Upcoming Course Offerings
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Toggle ItemENGL 303:001: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Reading and Critiquing Flannery O'Connor (Keith Lawrence)
We will read a handful of stories by O’Connor; in addition to analyzing these stories amongst ourselves, we will engage published criticism of them. Students will learn fundamental principles of research and argumentative writing: how to develop a focused, appropriately sophisticated and unique argument; how (and where) to do meaningful research; how to effectively enter a relevant scholarly conversation; how to develop and support a cohesive claim; how to ensure that a scholarly argument ends in a significant “so what?” justification; and how to employ MLA style in documenting and citing sources.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303:002: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Poetry of Katherine Philips (Jason Kerr)
Katherine Philips (1632–64) was a major British author of the mid-seventeenth century, famous now for her intense poems expressing friendship with other women. Her poems of friendship will provide a launching-pad for this course's work in learning the craft of literary criticism, and published scholarship on her work will help us gain familiarity with this genre of writing. Work in the course will center on key skills pertinent to writing literary criticism: reading poems closely for their conceptual implications, finding and engaging with different kinds of sources that can enrich our readings, and developing effective strategies for organizing written arguments. Because literary criticism is simultaneously the genre that best distills the core portable English major skill—thinking in sophisticated ways about the interrelationships of texts and concepts—and a genre in which few students will write after graduation, we will also engage in frequent reflection about transferring skills refined in this class to other contexts.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-003: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Shakespeare’s King Lear (Michael Lavers)
The French painter and sculptor Georges Braque said: "In art there is only one thing that matters: the thing you cannot explain." I have no idea why King Lear makes me want to weep, why it feels transcendently meaningful. And I'll never know. The play seems not to contain meaning, but rather to be meaning itself. It is, therefore, inherently mysterious and beyond analysis. This is what makes it great. But still, an honest attempt to articulate not the "meaning" of the play but my experience reading it or watching it--this attempt, to explain the unexplainable, is beautiful and important. Come find out why.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-004: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Chaucer's Global Fantasy (Miranda Wilcox)
Geoffrey Chaucer was a socially mobile royal bureaucrat in cosmopolitan London who witnessed the major crises of the late fourteenth century, including pandemic, war, and insurrection. In The Canterbury Tales, he imagined an eclectic group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury entertaining themselves by telling stories. We will examine the intersections of political power, gender difference, and religious conversion and conquest in the lawyer’s tale about Roman Constance set adrift in rudderless boats after failed marriages in Syria and northern England. We will also compare and contrast Chaucer’s global fantasy with his sources and analogues. As we read literary criticism about the poem, we will learn basic conventions that professional critics employ, tools that we will then imitate and implement in our own literary criticism. As we write about “The Man of Law’s Tale,” we will become more attuned to the kinds of questions that literary critics ask, and we will begin to read with greater discernment and formulate more sophisticated conceptual claims about literary texts.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-005: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Form and Meaning in Art Spiegelman's Maus (Joseph Darowski)
Art Spiegelman's Maus is a graphic novel that presents the story of Spiegelman interviewing his father about the Holocaust. While the story is true, Spiegelman's postmodern interpretation of his family's history presents all the characters as animals (the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, etc.). The resulting text is difficult to categorize, but rich in thematic impact and literary merit. In this section of 303, students will become conversant in the strengths of the comic book/graphic novel medium, explore the unique aspects of Spiegelman's iconic work, and develop proficiency in applying secondary critical sources while engaging in literary analysis.
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Toggle ItemENGL 323-001: Intro to Professional Writing (David Stock)
This class introduces you to professional writing: what it is, how it differs from academic writing, and how to prepare to do it well. You’ll learn foundational knowledge and skills to 1) analyze professional writing situations; 2) practice creating content that meets generic and stylistic expectations typical of professional writing; and 3) collaborate with peers to design and complete a workplace writing project for a real client. This class helps you develop professional writing competencies that are highly valued in workplace settings.
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Toggle ItemENGL 337R-001: Studies in Literary Form and Genre (formerly ENGL 333): Studies in Poetry (Trent Hickman)
In this section of the course, we’ll focus on schools and developments in American poetry from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The class is equally a course in the literary history of poetry in this period as well as a practicum in how to read, analyze, and write persuasive critical arguments about poetry. (It is not a poetry writing class; for that course, you’ll want to enroll in English 319R.)
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Toggle ItemENGL 337R-002: Studies in Literary Form and Genre (formerly ENGL 339): Studies in Nonfiction (Joey Franklin)
Writers have been turning out essays for centuries, maybe even millennia, but of late the genre has been enjoying a particularly long and satisfying moment in the spotlight. Under the umbrella of "creative nonfiction," essayistic moves are everywhere—from magazines and blogs to YouTube, social media, and even comics. But as lively as the conversation about the essay is, and as easy as it is to find people interested in mining their personal lives for something to share with the world, if, as scholars and creators of English literature, if we don’t understand the history and development of the genre, we may be missing out on one of the richest, most vital parts of the conversation. In this course, we will discover together the genre’s pioneers and prophets, its zealots and blasphemers, trailblazers and tricksters. We will chart the history of the genre, paying close attention to the importance of tradition, the role of experimentation and transgression, and to how the essay works its way into other genres. You’ll perform your own research, and together we’ll build a solid foundation for the essay that will change the way you think, write, and, perhaps, post to social media, for good.
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Toggle ItemENGL 357-001: Literary Ethics and Moral Scholarship (Keith Lawrence)
We will begin with discussions of John Gardner's critical text, On Moral Fiction—and then consider how his points do and do not apply to readings of controversial texts from world and American literature—plays, poems, stories, and two or three novels (including Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and McCarthy’s The Road). We will examine historical critiques of panned-and-banned texts and explore how contemporary believing scholars might appropriately read, engage, discuss, and write about them.
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Toggle ItemENGL 382/384R-001: Author Studies (formerly ENGL 382): Shakespeare: Brave New Worlds (Gideon Burton)
Shakespeare's plays and poetry will be studied through the lens of "brave new worlds." While focusing on works and themes in Shakespeare that romanticize or demonize the foreign or the Other, students will at the same time be experiencing these texts across various newer media and formats, including films, audiobooks, and graphic novels.
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Toggle ItemENGL 382/384R-002: Author Studies: Tales of Shakespeare (Sharon Harris)
What difference does it make to consider something a tale? We’ll study each major genre in Shakespeare and dig into adaptations as tales retold. First is the genre-bending social commentary of Romeo and Juliet. Maybe you hated this in high school; we’re up to the challenge. Then we move to the urban fable Measure for Measure. Third is the winding romance The Winter's Tale, the only play labeled as a tale. Fourth is Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fairytale for grownups. The semester finishes with Henry VIII, or All Is True where we explore what happens when history becomes a tale.
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Toggle ItemENGL 384R-003: Author Studies: Lorraine Hansberry: To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (Kristin Matthews)
In this major author course, we will examine the writings of the award-winning Black American playwright, Lorraine Hansberry. Although many readers are familiar with her play, "A Raisin in the Sun," many more are unaware of the other plays, essays, poems, interviews, and news articles she crafted before she died from cancer at the age of 34. Still more don't know about her pioneering work in the freedom movements of midcentury America. Thus, our class will put the range of Hansberry's work into conversation with key moments and movements of her day, exploring how this young, gifted, and Black writer from Southside Chicago helped transform America's literary and political landscape.
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Toggle ItemENGL 386R-002: British Literature before 1800: A Wild Romp through the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater (Brett McInelly)
A Wild Romp through the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater: This section of English 386R focuses on the drama produced during what is often referred to as the Long Eighteenth Century, roughly 1660 to 1800. Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the theater, which had been effectively shut down during the Puritan Interregnum, had to essentially reinvent itself, which led to a number of theatrical innovations, such as the introduction of women actors on the stage, and the development of new dramatic types, including Heroic Drama and the Comedy of Manners. An extremely rich and productive era in the history of English drama followed, during which time the theater established itself as a mainstay of English culture that continues to this day. We will examine the social and cultural forces that influenced the dramatic arts and consider the ways drama informed social and cultural practices. We will likewise give attention to contemporary criticism of eighteenth-century literature, investigating the preoccupations and methods of literary critics.
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Toggle ItemENGL 386R-001: British Literature before 1800: Women Writers of the English Civil War (Jason Kerr)
The period of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (roughly 1640-1660) was an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic crucible that produced ideas foundational for the eventual founding of the United States, among other things. This course will study the varied ways that women participated in this potent cultural moment as poets, prophets, and political theorists.
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Toggle ItemENGL 387R-001: British Literature after 1800: The Modernist Short Story (Jarica Watts)
This course will examine some of the finest short stories of the early twentieth century. If the nineteenth century saw the flowering of the genre, the short story becomes the site of some of the most ambitious and adventurous experiments within early twentieth-century literary modernism. During the first half of the semester, we will investigate a range of more ‘experimental’ stories by writers such as Mansfield, Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf; we will use the second half of the semester to examine the shocks of the short story form as it plays in the fiction surrounding World War I. Throughout both units, we will investigate the formal characteristics of the short story—plot (or its frequent absence), narrative technique, arrangement of scenes, tone—in relation to literary modernism, and how structure determines the treatment of a range of contemporary ideas: time and consciousness, subjectivity, alienation, sexology, body and gender, fantasy, imperialism, and immigration.
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Toggle ItemENGL 387R-002: British Literature after 1800: British Romantic Poetry (Paul Westover)
This course focuses on learning to read Romantic-era British Poetry. When I was introduced to British Romanticism (back in the 1990s), the course I took focused primarily on the “Big 6” (male) Romantic poets. That class was old-fashioned even then; still, I treasured “my first acquaintance with poets,” to borrow a phrase from William Hazlitt. I fell in love with a core of writers who remain central to my discipline, and over the years I’ve expanded that love to include many other writers (including women) from the period. However, I know that not all students share my poet-love immediately—at least, many find their love mingled with self-consciousness. When pressed, they confess to having some fears about poetry. This is a class for overcoming such fears. Our aim will be to build confidence in reading, developing valuable skills that will transfer. In short, this is a class for those who love Romantic lit. but also for anyone who simply wants to learn how to read, talk about, enjoy, and write about verse. It’s great for future teachers, too.
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Toggle ItemENGL 389R-001: American Literature after 1800 (Dennis Cutchins)
For these reasons our class is not going to use an anthology this semester. Moreover, I am not going to choose most of your readings, either, since that would be basically the same as using an anthology. Instead, you are going to choose the readings for this course. I hope this more or less radical approach to American literature will help us see literature as a process rather than simply a book. Instilling this dynamic sense of literature is my most central goal this semester.
Since the late 19th Century Americans have struggled to create the idea of American literature. Some of the most important tools in that process have been literary anthologies. The choices anthology editors have made over the years have dictated the course of much of what we study. Not only does that limit what is taught in classes like ours, but many of the best questions about the study of American literature may never be asked because of anthologies. Who, for instance, were the most important American authors of the 19th or 20th Centuries, and how should we define “importance?” Most of us look to the anthologies to find the answer to these questions, but we don’t read the same authors literate folks read in 1890 or even 1930. Some authors have completely disappeared from current anthologies, while others have moved from relative obscurity to surprising popularity. Why? Each of these questions is effaced when we accept any anthology because anthologies make the answers too easy.
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Toggle ItemENGL 389R-002: American Literature after 1800: American Dreams in Black and White (Makayla Steiner)
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line . . .” – W.E.B. Du Bois
In this section of 389R we will focus on the intersection of racial and religious identity as we examine how various American writers construct or articulate diverse understandings of the “American dream.” We will read across several genres and engage work by authors ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Lydia Maria Child to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marilynne Robinson, and Brit Bennett. The course is both reading- and writing-intensive, and assignments are designed to give students opportunities to increase their understanding of how literary elements function across and within specific genres, and to demonstrate their ability to write persuasively about the material under consideration.
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Toggle ItemENGL 394-001: Applied English: Inscape (Cheri Earl)
Students publish the print version of Inscape: a Journal of Literature and Art in fall semester and the digital version in winter semester. The journal is managed by graduate students in the MFA program, but undergraduate students may apply to be team leads. Staff members learn the business and craft of editing and publishing through soliciting, evaluating, content editing, and formatting pieces of writing. Experts in publishing, writing, editing, and marketing guest lecture during class as well. The staff learns and uses publishing software such as Wordpress, Photoshop, InDesign, and others, and such platforms as Scholars Archive and Submittable. Students will also create a professional portfolio that includes a resume and cover letter/letter of application, a mock interview, a fleshed-out LinkedIn profile, and a job networking experience. The Inscape internship is designed for creative writers and those who want to work in the publishing industry; it can be especially helpful to editing or creative writing minors. Inscape is the best student journal experience on campus—and it looks great on a resume!
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Toggle ItemENGL 394-002: Applied English: The Provo City Lab (Jamin Rowan)
In this section of English 394R, students will work with local government and other civic-minded organizations to improve urban design, public transportation, and community development. Students might, for instance, assist city planners in developing and writing one of the city’s neighborhood plans or help develop a culture of active transportation on campus. The course is designed to help students recognize that they can draw upon the competencies they have developed in their English, General Education, and other courses in their efforts to contribute in important ways to the communities to which they belong.
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Toggle ItemENGL 396R-001: Studies in Women's Literature before 1800: Women Writers of the English Civil War (Jason Kerr)
The period of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (roughly 1640-1660) was an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic crucible that produced ideas foundational for the eventual founding of the United States, among other things. This course will study the varied ways that women participated in this potent cultural moment as poets, prophets, and political theorists.
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Toggle ItemENGL 450-001: Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Spiritually Engaged Criticism (Matthew Wickman)
Literary texts often evoke experiences that are sacred, ultimate, and transformative – spiritual experiences. Criticism, meanwhile, tends to distance itself analytically from such experiences. Must this be so? How might criticism enter more fully into the life of the texts it engages? This course will explore these questions by inquiring into what spiritual experience means as an academic subject as well as a religious category, taking up such schools of thought as postcritique, postsecularity, phenomenological criticism, and more.
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Toggle ItemENGL 494-001: Professional Writing and Rhetoric Senior Capstone: Mythology and Contemporary Fiction (Christopher Blythe)
This course examines how contemporary authors have built worlds from classical mythology, in a process that J.R.R. Tolkien referred to as "mythopoesis" and folklorists have termed the "folkloresque." Students will become familiar with adaptation studies as a lens to analyze these texts that draw from ancient myths to comment and frame the modern world.
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Toggle ItemENGL 495-001: Senior Capstone: Literature of Imprisonment at Topaz, Utah (Brian Roberts)
During World War II, the United States government unconstitutionally imprisoned 110,000 US residents of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of whom were US citizens. Around 9000 of these prisoners were sent to the Topaz War Relocation Center, an internment camp in central Utah’s Sevier Desert about an hour and a half drive from BYU. As students and scholars of literature here at Brigham Young University, we are uniquely positioned to study the moving literature surrounding this event, much of it written by important figures in the Asian American and broader US literary tradition. During the course of the semester, we will read a vibrant selection of poems, short stories, novels, memoirs, and essays that not only speak to the prisoners’ experiences in central Utah during WWII but that also relate to urgent national conversations that are unfolding today. During the semester, we will make a fieldtrip to the former site of the Topaz Internment Camp and to the Topaz Museum in the nearby town of Delta, Utah.
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Toggle ItemENGL 495-002: Senior Capstone: Forster and Woolf (Jarica Watts)
This class will focus on two 20th century masters of English prose, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. These two authors knew each other well, and many consider Forster a periphery member of the Bloomsbury Group. In this course, we will cover a representative sample of both writers' work-fiction and non-fiction, as well as critical and biographical scholarship about them. Both authors wrote about the writing process. Given that a capstone paper is the final requirement for this course, we will concern much of our time with parsing what makes not only good literature but also good criticism.
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Toggle ItemELING 525: Old English I (Miranda Wilcox)
Learn to read the “Dream of the Rood” and “The Wanderer” in Old English! Impress your friends with Tolkien trivia! We will learn the basic vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Old English while translating short prose and poetic texts, including riddles, elegies, chronicle entries, and lives of saints. This class counts as an elective toward the English BA, and there are no prerequisites. Please contact miranda_wilcox@byu.edu with questions and if AIM asks for an Add code.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-001: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): N. K. Jemisin's Short Stories and Worlds (Jill Rudy)
Winner of the Best Novel Hugo award three years running for the Broken Earth trilogy (2016-2018), N. K. Jemisin says she tried short stories just hoping to pay the utility bills. She learned to appreciate the form for itself and for testing the novel’s world building and character development. Jemisin’s stories exemplify speculative genres and address recurring conceptual issues such as monstrosity, sentience, gender, race, belief, disability, environmental justice, Afrofuturism, AI, and being human. We will read and analyze a small selection of Jemisin’s short fiction because her stories afford close-reading, inquiry, and writing literary criticism. This course hones skills practiced in other core English courses: reading stories for formal patterns, figurative language, and conceptual implications; attending to diction, sentence variety, and other stylistic choices; conducting research to expand and deepen observations and to join critical conversations; and exercising effective writing strategies to make and develop persuasive claims that matter.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-002: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (Ansalee Greenwood)
In this course, we will read and write about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and its surrounding literary conversation. Published in 1999, Interpreter of Maladies richly and empathetically tells stories of Indian-American immigrant characters and their diverse experiences. As we study and practice the genre of literary criticism, we will learn how to engage with complex texts, grapple with difficult questions, develop nuanced perspectives, and deliver persuasive arguments. Because many of Lahiri’s stories include characters whose lives have been shaped by trauma, we will use the ideas of trauma theory as the theoretical lens to interpret them.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-003 and 004: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Form and Meaning in Art Spiegelman's Maus (Joseph Darowski)
Art Spiegelman's Maus is a graphic novel that presents the story of Spiegelman interviewing his father about the Holocaust. While the story is true, Spiegelman's postmodern interpretation of his family's history presents all the characters as animals (the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, etc.). The resulting text is difficult to categorize, but rich in thematic impact and literary merit. In this section of 303, students will become conversant in the strengths of the comic book/graphic novel medium, explore the unique aspects of Spiegelman's iconic work, and develop proficiency in applying secondary critical sources while engaging in literary analysis.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-005: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Blake's Prophetic Works
William Blake’s “prophetic” poems, more than any of his other works including the Songs of Innocence and Experience, have defied systematic interpretation for over two hundred years. How can we write meaningfully about such an eccentric body of work? Blake himself offered a note of reassurance: “I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions,” he wrote. This suggests that the prophecies both demand and generously reward the intellectual labor of ‘elucidation.’ History seems to have born this suggestion out: generations of writers, including not only literary critics but Beat poets (Ginsberg), folk/rock artists (Dylan), metalheads (Bruce Dickinson), graphic artists (Moore), and fantasy novelists (Pullman), have found Blake’s prophecies, if not ‘lucid,’ then profoundly luminous for their writing. In this class, we’ll encounter some of the poet-artisan’s most challenging multimodal poems, including Milton: A Prophecy and the “continental prophecies,” alongside historical, critical, and methodological scholarship, plus more contemporary experiments in mixed media artistry. In all these encounters we will forfeit the struggle for interpretive mastery to cultivate a techne of critical elucidation in writing. In the process, we will consider how the methodical and down-to-earth pursuit of craft—be it Blake’s multimodal techne or our critical one—can generate imaginative energy and conviction and even moods of devotion.
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Toggle ItemENGL 318-003: Writing Fiction (Brandon Sanderson)
This class will focus on writing science fiction. Admittance to class by application only. The application can be found at https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/application-for-byu-318-r-section-2/. Register for ENGL 490R section 003 (open enrollment) for the lecture-only portion of Sanderson's course.
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Toggle ItemENGL 327:001: Studies in Rhetoric: Rhetoric and Medicine, Medicine and Rhetoric (Jarron Slater)
In this course, the inseparable relationship between rhetoric and aesthetics will provide a foundation for studying questions about rhetoric and its relationship to medicine. When Gorgias likened the power of speech to the effects that drugs (pharmakon) have on the body, he used a word that can also mean poison, medicine, or cure. Sometimes the word even refers to a charm or a spell. How do people act symbolically to provide medicine or drug, poison or cure, for audiences?
Recently, much scholarship, particularly in the fields of health humanities and narrative medicine, has argued that the arts and humanities can help people to become more empathetic and reflective professionals. The health humanities and narrative medicine also have roots in rhetoric: to Rome’s greatest rhetorician Cicero’s notion of humanitas, and to those rhetorical exercises with the fancy name (progymnasmata). And if Susan Sontag is right when she wrote that, eventually, everyone is forced to confront illness of some kind, then what can those who have been, who are, or who will be patients—that’s all of us—learn from the rhetoric of health humanities and narrative medicine?
Eventually, studies of questions about rhetoric and medicine coalesce, leading to a quintessential genre—the pathography, which we will listen to, read, and write, as we ask how these stories of suffering, or illness narratives may provide a quintessential genre of humanity itself.
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Toggle ItemENGL 332R-001: Media and Popular Literatures after 1800: Bob Dylan and Literature (Brian Roberts)
There had been whispers about it for years. And then it happened. In 2016, the famed musician Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Following the announcement, Sara Danius (of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize) said, “He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition.” She continued: “Homer and Sappho…wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan.” She suggested, “If you want to start listening or reading, you may start with Blonde on Blonde, the album from 1966.” This course offers students the chance to spend a semester thinking about Dylan’s work as literature. It also affords an opportunity to consider this poetry’s place in the cultural landscape of the United States and the world from the mid twentieth century to the present day. A few of the many topics we will consider: Dylan and poetic forms, Dylan’s literary ancestors and inspirations, the significance of major albums including Blonde on Blonde, questions of sampling (including allegations of plagiarism), performance’s role in making and remaking literature, and the recurrent matter of Black lives in Dylan’s lyrics and music.
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Toggle ItemENGL 337R-001: Studies in Literary Form and Genre (formerly ENGL 333): American Novel (Makayla Steiner)
The American novelist Ernest Hemingway famously argued that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . . . There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Such a claim was contestable even then, and 62 years after Hemingway's death the American novel continues to flourish—as do arguments about its genre conventions, purpose, and impact on contemporary culture. In this section of 337R we will read a selection of American novels published in the last half-century with two deceptively simple questions in mind: What is a novel, and what—if anything—makes it particularly "American"?
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Toggle ItemENGL 337R-002: Studies in Literary Form and Genre (formerly ENGL 339): Short Story (Steve Tuttle)
The emergence of the short story as a literary form coincides with the birth of the periodical nearly 250 years ago. Magazines and journals created a space and an opportunity for writers to see what they could do in just a few pages. In this class, we will trace the history of the short story from the pages of those early magazines through virtually every literary movement of the last two and half centuries. Students will read and respond to a wide range of stories that span cultures, communities, time periods, and literary genres. They will examine how short stories allow us to better understand not only literature and literary trends, but also political, scientific, and cultural movements.
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Toggle ItemENGL 337R-003: Studies in Literary Form and Genre (formerly ENGL 339): The British Novel, Then and Now (Jamie Horrocks)
Jane Austen’s quip that “The person, be it a gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid” is quite correct. And in ENGL 337R this semester, we’ll set out to prove it. This course will examine some of the best British novels and—to add to our pleasure—the modern textual re-writings they’ve inspired. Many of these, like Jean Rhys’s reimagining of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Sarah Waters’s queer rendering of Oliver Twist, Fingersmith, are constructed as historiographic metafiction designed to probe the nature of fiction and its interpretations of cultural history. Others, like The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and Mary Reilly, test the limits of adaptation, while novels like English Passengers and Cloud Atlas conjure up the trauma of postcolonial post-memory. In our studies, we’ll use novels like these to explore the confluence of fiction, history, and theory in past and present British literature.
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Toggle ItemENGL 344-001: Digital and Visual Literacies (Joseph Darowski)
English 344R engages in the study of multimodal texts and genres with ties to literature, based in theoretical grounding from the fields of adaptation studies, design, folklore, and digital rhetoric. Students will engage with stories that have appeared in multiple modes of storytelling and consider how the type of storytelling affects both the story itself and the audience’s reception. We will consider books, e-books, audiobooks, podcasts, online videos, films, television shows, video games, and other types of storytelling in order to explore narrative, adaptation, theme, author, and audience. Among the stories we will analyze are Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice, as well as multimedia icons like Sherlock Holmes and Superman.
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Toggle ItemENGL 357-001: Belief and Doubt in Literature and Life (Terryl Givens)
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Toggle ItemENGL 368-001: Literature of the Latter-day Saints (Christopher Blythe)
This course is dedicated to the study of Latter-day Saint Literature from the nineteenth century to the present. While the definition of “Latter-day Saint Literature” varies, our emphasis will be on writings by, about, and largely geared toward an audience of those who self-identify as Latter-day Saints. The perspectives of these Latter-day Saint voices are diverse. The writing and creative works that we will study include journals, film, drama, correspondence, personal essays, scholarship, sermons, short stories, and novels.
This semester our particular interest is on speculative fiction (e.g. science fiction, alternative history, fantasy) that incorporates Latter-day Saint folklore. This will allow students to not only become familiar with popular literary works but also with traditional stories that circulate informally among Latter-day Saints.
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Toggle ItemENGL 370-001: Transnational Literature after 1800: African Worlds (Aaron Eastley)
African Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka recently opined that “A truly illuminating exploration of Africa has yet to take place.” Part of the challenge is that Africa means and has meant so many different things to so many different people. In the spirit of the vastness and specificity of such experiences, this course features a deliberately eclectic selection of narratives featuring human lives tightly bound to Africa. In doing so it seeks for deep human understanding of the kind Soyinka has urged in his call for “a new breed of explorers” seeking “a deeply craved Age of Universal Understanding.” Readings will include works including early African folktales, tales of travels in Africa, Soyinka’s plays A Dance of the Forests and The Road, Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude, Okri’s The Famished Road, Walcott’s The Prodigal (as well as selections from The Bounty and White Egrets), and Gyasi’s Homegoing.
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Toggle ItemENGL 370-002: Transnational Literature after 1800: Borges and Beyond (Emron Esplin)
Argentine author, translator, librarian, intellectual, and polyglot Jorge Luis Borges was one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. His work reveals the influence of European philosophical and literary traditions, but it also demonstrates his fascinations with Islam, Asia, Judaism, and Argentina itself. Borges’s work was instrumental for the eventual “Latin American Boom,” and his literature foretells several of the poststructuralist concerns with language, knowledge, and reality that took center stage in the latter half of the 20th century. We will begin the course by reading the majority of Borges’s fiction, and then we will turn our attention to the works of various writers and filmmakers from around the globe who have been heavily influenced by Borges. Some of our course topics will include identity, the infinite, memory, the fantastic, metafiction and literature about literature, translation, detective fiction, theories of literary influence, and genetic criticism. This course is cross-listed in English and Spanish and will be team-taught by Emron Esplin (English Dept.) and Erik Larson (Spanish and Portuguese Dept.). Lectures and discussions will take place in English. Students in the Spanish section will do their readings and written assignments in Spanish while students in the English section will write in English and read Borges in English translation.
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Toggle ItemENGL 382-001: Shakespeare (Jason Kerr)
Shakespeare's plays explore human relationships across many dimensions of experience: those that connect us, those that harm us, and those where the two aren't so easily separable. In this course, we will put recent philosophical literature about ethics and vulnerability in conversation with (tentatively) Much Ado about Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, and Richard II. These plays invite reflection on vulnerability in contexts that include embodiment, emotions, sexuality, romantic relationships, family dynamics, and politics, all of which often turn out to be messily entangled with each other. We will discuss these sensitive and ever salient topics with the aim of getting clearer about what it means, in both theory and practice, to engage the world and the people around us with care.
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Toggle ItemENGL 384R-001: Author Studies: Shakespeare (Jason Kerr)
Shakespeare's plays explore human relationships across many dimensions of experience: those that connect us, those that harm us, and those where the two aren't so easily separable. In this course, we will put recent philosophical literature about ethics and vulnerability in conversation with (tentatively) Much Ado about Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, and Richard II. These plays invite reflection on vulnerability in contexts that include embodiment, emotions, sexuality, romantic relationships, family dynamics, and politics, all of which often turn out to be messily entangled with each other. We will discuss these sensitive and ever salient topics with the aim of getting clearer about what it means, in both theory and practice, to engage the world and the people around us with care.
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Toggle ItemENGL 384R-002: Author Studies: Chaucer (Juliana Chapman)
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Toggle ItemENGL 384R-003: Author Studies: Virginia Woolf (Jarica Watts)
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Toggle ItemENGL 386R-002: British Literature before 1800: Women and the Arthurian Legend (Juliana Chapman)
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 explore Arthurian women and our perceptions of them—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, and conclude with women’s roles in perpetuating the legend’s global literary afterlife.
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Toggle ItemENGL 387R-001: British Literature after 1800: The British Novel, Then and Now (Jamie Horrocks)
Jane Austen’s quip that “The person, be it a gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid” is quite correct. And in ENGL 337R this semester, we’ll set out to prove it. This course will examine some of the best British novels and—to add to our pleasure—the modern textual re-writings they’ve inspired. Many of these, like Jean Rhys’s reimagining of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Sarah Waters’s queer rendering of Oliver Twist, Fingersmith, are constructed as historiographic metafiction designed to probe the nature of fiction and its interpretations of cultural history. Others, like The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and Mary Reilly, test the limits of adaptation, while novels like English Passengers and Cloud Atlas conjure up the trauma of postcolonial post-memory. In our studies, we’ll use novels like these to explore the confluence of fiction, history, and theory in past and present British literature.
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Toggle ItemENGL 388R-001: American Literature before 1800: Women Writers in Early American Literature (Brice Peterson)
The discovery of a “New World” for European colonizers and an “Old World” for Indigenous inhabitants ushered in an era of newness: new lands and opportunities, for some, and new foes and traumas, for others. In particular, this merging of worlds offered European, African, and Indigenous women a new way of thinking about the world and their place in it. In this class, we will focus on how four specific women in early America think about their identity in light of this changing world: the colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, the Restoration dramatist Aphra Behn, the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, and the Pequot missionary Mary Wood Apess. While we will certainly discuss how these poets think about topics such as religion, art, family, war, relationships, Nature, and death, we will pay special attention to how they use poetry to interrogate their identity as woman in terms of religion, gender, race, and the burgeoning United States of America.
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Toggle ItemENGL 389R-001: American Literature after 1800: Bob Dylan and Literature (Brian Roberts)
There had been whispers about it for years. And then it happened. In 2016, the famed musician Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Following the announcement, Sara Danius (of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize) said, “He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition.” She continued: “Homer and Sappho…wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan.” She suggested, “If you want to start listening or reading, you may start with Blonde on Blonde, the album from 1966.” This course offers students the chance to spend a semester thinking about Dylan’s work as literature. It also affords an opportunity to consider this poetry’s place in the cultural landscape of the United States and the world from the mid twentieth century to the present day. A few of the many topics we will consider: Dylan and poetic forms, Dylan’s literary ancestors and inspirations, the significance of major albums including Blonde on Blonde, questions of sampling (including allegations of plagiarism), performance’s role in making and remaking literature, and the recurrent matter of Black lives in Dylan’s lyrics and music.
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Toggle ItemENGL 389R-002: American Literature after 1800: Why Indigenous Literatures Matter,” or Being/Becoming Human in the United States (Mike Taylor)
This course grows out of an acknowledgement that the United States is built upon and continues to sustain itself from the ancestral homelands and waters of 574 federally recognized, self-governing American Indian and Alaska Native Nations. Grounded in this recognition of diverse and ongoing forms of Indigenous self-determination across the United States, this course engages post-1800 Indigenous-US literatures to analyze the still-contested intersections of culture, economics, history, law, politics, and religion that remain central to the Indigenous American experience today. This acknowledgement of Indigenous lands, waters, and continuing sovereignty challenges us to engage Indigenous literatures as much more than cultural artifacts. Rather, Indigenous literatures offer vibrant alternative—and much-needed—ways of knowing and being, as student, as scholar, and as human.
Throughout this course, we will analyze Indigenous and settler responses to four foundational questions to Indigenous literatures and literary studies:
- How do we learn to be human?
- How do we behave as good relatives?
- How do we become good ancestors?
- How do we learn to live together?
Taken from Cherokee author and scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s literary manifesto, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, these questions challenge us to engage Indigenous literatures within their interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intergenerational contexts, and to hold ourselves accountable to the systems of knowledge and relations that such stories compel us participate in.
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Toggle ItemENGL 389R-003: American Literature after 1800: Literature of the Latter-day Saints (Christopher Blythe)
This course is dedicated to the study of Latter-day Saint Literature from the nineteenth century to the present. While the definition of “Latter-day Saint Literature” varies, our emphasis will be on writings by, about, and largely geared toward an audience of those who self-identify as Latter-day Saints. The perspectives of these Latter-day Saint voices are diverse. The writing and creative works that we will study include journals, film, drama, correspondence, personal essays, scholarship, sermons, short stories, and novels.
This semester our particular interest is on speculative fiction (e.g. science fiction, alternative history, fantasy) that incorporates Latter-day Saint folklore. This will allow students to not only become familiar with popular literary works but also with traditional stories that circulate informally among Latter-day Saints.
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Toggle ItemENGL 392-001: American Folklore: Tall Tales and Other American Life Stories (Jill Rudy)
Tall-tale heroes like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Davy Crockett, and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind epitomize American folklore because they accomplish extravagant deeds on a big, bold landscape. Tall tales follow a narrative arc from the cradle to the grave that links heroes with lands and lifetimes. Considering selected stories and traditions that take place in the land now known as the United States invites reflection on the consequences of connections: individuals and communities, lands and peoples, reality and fiction, lies and truth. Life stories follow traditional forms and appear in all media from oral and written to electronic and digital. In addition to reading American Tall Tales by Mary Pope Osborne, we will analyze film and musical adaptations of Big Fish by Daniel Wallace, study selections from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s nonfiction Braiding Sweetgrass, and consider the connection between life story and material objects with Jon Kay’s Folk Art and Aging. Students will learn folklore documentation and archiving techniques while designing and conducting their own focused fieldwork or life story project.
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Toggle ItemENGL 394-001: Applied English: Inscape (Cheri Earl)
Students publish the print version of Inscape: a Journal of Literature and Art in fall semester and the digital version in winter semester. The journal is managed by graduate students in the MFA program, but undergraduate students may apply to be team leads. Staff members learn the business and craft of editing and publishing through soliciting, evaluating, content editing, and formatting pieces of writing. Experts in publishing, writing, editing, and marketing guest lecture during class as well. The staff learns and uses publishing software such as Wordpress, Photoshop, InDesign, and others, and such platforms as Scholars Archive and Submittable. Students will also create a professional portfolio that includes a resume and cover letter/letter of application, a mock interview, a fleshed-out LinkedIn profile, and a job networking experience. The Inscape internship is designed for creative writers and those who want to work in the publishing industry; it can be especially helpful to editing or creative writing minors. Inscape is the best student journal experience on campus—and it looks great on a resume!
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Toggle ItemENGL 394-002: Applied English: Professional Writing Internships (Jon Balzotti)
This weekly, 3-unit seminar is designed to give majors at BYU an overview of possible career and internship options in professional writing and ways to pursue their professional interests. Each student will be placed in a competitive professional writing internship and will produce a polished writer’s portfolio they can use in applying for future internships and employment. Each month, students will meet and talk with guest professionals working in diverse professional writing-related fields such as web design, journalism, public relations, corporate and media relations, technical writing, medical communications, and non-profits. The visiting professionals talk about their own and related careers, show samples of their work, and answer student questions.
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Toggle ItemENGL 394-003: Applied English: Criterion (Jason Kerr)
This course has two dimensions: publishing a scholarly journal and developing competencies that empower students to connect their BYU education to a variety of professional contexts. The publishing side involves taking an issue of Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism through all stages of the publication process from soliciting submissions to producing the issue in both print and electronic formats. Alongside this work, the course engages students in a process of learning how to communicate the value and relevance of skills developed at BYU in resumes and job interviews.
This course is geared toward juniors. Criterion will continue to function as a club alongside the class, and students at other stages are invited to participate. Future members of the editorial team (as part of the course) will be drawn from club participants. Joining the club in preparation for the course is a good way of making English+ an integral part of your time at BYU.
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Toggle ItemENGL 396R-001: Studies in Women's Literature: Sojourners' Truths (Aaron Eastley)
Stories of migration are among the most powerful and revealing stories we have to tell, and often women’s migration narratives are far more complex and intensive than men’s. This course explores a range of texts connecting Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the US and the UK, all featuring woman protagonists making their way in/to new worlds. Primary texts will include Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude (West Africa/Caribbean), Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen (Nigeria/UK), Ali’s Brick Lane (Bangladesh/UK), Wicomb’s October (Scotland/South Africa), and Gyasi’s Homegoing (US/Ghana). These primary texts will be contextualized with an array of shorter readings in historical and biographical sources and theoretical works on feminism and diaspora/transnationalism.
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Toggle ItemENGL 397R-001: World Literature: African Worlds (Aaron Eastley)
African Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka recently opined that “A truly illuminating exploration of Africa has yet to take place.” Part of the challenge is that Africa means and has meant so many different things to so many different people. In the spirit of the vastness and specificity of such experiences, this course features a deliberately eclectic selection of narratives featuring human lives tightly bound to Africa. In doing so it seeks for deep human understanding of the kind Soyinka has urged in his call for “a new breed of explorers” seeking “a deeply craved Age of Universal Understanding.” Readings will include works including early African folktales, tales of travels in Africa, Soyinka’s plays A Dance of the Forests and The Road, Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude, Okri’s The Famished Road, Walcott’s The Prodigal (as well as selections from The Bounty and White Egrets), and Gyasi’s Homegoing.
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Toggle ItemENGL 494-001: Professional Writing and Communication Senior Capstone: Rhetorics of Persuasive Peacemaking (David Stock)
This capstone invites you to see your rhetorical education—whether through the English major or the Professional Writing and Communication minor—as preparation for practicing persuasive peacemaking. In the first half of the semester, we’ll engage critically with rhetoric and writing studies scholarship that draws on multiple disciplines (philosophy, communications, political science, psychology) to help us develop a collective theory of rhetoric as an art of peacemaking. We’ll become conversant in scholarly conversations about contemporary exigencies, such as political polarization and extremism, that invite responses focused on deliberation and reconciliation, including those voiced by latter-day prophets and apostles. In the second half of the semester, you’ll apply what you’ve learned by producing one of two options for your capstone project: an extended seminar paper that makes an original contribution to the capstone’s scholarly conversation, or a substantial multimodal project that is relevant to capstone content and to your professional or personal goals. Either capstone project should demonstrate your abilities as a professional, ethical, and rhetorically effective communicator and should be fit to include in a portfolio of work for academic or professional purposes.
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Toggle ItemENGL 495-001: Senior Capstone: America through the Beatles (Trent Hickman)
The impact of the arrival of the Beatles to the United States in 1964 is difficult to underestimate, as the Beatles would shape American cultural sensibilities—not just in music, but in youth culture, film, advertising, fashion, and literature—for the rest of the decade and beyond. Though the Beatles were touted as the vanguard of what would come to be known as the British Invasion, they were also in many senses deeply American in their musical influences, their style, and their artistic underpinnings. Our course will focus on the changes to America and to American sensibilities in the 1960s through the lens of the Beatles in their role as one nexus of American cultural change and will help you to innovate your own original thinking about these subjects in your own research-based capstone paper.
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Toggle ItemENGL 495-002: Senior Capstone: Do You Have Good Taste? An Inquiry into Literary Judgment (John Talbot)
“Increasingly, many teachers of the humanities agree with their incoming students, that there is no distinction between good and bad taste, but only between your taste and mine.”
--Roger Scruton (2009)
Your instructor is not one of those teachers Scruton describes. He thinks there is such thing as good taste in literature and bad taste, and that to believe in good taste is not a mere expression of prejudice. He thinks there is such thing as great books and mediocre ones and bad ones, and that English majors ought to learn to discriminate among them, and ought to learn to love great books, prefer them to mediocre books, and eschew bad ones. (He acknowledges that “ought” carries some moral weight: the questions in this class are not just aesthetic, but also moral.) He thinks that students of English – undergraduates in particular – ought to spend their very limited time chiefly with the greatest of books, cultivating a taste for them, and developing the capacity to tell good writing from bad. He likes lively debate over which books are the best and relishes the differences of opinion; what he dislikes is the claim that such debate is pointless because the only standard that matters is personal preference. He regrets it when an individual, a university, or a culture abandons distinctions between good and bad taste. But he also knows that there are reasonable counter-claims, and wants to hear them aired, so as to submit his own belief to be challenged by the best possible arguments.
Your teacher invites debate. He has already declared his own position, but is prepared to be swayed – even expects to be swayed – by counter-arguments, and in any case wants all possible points of view to have a hearing. The point is not to convince anybody, but for everybody to be able to understand and articulate the various positions that can be taken. All students will be expected to rise to the occasion of cheerfully and charitably engaging in disagreement and debate. The best students will find ways of bringing into the class their own experiences as readers and English majors, and will be able to refer to works of literature and criticism they have read in other classes and (one dares to hope) on their own, too.
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Toggle ItemENGL 495-003: Senior Capstone: William Wordsworth and Literary Geography (Paul Westover)
The imagination has its own geography, and England’s Lake District has become an essential region within it for readers of Anglophone poetry. William Wordsworth, the leading poet of English Romanticism, is the primary reason. Never had a writer so thoroughly grounded his work or his own identity in place. Wordsworth permanently altered the way readers imagined their relationships not only to the Lake District but also to location and to “nature” generally. Thus, it is no surprise that by the late 1800s readers were referring to the Lake District as “Wordsworth Country” and going there on pilgrimage. Wordsworth had helped create one of the first modern literary landscapes.
We have recently seen a “spatial turn” in the Humanities. One of its manifestations has been the acceleration of interdisciplinary work on literary geography. An exploration of Wordsworth and his legacy, as offered by this senior capstone course, provides an introduction to this realm of study. At the same time, investigating Wordsworth will show us that literary geography is not in itself new; in fact, it was a major preoccupation of nineteenth-century culture. Thus, we have in the writing of Wordsworth and his contemporaries a rich archive on the interactions of places, books, and personal experiences—an archive that we can explore with tools both old and new. Students in this class will do just that and produce their own original scholarship.
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Toggle ItemENGL 303-001: Writing Literary Criticism (formerly ENGL 295): Yankton Sioux activist and intellectual, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) (Michael Taylor)
Students will have the unique opportunity to explore the diverse writings of early twentieth-century Yankton Sioux activist, author, and intellectual Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša). In addition to analyzing current Bonnin scholarship, students will utilize the Bonnin archives housed in BYU’s Special Collections Library to learn how to navigate both critical secondary and primary sources effectively in ways that offer meaningful interventions in the contemporary field of Indigenous and American literary studies.
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Toggle ItemENGL 495-001: Senior Capstone: Literature and Social Change in the Modern Age (Nicholas Mason)
Historically literature has been credited with having the power to transform both individual readers and society as a whole. While the former of these roles remains largely unquestioned, it is increasingly difficult to imagine even the most popular and celebrated writers of today arguing, as Percy Shelley did in 1821, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” With this in mind, this senior seminar will explore a series of interrelated questions about the societal impacts of literature both in generations past and today, when great books are at once more readily available than ever but part of an increasingly crowded media landscape. Given the constraints of a seven-week term, our readings will primarily consist of shorter works of bestselling literary fiction from the past two centuries, ranging from Charles Dickens’s critiques of child welfare policies in the Victorian era to Kazuo Ishiguro’s explorations of bio-medical ethics in the 21st century. Like all sections of ENGL 495, this course will culminate in students producing a major research paper that speaks to the central themes of the class.