Upcoming Course Offerings

Few stories are as well-known and dearly loved as Tolkien’s tales of Middle Earth and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. All sorts of readers seem to enjoy these works and to feel themselves becoming better people as they read them. This is as the authors intended. Both Tolkien and Lewis wanted to inspire their readers to want to become more Christlike. Yet both were keenly aware that most people read for enjoyment and dislike pointedly preachy books packed with heavy-handed symbolism. Accordingly, these two great writers (who were also great friends) sought to influence their readers in ways that were both more subtle and more truly influential. This course will look at how the simple but powerful storytelling of Tolkien and Lewis inclines us toward the Savior. Introductory readings will include Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” and Lewis’s essay “On Stories,” and portions of Michael Ward’s The Narnia Code. At the center of our course will be Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin and The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

English 303 is a course that intends to help you become a better, more effective writer. As Stephen King wisely noted, good writing is born of careful reading and deep thinking, so this course will require a fair amount of reading, a lot of thinking (alone and with others), and a significant amount of writing. The course will focus on individual and collaborative writing practices designed to help students develop and hone their written and oral communication skills. Assignments may include—but are not limited to—reading journals, textual annotations, crafting abstracts and/or proposals, writing short essays, and preparing formal and informal oral presentations of their work. To take part in the scholarly conversations that surround the assigned texts, students will practice identifying and integrating credible sources into their own analyses, properly document those sources, and regularly share and reflect on their writing process. Substantive revision and workshops will be a core element of the course, and the culminating project will be an 8-10 page work of original literary criticism.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been both celebrated and excoriated over the years since its publication in 1884. In 2024, Percival Everett published his novel James, which rewrites and reimagines Twain's story from the perspective of the enslaved man who is Huck's traveling companion. Especially since James won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the time feels ripe to look at both Twain's and Everett's novels, individually and comparatively, and to learn how to research and write literary criticism about them that can join the long-standing and vigorous scholarly conversation surrounding Twain's novel and the newer discussion about Everett's.

This class takes AI as its subject and its method, with the particular perspective that the humanities can bring. We will examine AI in three different humanities activities: writing, editing, and critical thought. By the end of the semester, you will be able to articulate what AI can and cannot do well; you will have written and edited with AI; you will have created your own application with AI; you will have participated in training an AI model; you will have read deeply in current debates about AI; and you will have a sense of what you can do that computers cannot.

Games, sports, practice, school (ludus), and play are essential elements of human culture. A recent estimation projects that roughly 60% of the global population (4.5 to 5 billion people) participates regularly in games of some kind (sports, board games, card games, social games, traditional games, digital games, mind games, or video games). It was no accident that Johan Huizinga famously defined human beings as homo ludens, the playing animal. In this course, we will study the rhetoricity of games in physical and digital spaces. After we study game-based theories of rhetoric, we’ll focus on two types of games, role-playing and video games, to study how these games function as rhetoric. As we analyze the implicit arguments in different types of games, we’ll experience how games and play, in physical and digital domains, assume an essential connection between the three ends of rhetoric: to teach, to persuade, and to delight.

This American novel course will focus on the nature of good and evil. I know that seems a weird topic for a literature class, but as you might expect, American novelists have spent a good deal of ink writing about both good and evil. Below is list of novels I’m thinking about reading. We’ll only read seven or eight books, but if you have suggestions send them to me as soon as possible. These novels, which lean toward the modern and contemporary, each treat the ideas of evil and good a little differently, but suggest some important notions about what actually constitutes both.

This course traces the development of the sonnet from its origins in Renaissance Italy through our contemporary moment. We will examine how trends in politics, religion, culture, and in Anglophone society at large are reflected in the innovations and renovations of a single literary art form over centuries, with the larger aim of exploring the relations between history and aesthetics.

Students will learn 1) the history of film as an art form and product of the entertainment industry, 2) how to read film as a text with interpretable meaning, and 3) various theories of adaptation from a text-based medium into the visual-based medium of film. Films will be assigned based on both historical significance and artistic merit. Students will become conversant in topics ranging from the broad evolution of film across more than a century to the specific interpretation of a single shot composition.

The idea is literary genetics: an investigation into the Greek and Roman DNA of English literature. The plan is to juxtapose readings of ancient and modern writers, e.g. Homer and James Joyce; Virgil and Milton, Catullus and Robert Frost, Horace and Wilfred Owen. No knowledge of the ancient languages is required; you’ll be shown something of how Greek and Latin work, and how that has affected English. Be prepared for comparisons, close readings, and lots of in-class arguing.

Cross-listed with ENGL 369

Christian poetry in America is thriving, with a large number of wonderful new and established poets, new and established presses, new anthologies, and an emergent body of excellent, rigorous criticism. For many of these writers, poetic inspiration is tantamount to spiritual discernment, making the production, reception, and interpretation of this poetry an act of opening oneself to the Spirit and engaging in worship. Learning to appreciate and interpret this poetry thus helps us become more spiritually minded, merging critical mastery with character development and Christian discipleship.

The idea is literary genetics: an investigation into the Greek and Roman DNA of English literature. The plan is to juxtapose readings of ancient and modern writers, e.g. Homer and James Joyce; Virgil and Milton, Catullus and Robert Frost, Horace and Wilfred Owen. No knowledge of the ancient languages is required; you’ll be shown something of how Greek and Latin work, and how that has affected English. Be prepared for comparisons, close readings, and lots of in-class arguing.

Cross-listed with ENGL 355

ENGL 382: English Teaching Majors ONLY. English majors should register for ENGL 384R-001.

ENGL 384R: Shakespeare

I’m sure you know Charles Dickens’s most famous piece of literature, A Christmas Carol, a “culture-text” that has had enormous influence since its publication in 1843. But did you know that Dickens wrote four other Christmas novellas? Or that he began as an essayist, writing creative non-fiction rather than the novels he’s become famous for? Or that he acted in his own plays? Or that he had a series of pet ravens named Grip, one of which purportedly inspired Poe? Charles Dickens continues to be one of Britain’s best-loved and most-quoted writers. In this class, we’ll find out why. We’ll read a variety of his texts: essays, novels, journalism, short stories, and no poetry (his poems are really bad). And we’ll use the Dickens texts in our Special Collections to conduct original research about the writer who revolutionized popular literature through storytelling.

Medieval Christians believed that meditating on the life of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, yielded insight about what it means to be human and humanity’s relation with God. Their imaginative engagement with stories about Jesus’s life nurtured their emotional connection with their Savior and Redeemer. In this class, we will join this mode of embodied devotion as we study the Holkham Prayers and Meditations, a cycle of Middle English devotions composed most likely by an English nun using richly descriptive and emotive language that guides the meditators to restage sacred history in their imaginations. We will read these prayers in conversation with other Old and Middle English texts narrating the life of Jesus, including mystery plays, lyric poems, and Julian of Norwich’s visions. Students will cultivate their own embodied devotional practices as a dimension of our collective engagement with medieval literature and scripture stories. This course is part of the Health Humanities initiative.

How can one engage with others regarding the most difficult topics in a way that is truthful, lively, and respectful? The Victorians provide particularly instructive examples in the form of polemical essay, social realist fiction, and political lyric. We will read writers such as John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau, exploring how their work engages with the most provocative issues of their time. Along the way, we will explore why narrative plays such an important role in the art of civility.

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.

Our course will study a sampling of literature from the late 1960s to the present, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. These texts challenge the traditional forms and shapes of literary texts, the relationships between author and reader, history and story, and belief and doubt in an increasingly diverse America. How do language, perception, and memory affect our ability to perceive what is real?

This course examines women's writing in and about nature. Historically, nature has been feminized as a site of conquest, domination, and profit. The women writers we will read this semester challenge and complicate those narratives, instead embracing nature as a vehicle for understanding identity, community, spirituality, and creativity. We will read essay, memoir, fiction, and poetry that invite different ways of seeing the world and our place in it. Our course will be discussion-based and will include both conventional and creative writing, as well as time spent outside.

This course examines women's writing in and about nature. Historically, nature has been feminized as a site of conquest, domination, and profit. The women writers we will read this semester challenge and complicate those narratives, instead embracing nature as a vehicle for understanding identity, community, spirituality, and creativity. We will read essay, memoir, fiction, and poetry that invite different ways of seeing the world and our place in it. Our course will be discussion-based and will include both conventional and creative writing, as well as time spent outside.

Inscape Journal is the English Department’s digital creative writing and art journal published every fall and winter semester at inscape.byu.edu. The journal is managed and edited by graduate students in the creative writing MFA program, various English MA programs, and art and art history undergraduate students in humanities. All student staff—enrolled in internships or volunteers—learn the business and craft of editing and publishing through soliciting and evaluating creative writing and visual art submissions, content editing, and formatting pieces of writing for web publication. They also receive hands-on training in writing and editing for the web and web design; social media marketing; acquisitions and community outreach; podcasting; event planning; and creating and implementing writing contests. Experts in the fields of publishing, creative writing and visual art, editing, event design, and marketing address the staff as guest presenters throughout the semester. Inscape Journal is the best student journal experience on campus.

Requirements: Students who join the Inscape staff as interns complete responsibilities commensurate with their department requirements, which includes creating a professional portfolio. All interns are expected to work on a logistics or marketing team as well as a genre group (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or visual art) and complete all responsibilities required by the faculty advisor and editorial leadership. Successful interns are prepared for careers in digital or print editing and publishing as well as marketing and management design.

Students will work on the staff of the new national children’s literary magazine, Whirligig. Staff members will be a part of each stage of magazine production: concept creation, acquisitions, writing, editing, art direction, designing, marketing, networking, and distribution. This is a great place to learn about writing for children and gain valuable practical experience in acquiring, revising, and preparing manuscripts for publication. Students will collaborate with authors and other publishing professionals both on and off campus.

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.

How do faith challenges in the modern LDS church intersect with faith challenges in Western Christian history? This course combines a history of agnosticism from Hume to the present with questions of urgent and personal relevance. How can we explain times of divine silence? Are the scriptures infallible? Why do the innocent suffer? Is doubt a spiritual sin? Readings will include Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Twain, C. S. Lewis, and many others. We will explore the power of literature, science, and philosophy to help us navigate our own wrestles with faith.

This section of “Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism” will focus on the rise, fall, and potential resurgence of aesthetic and evaluative criticism, modes of interpretation concerned primarily with assessing and appreciating the beauty, artistry, and comparative achievement of works of literature. Through most of literary history, the critic was defined first and foremost as an arbiter of taste whose principal task, as famously summarized by Matthew Arnold, was to point readers toward “the best that is known and thought in the world.” But in the waning decades of the twentieth century, a wave of influential critics revolted again the notion that some poems, plays, and novels are objectively better than others and the assumption that professors—and, to a lesser extent, students—of literature are better equipped than others to judge the success or failure of literary works. In these critics’ wake, aesthetic and evaluative approaches have been consigned to the margins of academic criticism, being replaced by modes more concerned with history and politics than artistry and beauty. Of late, however, the pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction, with numerous important books and essays arguing that, as compelling historicist and political readings can be, they often fail to account for the aspects of certain books that make them so meaningful in our lives. These latest entries in the ongoing debates over aesthetic and evaluative criticism are where this section of ENGL 450 will end up; but, before getting there, we’ll spend the first half of the semester exploring foundational essays from earlier eras concerning the wisdom or folly of trying to define the qualities of great works of art.

This capstone course will look at scholarship on religious and regional folklore, focusing on Latter-day Saints as the primary example. “Mormon folklore” has been well-represented in the field. There is a long history of Latter-day Saint folklorists, and topics like The Three Nephites and J. Golden Kimball stories are known outside our community. Students will select and investigate their own topic in this area using scholarly, archival, and ethnographic methods. The primary assignment will be to produce a publication-ready academic article. Students will workshop their papers and present their research in class.

Words are magic, and words designed for specific audiences are spells that shape ideas, attitudes, behaviors, even the destinies of nations. Some ancient Greeks believed this power came from the gods; some thought it was witchcraft; and some recognized it as a tool to build stronger communities. During the first half of this course, students will be introduced to this history. Specifically, they will look at ancient texts related to rhetoric and magic, and they will begin to demystify the nature of persuasive communication. In the second half of this course, they will start learning how to cast their own spells. Specifically, they will embark on a capstone project for which they will choose one of two options: an extended persuasive essay or a multi-modal recorded speech for which they can use the library’s video production studio. Both assignments will be expected to draw on careful research and five key areas of professional persuasion.