ENGL 114: Literary Editing & Publishing/Rice Review
Tuesday 6:15-8:45 p.m.
Instructor: Ian Schimmel
Taught in the Spring, Literary Editing & Publishing/The Rice Review is the second course 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. 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. ENGL 113 is a prerequisite or permission of the instructor is required to register for this course.
Satisfies:
English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 175*: Global Literatures in English
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Instructor: Betty Joseph
An introduction to global literary studies and critical writing in which students study a range of literatures in English. The subject is twentieth-century modernism and its successors; postmodernism; and postcolonialism. Open & suitable for all students!
Satisfies:
*D1
ENGL 200*: Gateways to Literary Study (two sections offered)
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Instructor: Tim Morton
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Alexander Regier
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
ENGL 211*: British Literature Romanticism to 20th Century
Monday, Wednesday 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Instructor: Logan Browning
We will read from a variety of genres (lyric poetry, satire, novels, short fiction, drama, essays, etc.), and range chronologically from the English Romantics to Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. 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. Open to all students.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1900
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: LLH
ENGL 254*: The History of Love
Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Instructors: Sarah Ellenzweig & Scott McGill
What is love? This team-taught course in Classical Studies and English explores answers to this question in the history of love poetry, with a focus on ancient Greece and Rome and early modern English literature. It examines how love shapes the concerns and forms of poetry and how poetry shapes the experience of love. The course looks at how different authors in different periods treat a wide range of subjects related to love, including eroticism, seduction, sex and sexuality, gender marriage, infidelity and age of aging. Open to all students.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1800**
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: LLH
Eligible for Classical Studies elective credit
ENGL 262*: Whodunit & Other Mysteries
Monday, Wednesday 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Instructor: Amanda Johnson
Back by popular demand! This course will explore a range of written and filmed narratives that follow the investigation of a crime or puzzle. Along the way, we will discuss how the setting of each mystery, and how it casts suspicion on different characters. We will also consider our cultural fascination with crime and study the figure of the genius detective. In the process, we will become detectives ourselves, as we study how these stories work, and discuss what kinds thinking can help us solve problems inside and outside literature. If you like puzzles, mysteries, or just reading books, join us! All welcome!
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1900
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: LLH, VCM
ENGL 272*: Literature & Medicine
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:00-11:50 a.m.
Instructor: Melissa Bailar
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
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: SME; VCM
Qualified for MDHM minor
ENGL 273*: Medicine & Media
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Kirsten Ostherr
This interdisciplinary course explores the role of imaging technologies in the practice of medicine, and the role of media in shaping our understandings of the body, health, and disease. The proliferation of screen technologies such as film, television, personal computers, smart phones, apps, VR/AR, and video games has led researchers to identify media literacy as a critical component of both medical training and public health intervention. Simultaneously, healthcare is increasingly promoted and delivered through imaging technologies such as x-rays, ultrasound, MRI, CT, PET and through digital information and communication technologies such as telehealth and AI/ML augmented algorithms, chatbots, and wearable sensors. We will examine the historical foundations of these interrelated developments and students will develop a framework for better understanding the current and future uses of these tools. We will explore the ethical dimensions of visual images, particularly as they relate to race, in a variety of medical contexts including the patient narrative, the electronic medical record, pharmaceutical advertisements, and virtual health. We will explore how to translate patient data into visual images and stories, and how to make data meaningful through real-life contextual frames. Students will analyze their positions as media consumers and data producers, and develop skills necessary for producing ethical images and information about bodies, health, and disease. We will blend critical analysis with production; class projects will include short video production and other creative projects. Guest lectures by clinician collaborators from the Texas Medical Center, the director of medical research for Grey’s Anatomy and more.
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: SME; VCM
ENGL 286*: Classical & Contemporary Film
Wednesday 7:00-9:30 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.
Satisfies: *D1
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: VCM
ENGL 300: Practices of Literary Study (two sections offered)
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10-10:50 a.m.
Instructor: Scott Derrick
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Betty Joseph
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 in the sophomore or early in the junior year.
Satisfies:
Theoretical Concepts and Methods-English major requirement
ENGL 301*: Intro to Fiction Writing (two sections offered)
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m
Instructor: Andrea Bajani
Wednesday 2:00-4:50 p.m.
Instructor: Bryan Washington
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 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 302: Screenwriting
Tuesday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Instructor: Amber Dermont
This course will introduce students to the art and craft of screenwriting through a focused study of terminology, formatting and cinematic technique. Assignments will include writing exercises, weekly viewing of films and reading of screenplays. Students will write their own treatments, outlines and full-length screenplays. Seating is limited. Registration for odd-numbered sections is restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Major Concentration. Registration for even numbered sections is open to all undergraduate students in priority order.
Satisfies:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: VCM
ENGL 304*: Intro to Poetry Writing
Thursday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor: Leslie Contreras Schwartz
This course is a writing workshop that focuses on the craft tools of poetry through creative writing practice, constructive criticism, and reading contemporary poetry. In addition to reading each other's work and providing constructive feedback, our class will focus on generative exercises and developing a creative practice using your own experiences, imagination, observations, and emotional life to write and revise poems. We will also read and discuss the collection of poems, Oceanic, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. 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 *305: Intro to Creative Nonfiction Writing
Tuesday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Instructor: Bryan Washington
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. Registration is limited with priority given to students who have declared the English Creative Writing Concentration. 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 306: Stand-Up Comedy Writing
Thursday 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Instructor: Amber Dermont
This course will be an introduction to the craft of writing comedy and writing stand-up comedy. Registration is limited with priority given to students who have declared the English Creative Writing Concentration. 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:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 309: Topics in Creative Nonfiction Writing - Reading FX’s Atlanta
Tuesday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor: Kiese Laymon
Topic for Spring 2023 will be, “Reading FX’s Atlanta”. Registration is limited with priority given to students who have declared the English Creative Writing Concentration. 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:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 310: Nonfiction Nature Writing
Monday 1:00-3:50 p.m.
Instructor: Lacy Johnson
"When we speak of nature,” Emerson wrote, “we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind.” Romantic poets in particular (as well as certain transcendental philosophers!) have encouraged us to think of nature as an undisturbed essence, a wildness, a “somewhere” that stands separate and apart from human influence. And yet, the idea of “nature” itself is the product of human imagination. In this creative writing seminar, we’ll explore some of the ways that creative nonfiction can become a vehicle for questions about how else we might imagine our relationship to the world, and we’ll look at some of the myriad ways these relationships have been documented in essays, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction. As we consider these texts, our emphasis will be on finding ways to reconsider received wisdom about “nature.” To that end, we’ll spend considerable time this semester outdoors, including, perhaps, engaging in field work, conducting interviews, foraging for wild plants, planting marsh grass, studying native ecosystems, and taking time to consider the ways we interrupt, intersect, and care for the living world around us. But more than anything else, this is a course in writing, and we will learn to write in ways that navigate the precarious terrain of personal experience, observation, science, research, memory, and facts. Students should be prepared to become mired in the complexity and contradictions of nature, including and especially our own. Registration 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:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: SME
ENGL 320: Shakespeare on Film
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Joseph Campana
A course that examines both the text of selected Shakespearean plays and films based on them, focusing on the difference between film and drama. This course is open to all undergraduate students.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1800**
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: LLH; VCM
ENGL 332*: Literature of the British Enlightenment
Monday, Wednesday 8:30-9:45 a.m.
Instructor: Rowan Morar
This course situates the British Enlightenment in the Atlantic World, a spatial concept that interprets the intellectual currents of the period through the movement of ideas, people, and things across the Atlantic. We will focus on the impact commerce, colonization, and cultural exchanges had on Africa, the Americas and Europe over the 17th and 18th centuries, as represented in British Literature. Course readings will include poems, plays, sermons, novels, and travel writing, as well as recent scholarship from literary theorists, historians, and anthropologists. Our course materials incorporate digitized archives, new web tools for research and writing, the DHvoyages.org slave database (hosted by Rice's History Department), and crumbling books held by Fondren's Woodson Collection. We will make a concerted effort to improve our communication skills with writing workshops throughout the semester. All majors and non-majors are welcome!
Satisfies:
Historical Foundations-periods before 1800**
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: LLH
ENGL 337*: Gothic American
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00-10:50 am
Instructor: Amanda Johnson
This course explores the scary thrills of American authors including our original Gothicist Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), the recently discovered African American novelist Hannah Crafts (b. circa 1830), the Southern Gothicist William Faulkner (1897-1962), and current NYTimes bestseller S.A. Cosby (b. 1973). In discussing how these authors engage with race, religion, sexuality, science, history, and philosophy, we will explore why America remains a haunted nation.
Satisfies:
*D1
Historical Foundations-periods before 1900
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: CSC; LLH
ENGL 340: Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing - Writing About and With Poetry
Friday 12:00-2:50 p.m.
Instructor: Sarah Ellenzweig
This seminar is a workshop class on writing about literature for public audiences. Our shared topic will be poetry: what it is; how we read it; and why it matters-both historically and today. No prior experience with poetry is needed. We will read a range of poems and poets from different pasts and presents, honing our interpretive skills and examining poetry’s enduring capacity to move, fascinate, amaze and incite. Students will come away from the seminar with greater confidence in reading poems and greater sensitivity to the subtleties of literary language and the pleasures of poetic form.
Satisfies:
Historical Foundations-periods before 1800**
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: LLH
ENGL 363*: The US Novel Post WWII
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 11:00-11:50 a.m.
Instructor: Krista Comer
The US novel, after World War II, is among the most exciting bodies of literature to read and talk about. In terms of formal experimentation, changing structures of literary production including the emergence of widespread creative writing programs, and new writers who come to prominence with the Civil Rights movements, we have a lot to consider. And that’s before we get to the 21st century! Our strategy for covering this ranging period of time and innovation of genre will be to combine an overview perspective with close-in slow reading of selected major writers.
Satisfies:
*D1
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: CSC; LLH
ENGL 366: Topics in American Literature - Bob Dylan: Pop Music; Race; Identity in US Culture
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor: Scott Derrick
Our central iconic figure will be Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan but we will look at a variety of other music as well, including figures in the folk movement, other rock groups, Motown artists, and the emergence of women singer/composers later in the decade. We’ll look at movies and videos, including George Lucas’s first film, American Graffiti (a film full of fifties music, and one that serves as Frederick Jameson’s canonical example of “pastiche”), and read an objectionable novel or two, such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or perhaps Kesey’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Satisfies:
(RPG) Critical Race, Postcolonial, and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: CSC
ENGL 369: The American West and its Others
Monday 2:00-4:50 p.m.
Instructor: Krista Comer
Using the U.S. West as a case study, this course focuses on concepts of place in literature and culture. We too are case studies in thinking about place: where are we from, how does it matter? What tools are needed to pursue discussions about the where of us? Our class time and our writing workshops help us learn about each other and our places.
Satisfies:
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race, Postcolonial & Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: CSC; SME
ENGL 375: Film & Literature
***See ENGL 286*: Classical & Contemporary Film (*D1, Wednesday 7:00-9:30 p.m.)***
Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Instructor: Ed Snow
ENGL 377: Writing on Art
Tuesday, Thursday 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m.
Instructor: Ed Snow
This course will explore how the languages of text and image can interrogate as well as attract and clarify each other. This semester we’ll hone our own writing skills by delving into paintings by Vermeer, pages of an unclassifiable “autobiographic graphic novel” by Charlotte Salomon (who was murdered at age 23 at Auschwitz), films by the magical Buster Keaton, and a few dazzling paragraphs by Cormac McCarthy. Our goal will be description and our focus will be on details (no generalizations allowed!). The idea will be to let thought and feeling intertwine, so that "meaning," instead of clamping down on the work of art, shimmers at its edges. The short writing assignments will feel a little like Zen: we'll try to slow down, become patient, bring the right side of the brain into play. If a poem or a prose poem comes to mind, so much the better. It only needs to be specific.
The course will thus also be a class in writing skills per se. The concision and descriptive vividness we will strive for should be a crucial resource for you in whatever you choose to do in the future—from filling out a job application to editing a manuscript to writing a novel.
There will also be two field trips: one to the Menil Museum to look at drawings, the other to the MFA (hopefully to study two late Monets and at least one free-standing sculpture by Degas).
Satisfies:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: VCM
ENGL 381: Topics in Women Writers - Filipina Writers
Tuesday, Thursday 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
This course introduces students to feminist narrative fiction from the Philippines and its expansive global diaspora. As one of the largest archives of postcolonial anglophone literature, Philippine writing in English has gone through many shifts throughout its century-long history. However, no other shift has been as transformative at the level of literary form as the emergence of diasporic Filipina feminist writing. Marking a watershed moment within Philippine literary history, radical feminist fiction by “Overseas Filipina Writers”—such as Jessica Hagedorn, Ninotchka Rosca, Gina Apostol, Arlene Chai, and Mia Alvar—first emerges from the political turbulence of Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian regime and the imposition of martial law in 1972. Whereas the Philippine novel in English had been typified first by a sentimental romanticism inherited from the 19th-century Spanish novel and then by an obstinate realism informed by early 20th-century American colonial education systems, the novels written by Overseas Filipina Writers in the immediate aftermath of the martial law era self-reflexively write in stylistic registers that foreground experimental literary form. The course will situate this formal shift within a broader account of a historically specific mode of “peripheral modernist” writing from the semiperipheral Global South. Attending to this genre’s ubiquitous experimentation—its nonlinear narratives, fragmented emplotment, and attenuated characterization—we will examine the aesthetic mediation of feminized reproductive labor, martial law social crises, gendered nationalist historiography, and neocolonial U.S.-Philippine relations. Course keywords: Third World feminism, postcolonial literary history, Asian American and Asian Anglophone writing, American imperialism, peripheral modernism, and critical irrealism.
Satisfies:
(RPG) Critical Race, Postcolonial, and Gender Studies
Meets Rice English major specialization/s: CSC; LLH
ENGL 402: Writing Longer Fiction
Monday 2:00-4:50 p.m.
Permission Required
Instructor: Justin Cronin
Class is limited to 12 students by permission of the instructor. An intermediate level fiction-writing course (presumably in the writing of the short story) is generally required, though exceptions can be made. All interested students should come to the first class meeting, where they will learn how to apply for admission to the course.
Course counts toward the English Creative Writing Major Concentration (ECRW). Instructor Permission Required. Contact the English department for instructions.
Satisfies:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 405: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing
Friday 12:00-2:50 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. 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:
Concentration: English Creative Writing Concentration (ECRW)
ENGL 411: Spring Semester Research Workshop
Wednesday 3:00-5:50 p.m.
Instructors: Emily Houlik-Ritchey, José Aranda, and Ian Schimmel
The Senior Seminar & Research Workshop 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 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, prerequisite ENGL 410
ENGL 493: Independent Study
Spring meeting times are to be determined by English faculty member and student
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 - Latinx Writing Lab (2 credit hours)
Monday 12:00-1:50 p.m.
Instructor: José Aranda
The Latinx Writing Lab serves as a compliment to ENGL 493 Latinx Research Lab. While this course will continue to survey current research topics, methods, and scholarship in fields expressly focused on U.S. Latinx histories, cultures, geographies and social/political issues. The Latinx Writing Lab is intended to support students who are engaged in the actual conversion of research into a research paper, poster, or some multi-media format. This course is an ideal way to support English majors who plan to enroll in ENGL 410 & 411 and work on Latinx projects, or students planning, commencing, or executing on a senior Latinx thesis in other departments or centers in humanities or social sciences. The grade for this course will be based solely on process and workshopping the conversion of research into some scholarly format.
If interested, please email Dr. Aranda of your interest and include your student ID #. Dr. Aranda will process the special registration required for enrolling in this course.
Notes:
*D1: approved for Distribution Group 1
English Dept. Required Field/s satisfied:
Diverse Traditions: Critical Race; Post-colonial & Gender studies: RPG
Historical foundations: **pre1800/1900 (**specifically pre1800)
Meets Rice English major specialization/s:
Culture & Social Change (CSC); Literature & Literary History (LLH);
Visual & Comparative Media (VCM)
Science; Medicine & Environment (SME)
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.