We offer approximately 150 to 200 sections of English courses each long semester and a handful of courses over the summer. All of our courses emphasize analytical reading, critical thinking, effective communication, and the development of various writing styles and skills. Our writing-oriented courses cover a variety of skills and degree requirements for students across the university including Core Curriculum courses, Writing Intensive courses, creative writing, and technical business writing. Our literature courses span across genres, time periods, and areas of study including such topics as: health humanities, digital humanities, linguistics, cultural studies, LGBTQ+ literatures, Latinx literatures, rhetoric, literature and film, African-American literatures, surveys of literary periods, and young adult/children's literature.
For a full listing of English courses and brief descriptions, visit the university’s undergraduate catalog.
Below you will find detailed course descriptions for some of our classes being offered during the Spring 2025 semester. While this list is not exhaustive, it is meant to aid students in selecting courses that meet their interests, particularly for our special topics courses which change from semester to semester. Please use the Class Search function in Howdy to see a full list of English and Linguistics classes being offered in Spring 2025.
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Taught by: Dr. Melissa McCoul
Course Description: Have you ever watched Bridget Jones’ Diary? Or one of the many Pride and Prejudice film adaptations? Ever worn a Frankenstein Halloween costume? In this class, we’ll explore these and many other historical and contemporary responses to four of the most popular and oft-adapted 19th century tales: Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Little Women. In addition to reading these four works, we will read a series of textual and graphic adaptations aimed at a range of audiences. This course serves as an introduction to the modes of reading and writing common to the discipline of English, and as such we will practice analyzing literary elements, enhancing communication and persuasive skills, and interrogating the stories’ thematic issues to understand their continuing hold on our collective imagination.
Prospective Readings:
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Taught by: Dr. Grace Heneks
Course Description: “We didn't start the fire It was always burning since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it, but we're trying to fight it”
The 21st century has been fraught with upheaval and immense transformation, marked by technological advancements, unprecedented political turmoil, environmental crises, and cultural revolutions. From 9/11 and its aftermath to the rise of social media, from the global financial crisis to the resurgence of nationalist movements, we will analyze the ways in which writers and artists have grappled with issues of identity, power, justice, and belonging in an increasingly interconnected yet divided world. Through a diverse selection of texts, films, artwork, and other cultural artifacts, we will examine how literature and culture both reflect and respond to these challenges and contradictions.
Prospective Readings:
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
Redeployment, Phil Klay
Get Out, dir. Jordan Peele
Station Eleven, Hilary St. John Mandel
The History of Loneliness, John Boyne
Spotlight, dir. Tom McCarthy
Snowpiercer, dir. Bong Joon-Ho
Beasts of the Southern Wild, dir Benh Zeitlin
Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow
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Taught by: Dr. James Francis
Course Description: "The science fiction-horror text is no stranger to literary criticism; in its written and visual forms, scholars have unpacked the ways in which the hybrid genre often tackles and represents shared sociocultural—including religious, political, and economic—terrors and apprehensions through thematic, symbolic, and metaphorical story elements. When we examine a specific time period and the sci-fi horror narratives produced during that era, we discover that the texts serve as historical time markers, responding to global concerns that link our transnational humanity and perspectives in remarkable ways. From early written works to the 1950s-1970s heyday period of sci-fi horror film texts (mostly adaptations), examining narratives from this time span will allow us to consider how past anxieties transition into fears of the early 21st Century zeitgeist. As an introduction to the English major, we will engage with various types of narrative forms (poem, short story, novel, fiction film, television) that confront science and horror as natural aspects of everyday living and genres (separate and combined) that fascinate us and therein develop strategies for reading, interpreting, researching, and writing about the narratives to gain a communal understanding of representative concepts in literature, rhetoric, and creative writing."
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Taught by: Dr. Regina Mills
Course Description:
This course explores games as a literary category and examines how we make games out of literature. We will look at how games make narratives through story and design. From fan fiction, in which readers of literature play with the literature they adore, to tabletop and online role-playing games, in which a gamemaster or game developer builds worlds and players characterize their created personas (avatars) through actions and dialogue, games of all kinds use and play with the conventions of literature. “Gaming Literature” is about seeing games as literature and viewing literary studies as a field of exploration and experimentation. This course provides a robust introduction to the major, showing students the many avenues of research available to English majors. From “literary studies” methods like close reading, area studies approaches such as Black studies and Latinx studies, queer studies, feminist studies, cultural studies (with a focus on pop culture and even folklore approaches), digital humanities, creative writing, rhetoric, film studies and the study of visual culture. There will be guest lectures from game developers and scholars across the country (via Zoom) who will introduce you to a variety of ways to approach games and other literary productions. This is a portfolio-based course, meaning that students' final grades depend heavily on their ability to reflect on feedback, learn from failure (just like you do in Mario when you fall into a pit or hit a Goomba over and over), and revise their work. Students will also create their own game (digital or analog) - a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure that will test their ability to use worldbuilding, characterization, and storytelling tools.Students will be required to complete traditional, academic reading (short stories, novels, academic articles and chapters, etc.) but also play games with strong narrative or character-focus, including table-top games, video games, and card games. Students in this class should be curious, open to trying new things, and willing to learn from and with each other. There will be no assumption that students are “gamers” or have ever played a game before. Dr. Mills will provide resources and guidance, so whether you're a newbie to games or a life-long lover of games, this class is for you!
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Taughty by: Dr. Andrew Pilsch
Course Description: This course will use the figure of the unreliable narrator to introduce key methods and principles of literary study. Given the course theme, how do we read a text when the surprise is spoiled in advance? What other ways of reading might be possible? We will read some criticism on the unreliable narrator (likely Wayne C. Booth, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and William Riggan) as well as a range of texts that utilize different aspects of unreliable narration, likely including Turn of the Screw, Gone Girl, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The question of unreliability and genre will also be important.
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Taught by: Dr. Mary-Ann O'Farrell
Course Description:
This class is an introduction to English studies organized around a topic (school fiction), a process (thinking self-consciously about what we do when we read, discuss, and write about literature and other kinds of texts), and a set of practicalities (issues involved in being an informed English major at Texas A&M).
The hothouse, small world nature of school has made it an appealing setting for fiction interested in exploring issues related to learning and to coming into identity: vulnerability and exposure, exclusion and belonging, the thrill of knowing and the painful surprise of not knowing, and the discovery that one has a relation to personal and to institutional forms of power. This section of English 303 will explore the riches of literary and visual works focused on the experience of school.
Proposed Readings:
Texts we will read and watch include such novels as the first of the Harry Potter books, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, and such films as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Clueless.
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Taught by: Dr. Apostolos Vasilakis
Course Description: This course will focus on the history of literary criticism and theory from antiquity to the present time. During the course we will read (among others) authors like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Lessing, Marx and Freud, Wittig and Cixoux, Said and Fanon, and discuss not only the evolutions and transitions in literary theory and criticism, but most importantly how theory has changed the way we think about literature; its own means of materiality; and our understanding of culture, history, and language.
Proposed Readings:
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Taught by: Dr. Noah Peterson
Description: 2025 marks the 540th anniversary since William Caxton first printed Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur in 1485. It is no exaggeration to say that every post-medieval Arthurian project has largely been a response to Malory's text and the "noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin" found within his book of King Arthur and the noble Knights of the Round Table. This course will include placing the Morte within its historical and literary context and involve detailed reading and discussion of the entirety of Malory’s text supplemented by contemporary scholarly approaches to Malory’s Arthurian project. Topics will include medieval texts and adaptation; religion and the medieval / modern reader; the complex construction of “chivalry”; gender and race as they appear in Malory’s text; the geography, landscape, and space that the characters navigate; the blended Romance / Chronicle prose style of Malory; and the modern, world-wide reception and response to Malory’s Morte Darthur including films which are inspired by the text.
Proposed Readings: Le Morte Darthur; selections from The History of the Kings of Britain, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur; several 20th and 21st century films
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Taught by: Dr. Sara DiCaglio
Course Description: How do rhetoric, health, and gender intersect? This course looks at the intersection of gender and health as a rhetorical object—something that is crafted and shaped through specific choices in language, writing, and other modes of discourse. Whose bodies fit into definitions of health? How do questions of disability, gender, and other modes of identity show up, get shaped by, or drop out of these definitions? What's the impact of these questions on our lived experiences of gender and health? Looking at a wide range of sources--pop culture, health pamphlets, commercials, policies, activism, spaces, social media, etc--this course will help students to understand how to use strategies of rhetorical analysis to better understand the ways gender and health are shaped in discourse. We will attend to a variety of texts and moments in cultural discourse, focusing on how literacy, expertise, and knowledge work in relation to one another in the creation of ideas about gender and health. The course is designed to be welcoming to students from a wide range of backgrounds; those with backgrounds in health will find new ways to attend to the impacts of language and rhetoric on those ideas about health, those interested in gender will have opportunities to think about how constructions of health relate to those questions, and those interested in rhetoric or the English major in general will see how language comes to impact the every day through our specific case study.
Proposed Readings:
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Taught by: Dr. Jason Crider
Course Description: This course serves as an overview of some of the major theories and theorists of rhetoric in the 20th and 21st centuries. What is the relationship between rhetoric and culture? Rhetoric and (post)modernity? How does rhetoric function as a method of literary interpretation or cultural criticism? How does rhetoric function differently in oral, textual, and digital contexts? How has rhetoric been traditionally theorized and taught as an academic discipline? Students will explore a broad range of rhetorical theories over the course of the semester and practice applying them to their contemporary historical moment.
Proposed Readings:
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Taught by: Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya
Course Description: Focus on the novel as a prose genre; analysis of structure coupled with writing assignments illustrating principles of form in long prose narrative. Readings may include Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, John Mullan’s How Novels Work, Henry James The Art of the Novel, and more. The course will be readings- and workshop-based.
Proposed Readings:
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Taught by: Dr. Melissa McCoul
Course Description: Maybe you grew up reading Harry Potter or Holes, Nancy Drew or the Narnia stories. Maybe you were a comic-book kid. Whatever your personal predilections, you probably already have a pretty good sense of what children's literature is. But as soon as you try to define it, you'll find that safe-seeming category becomes slippery. In this course, we will begin to tease out the boundaries of this capacious category called “children's literature.” What counts? Who decides? What differentiates writing for children from writing for adults? Why should we, as adults, read children’s literature? In this course, we will explore a range of children’s literature in English, including picture books, poetry, contemporary novels, historical fiction, and fantasy. Our task is to think critically about what these books can tell us about how we (and others) understand childhood, how those definitions have changed over time, and how these books participate in larger movements of history, culture, and literature.
Proposed Readings:
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Taught by: Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya
Course Description: An understanding of the canon of British literature, both traditionally and non-traditionally defined; an understanding of the origins and development of the novel form; an understanding of the British empire and its cultural consequences; an understanding of some major cultural trends of the twentieth century; an understanding of and familiarity with the British novel (1870–2024).
Prospective Readings:
Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch.
Lewicka, Marian. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
Max, Beerbohm. Zuleika Dobson.
McEwan, Ian. On Chesil Beach.
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Taught by: Dr. Whitney Sperrazza
Course Description: This course explores the history of medicine through the lens of literary texts written during the early British empire (1550-1750). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, plants, animals, insects, and human bodies were transported across the Atlantic as part of England’s colonial project. The period’s poetry, prose, and drama functioned as both a space to investigate completely new things and a space to test interactions between new and old things. What is this new plant and how do we test its effect on the human body? How might new medicinal knowledge challenge or expand old ways of practicing medicine? In this class, we’ll study medicinal recipe books, travelogues, and botanical treatises alongside more traditional literary texts in order to better understand how the history of medicine shaped and was shaped by the literary market.
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Taught by: Dr. Elizabeth Robinson
Course Description:
Speaking of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien writes:
[A] basic passion of mine . . . was for myth and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world . . . I am not ‘learned’ in the matters of myth and fairy-story, however, for in such things . . . I have always been seeking material, things of a certain tone and air, and not simple knowledge. Also . . . I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought . . . nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing (Letters 144).
Thus, Tolkien goes on to explain, he began to create “a body of more or less connected legend” (The Silmarillion) which tells the tales of the First, Second, and Third Ages of Middle-earth. The Hobbit (written for children) follows, and is important to the sequel, The Lord of the Rings, as it brings the “One Ring” out of the darkness of Gollum’s cave, of time, and of history. The Lord of the Rings concludes the cycle and recounts the end of the Third Age and ushers in the Fourth Age, the age of Men, which is where Tolkien ends his mythic cycle about Middle-earth.
While Tolkien creates his great mythic cycle partly to create an English mythos, it is also “fundamentally a religious and Catholic work” in which “the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism” (Letters 172). The centrality of the Christian myth to Tolkien’s work is made abundantly clear in his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories” in which he sets out the concepts of Recovery, Escape, Consolation, and Eucatastrophe, “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale)” to define what we today consider genre fantasy (On Fairy-Stories 153). Creating such fantasy, Tolkien argues “remains a human right: we make . . . because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker (“On Fairy-Stories” 145).
This course analyzes the seminal tales of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, his “English” myth. It explores topics including the nature of heroes/heroism, good and evil, the created races (Elves, Dwarves, Men etc.), the supernatural and the ways in which the Christian myth “is absorbed” in the larger myth, significant themes, and the roles of women. The course draws upon relevant scholarship, and is informed by consistent reference to Tolkien’s letters, his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” and his poem, “Mythopoeia.”
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Taught by: Dr. Jason Harris
Course Description:
This course will focus on strategies for composing and revising long form fiction: novels and novellas.Students will read several novels and novellas in addition to participating in workshops where they share and give feedback on sections from their own long-form fiction.A revised draft of a significant portion of a novel or novella will be required at the end of the semester.Proposed Readings:Fiction:Novels:Butler, Octavia. Parable of the SowerDufresne, John. My Darling Boy.Ferrante, Elena. Those who Leave and Those Who StayWoodhouse, P.J. Code of the WoostersGraphic novel: Mazzucchelli, David. Asterios Polyp.Novellas:Camus, Albert. The FallCisco, Michael. PestKeegan, Claire. Small Things Like TheseCraft Texts:Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done. Soho Press, 2022. 9781641293419Warner, Sharon. Writing the Novella. University of New Mexico Press, 2021. 9780826362551
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Taught by: Dr. Laura Mandell
Course Description: Based in Feminist and psychological theories, this course explores the relationship between politics and great art in women's writing. We will be examining in novels written by women from 1813 to 2023 the problem of "Othering," which is to say, projecting onto others -- usually those who are oppressed in some way -- all the qualities, capacities, and actions that one hates about human beings. In The Second Sex (1949, trans. 1953), Simone de Beauvoir argued that woman is seen as "the Other" by men and even by themselves. Later, the concept as derived from Jean-Paul Sartre was taken up by the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan whose work was popularized by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose in their edition of essays by Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (1982). We have come to recognize "othering" people, whether idealizing or demonizing them (usually both) as instrumental in racism, classism, and imperialism, from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to Chandra Talpade Mohanty's groundbreaking essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" (1984). The academy tends to discount the aesthetic value of political writing, seeing it as "bad art." Here, we are going to examine efforts by women novelists to expose oppression and its baneful political effects, testing the notion proposed by Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects that works objecting to Western culture's process of othering those who are different just is great art.
Proposed Readings:
Jane Austen, Emma; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments; Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other.
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Taught by: Dr. Britt Mize
Course Description:
This course will consider the immense variety of adaptations, versions, and reimaginingsof Beowulf that have appeared from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Our collective andindividual engagements with these materials will be guided by questions about the nature,definition, and limits of adaptation as a mode of creation. Related to adaptation, but at timesdiscrete from it, is the issue of appropriation and repurposing, and we will consider what theuses (personal, ideological, institutional) of Beowulf have been in specific modern moments.The bulk of the course’s subject matter will comprise selections from the many inventiveredactions of Beowulf. These include works of belletristic and mainstream fiction as well assci-fi, fantasy, and detective novels; comic book series and graphic novels; films and televisionproductions; children’s books; continuations and sequels; live retellings or recitals; musicalsettings (including rock songs, a bluegrass musical, and a full opera); stage plays; parodies; andboard and video games. We will consider, also, other appropriations of Beowulf’s perceivedvalue, such as attempts by religious groups to invoke Beowulf’s authority in support of theirbelief systems, and intellectual and propagandistic assertions of its relevance to real wars.
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Taught by: Dr. Sally Robinson
Course Description: From at least the middle of the 19th century, American culture has been attempting to come to terms with the ever-increasing dominance of consumerism in all aspects of life. Literature, film, and a wide range of nonfiction writing has represented, criticized, made fun of, and celebrated the forms and practices of consumer culture. Whether the topic is profligate shopping, reality television, advertising, brand activism, food trends, neoliberalism and the “marketization” of everything, commercialized religion, or the “Disneyfication” of literature and history, representations of consumerism always raise questions about cultural value. In this class, we will read fiction and nonfiction and view films that actively engage in questions about the meanings of consumerism. Some attack consumerisms as “fake;” some celebrate it as empowering; some rely on gender and class stereotypes to categorize “high” versus “low” culture; some imagine consumer culture as a vast conspiracy aiming to control individuals; and some worry about what kind of people consumer culture makes us. Throughout the course, we will challenge commonsense ideas about the meanings of consumerism, with the goal of arriving at a more complex picture of how culture and commerce, art and commodities, interact with and influence each other; and how writers and filmmakers have created narratives to respond to the threats and promises of consumer culture.
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Taught by: Dr. Mike Collins
Course Description: Crime, detection, trial, punishment, rehabilitation,parole: This is the familiar cycle of justice in the United States and many other nations. The whole of this cycle, as well as the legal and theoretical frameworks in which the cycle unfolds, is the subject matter of the interdisciplinary subfield of literary criticism and legal studies that is known as “Law and Literature.” As a way of introducing “Law and Literature,” and its subfield “Law as Literature” (which investigates the literary aspects of judicial opinions and other legal texts), this class will explore works that represent, theorize, or critique all of part of this cycle as the authors explore the intricacies of injustice and its opposite. At a larger level, this class will explore the impact of legal systems on societies like that of the United States. Although the list of texts to be read has not been finalized, previous versions of this class have focused on texts by authors such as fiction writers Louise Erdrich and Walter Mosley and nonfiction writer Sarah Weddington, one of the lawyers who brought the case of Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court.
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Taught by: Dr. Joshua DiCaglio
Course Description:
This course takes the Space Race as a central moment that we can use for advanced study of rhetoric and literature. The amount of attention, effort, and narratives generated for and by this transformation make the Space Race an excellent case study in how and why we need more careful and extensive understanding of language and culture. Just as Vietnam was the first televised war, the Space Race was the first coordinated and on-going experiment in the cooperation between science, public relations, and mass market media, which led to a widespread conversation on the value of modern technology, the goals of man, and the direction of society. All this rhetoric and effort occurred alongside the Cold War, fears of Nuclear annihilation, Vietnam, the first whispers of ecological crisis, and increasing impatience with racial disparities highlighted by the Civil Rights movement. Now corporations speak of a future of on Mars and making humanity an “interplanetary species,” while we now have an actual Space Force and working shuttles run by independent parties. It is difficult to understand this current moment without first examining the original rhetoric and narratives that made space travel possible and a goal worth pursuing.
In this course we will look at the rhetoric around space in order to reopen these political, personal, and social questions as they manifested in the 1960s, as well as their legacy for today. We will consider some of the cultural and rhetorical artifacts that set the stage for thinking about space then spend some time looking at the media events and reactions of the actual Space Race, both in their original form and in more recent representations of them. We will then turn to reflections on the value of Space travel, which will lead us to the current rhetoric around NASA, the trip to Mars, and space photographs.
Proposed Readings:
Setting the Stage:
Cicero, Dream of Scipio
Lucian, A True Story
From the Earth to the Moon (film/book)
Kennedy Speech
Sputnik coverage
Poole, Earthrise (Chapter 1-2)
Fuller, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
2001: A Space Odyssey
Chelsey Bonstell paintings
Racing to the Moon
Edgar Mitchell, Way of the Explorer
From the Earth to the Moon (documentary)
Media events on moon landing
Tribbe, No Requiem for a Space Age (selections)
Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog
What was that?!?
Mitchell, Way of the Explorer (chapter 4-5)
White, the Overview Effect
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (episode 1)
Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Poole, Earthrise (chps 3-4)
Afrofuturism in Sun Ra, Parliament/Funkadelic
Challenger Explosion coverage
Maybe Again?
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (selections)
Space X and Virgin Galactic coverage
Interstellar Contact Gravity