Upcoming Course Offerings

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 as springboards to other course assignments culminating in a ten- to twelve-page conference paper. Through small-group and class discussions and through group and individual writing assignments, 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.

So close to the winter holidays, who could possibly not recall with fondness that beloved Dickens Christmas classic, the novella that helped make him famous and that will be the focus of this section of ENGL 303? Readers of this book have to possess the stony heart of Scrooge himself not to chuckle at antics of the Nicaraguan natives as they sabotage their British overlords, not to cheer the musket-wielding grandma during the pirate attack, not to hope the poor sailor boy finds true love (and perhaps even learns to read). Yes, this semester we will use Dickens’s collaborative Christmas story The Perils of Certain English Prisoners to think carefully about the processes of reading and writing literary criticism. There’s very little mistletoe and no snow at all in this story of adventure on the high seas, but it will help us examine issues of race, ethnicity, language, narrative, literary collaboration, ecology, gender, and more as we perform research and compose a series of essays that will hone your academic writing skills.

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.

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.

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.

In this course, we will study 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 genre called the pathography, which we will listen to, read, and write, as we ask how these stories of suffering, or illness narratives, may provide a type or symbol of humanity itself.

For many audiences, their first experience with medieval literature is through film. Examples include Disney’s animated The Sword and the Stone and Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. While some are beloved, others are heavily criticized, garnering Rotten Tomatoes scores as low as 14% and IMDB ratings of 2/10 stars. While many audience members have not read texts like the Pearl Poet’s 14th century Gawain and the Green Knight or Thomas Malory’s 15th century Morte D’Arthur, they have seen enough film adaptations to feel they know these works. Whether it’s stories of King Arthur and Guinevere, Gawain and the Green Knight, or Beowulf, how do great works of literature devolve into mediocre film? Is it almost impossible to have a great medieval film, or is it just a matter of taste and changing aesthetics? Further, do objectively bad films damage our sense of the original texts? Taking several medieval narratives as a starting point, we’ll consider their 21st century cinematic adaptations and what this process indicates about the current cultural value of these works.

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 planning to read. 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.

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• Gilead by Marilynn Robinson
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

No genre is older of more universally human than the short story. This course will explore the world through stories, pondering deeply along the way why and how we are so deeply enchanted by taking droughts from the cauldron of story. Our aim is to discover as much as we can of what Ben Okri has called the “mysterious and beautiful things that make us human—as well as the tragic things…” In doing so, we will move back and forth between the local and the universal, following the conceptual lead of Edward Said, who has observed:

“If at the outset we acknowledge the massively knotted and complex histories of special but nevertheless overlapping and interconnected experiences---of women, of Westerners, of Blacks, of national states and cultures---there is no particular intellectual reason for granting each and all of them an ideal and essentially separate status. Yet we would wish to preserve what is unique about each so long as we also preserve some sense of the human community and the actual contests that contribute to its formation, and of which they are all a part.”

We will first visit the ancient origins of the short story, looking at a selection of Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, African, and Greek stories. Subsequent themed units will explore (1) childhood and coming of age, (2) poverty/trauma and courage, (3) individuality and family relationships, and (4) community and conflict (cultural, racial, and gender) across stories from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, India, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, America, Wales, and Trinidad.

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.

In the history of modern African literature, West Africa has been the source of significant innovations. From Chinua Achebe’s now-canonical Things Fall Apart to Alain Mabanckou’s surreal Mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine) and more, West African Anglophone and Francophone writers have played a particularly important role in the development of “postcolonial” fiction in Africa. Such writers are typically read in the context of the literatures of the African continent and/or world literatures more broadly, but this course proposes a regional approach that will enable close attention to localities while also leaving room for comparison across borders, cultures, and languages. Beginning with the deep narrative traditions of West African orature, we will then study some of the most important works of fiction in the last 75 years, including Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir (The African Child), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Mariama Ba’s Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), Ken Bugul’s Le Baobab Fou (The Abandoned Baobab), Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, and Mabanckou’s Mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine). Throughout, we will examine questions of narrative form, cultural “authenticity,” tradition vs. modernity, politics, history, gender, religion, globalization, and more. All texts will be read and discussed in English, but students who register for French 456R will also participate in a 1-credit discussion section on Fridays where the texts will be read and discussed entirely in French.

While English majors generally develop a solid understanding of British and American literary history, they often graduate with no clear sense of what is happening in literature today, especially outside the English-speaking world. This cross-listed course for students majoring in English and European Studies attempts to begin filling this gap. We will spend the first month surveying major pre-1945 European writers (e.g., Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, etc.) and movements (e.g., romanticism, realism, expressionism, etc.) that continue to inform contemporary European art and literature. From there, the rest of the semester will focus on a single genre (fiction) and a single period (post-1970, with particular emphasis on novelists still writing today). We will read several novels, but none will be particularly long and all will be in English.

Mexican culture—food, language, religion, literature, politics, music, etc.—manifests itself not only throughout Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands but throughout the United States in general and throughout the American continent. Américo Paredes and several others scholars refer to this region of Mexican cultural influence as “Greater Mexico.” This course will introduce students to the concept of Greater Mexico while offering an in-depth study of literature, visual art, and other cultural products from Mexican, Chicano/a, and U.S. literary traditions.

382: This section is for English Teaching majors only. Non-teaching majors should register for ENGL 384-001, which is the same instructor/day/time.
384: Shakespeare’s Song Sampler (English Teaching majors should register for ENGL 382 section 001)

Did Shakespeare organize Much Ado about Nothing entirely around music? There’s a hidden code in a song in Merchant of Venice. Twelfth Night was written for a newly hired singer. Comedy and magic combine in the witches’ songs in Macbeth. Desdemona presages her death through her swan song in Othello. And The Tempest is suffused with music, the only play with surviving original scores. Through songs from Shakespeare’s time and modern reappropriations we’ll discover themes, context, and cutting-edge scholarly approaches to the plays. No musical background is necessary!

This course engages in a sustained way with the writings and thought of John Milton, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest poets in English literary history. Intertwined with his poetry, however, is his legacy as a religious, political, and social thinker in a time when those categories blurred together in a maelstrom of civil war and religious upheaval. Milton participated in these events energetically, and learning about how he navigated his own challenging times can give us insight into how to live better in ours, different though they may be.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 and grew up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida. She attended Howard University and graduated with a BA from Columbia University, where she also did graduate work, studying with the famed anthropologist Franz Boas. She also became a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, writing short stories, plays, folklore and ethnographic studies, and novels, and collaborating with fellow writers including Langston Hughes. Hurston died in relative obscurity, but her 1936 book Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century, and studying her work opens onto highly important vistas in US literary and race relations. The story of Hurston’s recovery from obscurity in the 1990s offers one of American literature’s most vivid case studies on how authors attain their status as great authors. If you want to know why dozens of English majors are walking around the JFSB in shirts with Hurston’s face on them, this is the class.

Early modern philosophers and physicians associated women (problematically!) with what they called the passions (emotions) and men with reason. In an age where reason is clearly championed above emotion, women writers nonetheless discuss, represent, employ, and embrace the passions in their poetry. This class will look to writers such as Ann Lok, Catharine Parr, Elizabeth Whitney, Aemiliay Lanyer, and Lucy Hutchinson to ask questions about how women writers use the emotions to represent themselves as social, devotional, and literary authorities.

For many audiences, their first experience with medieval literature is through film. Examples include Disney’s animated The Sword and the Stone and Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. While some are beloved, others are heavily criticized, garnering Rotten Tomatoes scores as low as 14% and IMDB ratings of 2/10 stars. While many audience members have not read texts like the Pearl Poet’s 14th century Gawain and the Green Knight or Thomas Malory’s 15th century Morte D’Arthur, they have seen enough film adaptations to feel they know these works. Whether it’s stories of King Arthur and Guinevere, Gawain and the Green Knight, or Beowulf, how do great works of literature devolve into mediocre film? Is it almost impossible to have a great medieval film, or is it just a matter of taste and changing aesthetics? Further, do objectively bad films damage our sense of the original texts? Taking several medieval narratives as a starting point, we’ll consider their 21st century cinematic adaptations and what this process indicates about the current cultural value of these works.

This course will explore the vibrant, though understudied, field of nineteenth-century British short fiction. We will read many the classics—Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction, Elizabeth Gaskell’s delightfully humorous scenes of country life, and Charles Dicken’s spooky Christmas stories. And we’ll go beyond the typical anthology to find a number of literary gems that have remained in the shadows for the past century and a half.

From pre-Columbian Indigenous stories to the writings of the American Revolution, this course will explore the coinciding—often directly competing—literary origins of America and will trace the diverse, intergenerational legacies that pre-1800s American stories put into being. In addition to becoming familiar with the literary history of early America, this course will engage diverse literary genres and communities of writers to wrestle with what it means to be an American.

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.

This section of 389R will explore how the American frontier became part of the popular imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one of the most enduring symbols of American national identity, the frontier has been a rich source of mythic images and ideas in literature, film, advertising, and political discourse. The concept of the frontier as the space of Americanization really took hold with the rise of mass culture in the decades after the Civil War. We will trace this development and its legacy through figures such as Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and Elinore Stewart, among others. And we will consider its influence in the development of a national identity that continues to shape the way we think about ourselves, as well as the way the rest of the world sees us.

Inscape: Journal of Creative Writing and Art is published every fall and winter semester on its shiny new website at inscape.byu.edu. The journal is managed and edited by graduate students in the creative writing MFA program and students in the art department. All staff members, either students enrolled in ENGL 394R 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. They also receive hands-on training and experience with web design and web editing, social media marketing, event planning, and (new) grant writing. The staff uses Instagram and Tik Tok, Wordpress, Photoshop, Canva, and Monday.com for team assignments, as well as the submission platform Submittable. Experts in publishing, writing, visual art, editing, and marketing are guest presenters every Thursday evening.

Requirements: Students enrolled in ENGL 394R are required to create a professional portfolio that includes a resume and cover letter/letter of application for graduate school, a mock interview, a fleshed-out LinkedIn profile, a job networking experience, and stellar staff assignment participation. The Inscape internship is designed for students interested in careers in publishing, which makes it an exceptional opportunity for 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.

Students will work on the staff of the new national children’s literary magazine, Wild Honey. 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 the children’s book industry and gain valuable practical experience. Students will collaborate with writers and other publishing professionals both on and off campus.

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.

Early modern philosophers and physicians associated women (problematically!) with what they called the passions (emotions) and men with reason. In an age where reason is clearly championed above emotion, women writers nonetheless discuss, represent, employ, and embrace the passions in their poetry. This class will look to writers such as Ann Lok, Catharine Parr, Elizabeth Whitney, Aemiliay Lanyer, and Lucy Hutchinson to ask questions about how women writers use the emotions to represent themselves as social, devotional, and literary authorities.

In the history of modern African literature, West Africa has been the source of significant innovations. From Chinua Achebe’s now-canonical Things Fall Apart to Alain Mabanckou’s surreal Mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine) and more, West African Anglophone and Francophone writers have played a particularly important role in the development of “postcolonial” fiction in Africa. Such writers are typically read in the context of the literatures of the African continent and/or world literatures more broadly, but this course proposes a regional approach that will enable close attention to localities while also leaving room for comparison across borders, cultures, and languages. Beginning with the deep narrative traditions of West African orature, we will then study some of the most important works of fiction in the last 75 years, including Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir (The African Child), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Mariama Ba’s Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), Ken Bugul’s Le Baobab Fou (The Abandoned Baobab), Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, and Mabanckou’s Mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine). Throughout, we will examine questions of narrative form, cultural “authenticity,” tradition vs. modernity, politics, history, gender, religion, globalization, and more. All texts will be read and discussed in English, but students who register for French 456R will also participate in a 1-credit discussion section on Fridays where the texts will be read and discussed entirely in French.

Application can be found at https://english.byu.edu/awards-contests-and-scholarships.

Brandon Sanderson's lecture class is open registration. It does not require department chair approval.

ENGL 490 has replaced ENGL 318 as Brandon Sanderson's workshop course. This workshop focuses on writing science fiction. Admittance to class by application only. Go to https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/application-for-byu-318-r-section-2/.

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.

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. We’ll survey scholarship from multiple disciplines (rhetoric, writing, political science, psychology, peace and conflict studies) and religious traditions to collectively theorize rhetoric as an art of peacemaking. We’ll analyze case studies of persuasive peacemakers, from women Nobel Peace Prize laureates to Mormon Women for Ethical Government. You’ll apply what you learn to one of two options for your capstone project: an extended seminar paper that makes an original contribution to the capstone’s scholarly conversations, or a substantial multimodal project relevant to capstone content and your academic, professional, or personal goals. Either project should demonstrate professional, ethical, rhetorically effective communication and should be fit to include in a portfolio of work for academic or professional purposes.

Why are there so many books about people reading books? Why do we like to read about other readers reading? This course will attempt to answer those questions through examining novels featuring readers, writers, libraries, and so so many books. The works span various genres: literary, historical, fantastical, romantic, and mystery. All of them pose questions about books' power to foster community, connection, understanding, healing, and one's self.

Following the Puritan Interregnum, during which time London playhouses were effectively shut down, the English theater had to essentially reinvent itself. This process resulted in new plays and new dramatic types, but theater managers likewise tapped plays from England’s not-to-distant past, including those by Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare became the most celebrated playwright of his day, it was during the Long Eighteenth Century that he was canonized—and immortalized—not merely through the reproduction of his plays, which were sometimes revised for eighteenth-century tastes—but through literary criticism as Samuel Johnson and others submitted the bard’s works to serious literary criticism for the first time. It was also during this period that we can talk about literary tourism as Shakespeare’s birthplace became a site of pilgrimage for Shakespeare enthusiasts. This section will examine the process of canonizing Shakespeare—as well as issues of canonization more broadly conceived—and explore how Shakespeare became Shakespeare while reflecting on what this process tells us about literary and cultural sensibilities during the period.