Upcoming Courses

ENGL 2123-001: Creative Writing
Bill Endres
As Pulitzer Prize winning poet William Stafford tells us, there is likely nothing special about writers. Their only difference is that they understand and pursue a practice. This course introduces students to the practices and skills needed to create imaginative writing. To this end, we will pursue a range of creative writing, including short stories, personal essays, and poetry. We will learn to read as writers. We will learn to think as writers. We will learn to observe and ponder as writers. We will play with language and narrative, keeping a writer’s journal. We will learn drafting strategies, how to turn down the volume of our ego for critique, and how to respond in a helpful manner to other’s writing. Much of our work will be exploring and doing revision and polishing our writing so that it generates the desired experience for readers. And if we aren’t careful, we might just have fun. 

ENGL 2123-002 Creative Writing (Writing Track; CW)
Rilla Askew
This course introduces writers to the skills needed to create imaginative writing. Work includes reading and writing creative nonfiction, as well as short stories and poems. Course goals include students finding their strengths as writers and areas that need improvement as they become adept at the elements of craft introduced in the course. Students also develop analytical strengths as they practice the craft of “reading like a writer” and offer constructive, detailed critique of fellow students’ work. Coursework includes assigned readings from the text, Write Moves, and written responses to the readings, as well as written and oral analysis of fellow writers’ work presented in class.

ENGL 2273 Literary & Cultural Analysis
Rita Keresztesi
This course introduces students to literary and cultural analysis focusing on textual explication and analysis. We will read fiction, drama and other media (film and music) from Africa. The class emphasizes writing critically about literature and culture as we discuss genre, form, and context. The course requirements include short reading responses, a presentation, and a final researched paper. 

Readings:
Binyavanga Wainaina, How to Write About Africa: Collected Works
Charles Larson, Under African Skies: Modern African Stories
Helon Habila, The Granta Book of the African Short Story
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman: A Norton Critical Edition
Wole Soyinka, Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions
Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter
Sembène Ousmane, Xala
 

ENGL 2443 World Literature 1700-Present (Late Survey)
Julie Tolliver
What is literature, and how does it help us understand what we cannot fully know? How do writers use the tools of fiction to examine the limits of human understanding, and how do we, as readers, come to recognize and accept the truths that fiction exposes? Our exploration of world literature picks up in the 18^th century with studies of texts that ask us to suspend our disbelief and face the fantastical. We will examine how these texts are constructed, formally, as well as how they represent the universe—how they imagine the horizons of the real and the unreal. We will consider how the texts construct value systems and how they use language to concretize these abstract ideas. We will analyze methods of narration and the place of the storyteller in the texts. And we will consider how they can reflect cultures of critique, dissent, or resistance. Examples of texts might include tales from The 1001 Nights, from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, from Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, and short stories by Nikolai Gogol’, Rabindranath Tagore, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Anita Desai, Louise Erdrich, and Olga Tokarczuk, among others. Understanding and comparing these texts will require flexibility and imagination on our part as we think through how to use what we know, and how to find out what we don’t, to explore the fantastic in world literature.

ENGL 2653 English Literature 1700 to Present (Late Survey)
Amanda Klinger
This course explores the major literary movements, history, and authors from 1700 through the twentieth century, a period filled with political upheaval, major cultural shifts, and new understandings of the mind and self in relation to the world, all of which impacted the literature of the time. The survey will explore the larger themes and historical contexts that accompany the texts of each period. The course also aims to encourage students to incorporate their own questions and interests within the texts we study to strengthen critical thinking skills through literary analysis. Readings may include texts by the following authors: Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Thomas DeQuincey, Christina Rossetti, George Elliot, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce.

ENGL 2883 American Literature from the Civil War to the Present (Late Survey)
Henry McDonald
This course will survey late 19^th and 20^th century American literature, including the works of African-American, Jewish-American, Southern, and Women writers, with a view to what it means to be “other” in America, drawing not just on WEB Dubois’s notion of double-consciousness, but also on the thought of recent French philosophers Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas, all of whom made resistance to the normalizing forces of modern social and political life a central focus of their work. Among the authors whose work we will read are Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Susan Glaspell, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, WEB Dubois, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Bernard Malamud, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston.  

ENGL 3103 Autobiographical Writing (Writing Track)
Susan Kates
This course is designed to help you tell the stories you wish to tell about your life.  If you work hard in this class, you will develop your skills as a writer, increase your control over the process of writing, and hone your awareness of how a sense of audience, persona, tone, and other elements of style can influence the ways that readers make sense of and respond to your writing.

English 3103 is designed around the “workshop” method—which means working in groups to share your own writing and respond thoughtfully to that of others.  Although much of the work in this class will consist of your own writing and the reading and discussion of your classmates’ writing, we will also read and analyze essays by a number of American essayists. Readings will include: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris; Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell; and a packet of essays to be purchased at King Kopy

ENGL 3113 Nature & Environmental Writing (Writing Track)
Sandra Tarabochia
In this course we will use reading, writing, and observation as tools for listening and responding to the universe as it beckons. We will consider how, as writers and humans, we both construct and are constructed by the relational spaces and places we inhabit. We will use writing to probe, represent, and even transform our complex relationships with nature and the environment.  We will practice and experiment with strategies from nature, environmental and science writing, as well as from autobiographical writing and creative non-fiction. This course is ideal for anyone looking for dedicated time to improve their writing in a supportive workshop setting. Students will design course projects that align with their disciplinary interests and writing goals.

ENGL 3143 Writing and Reading Literacy Narratives (Writing Track) - ZOOM
Will Kurlinkus
In this course we will learn about how people learn. From reading and writing to videogaming and bartending to how to deal with a cancer diagnosis—we will be studying and producing literacy narratives, non-fiction pieces about how we (and the people around us) came to know something that transformed our lives. Among other texts we'll be reading essays on craft butcher shops, motorcycles, and the satanic panic from popular authors including Chuck Klosterman, Rebecca Solnit, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Sedaris.

ENGL 3183 Digital Composing
Bill Endres
Digital technologies have opened rich, new ways to compose. These include blogs, podcasts, videos, and 3D models (in video/virtual reality). In this class, we will compose using a number of these forms. To ground our composing, we will identify objects important to us and create our compositions around their significance and stories. As these compositions unfold, we will explore narratives about our identities, communities, and the purposes we hold dear. To help guide us in composing, we will lean on the centuries of wisdom accumulated in rhetorical theory. Rhetorical theory will prove particularly helpful to us in sorting out possibilities in newer forms of compositions. Finally, we will explore the role of new technologies, such as ChatGPT, in the composing process.

ENGL/WGS 3203 Rhetoric & Sexuality (Writing Track)
Sandra Tarabochia
This course investigates intersections of literacy, rhetoric, and sexuality as they function socially, politically, and for each of us personally. Together we will explore and develop what Jonathan Alexander calls “critical sexual literacy” or the ability to recognize the role of sexuality in our individual and collective identities and examine dominant values underlying representations of sexuality (5). Toward that end, we will read theory and research-based texts in order to identify key concepts and principles that will aid us in our study of rhetoric, literacy, and sexuality. Drawing on that knowledge base we will rhetorically analyze how gender, sex, and sexuality are represented in public texts, employing a broad definition of “text” to include written, visual, audio, and digital material as well as social structures and culture as texts. We will use writing to conduct critical self-reflection, to rhetorically engage the world around us, and to join scholarly/public conversations about literacy and sexuality.

ENGL 3363 Films & Context: African Cinema (Multicultural; Post-1700)
Rita Keresztesi
This class offers a unique perspective on postcolonial Sub-Saharan African filmmaking. The beginning of African cinema production coincided with and chronicled the political, economic, social, cultural, and psychological aspects of decolonization. African filmmakers made the medium their platform to debate the tasks and challenges for newly independent nations. The career of Ousmane Sembène (of Senegal), called the “Father of African Cinema,” spanned forty-some years from the early 1960s till his death in 2007. We will view and discuss several of his and his contemporaries’ films, as well as recent movies from both West and East Africa. We will read essays, autobiographies, and theoretical texts to gain better understanding of the films and their contexts. Grades are based on participation in class discussions, a presentation, reading responses, and a final researched paper.

ENGL 3643 Muslim Women’s Writing (MC; Post-1700) 
Zeynep Aydogdu
(Cross-listed with WGS 3220) What does it mean to be a “Muslim woman” in the West? This interdisciplinary course considers Muslim women’s literary, intellectual, and cultural production against the backdrop of the post-9/11 proliferation of narratives about the fictive unity called “Middle Eastern/Muslim women.” Women in this category are often presumed to share a unified and homogenous identity as “victims” of oppression  and have been perceived through pity, fear, and fascination, particularly in the West. In this course, we look at how Muslim women respond to and engage with such representations through an analysis of their intellectual, literary, artistic, and cultural contributions from the early 20th century to the present. We begin by understanding the debates around Muslim women as gendered subjects embodying religious difference and “otherness” by looking at the history of Orientalism. We then examine autobiography, fiction, poetry, film, and comics representing Muslim women's complex identities, lives, histories, and subjectivities. To contextualize these texts, news media reports, political discourse, and popular culture will be studied. Topics include immigration, gender and sexuality, media representations, the local and global impact of war and violence, community and religious practice, intersectional politics, Mipsters, veiled superheroes, and popular culture.

ENGL 4113 How to Edit & Publish a Literary Magazine (Writing Track)
Daniel Simon
English 4113 provides an introduction to the writing, editing, and publishing of literary magazines, both print and online. It is designed for students who are planning careers in writing, graduate literary studies, or the wider world of publishing. Students will learn about the place of literary magazines in humanities publishing generally and the larger contemporary landscape in which cultural magazines play a vital role. Topics include the history and present state of US magazine publishing, the status of periodicals in culture and the academy, the economics of the industry, current challenges, and future trends.

The internship component is an important feature of the course, offering students the opportunity to write for, edit, and produce an actual magazine: World Literature Today, OU’s award-winning bimonthly of international literature and culture. The course will also draw guest speakers from the pool of publishing experts scattered across the OU campus and in central Oklahoma, thus providing advice and networking opportunities for students interested in exploring professional careers in writing, editing, design, marketing, event planning, and digital media.

ENGL 4273 Women Writers: The Poetry and Politics of the Victorian Poetess (Post-1700)
Justin Sider
This class explores one of the most complex cultural figures of the nineteenth century: the Poetess. Women poets in the Victorian period were expected to fulfill multiple, contradictory expectations—to be at once artist and aesthetic object, at once mother, maiden, and muse. Their poems were often taken as pure expressions of the soul, yet they were in fact carefully calibrated performances. In this sense, the term “Poetess” names not a person but a set of gendered conventions and expectations, a role that women poets often played when they wrote and published poetry. The term sounds patronizing today, but we can still see its legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the confessional work of poets like Sylvia Plath or even pop singers like Lana Del Rey. This semester, we will focus on the careers of three major Victorian women writers—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Augusta Webster—and consider the ways that they negotiate questions of gender and genre across the Victorian period. We’ll supplement our study of these authors with a range of other writing, from Romantic and Victorian poetry to writing by Anglophone Indian and Indigenous poets to contemporary pop music, as well as criticism and theory on poetics and gender.

ENGL 4343: The Indian in American Pop Culture (Post 1700, MC)
Joshua Nelson
From American authors' first attempts at a national literature, to the first images captured on film, all the way to Killers of the Flower Moon, Native Americans have loomed large in the American imagination, by turns as threat, attraction, promise, or some mixture of all of these. This course will trace in an eclectic collection of novels, films, comics, TV shows, music and more the development of racialized and stereotyped figures like the bloodthirsty savage, the sexualized Indian maiden, and the wise noble savage, on through forceful correctives from Native perspectives seen in works like Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs. As we consider the narrative and visual strategies these works employ, we will put them into conversation with critical theories about identity and representation. Requirements will include short responses and a major project that you can pursue on your own or in collaboration (a research paper, short film, or staged reading, e.g.). [IV-World Culture GenEd]

ENGL 4603 Shakespeare’s Rome (Pre-1700)
Joseph Mansky
(Slash-listed with ENGL 5003) This course examines representations of antiquity in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. For Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, Ben Jonson, and other early modern playwrights, ancient Rome was not merely a lost civilization but a rich repository of gripping, timely tales. Dramatists drew on classical history in all sorts of ways: to make sense of the turmoil swirling around them, to interrogate Renaissance culture and politics, to forge their own artistic identities. Early modern plays set in antiquity accordingly open up an array of critical questions central to literary and cultural studies, including issues of translation and interpretation, rhetoric and politics, gender and power, and imitation and innovation. We will explore these questions and more by reading Renaissance drama alongside selected primary and secondary texts.

ENGL 4533 Shakespeare Tragedies (Pre-1700)
Joseph Mansky
From the bloody butchery of Titus Andronicus to the gripping psychodrama of Othello and Macbeth to the political scheming of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s tragedies probe some of the most urgent questions of collective life. What to do about a tyrant? How do individuals and communities respond to violence, oppression, or betrayal? What happens when outsiders rise to power? What does evil look like? How do inequities of class, gender, and race affect the fates of individuals and their societies? Can we lose our humanity? We will ask all these questions and many more as we study Shakespeare’s diverse tragic visions.

But, to adapt a line of praise from his fellow playwright Ben Jonson, Shakespeare was writing not just for all time but also for the early modern age—an age of republicanism and tyranny, of censorship and heterodoxy, of strict hierarchies and growing social mobility. We will situate the plays in these and other historical contexts in order to investigate what the tragedies meant in Shakespeare’s day—and what meanings they might hold for us today.

ENGL 4733 American Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism (Post-1700, ME)
Henry McDonald
This course will survey works in 19^th and 20^th century American Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism, with attention to the ways in which gender, class, and race have been influenced by the different kinds of affective or emotional economies – “structures of feeling,” as Raymond Williams put it – characteristic of the literatures of realism, naturalism, and modernism. Among the authors we will read are Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Booker T. Washington, Charles Chestnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jack London, James Weldon Johnson, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Katherine Anne Porter.

ENGL 4853 The English Capstone Course: Plants in Literature
Amit Baishya
This iteration of the capstone will introduce you to the exciting new field of plant humanities through a focus on plants in fictional narratives (novels, nonfiction, comic books, cinema and television). We will begin with a dominant mode through which plants are represented in science fiction and horror—plants-as-other. Texts we will discuss include John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the original 1950s movie), an episode from the smash Netflix series Stranger Things, and Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. We will then turn to some recent work that considers plants-as-kin. The lone novel we will read is Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. We will also read two nonfictional work —Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree to conclude this section on plants as our kin who teach us arts of living in an increasingly damaged planet.

ENGL 4853 Capstone: Moving Out, Moving On: Where To From Here?
Susan Kates
In this course, we will bring together skills, methodologies, and forms of knowledge we have acquired and developed within the English major. We will refine close reading skills, illustrate research competency, and utilize analytic thinking and cultural understanding and analysis.

We will reflect upon significant moments in our educational journeys, examine the hopes and dreams we have for ourselves, and consider the values that guide us in choices we have made and continue to make as we move into another realm of life. Our reading and writing for this course will focus on what it means to construct a sense of self and a life narrative in relation to the larger social world of family and friends, education, media, work, and community. What does it mean to see ourselves as embodying ethical values or belonging to a certain ethnic, racial, national or religious group(s)? How do we imagine ourselves within a larger family narrative? In what ways do we view our identities as connected to and expressed by our educational and work experiences? How do we see ourselves as shaping and shaped by the popular media culture of our society?

Readings will include Miseducated: A Memoir by Brandon Fleming; Tiny, Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed; and Between Two Kingdoms:  A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad and shorter pieces by other autobiographical writers.

ENG 4943/5943 Advanced Creative Nonfiction (Writing Track)
Rilla Askew
Creative nonfiction is a factually accurate narrative that employs literary techniques more commonly associated with fiction and prose poetry. Examples may include memoir, historical or environmental essays, spiritual autobiography, hermit crab essays, and more. Through reading the required text, Tell It Slant, analysis of published creative nonfiction, and participation in writing workshops, students will enlarge their strengths as creative nonfiction writers, increase their analytical skills and stretch themselves in terms of style and voice. 

The format of the class is instruction, peer review, and traditional writing workshop. Students read and discuss published works of creative nonfiction, submit new works of their own, offer constructive detailed critique of fellow students’ work, and hone the craft of revision.

ENGL 5003 Shakespeare's Rome
Joseph Mansky
T 1:30-4:20
(Slash-listed with ENGL 5003) This course examines representations of antiquity in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. For Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, Ben Jonson, and other early modern playwrights, ancient Rome was not merely a lost civilization but a rich repository of gripping, timely tales. Dramatists drew on classical history in all sorts of ways: to make sense of the turmoil swirling around them, to interrogate Renaissance culture and politics, to forge their own artistic identities. Early modern plays set in antiquity accordingly open up an array of critical questions central to literary and cultural studies, including issues of translation and interpretation, rhetoric and politics, gender and power, and imitation and innovation. We will explore these questions and more by reading Renaissance drama alongside selected primary and secondary texts.

ENGL 5133 Teaching Technical Writing
Will Kurlinkus
Introduction to the types of writing professional engineers and scientists are expected to do and methods of teaching these forms of writing. In addition, students will attend classes being taught by the professor and have the opportunity to design and teach some workshops as well as evaluate the undergraduates' work.

ENGL 5223 Race and Film
Joshua Nelson
From the earliest images captured on film, like Thomas Edison’s recording of traditional American Indian dances, all the way to Oscar Award-winning movies by Black directors, cinema has worked toward conflicting ends, on one hand constructing racial identities and reinforcing stereotypes; and on the other, reimagining histories, celebrating communities, and staking out spaces for cultural, political, and artistic self-representation. As we consider the narrative and visual strategies of minority-directed films made in a variety of times and genres, we will put thematically related works into conversation with critical theories about urban and rural identities, visual sovereignty, interracial relationships, class, gender, integration, and violence. We will screen one or two films a week, to be watched on your own time, and cover several articles or chapters from film studies and film theory.  Assignments may include article summaries, film reviews, and a major research paper.

ENGL 5453 Topics: Native American and Indigenous Rhetorics
Rachel Jackson
Since the early work of Malea Powell and Scott Lyons at the turn of the 21^st century, Native American and Indigenous Rhetorics as a subfield of Rhetoric and Writing Studies continues to emerge and excel in response to growing calls for pluriversal cultural rhetorics that decenter the ancient Greco-Roman traditions of western imperialism.  Born initially from Native American literary theory and scholarship, the conversation regarding Indigenous rhetorics has by now taken deep root in RWS as Native American, First Nations, and Chicana and Latinx thinkers and scholars work toward shared concepts and theories, values and goals.  This course will take a geographical, land-based, decolonial approach to understanding the cultural, political, and ideological identities and commitments animating these movements in order to articulate the ways in which they function wholistically as one vital arc in the transrhetorical construction of Indigenous futures.  As such, our conversations will participate in world-making!

Longer readings may include a selection from the following with additional article-length readings:

• American Indian Literary Nationalism (Weaver, et al., 2006) 
• Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Vizenor, 2008)  
• Reasoning Together: The Native Critiques Collective (Acoose, et al., 2008) 
• Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and Territories of Writing (Baca, 2008)  
• X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Lyons, 2010)  
• The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures/Decolonial Options (Mignolo, 2011)  
• The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance (Cushman, 2011)  
• Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Allen, 2012)  
• Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies (Wieser, 2017)  
• Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Rifkin, 2017)   
• The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (Truer, 2019) 
• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019) 
• Pluriversal Literacies: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Futures (Garcia, et al., 2024)

ENGL 5703 Forms of Protest: Dissident Lit & Social Movement Rhetoric
Professor Jim Zeigler
This seminar will investigate a catalog of forms of protest: petitions, open letters, manifestos, boycotts, strikes, marches, agitprop drama, riots, pranks, vandalism, sabotage, occupations, novels, comix & ‘zines, posters, parades, and whatever other kinds of “punch up” communications inspire our attention in the span of this academic term. Our select forms of representation have been used to convey uneasy truths and political demands, often in defiance of threats of reprisal. We’ll supplement these forms with texts that represent protest without necessarily participating in it and works in critical theory that examine how and to what extent activism is a meaningful cause of social change.

Our topic will afford us a forum for the interests and approaches of Literary & Cultural Studies (LCS) and Rhetoric & Writing Studies (RWS). Our attention to dissident literatures will address the relationship between art and politics, and our concern for social movement rhetoric will investigate the role of persuasion in change. Graduate students are invited to develop independent research projects on forms of protest drawn from their areas of interest, but the syllabus will concentrate on cultural politics from the 1960s to the present with an emphasis on conflict in and about the United States. One aim of our seminar is to demonstrate that the fields of literature and rhetoric are resourceful partners for research in cultural studies. Implicit in the seminar’s design is the hopeful expectation that the practices of ideology critique, discourse analysis, and artful persuasion can inform activism to effect more just and truthful institutions, laws, policies, and norms

ENG 5943 Advanced Creative Nonfiction (Writing Track)
Rilla Askew
Creative nonfiction is a factually accurate narrative that employs literary techniques more commonly associated with fiction and prose poetry. Examples may include memoir, historical or environmental essays, spiritual autobiography, hermit crab essays, and more. Through reading the required text, Tell It Slant, analysis of published creative nonfiction, and participation in writing workshops, students will enlarge their strengths as creative nonfiction writers, increase their analytical skills and stretch themselves in terms of style and voice. 

The format of the class is instruction, peer review, and traditional writing workshop. Students read and discuss published works of creative nonfiction, submit new works of their own, offer constructive detailed critique of fellow students’ work, and hone the craft of revision.