American short story, The Ugliest Pilgrim, by Doris Betts which has been made into the award-winning musical, Violet.

Required Texts: 

• The Life of Christina of Markyate.  Trans. C. H. Talbot with  Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser.  Oxford World's Classics, 2010. ISBN-10: 0199556059; ISBN-13: 978-0199556052.
• Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Clarendon Paperbacks).  Bella Millett (Editor), Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Editor).  Oxford UP.  1992.  ISBN-10: 0198119976; ISBN-13: 978-0198119975
• John Mandeville. The Book of Marvels and Travels. Translator Anthony Bale. Oxford: Oxford UP (Oxford World’s Classics), 2012.  ISBN-10: 0199600600 ISBN-13: 978-0199600601
• William Shakespeare. All’s Well That Ends Well. Folger Shakespeare Library. Simon & Schuster. 2006. ISBN-10: 0743484975.  ISBN-13: 978-0743484978
• PDF Material on CANVAS

Format: Discussion, students’ oral reports

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: morrison@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH M12, by appointment

Instructor: Dr. James Reeves

Course Description:

In this course, we will interrogate the novel’s prominence and its unique place in literary history. In the process, we will ask the following questions: How are novels distinct from other genres? How do novels represent character, consciousness, identity, and so forth? What historical and cultural work do novels accomplish? And, finally, what does our understanding of form and history tell us about our own political, cultural investments? We will provide tentative answers to these questions by reading five British novels—two from the eighteenth century, one from the nineteenth, one from the twentieth, and one from the twenty-first. The course is reading intensive, but if you put in the effort, you will leave with a better understanding of the novel's origins, its generic, formal characteristics, and criticism's long, often-unsuccessful history of trying to come to grips with the form.

Required Texts: Exact reading list is still TBD, but may include novels by Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Bronte, Evelyn Waugh, Zadie Smith, or other prominent British novelists. 

Format: TBA 

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jreeves@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 212, MW 10:00am - 11:00am

Instructor: Dr. Nithya Sivashankar

Course Description:

This is a survey course in which we will read children’s literature that centers the experiences of people who have been historically marginalized in the United States of America and around the world. We will learn to critically read, think, and write about books written for children under 12 years of age. We will examine a variety of genres including folk and fairy tales, historical fiction, contemporary realistic fiction, and non-fiction. We will also explore diverse formats such as board books, picturebooks, graphic novels, short stories, verse novels, and wordless narratives. Some of the questions that we will ask and converse around during the course of the semester include:

1)    What is children’s literature and what are some common assumptions about this category of texts?
2)    What is the relationship between society and the literature that is produced for the children in it?
3)    Whose voices are being heard in books for children, and whose aren’t?
4)    What are the conversations and debates surrounding the need for diverse books for children in the United States of America?
5)    How is knowledge about the past produced through literature for children? How does historical fiction for children tend to center whiteness? 
6)    How are LGBTQIA+ experiences represented in books for children?
7)    How are characters with disabilities (visible and invisible) portrayed in children’s literature?
8)    How is Islamophobia treated and discussed in literature for young readers?

We will also be engaging with secondary resources such as literary essays, editorials, opinion pieces, podcasts, TED talks, blog posts, and social media narratives.

Required Texts: To be decided. Possible readings may include:
•    American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang) 
•    Fry Bread (Kevin Noble Maillard and Juana Martinez-Neal)  
•    Garvey's Choice (Nikki Grimes)
•    Land of the Cranes (Aida Salazar)
•    Locomotion (Jacqueline Woodson)
•    Meet Yasmin (Saadia Faaruqi)
•    My Heart Fills with Happiness (Monique Gray Smith and Julie Flett)
•    Sisters of the Never Sea (Cynthia Leitich Smith)
•    The 1619 Project: Born on the Water (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renee Watson and Nikkolas Smith)
•    The Arrival (Shaun Tan) 
•    The Wild Book (Margarita Engle)
•    They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid's Poems (David Bowles) 

Format: Discussions and short, interactive lectures.

Evaluation:

• Engagement and Participation 10%
• Three Short Essays 30%
• Pop Quizzes 20%
• Research Paper Proposal 15%
• Final Research Paper (5-7 pages) 25%

Instructor Contact: nithya.s@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 131, Tue/Thu 2:30pm - 3:30pm

Instructor: Dr. Nithya Sivashankar

Course Description:

This is a survey course in which we will read children’s literature that centers the experiences of people who have been historically marginalized in the United States of America and around the world. We will learn to critically read, think, and write about books written for children under 12 years of age. We will examine a variety of genres including folk and fairy tales, historical fiction, contemporary realistic fiction, and non-fiction. We will also explore diverse formats such as board books, picturebooks, graphic novels, short stories, verse novels, and wordless narratives. Some of the questions that we will ask and converse around during the course of the semester include:

1)    What is children’s literature and what are some common assumptions about this category of texts?
2)    What is the relationship between society and the literature that is produced for the children in it?
3)    Whose voices are being heard in books for children, and whose aren’t?
4)    What are the conversations and debates surrounding the need for diverse books for children in the United States of America?
5)    How is knowledge about the past produced through literature for children? How does historical fiction for children tend to center whiteness? 
6)    How are LGBTQIA+ experiences represented in books for children?
7)    How are characters with disabilities (visible and invisible) portrayed in children’s literature?
8)    How is Islamophobia treated and discussed in literature for young readers?

We will also be engaging with secondary resources such as literary essays, editorials, opinion pieces, podcasts, TED talks, blog posts, and social media narratives.

Required Texts: To be decided. Possible readings may include:
•    American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang) 
•    Fry Bread (Kevin Noble Maillard and Juana Martinez-Neal)  
•    Garvey's Choice (Nikki Grimes)
•    Land of the Cranes (Aida Salazar)
•    Locomotion (Jacqueline Woodson)
•    Meet Yasmin (Saadia Faaruqi)
•    My Heart Fills with Happiness (Monique Gray Smith and Julie Flett)
•    Sisters of the Never Sea (Cynthia Leitich Smith)
•    The 1619 Project: Born on the Water (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renee Watson and Nikkolas Smith)
•    The Arrival (Shaun Tan) 
•    The Wild Book (Margarita Engle)
•    They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid's Poems (David Bowles) 

Format: Discussions and short, interactive lectures.

Evaluation:

• Engagement and Participation 10%
• Three Short Essays 30%
• Pop Quizzes 20%
• Research Paper Proposal 15%
• Final Research Paper (5-7 pages) 25%

Instructor Contact: nithya.s@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 131, Tue/Thu 2:30pm - 3:30pm

Instructor: Dr. Katie Kapurch

Course Description: A survey designed to provide a critical philosophy and working repertoire of literature for adolescents.

Required Texts: None

Format: Asynchronous online.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: kk19@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Dr. Katie Kapurch

Course Description: A survey designed to provide a critical philosophy and working repertoire of literature for adolescents.

Required Texts: None

Format: Asynchronous online.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: kk19@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Graeme Wend-Walker

Course Description: This course examines one of the fastest growing of literary genres. Adolescent literature—often also referred to as young adult literature, or “YA” for short—has a relatively brief history, having only emerged as a distinct marketing category in the 1960s. It now enjoys a very high profile in publishing and filmmaking, due in part to how popular it has become with readers beyond the traditional adolescent age range. 

We will look at key texts from the history of YA and texts from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Mexican American, African American, and Nigerian American. We will consider the socio-economic and cultural factors that gave rise to the genre, with a particular focus on those cultural exchanges between the United States and Britain which created the phenomenon of young adulthood as we know it. Music and film will be a key part of this historical approach, as these became important components of YA culture well before YA books emerged. We will also discuss issues such as social media and their place in YA culture today. Students will learn to apply a range of critical tools to these texts so as to better understand the role they have in both reflecting and shaping society.

Required Texts: The book list is likely to include works such as the following: S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders; John Green, Looking for Alaska; Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter; Neil Shusterman, Unwind; Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down; Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak; Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch.  

Format: Asynchronous online. A blend of written and recorded lectures.

Evaluation: Exams, essays, and short exercises including reports, quizzes, and discussions.

Instructor Contact: graeme@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 240, by appointment. 

Instructor: Dr. Denae Dyck

Course Description:

What happens when women re-imagine the roots of literary and cultural traditions that have long been dominated by men? This course considers how a range of women writers have engaged in a process of symbolic renovation, asking new questions of old stories. We will examine how these texts strategically revise myths and themes from biblical, classical, and other sources for the purposes of both subversion and transformation. How do these texts expose and critique patriarchal power structures? How do they advance new narratives about identity, belonging, and creativity? Our study will highlight a variety of feminist movements (social, political, and philosophical), situating readings in relation to historical contexts and attending to how writers have understood gender as intersecting with sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and ability. 

Our readings will span the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries and feature multiple genres (fiction, poetry, and essays). Selections will include texts by Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Jeannette Winterson. We will develop critical reading and writing skills as we take up theoretical questions and make connections across texts. 

Required Texts: 

• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
• various poems and essays available on Canvas 

Format: Our class sessions will combine interactive lectures, small and large group discussions, and hands-on writing workshops.

Evaluation: Short Essays, Critical Response, Reading & Reflection Journal, Final Project Proposal, Final Project

Instructor Contact: denae.dyck@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 247, Fall term: Tues/Thurs 10:30am-12pm & by appointment; Spring term: Tues/Thurs 1:30-3:00pm & by appointment

Instructor: Jaime Armin Mejía

Course Description:

—Catalog Description of Course: A study of English syntax as described by traditional, structural, and transformational grammarians, with major emphasis on syntax. 
—Description and Objectives of the Course: There’ll be a few lectures, but daily class time will be spent on doing sentence exercises. More importantly, students will learn the syntax of English at the sentence level by learning how words are ordered in sentences in English. 
    Students will become intimately familiar with English at the sentence level by learning the syntactical structures constructing sentences. This task will not be easy, as students have to learn a considerable amount of syntactical knowledge in this class, knowledge that’s quite extensive and complex. Unless students work very hard to learn what this class requires on a daily basis, understanding English at the sentence level will remain limited. The understanding students can potentially have by working hard to learn what this class offers should make them considerably better writers and readers. I can think of no better reason for students to work hard in this class. 

Required Texts: 

• English Syntax: A Guide to the Grammar of Successful Writers, Dick Heaberlin
• The Little English Handbook, 8th ed. Edward P. J. Corbett and Sheryl L. Finkle

Format: Attendance: I expect perfect attendance from everyone, as there are no excused absences. While 20% of the overall grade is for attendance and participation, if you have too many absences, you will not pass this class. Anyone absent 5 times will typically fail this course. The majority of the work for this course is based on work for the midterm exams and group presentation which accounts for 80% of the overall grade. The work for this class will require a great deal of effort from each student, as each of you is expected to learn all the material. 

Evaluation: Will be based on two midterm exams (1st=15%; 2nd=25%), a final group presentation (40%), and attendance and participation (20%). Each midterm will have 10 sentences which students in groups of three or four will parse. Any incorrectly parsed word, phrase, or clause will have points deducted. We’ll have practice exams to prepare for the two midterms. These small groups will then do a stylistic analysis of a sample (an essay) of each of their group members’ own writing. 

Instructor Contact: jm31@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 135, Tue/Thu 11:00am - 12:30pm

Instructor: Steve Wilson

Course Description: There are many instances throughout literary history of genius springing up among a small group of friends who fuel one another's creativity:  The Bloomsbury Group, the Beat Generation, the English Romantic Poets.  One such American group whose synergy led to one of the great periods in the literature of the U.S. were the Transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.  Known also as "the American Renaissance," this movement composed what would become arguably the first truly American voice in literature.  English 4334 will explore the roots and nature of that voice.

Required Texts: Emerson, The Portable Emerson; Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau; Hawthorne, The Celestial Railroad and The Blithedale Romance; Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Alcott, Transcendental Wild Oats; Melville, Bartleby and Benito Cereno; selections from Fredrick Douglass.

Format: Primarily discussion, with occasional in-class group work.

Evaluation: There will be three in-class essay exams of roughly five pages each,  as well as a five-page research paper on a topic approved by me.

Instructor Contact: sw13@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 349, MW 9:30-10:30 and by appointment

Instructor: Joe Falocco

Course Description: Students will read representative examples of Shakespeare’s later works (written after 1601). They will take quizzes for each play and prepare a paraphrase and textual analysis of a key section of each play. Most class meetings will consist of students presenting these assignments orally. For a final project, students will have the option of writing a paper or performing in a scene/monologue.

Required Texts: Students must purchase the Seventh Edition of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare” edited by David Bevington. There is no alternative to purchasing a hard copy of this book and bringing it to class each day. 

Format: As described above.

Evaluation: TBA

Instructor Contact: jf48@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 211, W 1:00pm - 5:00pm or by appointment

Instructor: Daniel Lochman

Course Description:

Catalog description: The problem comedies, through the tragedies, to the plays of the final years; emphasis on reading in depth the plays, significant critical materials, and selected plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. (WI).

This spring, we will read works illustrating the range of Shakespeare’s later works, such as Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.  Contemporary reactions to Shakespeare plays range from Robert Greene’s 1592 caustic criticism of the new “Ioannes Factotum” on the London scene as an “upstart Crow” (1593) to Ben Jonson’s praise of his rival Shakespeare as the “Sweet swan of Avon” (1623). In this class, you can judge for yourself, based on class discussion, careful reading, and thoughtful interpretation. Be prepared to spend some time out of class examining performances on film and, as available, live performances in Central Texas. 

Required Texts: 

• The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition: Later Plays, Third Edition (2015): ISBN: 9780393938586

Format: Discussion, lecture, in-class and out-of-class analysis of readings, informal and formal oral readings / presentations of selections from the readings.

Evaluation: Evaluated assignments tentatively may include essays reacting to specific passages and issues in the plays; review of a live or film performance of a play we study; a performative reading; reading quizzes; a research project project culminating in a documented paper; and a final examination.  

Instructor Contact: dl02@txstate.edu

Instructor Office Hours: FH 218, by appointment