ENGL 114: Literary Editing & Publishing/Rice Review
Tuesday 6:30-9:20 p.m.
>>Instructor: Ian Schimmel
This is the first course in a recommended two-part sequence that explores literary publishing and the diversity of professionals in that space: editors, agents, publishers, and writers. Students enrolled in ENGL 113 will consider the fundamental questions of the industry: "What is literature and who decides?" "What is craft?" "What is poetry and what is the utility of a poem?" "What stories are fiction writers allowed to tell?" "What is creative nonfiction's relationship to truth?" Alongside these discussions, students will study the basic elements of literature's three main genres (poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction), enlarge their understanding of editorial critique, and develop skills for providing feedback in the workshop setting. All students will be considered as official staffers for The Rice Review magazine and be acknowledged in that year's annual issue. There is no prerequisite for this course, but a joy for reading and debating the qualities of great poetry and prose is strongly encouraged. ENGL 113 is a prerequisite for ENGL 114. For more information about the spring continuation of the course, and the production of The Rice Review, please refer to the course description for ENGL 114.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 200*: Gateways to Literary Study (two sections offered)
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:00-1:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Sarah Ellenzweig
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
>>Instructor: Merrill Turner
This course is designed for and required of all prospective English majors and should be taken in the first or sophomore year. Emphasis is on close reading, literary interpretation, and critical writing. Attention is paid to the major genres (poetry, drama, and fiction) across a range of historical periods. Open to all students!
Note to English majors or potential English majors: Due to the popularity of ENGL 200, if the section of ENGL 200 you want appears to be full, please contact the instructor to receive a "special registration/override” via ESTHER.
Satisfies:
*D1
Training the Imagination: English major requirement
**COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELED**
ENGL 204: Forms of Poetry-Sonnet Studio
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
>>Instructor: Joseph Campana
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
>>Instructor: Joseph Campana
This course examines the fundamental architecture of poetry. How do poets create a sense of shape? What are the nuts and bolts of a poem? Students will read widely in the history of poetry from traditional meters and historical forms to contemporary free verse and experimental or open forms. Part workshop and part seminar, this course will feature critical and creative assignments and is designed for majors and non-majors, writers and non-writers alike. Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW).
Satisfies:
*English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 210*: Beginnings-British Literature to 1800
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 4:00-5:40 p.m.
>>Instructor: Sarah Ellenzweig
“Beginnings” is a foundations class for literature enthusiasts who are interested in reading and/or in creative writing, and who want to understand the literary past and how it remains with us. We will explore together why we should still care about “early” authors and texts now. Our class will approach our literary past with openness and curiosity for what it might hold for us, remembering that we can’t find our voices without knowing something about the traditions, legacies, and heritages that precede and shape us.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before **1800/1900 (specifically **pre-1800)
Meets Rice English major specialization: LLH
ENGL 222*: The World and South Asia (cross-list ASIA 222)
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
>>Instructor: Ragini Srinivasan
How do we write “South Asia” in English? What is the relationship between South Asian literature and the literature of the Anglophone World? The South Asian subcontinent includes 8 or 10 independent nation states, depending on how you draw the map, which comprise nearly a quarter of the world’s population. These nations have different, historically specific relationships to English. Taking inspiration from the Kathmandu-founded, Colombo-based journal Himal Southasian’s “Right-Side-Up-Map of South Asia”, which challenges dominant modes of visualizing the region, this introductory course invites students to reconceive South Asia and its nations through English literature on one hand, and to reconceive the literary through engagement with South Asian cultural production on the other. Key topics will include colonialism, anti-colonial movements, and political violence; the nation, diaspora, and the global; postcolonial language politics and English’s relationship to South Asian vernaculars; sexuality, subjectivity, and sound cultures.
Satisfies:
*D1 and AD (Analyzing Diversity)
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; LLH
ENGL 267*: Introduction to African American Literature
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
>>Instructor: Biko Caruthers
This course will provide a rich introduction to major conversations and themes within African American literature. One of the many questions we will answer is in what ways black writers have argued against the definitions and categories of the dominant social order.
Satisfies:
*D1 and AD (Analyzing Diversity)
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; LLH
ENGL 269: Science Fiction & the Environment
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:00-11:50 a.m.
>>Instructor: Michael Pons
What is the “environment” and how does humanity relate to it? This course seeks to answer these questions by looking to science fictional texts. Science fiction is one of the most potent cultural grounds for imagining possible futures. This massively popular genre of novels, films and television shows is contemporaneous with discussions of chemical pesticide use, oil production, nuclear war, and global warming and climate change. In this course, we will analyze the way that science fictional texts frame debates in environmental discourse.
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; SME
ENGL 272*: Literature & Medicine
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:00-11:50 a.m.
>>Instructor: Cameron Dezen Hammon
Designed for, but not limited to, students interested in the medical profession, this course introduces the study of medicine through reading imaginative literature--novels, plays, essays, poems--by and about doctors and patients, focusing on understanding ethical issues and on developing critical and interpretive skills.
Satisfies:
*D1 and AD (Analyzing Diversity)
Meets Rice English major specializations: SME; VCM
Medical Humanities Minor-approved/eligible: MDHM
ENGL 274*: Literature & Religion-Heaven & Hell
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
>>Instructor: Joseph Campana
Heaven & Hell examines the place of religious thought in literature and culture from the pre-modern to the modern world. The course examines how religious problems and questions--from an investment in a theological worldview to the critique of God and providence--have shaped literary form and function.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1800
Meets Rice English major specialization: LLH
ENGL 300: Practices of Literary Study
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
>>Instructor: Timothy Morton
This course explores the relation of literary and other cultural texts to key concepts in literary and cultural theory. In their reading and writing, students engage a variety of theoretical problems and modes of reading, among them close textual analysis, critical attention to representation of the (racial, gendered, sexual, class) subject, and what it means to read a text’s relation to philosophical traditions, power relations, history, and empire. ENGL 300 is to be taken after ENGL 200, ideally in the spring of the sophomore or fall of the junior year.
Satisfies:
Theoretical Concepts and Methods-English major requirement
ENGL 301*: Intro to Fiction Writing (three sections offered)
Monday 4:00-6:50 p.m
>>Instructor: Amber Dermont
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
>>Instructor: Andrea Bajani
Wednesday 3:00-5:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Amber Dermont
ENGL 301 is a course that teaches the fundamentals of fiction writing, and includes a mixture of reading and writing assignments. The goal is for each student to produce two short stories possessing imaginative ingenuity, structural integrity, and literary merit by the end of the semester. The course counts toward the English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW). Seating is limited. Registration for odd-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW); registration for even numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order.
Satisfies:
*D1
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 304*: Intro to Poetry Writing
Thursday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Tomás Q. Morín
An introduction to poetry writing through the study of contemporary poets and the writing of poems. The class will pay extensive attention to such elements of poetry as imagery, figurative language, tone, syntax, and form in order to create a vocabulary for students to discuss their own poems. Students' poems will be critiqued by the class in a workshop setting. Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW). Registration for odd-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW); registration for even numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students.
Satisfies:
*D1
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL *305: Intro to Creative Nonfiction Writing
Monday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Lacy Johnson
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
>>Instructor: Cameron Dezen Hammon
David Shields is fond of criticizing the label “Creative Nonfiction,” saying: “it’s like having one drawer in your dresser labeled ‘socks,’ and one other drawer labeled ‘non-socks.’” The term “Creative Nonfiction” is, indeed, unwieldy, since we use it to encompass at least all of the following sub-genres: memoir, personal essay, lyric essay, literary journalism, profiles, historical narrative, travel essay, nature writing, writing for radio, science writing, and cultural critique. Though disparate, what all of these sub-genres have in common is a shared set of questions about truth. If we have learned anything from scandals in the nonfiction world (James Frey, Margaret Jones, Jonah Lehrer, etc.), writers of nonfiction are expected to only ever tell the complete, unaltered truth. However, when we look to masters of the form, we see that their work is often not so much marked by truth as truthiness (to use Stephen Colbert’s term), which means that the driving force isn’t necessarily so much the facts about a given matter (facts themselves are not inherently interesting anyway) so much as an inquiry about how they might be understood.
In this workshop, we’ll explore what “truth” means to writers working across many subgenres of creative nonfiction, and we’ll work to put our powers of observation, narration, reportage, and research to work in service of this broad and nebulous aim. The course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW). Registration for odd-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW); registration for even numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students.
Satisfies:
*D1
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 308: Podcasting
Wednesday 2:00-4:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Ian Schimmel
This project-based course will lead us through an introduction to the ever-expanding medium of podcasting, specifically radio storytelling. We will unpack and discuss the techniques of practiced podcasters and use those elements in our own attempts at radio reportage: arts & culture shorts, vox pops, sonic IDs, and short and long-form interviews. We will become proficient in capturing sound, interviewing strangers, writing scripts, pitching ideas for stories, and using GarageBand software to edit and shape that content. This course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW). Registration for odd-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW); registration for even numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students.
Satisfies:
Meets Rice English major specialization: VCM
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 332*: Literature of the British Enlightenment-Coffee, Sex, & Tobacco in Public Culture
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 2:00-2:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Taylin Nelson
ENGL 332 is a course that examines a representative range of British prose and poetry from 1660-1790, the period known as the Enlightenment. This was a volatile age of plots, revolution, philosophical and scientific innovation, and literary transformation. Our readings will cover poems of several genres, short prose narratives, essays and philosophical treatises.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1800** (specifically **pre-1800)
Meets Rice English major specialization: LLH
ENGL 341*: Victorian Literature & Culture
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
>>Instructor: Logan Browning
We will explore some of the preoccupations and controversies of the Victorian era in Britain (1837-1901) through a study of three key literary texts (Dickens’s Oliver Twist [1837-38], Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam [1850], and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest [1895]) along with a variety of verbal and visual texts drawn from a wide range of sources. These associated texts will include journalism, history, caricature, advertising, book and magazine illustration, and political speeches. Topics for reading and discussion will include Victorian ideas about the city, social organization, gender and sexuality, public health, empire (especially including Anglo-Indian relations), technological change (particularly the coming of the railways), and evolutionary science. The writing for the class will require both research and critical thinking with the goal of illuminating connections between our key and associated texts in order to enhance our understanding of Victorian Culture.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before **1800/1900 (specifically **pre-1800)
Meets Rice English major specialization: LLH
MDHM 359*: Responsible AI for Health
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
>>Instructor: Kirsten Ostherr
This interdisciplinary course explores how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and related tools are poised to transform healthcare–for better and for worse. It examines the latest uses of these tools in clinical healthcare settings, in public health, and in day-to-day wellness apps. It considers the social, cultural and ethical issues related to the development and application of AI for health. And it explores the ways that technology can have unintended consequences that reproduce existing health disparities, especially racial and intersectional health disparities.
This course will count as an elective in MDHM minor, the STSM minor, and the ENGL major. It may count as an elective for the DSCI minor (contact the program advisor).
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specialization: SME
Medical Humanities Minor-approved/eligible: MDHM
ENGL 360: U.S. Literature Civil War to WWI
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
>>Instructor: Scott Derrick
From the early 1500s to the eve of the U.S. Civil War, this course surveys texts from the New World that participate in discovery, colonialism, and nation-building. Along the way, we will see how violence and consumption drove American narratives of “progress,” from the early Puritan settlements to the Revolutions, and how these same impulses bring about America’s fracture in 1860. We will trace these patterns through texts by canonical writers such as Thomas Jefferson and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as writers of color such as Phillis Wheatley and Mohegan writer Samson Occom. Through poetry, fiction, oratory, memoirs, and drama, we will consider together how the literature of Early America is intoxicated with its own promises and explosive implications. One textbook is required.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before **1800/1900 (specifically **pre-1800)
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; LLH
Satisfies elective for the LASR major
ENGL 362*: Modern American Fiction
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
>>Instructor: Scott Derrick
A survey of the fiction of the first half of the 20th century, one of the great periods of social turmoil and intense artistic experimentation. Authors may include Chopin, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Toomer, Faulkner, Hurston, and Barnes.
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specialization: LLH
ENGL 373*: Survey of American Film & Culture (cross-list FILM 373; HART 380)
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
>>Instructor: Clint Wilson
ENGL 373 is a course that explores the history of film & cinema in the U.S. from its origins to the present day. The course will examine the development of narrative, sound, the classical Hollywood form and style; film genres; the emergence of television; the influence of postwar “art cinemas”; the origins of the blockbuster; and the status of Hollywood as “global cinema.”
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specialization: VCM
ENGL 382: Feminist Theory (cross-list SWGS 380)
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
>>Instructor: Susan Lurie
A course focusing on concepts that drive and divide social movements centered on gender equality, women's issues, and sexual identity in the two-thirds and one-third world, among them feminism; the body; race; labor; rights, needs, and desires.
Satisfies:
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; LLH
ENGL 383*: Global Fictions-Literature of War & Migration
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:00-11:50 a.m.
>>Instructor: Zainab Abdali
This course has two components: one, it looks at recent fiction in English by U.S., British, and international writers that deal with global and transnational issues; and two, it studies the work of recent cultural critics who provide new understandings of an increasingly networked world as well as the imaginative and narrative tools--fictional, artistic, cinematic, electronic and visual--that we use to process the fast-paced realities of contemporary globalization.
Satisfies:
*D1 and AD (Analyzing Diversity)
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; LLH
ENGL 390*: Introduction to Theatre (cross-list THEA 303)
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 2:00-2:50 p.m.
Permission Required
>>Instructor: Weston Twardowski
A survey course of the art and theory of the theatre through an examination of dramatic literature and theatrical venues from the Greeks through the modern era. The course will also explore the craft of the theatre from a practitioner's point of view as it is realized today. Requires attending several theatre productions in local Houston venues.
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specialization: VCM
COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELED
ENGL 397: Topics in Literature & Culture-Transpacific Literature
Thursday 2:30-5:20 p.m.
>>Instructor: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
Thursday 2:30-5:20 p.m.
>>Instructor: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
This course will introduce students to the recent “transpacific turn” in Asian Anglophone and Asian American literary studies. Using the landmark edited collection, Transpacific Studies: Framing and Emerging Field (2014) to situate our theoretical, historical, and methodological approaches, we will engage with novels, short stories, and films that explicitly foreground the “new ways in which Asia is linked to the Americas” (Hoskins & Nguyen).
Satisfies:
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specialization: CSC
ENGL 398: Slavery in 20th Century Film and Fiction
Wednesday 6:00-8:30 p.m.
>>Instructor: Biko Caruthers
This course studies how twentieth century reconstructions of slavery in American literature and film engage contemporary anxieties regarding race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. These neo-slave narratives often critique modernity; challenge how we think about history, evidence, memory, and trauma; and trouble narrative conventions.
Satisfies:
*D1 and AD (Analyzing Diversity)
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specializations: CSC; VCM
ENGL 403: Craft of the Novella
Tuesday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
>>Instructor: Bryan Washington
This course will be conducted mostly as a novella workshop for advanced fiction writers. It will include assigned writing exercises and weekly readings of novellas to deepen students' understanding of the form. The course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW). It is repeatable for credit.
Satisfies:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 410: Senior Seminar
Friday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
>>Instructors: Margarita Castromán; Alden Sajor Marte-Wood; Tomás Morín
The Senior Seminar (ENGL 410) and Research Workshop (ENGL 411) is an immersive, year-long, research and writing methods course that prepares Rice English majors to produce a significant piece of critical or creative work. The course will be co-taught by three English faculty members from different areas of expertise, including one creative writer.
The Fall Senior Seminar (ENGL 410) will guide each year’s senior cohort through the methods and best-practices that invigorate longer-forms of creative inquiry and research. The Spring Research Workshop functions as a more hybridized course, with some classes exploring topics relevant to the entire cohort, and others geared towards smaller, workshop-style discussions. At strategic points throughout the spring writing process, students will meet individually with one of the faculty instructors, as well as with an outside faculty reader in their field of interest. All students will have the opportunity to present and celebrate their work at an end-of-the-year departmental symposium.
Satisfies:
English major requirement
**The Rising Senior English Major Lunch is on March 29, 2023 at 12:00 p.m. in English lounge**
ENGL 493: Independent Study
Spring meeting times are to be determined by an English faculty member and the student (all via permission)
A course designed for students who want to pursue intensive semester-long study of a particular topic not included in the curriculum. Students must identify and receive the approval of an English department faculty member and complete a special registration form. Once a professor and student agree to work together, they must devise a syllabus for the course which must be approved by the department chair before coursework can begin.
ENGL 493.001: Independent Study-Advanced Literary Editing and Publishing
>>Instructor: Ian Schimmel
ENGL 493.002: Independent Study-R2/Editors-in-Chief
>>Instructor: Ian Schimmel
ENGL 493.003: Independent Study-Internship: Public Humanities
>>Instructor: via permission from an instructor TBD by request
Notes:
*D1: approved for Distribution Group 1
AD: Analyzing Diversity
English Department Required Field/s satisfied:
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race; Post-colonial & Gender studies: RPG
Historical foundations: **pre-1800/1900 (**specifically pre-1800)
Meets Rice English major specialization/s:
Culture & Social Change (CSC)
Literature & Literary History (LLH)
Science; Medicine & Environment (SME)
Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
English Creative Writing Concentration: ECRW
Seating is limited in all creative writing courses. Registration for odd-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW); registration for even numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order.