Upcoming Course Offerings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.