Teaching
I am teaching three courses in Spring 2025 at West Texas A&M University, advising two BA in English capstone projects, and supervising one independent research study.
Course descriptions and syllabi are available below.
Syllabus Course Description:
The course catalog describes ENGL 3352 thusly: “An upper-division survey of English literary culture from the Age of Johnson to the present and its relationship to social and historical context.”
Hmmm. The notion of “surveying” 300+ years of English literature might strike some as a preposterous notion, and not unreasonably so. After all, how are we to “cover” such an immense territory, regardless of how we mark out that territory, whether temporal, geographical, or literary?
Well, here’s the thing: we can’t. “Coverage” of any literary period or genre or territory in a one-semester course makes for a provocative dream, but I can assure you, that’s all it makes for. Looking for “coverage” is a kind of fool’s errand, one that’s a little bit like going to the hardware store to buy bread: you may wish passionately, fervently, that a trip to Ace Hardware will net you a loaf of tasty multigrain, but alas, I fear you will be disappointed, time and time again.
Your professor labors under no illusion that “coverage” could be possible, and perhaps ironically, she doesn’t find releasing the idea of “coverage” to be disheartening. Quite the contrary: she finds such a prospect liberating.
The survey course asks us to move quickly from writer to writer, from period to period, from movement to movement, like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond. We will achieve breadth, but not necessarily depth. Such an approach affords us magnificent opportunities we rarely ever have. We get to make connections that we might not otherwise see in a course that focuses more narrowly on, say, a particular time period.
In what other place do we get the opportunity to compare the short fiction of Eliza Haywood, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf, not only because these writers don’t fit easily on the typical syllabus divisions (i.e. 18th century, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist), but also because how often short fiction—a form that lends itself beautifully to the survey course—is dwarfed by its monolithic cousin, the novel? Where else can we juxtapose John Gay, Oscar Wilde, and Tom Stoppard, three dramatists each outrageous and precedent-setting in his own way? And what other opportunity allows us to trace out the miraculous marathon that the lyric has undertaken over the past 300+ years?
The survey course is something like the most fabulous party you could ever imagine attending. You’ll talk to lots of people, and you’ll leave feeling that you only scratched the surface with most of them. But is that so bad? After all, don’t all relationships begin with an initial acquaintance?
So while you may only shake hands and share a drink with the material we’ll encounter this semester, rest assured: when the opportunity presents itself for you to deepen your bond with a particular author or literary period or concept, you will have this beginning to set that process in motion—a beginning that should, given your rapt attention and dedicated study, stand you in very good stead.
A fabulous party, early 19th-century style.
I have developed and am teaching this course in the WTClass Canvas LMS as one WTAMU's Canvas Migration Faculty Mentors for 2024-25.
ENGL 2321-70
In this course, we will investigate some of the most famous villains ever created—Grendel and his mother; Macbeth; Satan; Frankenstein’s Creature; Mr. Hyde; Dracula—focusing on the intersections between creation and destruction, inspiration and desolation, divinity and monstrosity.
A few key questions will shape our inquiries this term:
How do we decide that someone or something is a "monster"? What makes someone's actions "monstrous"?
How has divinity been conceptualized by different authors in the British tradition? To what can we attribute these concepts?
Why do monsters appear so frequently in literature? What do monsters represent for the culture that created them? What do monsters represent for us today?
Who created monsters: God or man? Are monsters figments of human imagination, a way we have of explaining to ourselves why terrible things happen, a way of understanding what is sometimes beyond understanding? Or are they a kind of punishment, our sins manifest?
Can monsters be controlled by gods? By God? By humans? Why or why not?
Are humans destined to battle monsters? Is it destiny or just coincidence when we encounter such beings?
Why do some literary monsters continue to haunt us, even centuries after their creation?
To answer these questions, we will read masterpieces from the multiple genres and subgenres: epic poetry, the novel, lyric verse, tragedy, drama, Gothic, science fiction, humor.