BYU English Department Course Descriptions, Winter 2010
Tentative Schedule (subject to change)325: Visual Rhetoric (Paul)
This course will explore how a wide range of visual texts—photographs, web sites, icons, videos, charts—are rhetorical, i.e., how they create meaning and shape our identities. We will look at how words and texts work together, from illuminated books to YouTube videos. To explore visual rhetoric, we will look at the way perception works, at the artistic and commercial function of visuals, and at the production of icons, graphs, and charts. We will use Faigley et al., Picturing Texts (2004) and Kostelnick and Roberts, Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators (1998).
328R: Style (Hansen) (cross-listed with Honors 307R)
This course on style is for students aspiring to be writers, journalists, bloggers, editors, lawyers, politicians, teachers, administrators, and civic leaders whose rhetorical style sets a standard. In the global Information Age, people in advanced nations earn their living by reading, writing, speaking, and otherwise processing information. Those who can exploit the power of clear, persuasive communication have a decided advantage over those who can't. But this course isn't merely utilitarian. It extends the 2500-year-old tradition of rhetorical style, built on a foundation of language analysis and imitation exercises, instructional methods used successfully for centuries in schools that descended to Europe and America from Greece and Rome. Its results are evident in great rhetoric that defines our heritage, from Chaucer to Churchill, from Longinus to Lincoln.
330: The British Novel (Bennion)
In English 333 We will read six novels: Emma (Jane Austen), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Hard Times (Charles Dickens), Middlemarch (George Eliot), Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy), and Orlando (Virginia Woolf). Discussion is the main class activity. Students participate in a discussion board; keep a reading journal; give a report on a critical essay; write three thought papers, two papers; and take a mid-term and final. I emphasize learning to read ethically, experimenting with the process of writing critically, gathering information about the history and principles of the English novel, and reading one's life as a text.
336: The American Novel (Tuttle)
This course will investigate some of the important developments in American literature in and around the twentieth century. We will ask a number of questions about ethnicity, psychology, class, politics, and gender. But the central questions of the course will focus on environment and nationality. These are questions about physical space and the primary role setting has in our understanding of literature. At every point we will ask ourselves what makes an American novel America. We will read novels by Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Steven Millhauser, Raymond Chandler, Sandra Cisneros, and others.
337R: Studies in Genre (Madden)
This section will study the history and theory of the personal essay, from the sixteenth century (Montaigne) through the British Georgians (Addison, Steele) and Romantics (Lamb, Hazlitt) and later writers (Woolf, Orwell), with sidesteps to the American Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau), and on to the present. We will focus both on canonical essayists and forgotten (often women) essayists, then bring out study to bear on the current trends in literary publishing.
343: Modern Drama (Harris)
In this modern and contemporary drama course, students will read playscripts, theory, and criticism from 1890 to the present. Defining drama and/or performance and determining how plays create their effect on audiences will be objectives of the course. To help achieve these goals, students will attend two plays and write reviews of the performances. Class discussions will examine scripts both as plans for performance and as artifacts of their various cultures.
345 section 001: Literature and Film (Perry)
This film adaptation course will explore the connections between these two giants of suspense and horror in terms of how Hitchcock draws on Poe's imagery, plots, and themes for several of his classic films. The class will study several of Hitchcock's most Poe-esque films, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Birds, and Psycho. These will be examined in the context of relevant Poe texts such as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia," Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Man of the Crowd," and others. Course texts will include Spoto's Art of Alfred Hitchcock, Thompson's The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Corrigan's A Short Guide to Writing About Film, and Perry's Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror.
345 section 002: Literature and Film (Lundquist)
This course will focus on adaptations of literature to film. We will study the various uses of romance in works beginning with the Arthurian legends (Tristan and Isolde) through superhero/fantasy films (The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Superman, The Dark Knight). Major texts will also include Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Remains of the Day, and Shadowlands. Robert Johnson's We will be used as a foundational text that will establish Jungian notions of the history of romance in the Western world.
358R section 001: Anglophone African Literatures (Eastley)
With the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to South African novelist J. M. Coetzee in 2003, Africa has produced four Nobel winners and a host of extremely high quality literary works. This course will consider African literatures written in English within both chronological and nationalist/regional frameworks, beginning with Nigerian Chinua Achebe's pioneering novels Things Fall Apart (1959) and Arrow of God (1964), and moving through time and geographic space to arrive in 1990's Zambia in Binwell Sinyangwe's A Cowrie of Hope. These primary texts will be explored in conjunction with a selection of secondary essays introducing key issues in postcolonial theory.
358R section 002: Latino/a Literature (Hickman)
This class surveys the literary history of a varied group of writers lumped into the category of U.S. "Latino" or "Latina" literature—namely, the literature written in English for readers of American literature by Mexican-American, Nuyorican, Cuban-American, and Dominican-American writers as well as from other related groups. While Spanish language terms will occasionally appear in these literary texts, you need not speak Spanish as a prerequisite for the course; rather, you should understand that the nature of Latino/a literary texts is one that approaches and entices English-speaking readers on their own terms even as it asks them to broaden their horizons of what constitutes "American" literature. After you complete this class, I hope you will be able to 1) understand the most significant developments in U.S. Latino/a literary history from 1848 to the present, 2) understand how U.S. Latino/a literary history, though worthy of study in its own right and as its own literary-historical phenomenon, relates to and is consonant with the larger flows of American literary history broadly construed, and 3) develop a sensitivity to the priorities and problems of U.S. Latino/a literature and to be respectful of those views, even if you finally find them to be views that you don’t personally espouse.
361: American Literature 1800-1865 (Crisler)
This course chronologically surveys American Literature from 1800 up to the Civil War, a period of such flowering that at least the last half of it has been dubbed the "American Renaissance." Readings will include selections from standard writers of this era such as Irving, Cooper, Poe, Bryant, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, the "schoolroom poets," etc. Concentrating on how the "new world" their literary forebears encountered in turn shaped the thinking of these writers, the course will also treat such quintessentially American themes as exceptionalism, slavery, individuality, religious toleration and intolerance, and primitivism.
362: American Literature 1865-1914 (Cutchins)
There are several objectives for this course. The most obvious one is that students should become more familiar with American literature written between about 1865 and 1914. By the end of the semester you should be able to recognize the writing of a dozen or more different authors. You should also be able to identify writing samples of the period as realistic, naturalistic, impressionistic, romantic, etc. and explain what each of these terms means. You should be able to write about the materials we will study analytically and creatively, and place those works in meaningful historical and literary contexts.
We will not, however, use an anthology this semeste Moreover, I am not going to choose most of your readings, either, since that would be basically the same as using an anthology. It would just be an anthology in which the readings were chosen by me. Instead, you are going to choose the readings for this course I hope that this more or less radical approach to American literature will help us contextualize our readings in new and dynamic ways.
363: American Literature 1914-1960 (Matthews)
This semester we will examine the complex aesthetic, generic, and political developments in American literature and culture between 1915-1960. The lens through which we will examine these works is "adolescence." In his mid-century study of American literature and culture, Leslie Fiedler claims that images of "adolescence haunt our greatest works as an unintended symbolic confession of the inadequacy we sense but cannot remedy." Fiedler's essay suggests that the adolescents in America's literature are symptomatic of the adolescence of American literature and culture. The anxiety that America may never be as "mature" as Europe haunts the cultural, economic, and political narratives of twentieth-century America. At the same time, however, many modern American thinkers invoke the adolescent as a symbol of hope and progress—a type for the "American Dream." These authors associate the young and independent adolescent with nascent opportunity and potential success. Inadequacy or potentiality? Immaturity or innocence? The seemingly conflicting uses of and for the American adolescent signal the complex processes involved in constructing a national identity and literature. It will be our project this semester to explore how particular texts and literary movements engage with the varying and oftentimes competing discourses of this turbulent period.
365 section 001: American Literature 1960-present (Cronin)
The purpose of this course in contemporary American fiction is to foster understanding of the major questions, definitions, and literary-theoretical issues of postmodernit: 1) to learn how to read contemporary American fiction, 2) to develop a critical vocabulary for identifying and describing its techniques and strategies, and 3) to explore its preoccupation with moral/philosophical/religious/ ethical issues of subjectivity at the end of the "American" 20th century. Texts will include Louise Erdrich, Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient; Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing; Toni Morrison, Paradise; Jonathan Rosen, Talmud and The Internet; Lloyd Jones, Mr. Pip; Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces; and Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader.
365 section 001: American Literature 1960-present (Hickman)
American literature has become increasingly concerned in recent decades with the relationship between human perceptions and language's ability to communicate such perceptions, and how the slippage between language and perception might affect our view of what is "real" in an increasingly diverse America. This course will 1) help you to understand and be able to detail the literary history of post-1960's American literature through the close reading and study of several novels and selections of theoretical and philosophical writing from this period, 2) help you to form educated opinions on these tensions between reality and literary artifice, author and reader, history and story, and what it means to be "American" after 1960, and 3) help you to join the conversation about these issues through well-conceived, well-researched thinking, reading, and writing. Assigned readings for the course include Julia Alvarez, In The Time of the Butterflies; Paul Auster, City of Glass; E.L. Doctorow Ragtime; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; and Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.
373: British Literature 1660-1789 (Paxman)
This course will focus on literature and the problem of human nature in the eighteenth century. The question of human nature threads through every literature because literature depicts human character. Eighteenth-century thinkers were fascinated by the question, and their legacy continues to play itself out in our day. In light of emerging philosophies of knowledge, scientific and technological advances, and influential economic theories, eighteenth-century writers were willing to confront the most puzzling challenge of all: the paradoxical powers and limitations of the human mind's ability to comprehend itself. We will study some of the great writers of the era, such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, and many of the less canonical as well, to learn how the era's greatest literature—its satires, novels, familiar essays, and non-fiction prose—reflects, and reflects upon, human nature: what motivates humans, how rational and emotional faculties motivate action, how language influences knowing, to what degree direct persuasion can influence conduct when it, too, is the product of people with only partial grasp of complex situations, the role of imagination in illuminating the human psyche to its true state, and how ironic or satiric texts may perhaps achieve ends that more direct representation may not.
374: British Literature 1789-1832 (Westover)
A lot of exciting recent work in Romantic studies pushes us to remember Romantic literature as wartime literature. Essentially, Britain was at war with France from 1793 until 1815, fighting both uncomfortably close to home and in the far-flung corners of the globe. The Romantic Period's literature often reflects on war—sometimes to glorify it, sometimes to reject it, often to ruminate on its costs. Of course, war did not dominate every detail of British life then, just as ongoing war does not dominate every detail of our lives now. Part of our task in this course will be to think about Romanticism's various literary innovations and to ask whether, in fact, they have anything to do with war. We will read a good deal of poetry in the class, but we will also read two novels—Austen's Persuasion and Scott's Waverley—along with relevant criticism and materials in other genres.
375: British Literature 1832-1900 (Thorne-Murphy)
This course will study literature of the Victorian period within its social context. This was the era of the Industrial Revolution, of the vast British Empire, of laissez-faire capitalism and the birth of socialism—serious and earnest matters which created an earnest and serious literature. Yet this era also produced a plethora of imaginative literature which could be as light-hearted as Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" or as humorous as Charles Dickens' unforgettable caricatures. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1843, "The condition of England, [. . .] is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world" (Past and Present, Damrosch 1035). Over the course of the semester, we will explore the various manifestations of this "strangest" culture and the literature it produced, from narratives that have become part of our pop culture (such as "The Christmas Carol" and "The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), to lyric poetry contemplating the nature of life and death, to the lengthy realist novels and stories in which the Victorians excelled. In particular, this course will study four different issues that are integral to understanding Victorian literature: industrialism and social progress, the role of the artist in society, ladies and gentlemen (class and gender), and science and exploration. As you study these themes, you will use your newly-developed understanding of nineteenth-century literature in a research project that leads you through the steps to conduct research in original Victorian-era periodicals, find short fiction to evaluate and study, share the results on a Victorian Short Fiction website, and analyze this literature in a research essay.
376: British Literature 1900-1950 (Harris)
This course traces developments in early twentieth-century English and Irish Literature—1890 to 1950. One issue will be learning how this Modern period develops from the Victorian period and how it then impacts the contemporary one. The course will highlight the works of major writers and focus on particular issues, especially those of creativity, language, and nationality. Reading texts from all genres—fiction, drama, poetry, essay—will help students identify modernist themes; reading a creative work and then a critical work by the same author will help students understand the aims of writers who struggled to define both their work and their period.
377/379: Secondary English Teaching Procedures and Practicum (Thursby, Ostenson)
Emphasis will be on researched best practices for real teaching/real learning in secondary English classes. Using Jim Burk's text The English Teacher's Companion, 3rd Edition, and the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) website and publications as a basis for reading assignments and discussion, this class will prepare pre-service students for professional secondary English teaching. This class will provide an overview of the students' previous BYU teacher preparation, and class time will be used in lecture, discussion, and student review presentations. Students will be assigned to a designated school in the BYU Partnership of Secondary Schools, and they will teach six lessons under the supervision of an assigned cooperating teacher during the 377/379 semester.
378: Teaching Literature and Reading in Secondary Schools (Grierson)
Theories and methods of teaching literature, reading, and related literacy skills in secondary English classes. Required before student teaching. For English teaching majors and minors only.
381: Chaucer (Petersen)
This course will focus on the works of the greatest late medieval author in the original Middle English. We will read most of The Canterbury Tales, in more depth than the 371 course can afford, as well as Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer's magnificent heroic epic, and many of his other lesser-known works. We will also learn the major critical tools and debates pertinent to Chaucer studies and spend some time looking at the sources and analogues to stories or tropes that appear in his works.
384 section 001: Major Authors: Cormac McCarthy (Snyder)
We'll trace McCarthy's career chronologically as it developed and read a number of his novels in order: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Child of God (1973), Blood Meridian (1985), Cities of the Plain (1998), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road (2006). We'll also read one play, The Sunset Limited (2006), and delve into the excellent secondary criticism that McCarthy scholars have produced to deepen our readings of his texts. Everyone will produce a conference paper, a proposal, a group handout, and an article review. This course is Oprah approved!
384 section 002: Major Authors: Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson (Paxman)
The rivalry between the two great novelists of mid-eighteenth-century England, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, was driven by fierce disagreements over what are the most crucial components of virtue, how to represent virtue in narrative, what constitutes the novel, how the novel can best promote the character development of readers, what role class and education play in life as in prose fiction, the legitimacy of the use of a narrator, and just about everything else. Their novels were debated, praised, and critiqued by the major thinkers of the day, who saw in the contrast between the two not only different types of prose fiction, but two fundamental and contrasting philosophies of life itself. We will study Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia alongside Richardson's Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Studying them, we see the contrasts in context of their time and ways in which their competing philosophies continue to be expressed in art and life.
384 section 003: Major Authors: John Donne (Kimberly Johnson)
This course examines Donne's prose and poetry, including early satiric work, secular and sacred lyrics, and sermons. Through close reading of Donne's literary corpus in context of the political and religious upheavals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, we will explore the ways in which cultural controversies of the day ramify into Donne's own negotiations of literary conventions. Further, we will consider the ways in which Donne's work performs (and identifies as its highest value) a thoroughgoing skepticism, laying the groundwork for the re-negotiation of tradition that will come to characterize the intellectual life of the seventeenth century.
385: British Literature 1603-1660 (Duerden)
The big concerns of early modernity—love, science, religion—occupy the line between mind and body. Does love spring from the mind or the body? Does knowledge come from reason, or from empirical and sensory experience? Can human knowledge be trusted, or should one resort to skepticism, or to faith? Should worship include ritual, ceremony, and outward observance, or should it focus on inwardness and spirituality? Should church government and civil government employ absolutist structures to govern and compel obedience, or should individuals be free to govern themselves according to an inner light? And what does any of this have to do with literature? How does each of these epistemological, social, and political concerns influence the aesthetic foundations of early modern literature? We'll read John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, of course, but also women writers you may not yet have met.
390R: Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (Christianson)
This course will focus on literary realism in the nineteenth-century novel. Specifically, we will examine how major figures in Britain and the US addressed some of the most pressing social issues of their day , including race, class, and gender relations as well as national identity. We will read novels by Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and George Eliot among others. This course fulfills the "Literature from 1800-1900" requirement in the new English major that took effect this year.
391: Introduction to Folklore (Rudy)
The emphasis in this course will be on learning how to identify, analyze, interpret, document, and appreciate folklore performances. People sitting around comparing scar stories, "Ryan Gosling is a Mormon" legends, or embarrassing moments are performing folklore to entertain and maintain social life. Folklorists study three categories of traditional expression: material, verbal, and customary lore. We will have three central units: fairy tales and modern society; folk genres, groups, and fieldwork; and folklore and the Internet. Students will learn how to recognize folklore in books, media, the internet, and daily life; how to summarize and analyze form, function, and meaning; how to compare and interpret worldview; and how to document folklore through observation, participation, recorded interviews, and archival procedures. Everyone experiences folklore daily. Folklore reflects problem solving and generates group values in response to the human condition.
392: American Folklore (Eliason)
This course is designed to introduce you to the substance and significance of the folklore all around you—especially in the context of the American experience. You will learn how to collect and analyze the customs, traditions, stories, music, and folk art of various American regional, religious, occupational, and ethnic groups. You will also learn that folklore is not just something culturally different people do, but it is an integral and important part of your life as well.
395R section 001: Reading Scripture (Jorgensen and Faulconer) (cross-listed with Honors 303R)
We think of this as a skills course in reading scripture, especially but not exclusively its narrative and poetic genres. We hope to increase students' reading skills and thus their understanding, love, good use, and enjoyment of scripture by reading selections from the Old and New Testaments and the Book of Mormon aloud and talking about them; by introducing students to a range of traditions, methods, or habits of scriptural interpretation: Rabbinical, early Christian (Augustine), Medieval (Bernard, Aquinas), Reformation (Luther, Calvin), Modern, and Postmodern (Millbank, Caputo, Wolterstorff); by recourse to original language where feasible (New Testament Greek); by comparing other contemporary translations (NIV; RSV; Stephen Mitchell, Raymond Scheindlin, Reynolds Price, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Alter, et al) with the King James Version. Primary texts will include selections from Genesis, Job, Psalms, 1-2 Samuel; The Gospel of Mark; the Epistle to the Romans; selected original (1830/1842) chapters from the Book of Mormon. Secondary materials will include selections from Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry; Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative; Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry, Reading the Bible; Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; Fokkelman, Reading Biblical Poetry; and Lacocque & Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically.
395R section 002: "Movie Madness": A Psychological Approach to Film and Literature (Fox and Williams) (cross-listed with Honors 323R)
In this course a clinical professor of counseling psychology (Marleen Williams) and a professor of English (Jay Fox) team up to examine ways mental disorders are represented in film and literature. Students will overview medical descriptions of several disorders and then read and view portrayals of those disorders in films and literary texts. We will look at the biological, psychological, spiritual, and sociological aspects of these disorders and the theories accounting for their prevalence, including the theories that creativity and madness are related. The course attempts to provide an innovative blending of behavioral science with cinematic and literary art. Texts will include Matters of the Mind (a textbook written especially for Latter-day Saints), "The Yellow Wallpaper," selections from Jane Eyre, Victoria, Mrs. Brown, The Madness of King George, What Dreams May Come, The Horse Whisperer, and The Boys Next Door; selected scenes from Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and selected readings from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV TR).
395R section 003: Darwinian Stories: Evolutionary Psychology and the Arts (Eliason, Miller, and Higley) (cross-listed with Honors 261)
The course will provide an overview of the emerging interdisciplinary specialty known as evolutionary psychology. A triple focus on genes, brain, and behavior will combine to frame major topics: sex and gender, aggression, cooperation, altruism, and religion. Of particular interest are representative expressions in the arts. Texts will include E.O. Wilson, Consilience; S. Pinker, The Blank Slate; M. Ridley, The Origins of Virtue; D. Buss, The Evolution of Desire; and F. De Waal, Our Inner Ape.
396: Studies in Women's Literature
In this course you will encounter male and female writers of women's lives. They span Jewish, African American, Christian, Afromystical, Native American, and even post-colonial Polynesian religious and cultural convictions—as well as a plurality of twentieth-century class, racial and geographic locations. One of the writers is a man writing about American gender constructions of femininity and masculinity via the subject of anorexia. Another is also a male writer recording post-colonial South Pacific tribal violence through the eyes of a very young woman. Each of these writers is a male or female "master" of fictional inventiveness and language innovation within the broad traditions of 20th/21st-century literatures. Their elegant experiments in language literally renew our own language, our spirits, and our understanding of women's histories. They will enable us to read experimentation in fiction, to expand our feminist-aesthetic awareness, and to recognize the ethical, moral and theological questions at the heart of all of these fictions. Texts will include Virginia Woolf, Room of One's Own; Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Lloyd Jones, Mr. Pip; Toni Morrison, Paradise; Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader; and Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple.