Upper Division Courses

Marcela Fuentes 
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 
Core: WEM 
English Major: Writing, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Creative Writing Workshop  

Telling true stories, and in the process grappling with what “true” means and where meaning resides, can be a
thrilling, daunting, and artistically complex act. In order to help you generate and craft material in the most
effective way, I have organized this course around several subgenres of creative nonfiction, from memoir to travel
writing to profiles to personal essays. Studying the structures and techniques of published works in these
subgenres (which often overlap), will help you choose appropriate angles from which to tell your own stories.
Along the way, we will identify and discuss and practice many of the essential skills of creative writing in
general. This course is discussion-based and uses the workshop method of instruction.

Chantel L. Carlson 
TR 2:00 – 3:20
Core: WEM
English Major: Writing, Elective
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective
Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Creative Writing Workshop 

“I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also, I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness.” 

                                                                                                                         August Wilson 

In this introductory dramatic writing workshop, students will learn and apply the principles of critical thinking by writing dramatic monologues, scenes, and one-act plays, including character and plot development, stage directions, and writing dialogue.  We will read plays by playwrights including Katori Hall, Nora and Delia Ephron, and John Patrick Shanley, and explore social constructions such as race, gender, and/or identity.  Prior to written assignments, students will also learn critical terms (such as characterization, plot structure, setting, dialogue, staging, etc.) as well as become familiar with the possibilities of the modern stage through readings of traditional and experimental plays.  Students will participate in a collaborative environment through workshops and group assignments.  In addition to quizzes, students will be required to write (and perform) several dramatic exercises/scenes, as well as complete a one-act play for their final project or write and film a short scene.   Film students are welcome in this course and will have the opportunity to work on writing for the screen as well.   

Lisa Nikolidakis
MW 5:30 – 6:50 
Core: WEM 
English Major: Writing, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Creative Writing Workshop, Advanced Creative Writing Seminar 

This course builds on the foundations of Fiction I, with a continued focus on crafting believable characters with complex inner lives—their desires, fears, and yearnings. This semester, we’ll explore magical realism, fabulism, and slipstream fiction: stories set in recognizable, everyday worlds where something strange or impossible quietly slips in. Think of it as reality with a hairline crack running through it—mysteries, hauntings, and surreal moments that reveal deeper truths. 

We’ll be reading writers who balance psychological realism and the fantastic, using language and character to make even the most uncanny elements feel real. Please note: this is not a high fantasy or sci-fi course—no sweeping quests, elaborate magic systems, death stars, or elves. Instead, our focus will be on literary fiction with subtle, transformative strangeness. By the end of the semester, you’ll be reading like a writer and creating stories that are both deeply imagined and sharply crafted. 

Prerequisites: ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 10203, ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20103 or ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20133. An advanced fiction-writing workshop, focusing on the growth of students' own work. Prior to enrollment, students are also strongly encouraged to take ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 30343 (Fiction Writing Workshop I). 

Alex Lemon 
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 
Core: WEM 
English Major: Writing, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Creative Writing Workshop, Advanced Creative Writing Seminar 

The Advanced-Multi Genre Workshop is a craft/workshop course in writing poems, fiction, and creative non-fiction. This class is intended for students who are dedicated to creative writing, who have a strong background in CW and sustained experience workshopping (at least one advanced workshop. “Workshop” implies that the products of our minds as well as the writing process are our chief concerns—concerns that will encourage a persistent questioning of everyday assumptions about genre, meaning, structure, form, voice, tone, etc. In this course, you are expected to read, discuss literary texts in multiple genres but your focus will be on producing four assignments of original creative work in the genre/s of your choosing.​ In class we will do thought and writing experiments, share work, constructively critique each other’s writing and discuss problems and possibilities with the imagination and writing. The primary focus of this course is your writing.  

Matthew Pitt
W 1:00 – 3:40
Core: N/A
English Major: Creative Writing, Elective
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective
Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Creative Writing Workshop, Advanced Creative Writing Seminar 

This course, offered to graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates, will be both project and process-intensive in nature. On the latter front, we will discuss how generative creative writing research calls for a blend of strategy and spontaneity; why it can prove beneficial to approach a first draft with a plan to make a mess, and invite creative collisions; and how deep development in revision must heavily rely both on authors committing to their initial imaginative impulses, as well as being receptive to altering, contesting, or even abandoning outright the blueprints that launched their journeys. Your instructor will tell the story of his forthcoming novel (set for launch early in our semester), exploring its origins and evolution over the course of many years and drafts. Simultaneously, we will discuss in-depth facets of the publication and production process, from submitting to editing to design.

During the term, other authors will visit class or converse with students via Zoom, delineating the varied creative and publication paths of their latest works (covering several genres). Students, in turn, will research, draft, and revise multiple original pieces. The seminar will offer an editing practicum component, and require students to curate markets suitable for their writing: both creative endeavors, as well as professional articles assigned or written “on spec”.

Undergraduate Enrollment by Department Permit Only; contact Professor Pitt.

Anne Frey 
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 
Core: WEM 
English Major: Theory 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective 

This class introduces students to the major critical movements of 20th- and 21st-century literary theory, including structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, new historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism.  To aid our understanding of these theories, we will also read  Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Victor Lavalle’s Destroyer, a recent graphic novel sequel to Frankenstein, and watch a couple of Frankenstein films so we can apply each critical school to these texts.  By the end of the course, students will gain both familiarity with key schools of thought and practical experience in using theory as a lens for analysis.  Work for the class includes in-class and take-home essays, a class presentation on a critical article, and a final exam.  

Theresa Gaul 
MW 4:00 – 5:20 
Core: HUM, LT, CA 
English Major: American Literature, Early Literature & Culture, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective  

This course offers a broad introduction to American literature up to 1865, exploring the question, “What is American literature?” from many points of view. We will read a fun and fascinating variety of works—spanning different genres and voices, including those of Native American, African American, immigrant, and women writers—and consider how their stories and perspectives shaped and expressed early American experiences and cultures. 

Hannah Jorgensen 
TR 3:30 – 4:50 
Core: None 
English Major: American Literature 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective  

This course surveys a range of contemporary women writers across genres, including literary fiction, sci-fi, romance, and fantasy (romantasy, even). Focusing on the 21st century, we will consider how women writers have captured audiences despite an overall decline in reading for pleasure. How have changes in the publishing industry led to increases in women’s authorship? How do social reading practices across book clubs, Goodreads, Bookstagram, and BookTok figure into the popularity of these authors? Alongside reading novels, we will engage with feminist literary theory and other secondary texts to historicize and understand how women’s writing has evolved and how scholars and audiences interpret, value, and respond to the work of contemporary women writers. 

Bonnie Blackwell 
W 6:00-9:40 
Core: CA, WEM (pending approval) 
English Major: British Literature 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective  

This course focuses on the questions: Why Austen? And: Why Now? In this semester-long Jane Austen course, we will read Jane Austen’s novels, including her early works, unpublished in her lifetime. We will watch 2-3 film adaptations of each novel, comparing diverse cultural responses to the same work. We will also watch ancillary productions which attempt to revisit or recapture Austen’s formative years, her Regency world, or to bring her distinctive courtship rituals to modern-day participants. We will develop a critical conversation about what these books mean to modern readers and movie-goers and ask thorny questions about Austen herself, and her goal of becoming a publishing success. 

Required books will include: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Lady Susan (these may be read online at the Republic of Pemberley or Project Gutenberg). 

Films screened will include: Love and Friendship, Becoming Jane, From Prada to Nada, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, etc. 

Jill C. Havens 
TR 2:00-3:20 
Core: WEM 
English Major: British Literature, Early Literature & Culture 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective  

"Chivalry bears within its own structure the potential for producing cycles of vendettas. However, chivalry is not law or a governing principle but an ideal mode of behaviour that applies to a particular social class. It cannot itself enforce law, and its most coercive aspect--force of arms--often becomes a catalyst for revenge." 

--Dwayne Coleman "Killing in Le Morte Darthur 

In this course, we will explore the relationship between the "ideal mode of behaviour" of chivalry and the grim realities of the brutally violent medieval period through a study of texts related to the legend of King Arthur. From the earliest Arthurian narrative in Geoffrey of Monmouth's A History of the Kings of Britain to the later definitive version of the legend in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, students will read of variety of literary genres (chronicles, romances, poems, lais, etc.) and contemporary texts (court documents, letters, legislation, etc.). We will use these materials to focus on the cycle of violence and revenge depicted in these texts (such as warfare, murder, assault, suicide, etc.), as well as the consequences of these violent acts in the medical treatment of wounds, the legal treatment of murder, the societal attitudes towards disability, the response to violence against women, and the long-term impacts of psychological trauma. Coursework will include two shorter analytic papers and a longer research project.  

Yingwen Yu 
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 
Core: CA, WEM 
English Major: American Literature 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective 

“Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study and the passionate possession of all Texans,” writes John Steinbeck in his Travel with Charley: In Search of America (1961). The class explores the rich body of multi-ethnic literature in Texas, offering a unique lens to examine the diverse cultural and historical narratives that have shaped the region. In this course, we will explore Texas as image, motif, and location in literary and nonfiction texts, as well as in still and moving images. We will examine how understandings of place shape identity through depictions of the land; social and cultural borders; and representations of indigenous and insurgent cultures. Texas, with its complex history of immigration, colonization, and cultural exchange, provides a compelling backdrop for the study of multi-ethnic literature. Course materials may include Borderlands/ La Frontera (Gloria Anzaldúa), The Asian Texans (Marilyn Brady), Bluebird, Bluebird (Attica Locke), Forgetting the Alamo (Emma Perez), Tears of the Trufflepig (Fernando A. Flores), Long Star (1996), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Miss Juneteenth (2020), and Truly Texas Mexican (2021).  

Assessment will be based on active participation and meaning contributions to group discussions. Students will also give a class presentation and complete journal entries. The semester will culminate in a final project, which could be a traditional research paper, an interview project, or a creative work that engages with the course themes. 

Alexandra Edwards 
T 5:00 – 7:40 
Core:  
English Major: Theory, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetoric & Culture 
Creative Writing: Elective  

This course explores cinema through the lens of material culture, examining film not just as images on a screen but as tangible objects with their own histories of creation, manipulation, preservation, and decay. Students will engage with theoretical perspectives on materiality while gaining hands-on experience with vintage film prints, editing equipment, and historical techniques including film tinting, toning, and camera-less filmmaking. Through workshops using 16mm and 8mm film, optical toys, and splicing equipment, we'll investigate the sensory dimensions of analog cinema—the projector's click, the motor's whir, the heat of the lamp—to understand what's at stake in film preservation when 75% of silent-era American films have already been lost. By handling and creating physical film objects, students will develop a deeper appreciation for cinema's precarious material existence and the urgent work of archival preservation while exploring film theory. 

Sarah Ruffing Robbins 
TR 12:30 – 1:50 
Core: CA & WEM 
English Major: American Literature 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective  

This research seminar for English majors and minors will focus on diasporas and the challenges displaced peoples face when seeking to find home. Through reading and writing incorporating personal responses and building to a sustained research project, we’ll explore themes of migration, displacement, settler colonialism, and resistance in imaginative and non-fiction texts that position American culture in a global, cross-cultural context. Likely readings include Afua Cooper, My Name Is Phillis Wheatley: A Story of Slavery and Freedom; Michelle Good, Five Little Indians; Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth; one book-length narrative associated with the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII; Francisco Jiménez, The Circuit; and journalistic accounts associated with the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.  

Daniel Juan Gil 
TR 9:30 – 10:50 
Core: WEM 
English Major: British Literature, Early Literature & Culture 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Literature & Language 
Creative Writing: Elective  

This course examines the poetry and political writings of the great revolutionary poet John Milton (1608-1674) and traces the reception of his ideas in the Enlightenment. Milton’s monumental epic poem Paradise Lost uses the story of the fall of Satan as an allegory for our own “fall” into the modern condition. The poem explores the nature of freedom and its limits, religious liberty, individualism, desire and sex, the persistence of an urge toward domination, and the nature of human creativity. Milton’s ideas also played a major role in the 18th century, including in the American and French Revolutions where Milton was often seen as a champion of liberty. At the same time, Milton’s work was sometimes used to deflate comforting narratives about the inevitable progress of freedom and natural rights. This course pairs in depth study of Milton’s writings with study of the reception of his work by writers such as Thomas Paine, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, William Blake, the Comte de Mirabeau and Olaudah Equiano whose An Interesting Narrative was one of the earliest autobiographies written by an enslaved person and who quotes Milton frequently as he rallies abolitionist forces. Students will write response papers, give class presentations, and write a final scholarly essay on a topic of their choice which we will compose in structured stages. All interested students are welcome and no previous knowledge of Milton or 17th century English culture is required.  

Matthew Pitt 
W 1:00-3:40 
Core: None 
English Major: Writing 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective 
Creative Writing: Upper Division Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing Seminar 

This course, offered to graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates, will be both project and process-intensive in nature. On the latter front, we will discuss how generative creative writing research calls for a blend of strategy and spontaneity; why it can prove beneficial to approach a first draft with a plan to make a mess, and invite creative collisions; and how deep development in revision must heavily rely both on authors committing to their initial imaginative impulses, as well as being receptive to altering, contesting, or even abandoning outright the blueprints that launched their journeys. Your instructor will tell the story of his forthcoming novel (set for launch early in our semester), exploring its origins and evolution over the course of many years and drafts. Simultaneously, we will discuss in-depth facets of the publication and production process, from submitting to editing to design. 

During the term, other authors will visit class or converse with students via Zoom, delineating the varied creative and publication paths of their latest works (covering several genres). Students, in turn, will research, draft, and revise multiple original pieces. The seminar will offer an editing practicum component and require students to curate markets suitable for their writing: both creative endeavors, as well as professional articles assigned or written “on spec”. 

Undergraduate Enrollment by Department Permit Only; contact Professor Pitt. 

Mohammed Iddrisu 
TR 9:30 – 10:50 
Core: CA, WEM 
English Major: Theory 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetoric & Culture 
Creative Writing Major: Elective  

This course is designed to critically explore rhetorical traditions and cultural practices mainly across non-Western cultures. We will engage with and examine different ways of knowing and being among different cultures, especially in the so-called Global South, and within Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. The scholarship we will engage with will call you to bear witness and respond to, in the words of Ellen Cushman, “the obligation of challenging imperial legacies of knowledge and power that have continued to structure the relationships we can have to place/land, history, our bodies, and one another”. To do this, we will delve into decolonial rhetorics and practices, Indigenous ways of creating and circulating knowledge, and alternative ways of knowing, being, and languaging that resist and challenge Eurocentric colonial paradigms. 

Readings may include writings by James Baldwin, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Ellen Cushman, Michael Bokor, Achille Mbembe among others. Course assignments may include case study analysis, critical response essays, and a final research paper. 

Chantel L. Carlson 
T 3:30 – 4:50 
Core: None 
English Major: Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing & Publishing 
Creative Writing Major: Internship 

This section of WRIT 30390 is a 1.5 credit-hour internship course intended for students with an interest in literary magazine publication and basic web design. Students in the course will work in every stage of the production of the semester’s print issue of eleven40seven, TCU’s undergraduate journal of the arts, and its web edition (www.1147.tcu.edu). Specifically, students will gain knowledge of and experience in (1) the history and purpose of the student literary magazine, (2) the selection, editing, and proofing of the semester’s submissions, (3) the journal’s print layout and the design of the issue’s web edition, and (4) the distribution and promotion of the completed issue. Students will also receive, as needed, practical software training. The course may be repeated for credit.   

Chantel L. Carlson 
R 3:30 – 4:50 
Core: None 
English Major: Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing & Publishing 
Creative Writing Major: Internship  

This 1.5 credit-hour service-learning course is intended for students with an interest in basic book publication, as well as community outreach.   Students in the course will be working either with a nonprofit (which may require time “on site”) or focusing on a community-based social issue.  Students will listen to and collect stories, which will then be compiled as a series of monologues.  Students will gain knowledge of and experience in (1) the history and purpose of monologues as a form of dramatic storytelling, (2) the collection, selection, editing, and proofing of participants’ stories, (3) the design of the monologue’s layout, and (4) the distribution and promotion of the completed text.  Students will also receive, as needed, practical software training. The course may be repeated for credit.​ 

Charlotte Hogg 
TR 11:00 – 12:20 
Core: CA, WEM 
English Major: Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Seminar 
Creative Writing Major: Elective 

**(REQUIRED for Writing Majors who declared in or after Fall 2024) 

Note: English majors/minors can enroll in this course with special permission. 

This experiential education course is designed for Writing majors and minors to make meaning of your academic endeavors so far and launch you into possibilities beyond college. There are two intersecting goals: 1) reinforce your research and writing practices through an in-depth research project in writing studies and 2) to investigate career opportunities and practices that center writing in this dynamic and fast-moving digital landscape. You’ll consider your interests in the context of writing studies, careers that involve writing, and your own habits and productivity as a writer. Whether your interests lean more toward rhetoric and culture, design and editing, creative writing, or you’re not sure how to use your writing knowledge, there are a host of possibilities and expectations to discover through your research, study of your own writing practices, exploration of writing careers, and creation of your own professional portfolio. Likely texts include Researching Writing, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, and more. Prerequisites: Writing majors and minors only; students must have junior or senior standing and must have completed one 30000-level ENGL or WRIT course. 

Shuv Raj Rana Bhat 
MWF 1:00 – 1:50 
Core: CA, CSV, WEM 
English Major: Theory, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetoric & Culture 
Creative Writing Major: Elective  

WRIT 40333 Language, Rhetoric and Culture explores the role of language in human communication and culture, with attention to the implications of language ideologies to various forms of communicative interaction. Language, rhetoric, and culture are three fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. Language, more than just words, is how we make our way in the world, how we understand the world. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, illuminates the how of communication: how are we affected by specific things and how do we in turn affect others? Culture depends on rhetoric and language to assert itself upon us, to create a world for us to inhabit. We will be examining this complex intersection through a variety of texts and artifacts interrogating and developing theories of their interplay. We will be reading and writing in a variety of modes: text, image, video, etc. from various perspectives: critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, media-centered approach, visual rhetoric approach, a culture-centered approach, dramatistic/narrative approach etc. 

Ismael Quinones 
MW 4:00 – 5:20 
Core: GA 
English Major: Theory, Elective 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetoric & Culture 
Creative Writing Major: Elective  

What is revolution? How is rhetoric during and after revolution? How do war and democracy relate? Why do revolutions create and destroy political orders? Our class will question how rhetorics of revolution change, maintain, and configure times of possibilities. Students in this class will develop a multimodal project based on historical essays, chronicles, and an archive to learn how to gather evidence, build an argumentative case, and practice democratic speech.     

Jason Helms & Stephen Boakye 
TR 2:00-3:20 
Core: WEM 
English Major: Writing 
Writing & Rhetoric Major: Digital Rhetorics & Design 
Creative Writing Major: Elective  

In this course, you will explore the topic of sound as well as author multimedia texts intended for audio consumption. Products for this class will not be the traditional, academic-oriented essays, but will instead be audio texts intended to be flexible enough for several different devices. You will produce a variety of products that examine different ways sound expresses and communicates meaning to a listening audience as well as read the most recent theories regarding authorship challenges. We will also be looking at and composing with rhetoric in mind, culminating in several formal works to be distributed as a class.