ENGL 101*: What is a Fact? Data, Reading, Meaning from Humanities to STEM
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Tim Morton
Whether in science, social sciences or humanities, all students benefit from this essential training in how to discover and interpret the world and its facts. Training in discovery and interpretation is the role of the humanities and literary studies. This class teaches critical thinking and imagination, the fuels of reason.
Satisfies:
*D1
ENGL 113: Intro to Literary Editing & Publishing/Rice Review
Tuesday 6:30-9:20 p.m.
Instructor: Ian Schimmel
Taught in the fall, this course is recommended to students desiring practical skills in the fields of literary editing and publishing. Experiential in nature, this class engages students in the real considerations and hands-on experience of publishing Rice’s nationally award-winning undergraduate literary journal, The Rice Review. Enrolled students will participate in weekly editorial meetings to read and discuss the merits of undergraduate submissions across literature’s three main genres: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students will discuss a diverse group of submissions in the workshop setting, refine their editorial skills through written critiques, and enlarge their understanding of the editing process. Later in the term, students will become proficient with Adobe's InDesign layout software and create final magazine spreads that demonstrate an attention to the interplay of text and image. Students will also be asked to become practitioners of “literary citizenship.” This will come about through participation at outside literary events and through the hands-on experience of planning and hosting The Rice Review’s Spring Launch Event. All students will be considered official staffers for the magazine and will be acknowledged in that year’s annual issue. Course counts towards the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) and the Minor in Creative Writing (CREW). Please reach out to ianschimmel@rice.edu with inquiries and to get permission to add this course.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 175*: Global Literatures in English
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Instructor: V Lundquist
How does literature both connect cultures across space and speak about what is specific to each culture? This course will explore a number of key developments and trends in 20th and 21st-century literature that enabled the ability of literary texts to reflect the cultures in which they were produced and have the capacity to travel across cultures. How did historical conditions (like the World Wars, the Cold War, colonialism, postcolonialism) and innovations in form, style, genre, and subject matter help make English literature a transnational literature? Any student, regardless of their major, background, or academic level, can register for this course.
Satisfies: *D1
ENGL 200*: Gateways to Literary Study (three sections offered)
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Margarita Castroman
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Instructor: Emily Houlik-Ritchey
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Instructor: Andrew Kraebel
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 with priority to declared majors and minors.
Note to all current and potential English majors/minors: 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
English major core requirement (ENGL): Training the Imagination
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Training the Imagination
English Creative Writing concentration core requirement (ECRW): Training the Imagination
ENGL 203: Topics in Creative Writing - Narrative Medicine
Wednesday 2:00-4:50 p.m.
Instructor: Tomás Q. Morín
The healthcare system fails our communities by treating every patient as if they were the same. Narrative Medicine addresses this failure because it recognizes that class, race, gender, education, environment, and income all impact well-being. In this class you will learn, and practice, the principles of storytelling in order to understand how doctors and patients can co-create a story of well-being in order to improve care. Seating in the course is limited.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 210*: Beginnings: British Literature to 1800
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Instructor: Logan Browning
We will read from a variety of genres (lyric and epic poetry, satire, tragedy and comedy, short fiction, essays, travel narrative) and range chronologically from Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney) to the prose of the eighteenth century’s Oprah, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and to the comic Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. Our goal will be to understand more clearly what others have thought valuable in each text and why, so that we can understand more fully what evaluative criteria each of us applies to his or her own reading. We will also explore the various ways in which the relations among artist, audience, medium, and historical context manifest themselves in the texts under consideration, and the various strategies that authors have used to direct or control responses to their texts.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 214: Literary Editing & Publishing Practicum/The Rice Review
Tuesday 6:30-9:20 p.m.
Instructor: Ian Schimmel
In this editing and publishing practicum, enrolled students will serve as senior editors for r2: The Rice Review and organize the various initiatives that are central to the magazine's operation: book distribution, web content creation, campus-wide readings, submissions campaigns, and editorial slush reading. During the semester, students will also have the opportunity to lead book group-style discussions around an author’s work and interview their assigned writer about writing and craft. These interviews will be edited for print and digital publication. As a means to enliven our magazine’s mission and presence, students will also be required to design and distribute their own handmade zine and to attend several outside literary events (~4 per semester). We will use these experiences - as well as assigned readings and discussions - to reflect on the various ways in which literature is defined and promoted, the changing landscape of the publishing industry more broadly, and how the work of The Rice Review participates in that rapidly evolving space. Permission of instructor required: ianschimmel@gmail.com
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 249*: Bob Dylan and the Intertwined Histories of Music, Politics & Race in 20th Century US Culture
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Instructor: Scott Derrick
This course focuses on Bob Dylan. It begins by looking at the musical traditions he absorbs and their relation to race. It examines influential “beat” movement figures such as Ginsberg and Kerouac. It focuses on the relation of Dylan’s crucial sixties albums to the social turmoil of the decade.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
ENGL 251*: Reading Poetry (formerly Masterworks of Poetry)
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Joseph Campana
Why and how do poems matter? What's a poem (or are definitions not helpful)? Why do so many say they "don't understand poetry"? Do critics and poets read poetry differently? What do poems do compared to story-based genres and media? Compared to visual genres and media? Why read poems from centuries past? In translation? What kinds of poems have people written? How have they built poems (with what rhythm and rhyme, shape and form) across time and across cultures? What's the difference between a lyric poem and a song lyric? Let's try to answer these questions and more.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 254*: The History of Love
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:44 p.m.
Instructor: Sarah Ellenzweig and Scott McGill
What is love? This team-taught seminar in Classical Studies and English explores answers to this question in the history of love poetry. The course focuses primarily on the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and its reception and reimagining in early modern England. We will end with reflections on these traditions from contemporary women, LGBTQ+ authors, and Black poets. The class examines how love shapes the concerns and forms of poetry, and how poetry shapes the experience of love. Subjects include eroticism, seduction, sex and sexuality, gender, marriage, infidelity, breakups, and aging. All readings are in English.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specializations: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 269*: Science Fiction and the Environment - The Gulf Coast
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:00-9:50 a.m.
Instructor: Christopher Nicholson
Examine the ways that science fiction has expressed and challenged ideas about nature, culture, society, and politics. The Gulf is a significant site within discourse of climate change and catastrophe: Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill loom large in public memory and imagination. This course will center contemporary SF novels, short stories, and films set on the Gulf Coast, including work by Karen Russell, N. K. Jemisin, Jeff VanderMeer, Fernando Flores, and Yoss. All students welcome to register. No prerequisites.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major specialization: Science, Medicine and the Environment (SME)
CMST minor approved
ENGL 272*: Literature & Medicine (cross-list MDHM 272)
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
Analyzing Diversity (AD)
English major specializations: Science, Medicine, Environment (SME); Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
Medical Humanities Minor-approved/eligible (MDHM)
ENGL 286*: Classic & Contemporary Film (cross-list HART 286)
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Ed Snow
In this course, we’ll study ten of the very best films that have been made around the world since 1930 (we won’t attempt silent cinema). Our goal will be to develop a nuanced appreciation for what it is about film that allows us to engage with it so deeply when it’s at its best. Our focus will be on details and our writing will emphasize description. Assignments and class discussions will typically concentrate on short, key sequences, single frames, and highly visual motifs. “Feelings” will also be essential: the idea is to connect with the heart of these movies, but to do so via “particular knowledge” (William Blake’s term) that requires us always to be looking. No prior expertise in film is necessary for immersion in this course. We’ll learn the nuts and bolts of film language as we proceed.
We’ll also be concerned with how “contemporary film” differs/departs from “classic film”, and with how sharp the divide is—if it exists at all. This distinction will be complicated by the ambiguity of “classic.” Does it mean “old” or “great”? Can a “contemporary” film be a “classic”? Can a “classic” film be “contemporary”? Anchoring these questions will be one certainty: what all the films we’ll watch in this class have in common is their brilliance. Seating in this course is limited.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major specialization: Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
ENGL 300: Practices of Literary Study (two sections offered)
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Instructor: Scott Derrick
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Eve Dunbar
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. Course is open to all students.
Satisfies:
English major core requirement (ENGL): Theoretical Concepts & Methods
ENGL 301*: Intro to Fiction Writing (three sections offered)
Monday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Instuctor: TBD
Wednesday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Instuctor: TBD
Wednesday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Instructor: TBD
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. Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW). Seating is limited. Registration for even-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) or Minor (CREW); registration for odd- numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order.
Satisfies:
*D1
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 305*: Intro to Creative Nonfiction Writing
Monday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor: Lacy Johnson
A course in reading and writing creative nonfiction prose for the beginning writer. Sections may focus on a range of nonfiction genres or one specific form, e.g. personal essay/memoir, travel narratives, literary journalism, science and nature writing. Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) and the English Creative Writing Minor (CREW). Registration for even-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) or Creative Writing Minor (CREW); registration for odd-numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order. Seating is limited.
Satisfies:
*D1
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 306: AI for Fiction Writers
Thursday 2:30-5:20 p.m.
Instructor: Ian Schimmel
In this studio course, we will experiment with the use of AI in fiction writing, examining the ethical, philosophical, and creative implications of AI-assisted storytelling. We will interrogate questions of authorship, originality, and literary tradition: How does AI reinforce or challenge established tropes? Can it enhance creative expression, or does it encourage formulaic, derivative narratives? What happens to our preconceived notions of voice, point-of-view, persona, authorial intent, and creative license when AI enters the writing process? And how should we - as writers, readers, scholars, and critics - evaluate stories that have relied on these generative tools? Registration for even-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) or Creative Writing Minor (CREW); registration for odd-numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order. Seating is limited.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 309: Verses/Versus - Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake
Wednesday 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Instructor: Kiese Laymon
In this course, we will consider the aesthetics of the "battle" between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. We will specifically contend with the ways style, gender, sexuality, age, place, and race contort the confessional in both artists leading up to "First Person Shooter" and "Like That". We will historicize this battle alongside some significant political and artistic battles of the 20th and 21st century. We will also consider the relationship between the way this battle played out and the brutal geo-political American-made catastrophes of the last few years. Registration for even-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) or Creative Writing Minor (CREW); registration for odd-numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order. Seating is limited.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 313: Advanced Literary Editing & Publishing Practicum
Tuesday 6:30-9:20 p.m.
Instructor: Ian Schimmel
In this advanced and intensive editing and publishing practicum, students will serve as senior editors for Rice’s nationally award-winning undergraduate literary magazine, R2: The Rice Review. Section editors will be responsible for: reviewing and critiquing hundreds of unique contributor submissions; facilitating effective and comprehensive editorial discussions; finalizing a set of publishable pieces in literature’s three main genres; becoming proficient in all phases of copy-editing, including both global edits and line edits; communicating with and assisting contributing writers throughout the editorial process; assisting with art pairings and magazine layout using Adobe’s InDesign; and organizing for The Rice Review’s spring launch event. To deepen our understanding of publishing and publishing history, students will also participate in several interactive field trips. Past trips have included visits to the Houston Printing Museum, the University of Houston's Gulf Coast Magazine, the Star Wheel Press at Fondren’s Woodson Research Center, ZineFest Houston, and the Texas Book Festival in Austin. We will use these experiences--as well as assigned readings and discussions--to reflect on the various ways in which literature is defined and promoted, the changing landscape of the publishing industry more broadly, and how the work of The Rice Review participates in that rapidly evolving space. Permission of instructor.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 314: Medieval Romance
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Emily Houlik-Ritchey
This class will focus on many of the more playful and bizarre tales in the medieval romance genre – that is, the “radical” romances of the era that defy our normative expectations (of gender, sexuality, race, disability, etc.). We shall complement our reading by cultivating “radical” interpretations, reframing these centuries-old texts in order to expound their unexpected relevance for our lives today. Come experience a “dark ages” that you might not have expected.
Satisfies:
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 316*: Chaucer
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:00-1:50 p.m,
Instructor: Andrew Kraebel
An introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Middle English, and the political and cultural climate of the fourteenth century. Learn to read and analyze medieval manuscripts while studying the works of the first major author in English.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 319: Fantasy & Science Fiction Creative Writing
Tuesday 2:30-5:20 p.m.
Instructor: Amber Dermont
In this class students will read, discuss and analyze a variety of classical and contemporary genres in order to compose and revise adaptations and original versions of fantasy and science fiction stories. Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW) and the English Creative Writing Minor (CREW). Registration for even-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) or Creative Writing Minor (CREW); registration for odd-numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order. Seating is limited.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 320*: Shakespeare on Film
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Instructor: Joseph Campana
Perhaps it was bound to happen. The playwright and poet who became a global icon and who worked across so many genres has had his works made and remade across a dizzying array of media. This course examines Shakespeare’s widely distributed and adapted works in the context of an ever-growing body of Shakespeare on screen. We’ll consider just how Shakespeare might have understood his own work with respect to what we now call “media.” We’ll consider the many ways Shakespeare has appeared on screens large and small: from the silent Shakespeare of the early 20th century to big budget Hollywood Shakespeare’s to mixed and multimedia productions to video, live-streaming, YouTube, and the ever-tinier confines of a mobile phone screen. In addition to consider Shakespeare’s many screens, we’ll try our hand at bringing Shakespeare to the screen ourselves. Works may include: Coriolanus, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, sonnets, and Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus; Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Billy Morrisette’s Scotland, PA, and Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth; Julie Taymor’s Titus and Tempest, Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, BBC’s Hollow Crown, and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, Haider, and Maqbool.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH); Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
ENGL 328: Milton
Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Instructor: Benjamin Parris
This course examines the poetic works of the 17th-century writer and radical thinker, John Milton. Texts include earlier shorter poems; Milton’s masque, popularly known as Comus; his epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; and his tragedy, Samson Agonistes. We will carefully read Milton’s poetry in ways that reveal its participation in the major transformations in philosophical and scientific thought, government, religion, and political economy that define early modernity, while also asking how historical controversies and literary works from the past remain crucial to understanding political, scientific, ethical, and aesthetic formations in our contemporary world. All students welcome!
Satisfies:
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 342*: Victorian Fiction
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 2:00-2:50 p.m.
Instructor: Helena Michie
Victorians come to us, as it were, in costume, exotic and eccentric forerunners of the comfortingly familiar. The women wear crinolines and sometimes set them on fire. At home, they make seaweed paintings, play on the piano, and think of marriage. The men become captains of industry and assert the dominance of Empire. No one has sex, although there are lots of children.
This course debunks some of these myths while attempting to treat seriously the Victorians’ sameness and difference from us, as well as differences within the category of the “Victorian.” We will be looking specifically at how the many genres of the nineteenth-century novel think through ideas that are given new shape in the Victorian period: poverty, domesticity, equality, gender, landscape, and sexuality.
We will be reading four novels for this course, by Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell. We will be reading the Dickens novel in serial parts (as it was published) throughout the semester
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Historical Foundations - periods before 1900
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1900
English major specialization: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 354: Queer Literary Cultures (cross-list SWGS 364)
Monday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Instructor: Carly Thomsen
What does it mean to look at the world queerly? What opens up when we approach queer as a verb rather than a noun? In answering these questions, we will examine taken-for-granted ideas about sexuality through focusing on the body, place and space, and contemporary LGBTQ politics. Queer theorists offer alternative ways of conceptualizing embodiment, argue that social logics are spatialized, and critique mainstream LGBTQ movements. In this class, we will explore how thinking differently about bodies, place, and politics creates new ways to understand sexuality—and vice versa. In so doing, we will consider how one’s sexuality has come to be a large part of one’s identity, desires for community, identity, and cultural recognition, and relations among social justice, equality, and rights. Our goal is to think “queerly” about sexuality and the various identities and experiences sexuality shapes and is shaped through, including race, gender, class, disability, geography and so on. Course texts include traditional academic articles, blogs, documentary films, and fiction. Cross-list: SWGS 364.
Satisfies:
English major core requirement (ENGL): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender (RPG)
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender (RPG)
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 359*: Writing New Orleans - The City as Muse
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor: Logan Browning
A remarkably diverse group of writers has drawn upon New Orleans and its environs as setting, inspiration, and example in the production of virtually every literary genre. Many of these authors, particularly those writing since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, have tried to predict the city’s future or pronounce its doom. We will look at some of the more notable instances of this New Orleans writing and try to understand the relation between them and the city’s languages, ethnic identities, musical heritage, visual arts, festivals, and cuisines. We will also reflect on New Orleans as a significant site in recent conversations about the coronavirus and racism. Our reading will include Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter, Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Anne Rice, The Feast of All Saints, James Lee Burke, The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Mystery, and Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge, as well as brief selections from a variety of other writers such as Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. You will choose from a number of recent New Orleans texts for presentations to the class. Some good choices would be Nathaniel Rich’s King Zeno, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, Mitch Landrieu’s In the Shadow of Statues, and Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, to name a few.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 366: Literature & Film of Great Depression
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Clinton Williamson
This course will survey the long history of American cinema and its profound ability to shape the imaginary of its viewer. Moving from the cinema of attractions of the late nineteenth century to the death of Hollywood in our present, we will focus upon the ways in which historical, political, and economic forces shape the creation of cinema and how cinema has dialectically come to mold how we conceptualize and engage with those very forces. Attending to the cultural impacts and residues of filmic production, we will collectively track how the work performed by cinema and those who make it came to construct what Guy Debord famously termed the “society of the spectacle,” a mode of capitalist production and consumption mediated through images. Within this course, we will pay special attention to the function of genre and its role in shaping cinematic fabula and syuzhet, looking to the western, science fiction, horror, noir, war movie, and romance. Throughout, we will ground our viewings with texts drawn from film criticism and theory, Marxist political economy, labor studies, and social history.
Satisfies:
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH); and via petition to ENGL DUS for Visual & Comparative Media (VCM) for Fall 2025
ENGL 366: Stephen King Reading Club
Monday 3:00-5:30 p.m.
Instructor: José Aranda
Beginning with his debut novel, Carrie, in 1974, Stephen King has regaled generations of readers with the underside, the darkside, the road less traveled in American society. For long-time readers of his fiction, it has never been just about the knock at the door at midnight or the static at the end of a phone call, but rather the emotional and spiritual toll that accompanies the everyday horrors of bullying, loneliness, bereavement, fear, and desperation. It is through his characters, so often placed in settings and circumstances at once estranged from reality but otherwise totally recognizable, that King strives to find the best of humanity in moments of complete despair. It is precisely in these moments that he ponders what it takes to stand witness, and more difficult yet, to make sacrifices for others no one else imagines possible.
This course seeks to understand one of the most prolific writers of our time, and how his fiction has shaped American culture for over five decades. We will survey some of King’s most-read, most influential novels. The overall goal is to explore how we as readers are challenged to engage the world as it is, to contest the evils of the world perhaps first in our minds and perhaps later through our actions. To this task, we will keep journals to chronicle our readings of this fiction. All assignments in this course will flow in and out of these journals. We will convert our classroom into a book club, provoking us to share ourselves as readers. Course is open to all students.
Satisfies:
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 371: Chicano/a Literature (cross-list SPAN 396; SWGS 354)
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Instructor: José Aranda
A mixed genre course focusing on the Chicano movement, the Chicano renaissance, and alternative literary and mythic traditions associated with them.
Satisfies:
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 372*: Asian American Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Instructor: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
A course that examines the various themes of the Asian American experience through literary and cultural forms. Special attention is given to the representational histories of Asian/American immigration, racial formation, and social movements. No prerequisites. All students welcome to register.
Satisfies:
*D1
Analyzing Diversity (AD)
English major core requirement (ENGL): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender/RPG)
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender/RPG)
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 373*: American Film & Culture - The Laboring of the Spectacle (cross-list FILM 373; HART 380)
Tuesday, Thursday 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Instructor: Clinton Williamson
This film course will survey the long history of American cinema and its profound ability to shape the imaginary of its viewer. Attending to the cultural impacts and residues of filmic production, we will track how the work performed by cinema and those who make it came to construct what Guy Debord famously termed the "society of the spectable," and mode of capitalist production and consumption mediated through images. This course has no prerequisites.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major specialization: Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
ENGL 374: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Instructor: Edward Snow
Our focus in this course will be on Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. We’ll look at how his films find in the pleasures of cinema an almost hidden language with which to explore the social and psychic anxieties that saturate the plots of his apparently normal worlds. Among his many themes, we’ll foreground those that have to do with marriage, specifically as it poses “traps” for women. This means that we’ll also be concerned more generally with gender and sexuality, and how the films treat them as issues, not givens. Here’s the films we’ll view, in reverse chronological order: Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Rear Window, Notorious, Spellbound, Shadow of a Doubt, Blackmail, The Lodger. Seating is limited.
P.S. No prior expertise in film or film criticism is necessary for immersion in this course. We’ll learn the nuts and bolts of film language as we proceed.
Satisfies:
English major specialization: Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
ENGL 376*: Southeast Asian Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
An introductory course that surveys the literary history of English-language writing in Southeast Asia This course examines 20th-an21st-century novels, short stories, graphic novels, and poetry across the region with a primary focus on literature from former colonies of British and American empires --names, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. ENGL 376 will introduce students to shared thematic engagements with anticolonial nationalism, the afterlives of war, movernization, martial law, urbanization, and globalization. No prerequisites. All students welcome to register.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender/RPG)
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender/RPG)
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 378: Politics of Reproduction: Sex, Abortion, & Motherhood (cross-list MDHM 378)
Monday, Wednesday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Instructor: Carly Thomsen
Image: Devil Bus by Rayn Bumstead
Reproductive justice impacts EVERYONE! Birth control, sexual health education and sexual pleasure, foster care, abortion, giving birth, immigration, incarceration, environmental justice, care work, the medical system, aging parents—these social and cultural issues make clear that thinking with reproduction is crucial for understanding and upending the social order more broadly. Put another way, cultural ideas about reproduction shape how we experience and understand gender and sexuality and ideas about gender and sexuality influence how we view reproduction. As such, we cannot challenge dominant ideas about gender and sexuality without critical conversations about reproductive issues. Because requirements for being considered a “good” woman are so closely connected to what it means to be a “good” mother, any analysis of gender requires critical engagement with ideas about reproduction—even for those of us who plan to avoid parenthood or do not have heterosexual sex. This class focuses on the politics of reproduction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the social relations that shape reproductive issues today, centering questions about race, class, ability, and geography throughout. Together, we will take on the paradoxes, horrors, complexities, and joys of reproduction.
Course texts include traditional academic articles as well as cultural texts such as film, theater, viral social media clips, and so on. For a final group project, students will create board games that can move the course ideas beyond our classroom. Open to all Rice students. No prerequisites required.
Satisfies:
English major core requirement (ENGL): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender/RPG)
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Diverse Traditions (Race, Postcolonial & Gender/RPG)
English major specializations: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Science; Medicine; Environment (SME)
ENGL 380*: Postcolonial Visions
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Betty Joseph
This course explores key works of poetry, fiction, drama, prose, cinema, and theory that voice the aspirations and struggles of colonized people from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. The course covers both the anti-colonial period and the challenges faced by new nation-states after political independence.
Authors include Ngugi wa Thiongo, Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Mariama Ba, Ismat Chughtai, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, J. M Coetzee.
Satisfies:
*D1
English major core requirement (ENGL) Diverse Traditions: Race, Postcolonial, Gender (RPG)
English minor core requirement (ENGM) Diverse Traditions: Race, Postcolonial, Gender (RPG)
English major specialization/s: Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH)
ENGL 397: Black Archives**
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Instructor: Margarita Castromán
“Black Archives” is an undergraduate course that traces the various archival turns of Black studies across the long twentieth century. Over the course of the semester, we will learn about the literary and historical tradition of Black archives, visit local libraries and repositories dedicated to preserving and making accessible the histories of marginalized communities, and hear about the projects and efforts underway in our city. No prerequisites required.
Satisfies:
(via petition for ENGL majors to ENGL DUS)
English major core requirement (ENGL): Diverse Traditions
English minor core requirement (ENGM): Historical Foundations - periods before 1800
English major specialization: Literature & Literary History (LLH)
**"Black Archives" will count towards Certificate in Civic Leadership and AAAS Minor
ENGL 401: Advanced Fiction Writing
Wednesday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Instructor: Amber Dermont
We are going to do something very dangerous in this class: we’re going to workshop and revise our short stories. Each student will be responsible for drafting and revising two original fully sustained narratives for our class to consider and discuss. We’re going to strive to make these characters, settings, and plots so credible and engaging that we and others would prefer to spend our time exploring them than do just about anything else in the world. The great American short story writer Flannery O’Connor who grew up poor in Milledgeville, Georgia and spent most of her life dying from lupus and tending to the ornery peacocks she kept as watchdogs, once said about her own writing, “my subject in fiction is the action of grace in a territory held largely by the devil.” In writing our own stories, we will negotiate this space between beauty and mischief as we set about to discover new approaches for composition and revision. Prerequisite ENGL 301. Seating is limited.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 404: Advanced Poetry Writing
Thursday 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Instructor: Tomás Q. Morín
An in-depth study of contemporary poetry, this course emphasizes the careful analysis of books by six to eight contemporary poets, the reading of selected essays on poetic technique, and the writing of poems with a view toward finding a personal voice.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 405: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing
Monday 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Instructor: Kiese Laymon
An advanced reading and writing workshop for writers who have some familiarity with the nonfiction genre. Published works will be read as blueprints for the construction of student work. Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW). Prerequisite(s): ENGL 305 OR ENGL 309. Enrollment is limited.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Creative Writing Minor (CREW)
ENGL 410: Senior Seminar
Friday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor: Sarah Ellenzweig
The Senior Seminar is an immersive research and writing methods course required of students pursuing one of the areas of specialization in the English Major and is an optional course for students pursuing the Creative Writing Concentration. Similar to other senior design and research courses throughout the university, the Senior Seminar engages students in the deeper and more rewarding processes of sustained critical writing and research, and offers all students the opportunity to prepare and build an independent research project with sustained faculty support.
Note: For students who intend to graduate in December or who plan to study abroad in their senior year, the senior seminar may begin in the junior year and completed in the senior year. Special circumstances such as this one will be advised by the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English department.
ENGL 493.000: Independent Study
Spring meeting times are to be determined by an English faculty member and the student (via permission of instructor; credit variable 1-6)
A course designed for students who want to pursue intensive semester-long study of a particular topic. Students must identify and receive the approval of an English department faculty member and complete a special registration form as directed. Registration is by permission of instructor.
Satisfies: determined by the director of undergraduate studies
ENGL 493.001: Independent Study-R2/Section Editors
Tuesday 6:30-9:00 p.m.
>>Instructor: Ian Schimmel
ENGL 493.002: Independent Study-R2/Editors-in-Chief
Tuesday 6:30-9:00 p.m.
>>Instructor: Ian Schimmel
Notes:
ENGL: English Major
ENGM: English Minor
CREW: English Creative Writing Minor
ECRW: English Creative Writing Concentration
*D1: approved for Distribution Group 1
AD: Analyzing Diversity
English Department Required Field/s satisfied:
Diverse Traditions: Race, Post-colonial & Gender (RPG)
Historical foundations: pre-1800/1900 (specifically as noted for pre-1800)
Meets Rice English major specialization/s:
Culture & Social Change (CSC)
Literature & Literary History (LLH)
Science; Medicine & Environment (SME)
Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
Seating is limited in creative writing courses. Registration for even-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW) or Creative Writing Minor (CREW). Registration for odd-numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order when space is available.