Advanced Course Descriptions

Topic: TBD

Instructor: TBD

Catalog Description: This course offers a focused examination of film as text, with an emphasis on critical, theoretical, cultural, historical, generic, and/or stylistic aspects. Specific content and focus vary by section and may include the history of classical Hollywood cinema; silent film; world, European, or national cinemas; or the documentary. This course may be repeated once for credit when its topic varies.

Satisfies: Group D; Film Concentration; Minor in Media Studies; Minor in Studies in Popular Culture

Topic: Documentary Film

Instructor: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth

Catalog Description: This course offers a focused examination of film as text, with an emphasis on critical, theoretical, cultural, historical, generic, and/or stylistic aspects. Specific content and focus vary by section and may include the history of classical Hollywood cinema; silent film; world, European, or national cinemas; or the documentary. This course may be repeated once for credit when its topic varies.

Section Description: How does documentary film, a genre with its roots in anthropological observation, come to build trust with its subjects, persuade its viewers, and traverse the boundary between truth and fiction in the twenty-first century? In this course, we will investigate how filmmakers use the documentary genre to argue for structural change, open an audience’s eyes to marginalized experiences, and reveal everything from wrongful conviction to the human need to create art. In doing so, we will analyze and research documentaries across the globe from 1921 to the present day. We will also read theory on the documentary film as a genre, criticism concerned with individual documentaries, and interviews with documentary filmmakers. While the course is primarily concerned with the critical study of major documentary films, students will have the opportunity to produce short documentary films that put into practice the elements we’ve discussed during the semester or apply their insights about the genre to writing an original argument about a documentary on or off our syllabus.

Texts: Nichols, Bill, and Baron, Jaimie. Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition. United States, Indiana University Press, 2024

Contact: zillingworth@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group D; Film Concentration; Minor in Media Studies; Minor in Studies in Popular Culture

Topic: Digital Technology and Writing

Instructor: Deb Balzhiser

Catalog Description: This course concerns the study and practice of advanced expository writing, with a focus on achieving rhetorical dexterity and effective communication. Specific content and focus vary by section and may include The Essay, Nature Writing, Argument, Writing for the Government, or Online Communication. This course may be repeated once for credit when its emphasis varies.

Section Description: We'll begin this course with foundations for examining digital technologies and writing, move to look at changes co-related with textuality, thinking, relationships, and culture, ask what is happening, now, and speculate about where we are going. Throughout the course, students consider social, epistemological, pragmatic, creative, or other compositional needs and effects. We’ll trace dynamics that together enact communication environments, meanings, and effects and we’ll analyze them experientially by crafting a variety of types of compositions.

What You’ll Do: Play with texts. Observe effects. Identify and craft messages that mean beyond their content. Dig into your niche passions, meaningful causes, and communities—are you a gamer? radio gardener? true crime enthusiast? virtual volunteer? troll? white hat hacker? Dig deeper. Read, discuss, investigate, and analyze. Write. Mediate, remediate, remix, re/map, assemble, curate, or otherwise adjust your communications (record a podcast? curate an AI exhibit?).

Coursework: We’ll strengthen creative and analytical thinking and apply those to close examinations of digital communications, media selection, and crafting messages through seminar discussions, writing, and feedback. You’ll read and write for and during every class. You’ll also craft 4 compositions, three of which will be mediated, that together will be equivalent in thought, effort, and time to 25-30 pages of academic analyses.

Texts: Required: • Work by you and your peers • Material available through Alkek and online related to actor network theory, assemblage, remix, media effects • Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Gingko Press critical edition, editor Terrence Gordon. • Terrence Gordon, ed. & Susan Willmarth’s, illustrator, McLuhan for Beginners • Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition • Choose 1 of 3: Marshall McLuhan with Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects; Catherine G. Latterell’s Remix Reading & Composing Culture; Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Contact: dm45@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group E; Writing and Rhetoric Concentration; Minor in Writing; Minor in International Aid and Development; Minor in Pre-Law

Topic: Writing about Music

Instructor: Edward Alan Schaefer

Catalog Description: This course concerns the study and practice of advanced expository writing, with a focus on achieving rhetorical dexterity and effective communication. Specific content and focus vary by section and may include The Essay, Nature Writing, Argument, Writing for the Government, or Online Communication. This course may be repeated once for credit when its emphasis varies.

Section Description: This course introduces students to numerous genres of writing about music. We will listen to music and read, study, and produce a diverse body of writing: music history and criticism; analyses of music industries; oral histories; liner notes; fiction, poetry, and visual interpretations of music; and promotional texts.

Texts: TBA

Contact: es46@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group E; Writing and Rhetoric Concentration; Minor in Writing; Minor in International Aid and Development; Minor in Pre-Law

Topic: Images & Argument: Visual Rhetoric

Instructor: Joanna Collins

Catalog Description: This course focuses on approaches central to the study and practice of writing and rhetoric. Specific content and focus vary by section and may include Composition Theory, Theories of Technical Communication, Chicana/o/x Rhetorics, or Literacy Studies. This course may be repeated when its emphasis varies for up to 9 hours of English credit.

Section Description: This course introduces students to visual rhetoric and explores how images persuade, inform, and shape meaning. Students will learn various approaches to studying everyday artifacts of visual culture, from photographs and posters to memes and infographics, including images produced by AI. Coursework such as visual analyses, circulation studies, photo essays, and other multimodal compositions invites students to engage with theory in practical ways and develop skills for writing effective arguments with and about images.

Contact: jcollins@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group E; Writing and Rhetoric Concentration; Minor in Writing

Topic: Film Theory

Instructor: Kate McClancy

Catalog Description: This course explores one or more theoretical and critical approaches, such as ecocriticism, film theory, trauma theory, or disability studies. It may be repeated once for credit when its topic varies.

Section Description: Ever since audiences first witnessed the Lumières’ virtual train arrive, film has thrilled and enthralled us, luring us through a magic window into a new, vibrant, seductive world. And ever since those early days of the medium, theorists have asked what about film is so captivating, and what exactly is the relationship between this hallucinatory world and our own. This course examines the major schools and approaches in film theory, investigating questions of representation, mimesis, visual rhetorics, genre, and aesthetics. It considers the position of film as the seventh art, as propaganda, and as a foundational element of mass culture.

Texts: Film Theory and Criticism, 8th edition, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2016. Films may include: Man with a Movie Camera; Rashomon; The 400 Blows; Jeanne Dielman; Psycho; Mulholland Dr.; Moonlight; Ex Machina; The Act of Killing

Contact: kmcclancy@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group D; Minor in Media Studies

Topic: Gods, Goddesses, and Icons

Instructor: Katie Kapurch

Catalog 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. Specific content and focus vary by section. This course may be repeated once for credit when its topic varies.

Satisfies: Group C; Minor in Studies in Popular Culture; Religious Studies Minor

Topic: UFOlogy: Mythology and UFOs

Instructor: James Reeves

Catalog 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. Specific content and focus vary by section. This course may be repeated once for credit when its topic varies.

Satisfies: Group C; Minor in Studies in Popular Culture; Religious Studies Minor

Topic: Literature of Resistance

Instructor: Steve Wilson

Catalog Description: This course covers a variety of topics that reflect faculty expertise. Students pursue an in-depth examination of a given topic to develop their close reading, literary analysis, and scholarly writing skills. Specific content and focus vary by section. Emphases can include studies in genre, such as science fiction, horror, or chivalric romance; medium, such as comics, games, or illuminated manuscripts; or form, such as modernism, metafiction, or memoir. This course may be repeated twice for credit when its emphasis varies.

Section Description: In this course we will analyze literary texts from the U.S. that explore and portray methods of resistance to systems of power. From a range of authors and approaches, the novels chosen for this course chart the ways authors set out to investigate how citizens make their voices heard and hold their leaders accountable and how people shape and react to social reform and traditions.

Texts: Ursula Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness; Helena Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; LeRoi Jones, Dutchman; Margaret Atwood, Handmaid's Tale; John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle; William Stafford, Down in My Heart

Contact: sw13@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group B or D

Topic: Global Science Fiction

Instructor: Suparno Banerjee

Catalog Description: This course examines selections from ancient and/or modern literature from around the globe. Specific content and focus vary by section, and the course may be repeated once for credit when its topic varies.

Section Description: Science fiction is a global genre that has developed in different ways in different parts of the world. This class will introduce students to science fiction cultures from around the world—US, Russia, Poland, Japan, China, India, Latin America, Africa etc. We will read (in original English and in translation) works by some major authors and watch some important science fiction films to explore how this genre functions in different cultures.

Texts: Possible reading includes Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem, Vandana Singh's Distances and possible movies include Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Contact: sb67@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group C; Minor in International Studies; Minor in International Aid and Development

Topic: TBD

Instructor: TBD

Catalog Description: This course examines the works of a British author, e.g. Charles Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, or Zadie Smith. Specific content and focus vary by section, and the course may be repeated once for credit when its emphasis varies.

Satisfies: Group A; Single Author; Early Literature

Topic: Edgar Allen Poe

Instructor: Robert Tally

Catalog Description: This course examines the works of a US author, e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa, Cormac McCarthy, bell hooks, or Toni Morrison. Specific content and focus vary by section, and the course may be repeated once for credit when its emphasis varies.

Section Description: Through his tales, poetry, and criticism, Edgar Allan Poe helped to establish a distinctively literary style of writing in the United States. He was also fiercely critical of American nationalism, and he delighted in practical jokes, hoaxes, and satire. Poe’s mythic persona as a haunted, drunken "poète maudit" living on society’s outskirts remains a fixture in popular culture, but this course will examine the real Poe, a market-savvy critic and writer with mass appeal who operated at the center of an emergent literary culture in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s. Poe’s subversion of American literature took place from within, and his lasting influence is pervasive, powerful, and unsettling.

Texts: Poe, Edgar Allan, Poetry and Tales, New York: Library of America, 1984. [ISBN: 9780940450189]

Contact: robert.tally@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group B; Single Author; Early Literature

Topic: The Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros

Instructor: Geneva Gano

Catalog Description: This course examines the works of a US author, e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa, Cormac McCarthy, bell hooks, or Toni Morrison. Specific content and focus vary by section, and the course may be repeated once for credit when its emphasis varies.

Section Description: This archives-based course examines the varied literary career of the celebrated author Sandra Cisneros as well as her presence in media that situates her as an activist, fashion icon, and philanthropist. Working with the Sandra Cisneros Papers at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, students will read her published writings and also examine manuscript drafts of her poetry, childhood diaries, correspondence, personal mementos, photographs, fan letters, and other items. All students will complete original research projects using these archives and have the opportunity to present their work at a half-day symposium dedicated to Cisneros's work and career.

Texts: Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek; Cisneros, Have You Seen Marie?; Cisneros, Caramelo

Contact: gmgano@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group B; Single Author

Topic: Greta Gerwig

Instructor: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth

Catalog Description: This course integrates perspectives from English film and media studies, including film criticism, history, theory, screenwriting, and practical video skills. Each student will choose a focus, and all students will critique scholarly research, screenplays, and video projects that demonstrate concepts learned. Specific content and focus vary by section, and this course may be repeated once for credit when its emphasis varies.

Section Description: This senior seminar focuses on a recent filmmaker’s small, but distinct oeuvre: the films of Greta Gerwig. Gerwig, whose most recent film Barbie made history as the highest grossing film by a woman director, provides a unique chance to explore the relationship between acting, screenwriting, and directing. While the three films that Gerwig has written and directed (Ladybird, Little Women, and Barbie) will serve as core texts in the course, we will also examine how Gerwig’s experience screenwriting and acting in independent films informs her current status as a popular film auteur. Gerwig’s evolution—from acting in small-budget indie films to directing the epitome of a summer blockbuster—raises questions about the consequences formally, ideologically, and historically of the meeting of arthouse cinema and Hollywood. Ultimately, this course considers not only Gerwig’s filmography, but her network of influences from mumblecore to the French New Wave and everything in between. The method of evaluation for this course may include presentations, papers, and a final critical or creative project (such as a short film, video essay, or screenplay).

Texts: Readings available on Canvas

Contact: zillingworth@txstate.edu

Satisfies: Group B or D; Single Author; Minor in Media Studies; Minor in Studies in Popular Culture