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Upcoming Course Offerings

Course offerings are subject to change at any time, depending on instructor availability. Contact the Graduate Program Manager with any questions at 801-422-4939 or gradenglish@byu.edu.

Winter 2024
Spring 2024
Summer 2024
Fall 2024
Winter 2025
Spring 2025
Summer 2025
Fall 2025
Winter 2026
Spring 2026
Summer 2026
  • In English 611R: Teaching Advanced Composition, you will complete semester-long internship in teaching advanced writing to college students. The bulk of your learning in this course will take place in an individual internship with an experienced advanced writing teacher, where you will observe and participate in the teaching of the class. We will also meet periodically for seminar sessions designed to support your experiential learning in the internship by giving you a space where you can reflect mindfully, contextualize your learning in the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and prepare to apply what you learn to future teaching. This course prepares you to practice thoughtful and researched-based teaching in your work during and after your MA. As part of this course, you'll develop a teaching portfolio that you can use on the academic job market. Applications required to enroll for this course.

  • Writing intensive: 9 weeks of reading, followed by 5 weeks of writing and research instruction, culminating in a 15 to 20-page final paper.

  • In this course we will examine stories written in medieval England by and about people of the Book – Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The concept of a “People of the Book” originates in the Qur’an and refers to communities oriented around revealed scripture – the Gospels, the Torah, and Qur’an. These communities and books intersected in complex ways during the Middle Ages. We will trace in the narrative contours visions of pluralistic communities of believers, and we will contextualize English Christian attitudes and policies towards religious minorities. Texts will include translations of Old and Middle English, Arabic, and Hebrew poetry, fables, travelogues, chronicles, romances, and saints’ lives as well as secondary contextual readings.

    14 weeks of reading followed by a 10-page final paper.

  • During a period known for the social problem novel, industrial fiction, and Condition-of England novel, authors took seriously the idea that literature could and should have a beneficial impact on society. We’ll query this idea by examining the theory and practice of social reform writing during the Victorian period, reading the work of authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Seacole, and Beatrice Potter. What aesthetic theories and practices did they develop to reinforce the motivations of social activism? We’ll explore the vision and efficacy of literature that engages with issues such as poverty, workers’ rights, the rights of women, systems of enslavement, imperial expansion, and environmental preservation.

    Writing intensive: 9 weeks of reading, followed by 5 weeks of writing and research instruction, culminating in a 15 to 20-page final paper.

  • Following the American Revolution, pressures to establish a distinctive American literature extended not only to novelists and poets but to playwrights as well. While playgoing was not universally recognized as appropriate or acceptable, let alone moral, most cities featured playhouses (although some were located in decidedly seedy areas) and acting troupes. Nevertheless, even during the Revolution itself, short plays—some of them by women playwrights—filled crucial political roles in demarcating the ethics of the Patriot stance and in garnering support against British control. And during the decades following the Revolution, American drama—perhaps more insistently than any other artistic genre—established distinctively “American” types, themes, ideals, and mindsets. This claim seems especially true of successively pioneering plays focusing on women and/or written by women. We will explore together plays written by Americans between 1770 and 1920, exploring pioneering efforts of men and women who founded American drama and eventually created a distinctively American theatre.

    Writing intensive: 9 weeks of reading, followed by 5 weeks of writing and research instruction, culminating in a 15 to 20-page final paper.

  • The secularization thesis is one of the most powerful progress narratives to develop in the modern era. It suggests that with increasing scientific knowledge, industrialization, and technological advancements, religion and religious practice declines. In recent decades, however, it has become increasingly clear that such is not the case. In spite of secularization’s attempts to marginalize and even eradicate it, religion remains as present as it ever was—it has only changed shape. Literature, in particular, has remained a repository for what we might call postsecular concerns, and many contemporary poets and novelists continue to articulate a specific ethical and moral vision as they seek to reconnect spiritual and secular virtues. That vision is not an atavistic return to pre-modern religious paradigms, but rather a uniquely postsecular sensibility developed in light of both the scientific advancements and the tumultuous cultural upheavals of the past century.

    In this course we will take what Paul Ricœur calls an “affirmative” approach to a selection of American literary texts published since the “religious turn” of the late 1990s that demonstrate a postsecular sensibility. Our goal, in part, is to practice a mode of scholarship that remains open and responsive to what a text has to offer, and one that accepts what it sincerely reveals as of equal importance to what it might conceal.

    14 weeks of reading followed by a 10-page final paper.

  • Disability theorists have called disability “the master trope of human disqualification.” Every person is born into a state of dependence on others, and every human life ends as the body breaks down, a fact these theorists underscore by dubbing those who find themselves outside the world of disability the “temporarily able-bodied.” Given the omnipresence of disability, students will find that any literary text–from the Bible to King Lear to The Old Man and the Sea and everything beyond–will yield new and significant meanings under this theoretical lens. This seminar will survey the history of disability studies, from its inception as a political movement in the 1960s, through its introduction into academia in the 1980s-90s, and to its force in the present day. We will use foundational theoretical texts to study the social construction, literary representation, and embodied experience of disability. Throughout the seminar, we will test these theories by applying them to primary texts ranging from novels to films.

    14 weeks of reading followed by a 10-page final paper.

  • What does it take for adolescents to be able to read and comprehend texts? From decoding to fluency to vocabulary to comprehension, what is required for the adolescent brain to make sense of a text? What should secondary teachers and parents know about these processes? What are the implications of these questions for adolescents and their teachers in terms of pedagogy, processes, motivation, text selection, and support? This special topics in English education course will interrogate, problematize, and respond to these questions as we explore the research that frames the teaching of reading and literature.

  • Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

    • Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

    Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

    • Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

    • Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

    • Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Fiction

    • Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

    • Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Poetry

    • Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • This seminar will immerse graduate students in critical reading and discussion of young adult literature. Course topics will include a review of the history of YA literature, major authors and critics, significant trends in YA literature, and contemporary YA literature and its influences. In addition to reading a wide range of YA books, by the end of the course, students will have prepared an article on some aspect of young adult literature for submission to a professional journal.

  • This course involves participation in the CUWP’s summer institute (SI). The course dates are unique, and graduate students should contact Debbie Dean before March 1 with their intention to participate as the course begins with an evening session in March, a full day in May, and then three weeks in June of daily, all-day, attendance. The program encourages teachers to be writers and focuses on improving writing instruction in a highly collaborative environment with teachers of multiple grade levels and content areas.

  • The Anglo-Welsh poet Katherine Philips wrote many of her poems during a decade of particular uncertainty: the 1650s, during which people navigated the aftermath of civil wars that culminated in the execution of King Charles I and the military defeat of his son and heir. Philips’s poetry engages with this complex period on many levels, ranging from the local and personal to the public and political, often writing in ways that render these categories difficult to distinguish. In this class, we will work with a (digitized) manuscript of Philips’s poems in her own hand, the texts dating from 1650 to about 1658. Because no teaching edition of her poems exists, we will begin by collaboratively transcribing the manuscript, creating our own plain-text version of this artifact to use as we spend the rest of the course engaging with a range of historical, contextual, and scholarly materials in service of working out Philips’s artistic response to her tumultuous moment.

  • For what is, by far, the shortest traditional period in British literary history, the Romantic Age continues to have outsized influence in contemporary Anglo-American culture. This seminar will interrogate this phenomenon by pairing Romantic-era writers and texts with important works from recent decades that grapple with Romanticism’s legacies. We will study, for instance, how William Blake’s radical ethical vision undergirds Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a 2009 eco-thriller by the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk; how a Byronic strain of toxic masculinity infects the protagonist of Disgrace, a Booker Prize winner from 1999 by the South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; and how the remarkable rise and fall of the “peasant poet” John Clare is retold in Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze, a Booker finalist from 2009. This course should therefore prove valuable not only for specialists in 19th-century British literature but also for aspiring novelists, students of contemporary literature, and anyone interested in how leading writers of today continue to find inspiration in literary movements of ages past.

  • “Happy are they who understand the words of Jesus, but happier still are they who listen to His silence.” So remarks a contemporary French theologian, evoking silence of a peculiar kind – what scripture describes as the still, small voice. Such a thought attests to how divine silence may be revelatory as well as opaque, peaceful as well as disapproving. Approaching divine silence as a vital feature of spiritual life, our seminar will trace how its themes and resonances are taken up in literary criticism and theory (e.g., in work by Christian Wiman, Simone Weil, Michel de Certeau, and others).

  • Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

    • Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

    Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

    • Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

    • Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

    • Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Poetry

    • Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Workshopping

    • Students in English 670R will evaluate and critique the young adult novels of their peers.

    Current Techniques in Writing Young Adult Novels

    • Students in English 670R will identify current techniques in the writing of young adult novels through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Writing and Revision of Young Adult Novels

    • Students in English 670R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication by a recognized publisher of young adult novels.
  • In English 611R: Teaching Advanced Composition, you will complete semester-long internship in teaching advanced writing to college students. The bulk of your learning in this course will take place in an individual internship with an experienced advanced writing teacher, where you will observe and participate in the teaching of the class. We will also meet periodically for seminar sessions designed to support your experiential learning in the internship by giving you a space where you can reflect mindfully, contextualize your learning in the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and prepare to apply what you learn to future teaching. This course prepares you to practice thoughtful and researched-based teaching in your work during and after your MA. As part of this course, you'll develop a teaching portfolio that you can use on the academic job market. Applications required to enroll for this course.

  • The Arthurian legend is one of the best-known narrative traditions from British literature. But from its sixth-century beginnings through today, Arthurian tales of knights, quests, named weapons, and monstrous beasts have most often relegated women to the margins. Despite the seeming equality of the Round Table, there are no seats for women, and when women do appear in the stories, they often do so in disturbing or problematic ways. This course aims to recover Arthurian women—women as characters in, as well as authors and readers of, the Arthurian Legend. Our study will begin with the roles of women in the legend’s creation and expansion during the medieval period, both in England and across Europe, then turn to women’s roles in perpetuating the legend’s literary afterlife. From Marie de France’s twelfth-century Arthurian poems, to the medievalism of the Romantic and Victorian periods, up through recent modern adaptations into literature, music, visual art, and film, women around the world have repeatedly made spaces for themselves at the Arthurian table.

  • How is it that Virginia Woolf is able to write so compellingly about the experiences of maternity when Woolf herself was never a mother? This course will begin by examining the female relationships in Woolf’s life—the very early death of her mother, Julia Stephen, in 1895 when Woolf was only 13; the powerful sisterhood between Woolf and Vanessa Bell; the intense and passionate connection between Woolf and British author Vita Sackville-West—in an attempt to contextualize the variety of mothers and motherly experiences we encounter in Woolf’s fiction. Students will read seven of Virginia Woolf’s ten novels, including Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, and The Waves, as we work our way through the complicated dynamics of feminism, modernism, and the maternal muse.

    Trigger warning: This class will discuss (and return often) to Woolf’s experience of childhood sexual abuse.

  • Just before the pandemic, the hot academic book was Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking, which argued for a more communal approach to both academic life and the practice of literary criticism. The pandemic and the ever-increasing precarity of much academic labor have generated increased interest in a kind of ethical criticism that attends to questions of what might be called the humane. This course will take up that set of questions, beginning with Hegel’s account of recognition—a concept that has informed many influential theoretical accounts of the human while also proving less than adequate as a model of the humane. Consequently, the course will explore recent work that attempts to generate alternatives to Hegel’s model, including philosophical discussions of vulnerability and intersectionality. The course will culminate by moving these concerns into a theological register, asking what kind of theological anthropology might best account for a way of thinking about the human that could underwrite a richer and more generous life together.

  • Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

    • Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

    Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

    • Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

    • Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

    • Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Fiction

    • Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

    • Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Poetry

    • Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • This course involves participation in the CUWP’s summer institute (SI). The course dates are unique, and graduate students should contact Debbie Dean before March 1 with their intention to participate as the course begins with an evening session in March, a full day in May, and then three weeks in June of daily, all-day, attendance. The program encourages teachers to be writers and focuses on improving writing instruction in a highly collaborative environment with teachers of multiple grade levels and content areas.

  • In this course, we will read a range of literary genres from diverse communities of American writers from 1865 to 1914 to engage the complicated realities of what it means to belong in the United States. Beginning with a juxtaposition of presidential emancipation and white supremacist propaganda, we will directly analyze and discuss the intersecting contexts and the embodied experiences of class, gender, race, and sexuality during this era of reorganizing and redefining the modern United States. Ultimately, our goal is to explore what this period of literature says of what it means to belong and what our individual responsibility is in (re)constructing spaces and relationships of belonging in our immediate and future communities.

  • Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

    • Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

    Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

    • Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

    • Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

    • Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Fiction

    • Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

    • Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Poetry

    • Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • In English 611R: Teaching Advanced Composition, you will complete semester-long internship in teaching advanced writing to college students. The bulk of your learning in this course will take place in an individual internship with an experienced advanced writing teacher, where you will observe and participate in the teaching of the class. We will also meet periodically for seminar sessions designed to support your experiential learning in the internship by giving you a space where you can reflect mindfully, contextualize your learning in the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and prepare to apply what you learn to future teaching. This course prepares you to practice thoughtful and researched-based teaching in your work during and after your MA. As part of this course, you'll develop a teaching portfolio that you can use on the academic job market. Applications required to enroll for this course.

  • Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

    • Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

    Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

    • Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

    • Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

    • Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Fiction

    • Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

    • Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

    Workshopping

    • Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

    Writing and Revision of Poetry

    • Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.
  • This course involves participation in the CUWP’s summer institute (SI). The course dates are unique, and graduate students should contact Debbie Dean before March 1 with their intention to participate as the course begins with an evening session in March, a full day in May, and then three weeks in June of daily, all-day, attendance. The program encourages teachers to be writers and focuses on improving writing instruction in a highly collaborative environment with teachers of multiple grade levels and content areas.