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SFA Home / College of Liberal and Applied Arts / English

Department of English

Welcome to the Department of English at Stephen F. Austin State University!

The Department of English offers a variety of courses in world, British, and American literature; writing; creative writing; film studies; linguistics; and literary criticism. We house a variety of majors and minors in these and related fields, and we instruct both undergraduate and graduate (MA) students. Our faculty members are productive and creative scholars; they teach with enthusiasm and skill and hold degrees from universities all across America.

Please use the navigational links on the right to learn more about the department and its offerings. You will also find a link for contact information.

 
We hope that you will make courses from the Department of English a vital part of your college career!

Detailed English Course Information for Fall 2012

CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 11441 ENG 212 001 Hoagland TR 12:30-1:45 F176 Course Title: World Literature 1650 to Present Course Description: Race, sex, religion, violence, and disease - the last 350 years have been tumultuous and troubled times, as the world has undergone significant cultural, moral, and political upheavals, often leading to war.  The world literatures spanning this time frame reflect the anxieties and moral and ethical dilemmas which characterize the “modern” world, which has become increasingly smaller as well as complex. Course work for this class includes reading quizzes, exams, and small papers.   CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 14037 ENG 315 090 Guidry MWF 12-12:50 F182 Course Title:Medieval British Literature Course Description: Medieval Brit Lit is a representative survey of British literature from the tenth century through the fifteenth century. The course will begin with Anglo-Saxon poetry and end with Middle English drama. ● The first unit will be Anglo-Saxon literature. It will include two key genres of Anglo-Saxon poetry—the heroic poem and the elegy—and a cluster of witty Old English riddles, which could be considered the literature of the Anglo-Saxon common man and woman. ● The second unit covers several Celtic-inspired short verse romances of Marie de France known as “lais.” Originally written in Old French, Marie’s lais were composed for the court of the English king Henry II in the late twelfth century. Their provenance combined with the fact that about half of   them are set in Britain make them part of British literature. Marie is the first   known female poet of Britain, and one of the first European women writers. Her magical lais combine rich fantasy with a serious exploration of love, which they approach from many facets. Marie uses romantic dilemmas as occasions for exploring the fundamental social conflict between private desire and public duty. ● The third unit centers on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written by an author known only as the Pearl-Poet (for another of his poems). The Pearl-Poet belongs to a brilliant group of late fourteenth-century poets who wrote during the reign of Richard II (1377-99). Chaucer and Langland also belong to the school of “Ricardian poets.” SGGK is the single greatest example of medieval English romance. ● The fourth unit focuses on the single most important dream vision in medieval English literature, William Langland’s sublimely imaginative and allegorically layered Piers Plowman, the only major literary work I know of prior to Dickens’ novels to feature a member of the working class of English society as its hero. (The dream vision is the genre to which Dante’s Divine Comedy belongs.) ● The fifth unit features the champagne of medieval English poets—Geoffrey Chaucer. One of the best storytellers in any literary tradition, Chaucer was also a formative influence on Renaissance English poets like Shakespeare and Sidney. We will read the General Prologue to his masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, along with a cluster of tales, including possibly the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and the Franklin’s Tale. ● The sixth unit delves into the first English autobiography, composed against all expectations by a woman—The Book of Margery Kempe. It is a fascinating look at one common (middle class) woman’s struggle to gain autonomy in a patriarchal society within the context of the emotional piety she practiced. Margery’s life makes a fascinating comparison to the fictional “literary confession” of Alison of Bath. ● The seventh and final unit takes up medieval drama, which had a profound influence on the art of Shakespeare and Marlowe, as well as other Renaissance dramatists. We will read the greatest English “mystery play,” the superbly crafted Second Shepherds’ Play, written by the anonymous English medieval playwright known as the Wakefield Master. We will then read a carnivalesque example of the English “morality play” (which fed directly into such characters as Beelzebub in Doctor Faustus and Iago in Othello) called Mankind.   CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 14041 ENG 405 090 Hoagland TR 2-3:15 F381 Course Title: Modern Arabic Literature Course Description: This course explores the violence and beauty, complexities and contradictions, and the joys and sorrows of Arabic / Islamic culture through the literature of some of the language’s most talented and insightful writers. Featuring writers from the Maghreb (including Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, and Algeria), Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and Sudan, and spanning the last fifty years, this course is also intended to introduce students to elements of postcolonial theory relevant to the study of Arabic literature. Students will write a short series of small papers, an annotated bibliography, and a conference length final paper. CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 14047 ENG 412 090 Given TR 11-12:15 F271 Course Title: British Dystopian Novels Course Description: We will read Brave New World, 1984, Lord of the Flies, V for Vendetta and other such novels from the 20th and 21st century as we explore the social contexts of different decades and how such books are indicative of those times.   CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 13176 ENG 426 090 Untiedt MW 1-2:15 F181 Course Title:The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy Course Description:Cormac McCarthy has written only ten novels, and he has done little to promote any of them. However, he has gained much attention for his works—both good and bad; readers generally either love him or hate him. Why are some critics comparing him to William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and even William Shakespeare? Students will read all of McCarthy’s novels and examine how he depicts an American landscape that is stark and oftentimes brutally violent, and consider how his style has evolved into one unlike any other American writer.   CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 12163 ENG 442 001 Sams, C TR 9:30-10:45 F183 Course Title: Conversation Analysis Course Description: Conversation Analysis (CA) is the study of both verbal and non-verbal social interaction. This course will focus on turn-taking (who gets to talk when), repair (how “mistakes” in speech are corrected), sequence organization (how conversational information is ordered), preference/dispreference, and non-verbal cues. There will be a special section of the course dedicated to deception in language. We will read articles by the founders of the field: Garfinkel, Jefferson, Sacks, and Schegloff. Students will also have the opportunity to learn CA transcription techniques and apply them by transcribing a tape recording or videotaped interaction. There are no prerequisites for the course. Currently, there are permits required for the course so please e-mail me (samsc@sfasu.edu) your name and student ID and I’ll have the permits entered.   CRN Subject Course Section Instructor Days Time Room 12165 ENG 524 001 Hoagland W 6-8:30 F183 Course Title: Great Texts to the Renaissance Course Description: This course, its companion course, English 525: Great Texts after the Renaissance, and English 582: Bibliography and Research Methods, constitute a core, common experience for students in the MA program at Stephen F. Austin State University. These courses are designed to introduce, and in some instances, reintroduce students to significant literary works from the American, British, and world traditions, while at the same time exposing students to graduate level research and writing through specific projects, such as annotated bibliographies, article reviews, conference and article length papers, and in the case of this course, a project modeled after the Norton Critical Edition. For this particular course, a broad range of classical works reaching back to antiquity (including works by the Greek tragedians, the Aeneid, and The Ramayana) to the early modern period (The Tempest and Don Quixote), offer students a wide sampling of significant pieces of literature reflecting the rich cultural traditions from which these texts come. As with any literature course, examining these texts both on their own merits but in conversation with one another will be integral to class discussion. The end goals for this course, then, are not only to deepen and enrich students’ understanding and appreciation of specific classical texts, but to further deepen that appreciation and understanding through a rigorous research project as well as a formal reading journal.

 

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