Previous Courses
UPPER DIVISION LITERATURE COURSES
3000 Critical Practices and Processes in Literary Studies
- 101 TTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Christine Krueger
Course Title: "Reading Minds: Psychology, History and Forms"
Course Description: The ability to read complex texts and make sense of them is the most important skill you can develop now that will change the rest of your life. Cognitive science demonstrates what English majors have always known--that reading nuanced, allusive, imaginative, and historically and culturally unfamiliar texts wires our brains not only to read any and all texts better, but to reason, empathize, plan, compromise and do all sorts of other important acts of “metacognition.” To practice and refine these skills, this course will integrate three forms of literary criticism: formalism, historicism, and cognitive criticism. They will help you “get into” some of the most beautiful, enlightening and moving works of English literature written over the past three centuries. Having got the hang of these approaches, you’ll be able to keep adding new ways of discovering meaning in literary and non-literary texts, from novels to scientific abstracts to haikus to contracts.
Readings: Longmans Anthology of British Literature (vols. 2A, 2B & 2C); George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin); Richard Lanham, Revising Prose; short readings on formalism, historicism and cognitive criticism (web).
Assignments:
Graded assignments: Two essays, three exams, participation.
Non-graded: Memorization and recitation, reading aloud, group work, worksheets.
- 101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor John Curran
Course Title: Shakespeare
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Shakespeare, Pre-1700
Course Description: This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s art and some of its major themes. The course will include representatives of Shakespeare’s four major dramatic genres - comedy, romance, history, and tragedy.
Readings: A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, The Tempest, Richard II, Henry IV, Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear.
Assignments: Students will be expected to come prepared to discuss specific problems they discern in the plays, read passages aloud in class, and serve as discussion leaders on at least three occasions. Further assignments will include three analytic papers (5 pages each) and a final exam.
- 101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor John Curran
Course Title: Milton
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700
Course Description: An examination of Milton’s life, times, art and thought, this course concentrates heavily on Paradise Lost. While we will work with specimens of the minor poetry and prose and with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, our primary task is to wrestle with the problems and questions emanating from Milton’s great epic
Readings: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
Assignment: Three papers and a final exam
4422 British Literature of the Long 18th Century
- 101 TTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Melissa Ganz
Course Title: Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900
Course Description: From bigamy and robbery to treason and murder, eighteenth-century novels obsessively depict illicit behavior. In this course, we consider the centrality of law and lawlessness to early English fiction, while exploring the ways in which novels can help us understand the nature and consequences of illicit acts. Reading fiction alongside criminal biographies, legal treatises, and statutes, we examine questions concerning justice and judgment, crime and punishment, gender and marriage, testimony and evidence, and legal terror and popular violence. Our texts include the lively and checkered autobiography of Moll Flanders, a four-time bigamist and successful thief who claims to have repented for her crimes even as she proudly narrates them; a novel by the founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, recounting the struggles of a young woman whose husband confines her in a madhouse; and a brilliant work of historical fiction that interrogates the duty to obey unjust laws. The course should appeal to students with interests in law and ethics as well as to anyone with an appetite for stories of transgression, punishment, and revenge.
Note: This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for English majors and also counts toward the new minor in Law and Society.
Readings: Novels by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott; secondary readings by Martha Nussbaum, Douglas Hay, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham, and others.
Assignments: Two papers; short reading responses; lively participation; and a final exam.
4432 US Literatures of the Revolution and New Republic
- 101 TTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Amy Blair
Course Title: US Literatures of the Revolution and New Republic
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900
Course Description: This course will cover the literature produced in and about the American continents from the period just before the American Revolution up through the early national period. The themes of “captivity,” “freedom,” “romance,” and “revolution” will loosely structure our study, as we look at the convoluted and tightly imbricated rhetorics of citizenship, nation-building, race, and gender. We will focus closely on the impacts of Puritanism and the Enlightenment on the formation of the emerging United States, and will consider carefully the debates surrounding the rise of an indigenous imaginative literature alongside the literature of the trans-Atlantic English diaspora. Students will pursue self-generated individual and group research projects throughout the semester.
4452 British Literature of the Romantic Period, 1790-1837
- 101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Brittany Pladek
Course Title: British Literature of the Romantic Period, 1790-1837: Art and Revolution
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900
Course Description: Wordsworth’s poetry, wrote William Hazlitt, “partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments.” The Romantic period (1790-1837) was a time of staggering change in western Europe. The scientific and philosophical discoveries of the Enlightenment, worldwide political upheaval, and advances in industrial production aligned with an era of literary innovation that both shaped and was shaped by the changes swirling around it. Poetry was a focal point for these revolutions. New forms, theories, and ways of reading verse rose to meet the challenge of a world that many felt had been “turned upside down.” The resulting shifts in what poetry was and meant reverberate in poetic reading to this day.
This class will survey the poetry of the British Romantic period as it participates in conversations about some of the era’s most significant historic and intellectual movements, including the French Revolution, slavery and abolition, industrial revolution, and the “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy led by Immanuel Kant. The class will partner with the Haggerty Museum, whose Fall 2017 exhibition, “The World Turned Upside Down: Apocalyptic Imagery in England, 1750-1850," explores images of apocalypse and revolution in Romantic England. Students will complete several assignments using the exhibit, culminating in designing their own tour of the exhibit based on course material. Finally, the class is designed as an introduction to the joys and demands of reading poetry. By surveying a range of Romantic poetic forms, students will be invited to become fluent in basic poetics and comfortable reading, interpreting, and enjoying poetry.
Readings: Work by Charlotte Smith, William Blake, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Letitia Landon.
Assignments: A few short papers, some working with the Haggerty’s “The World Turned Upside Down” exhibit; a museum tour.
- 101 TTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Leah Flack
Course Title: Modern Irish Literature and Culture
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900
Course Description: This course will explore the imaginative, world-changing power of modern Irish fiction, poetry, drama, music, and film. We will begin with the premise proposed by Declan Kiberd that the Irish “invented” Ireland (in dialogue with England). In our study, we will ask how Irish artists have grappled with changing questions surrounding what it means to be Irish in an era of empire, war, revolution, and peace. Some key questions we will explore include: what is the responsibility of the Irish artist at moments of political transition? How have literature and film enabled the Irish people to remember their past and envision their future? Our study will begin at the turn of the twentieth century with two of the best-known writers of the century, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and it will end with the contemporary award-winning fiction of Colum McCann (winner of the National Book Award), Eimear McBride (winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction), and Roddy Doyle (winner of the Booker Prize). Along the way, we will take a detour through Ireland’s rich musical tradition, from the Irish Rovers and the Pogues through U2 and Two Door Cinema Club. We will also view and discuss a number of films, including The Wind that Shakes the Barley, The Crying Game, and Brooklyn.
Assignments: Will include a choice of one long (10-12 page) paper or two shorter (5-7 page) papers; a short film and music review; a final exam; daily, informal reading responses; one discussion lead; and active, informed participation.
4610 Individual Authors - J.R.R. Tolkien
- 101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: J.R.R. Tolkien
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900
Course Description: This decade has seen the hundredth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle-Earth (The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917) alongside the completion of Peter Jackson’s career-defining twenty-year project to adapt The Lord of the Rings for film (1995-2015). This course asks the question: Who is J.R.R. Tolkien, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century? Why have his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy that he remade so completely in his image, remained so intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them? Our study will primarily trace the history, development, and reception of Tolkien’s incredible magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-1949, published 1954-1955)—but we will also take up Tolkien’s often contested place in the literary canon of the twentieth century, the uses and abuses of Tolkien in Jackson’s blockbuster films, the special appeal of Tolkien in politically troubled times, and the ongoing critical interests and investments of Tolkien fandom today. As Tolkien scholars we will also have the privilege of drawing upon the remarkable J.R.R. Tolkien Collection at the Raynor Library here at Marquette, which contains among other treasures the original manuscripts for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Note: No prior knowledge of Tolkien is required. The course is designed for a mix of first-time readers, frequent re-readers, and people who are returning to the books for the first time as adults after many years away.
Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and selected additional readings
Assignments: Final paper or creative project; weekly forum posts; one presentation; enthusiastic and informed class participation
- 101 TTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Christine Krueger
Course Title: Animals and the Origins of Children’s Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900, Post-1900
Course Description: Why are the great works of children’s literature filled with animals? Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Books and Just So stories, Peter Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear, The Chronicles of Narnia, all feature talking animals (even if some are stuffed toys). The relationship between ideas about animals and young humans is central to the evolution of the genre of children’s literature. This course explores the human-animal connection by placing classic literary texts in the contexts of evolutionary biology, animal and child protection movements, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology from 1860s-1960s. Students will do independent research projects and group research presentations. Three hypothesis statements/annotated bibliographies (30%); three group presentations (30%); cumulative research paper (30%); class participation (10%).
4810 Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
- 101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Tol Foster
Course Title: Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Fulfills English Major Requirement: UCCS Diversity Requirement
4825 Native American/Indigenous Literature
- 101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Tol Foster
Course Title: Native American/Indigenous Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: UCCS Diversity Requirement and Multicultural American Literature
- 101 TTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Ainehi Edoro
Course Title: The (Untold) History of the African Novel
Fulfills English Major Requirement: UCCS Diversity Requirement
Course Description: In this course, we will do an experiment. We will imagine a history of the novel in Africa that excludes the influence of European aesthetic forms. Modern African fiction has traditionally been situated within the history of the novel as a European invention, thereby making the history of fiction in Africa merely a part of a longer history that begins in Europe. Our goal is to tell the story of the African novel differently by setting up pre-modern African texts as the starting point. We will begin with texts like The Ozidi Saga, the Sundiata epic, Sayyid Abdallah’s 18th century Swahili poetry, Walatta Petros’ 17th century biography, Ifa divinatory stories, folk tales, etc. and then work our way up to novels like Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons, and Lauren Beukes’ horror thriller about a time-travelling serial killer. Our goal is simply to identify aesthetic elements in the African novel that are generated from within the African literary archive.
4997 Capstone - History of the Book and the Material Text
- 101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Elizaveta Strakhov
Course Title: Capstone – History of the Book
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Capstone requirement
Course Description: What is a book? Traditionally literary scholars answer this question by thinking about characters, plot, genre, etc. The discipline of the history of the book, however, answers this question rather differently. The history of the book looks at the book’s pages and their size, its cover (soft or hardbacked), the quality of its ink and illustrations, the tightness of its binding (how hard is it to crack open?), and all the other details that make the book a physical object before we start to ask ourselves questions about characters, plot, and genre. Because, often, we understand a book’s message, purpose, and the intent behind its composition far better when we take into account its status as, first and foremost, a physical object with a concrete history behind it. This research seminar will teach you the history and development of the book from the earliest origins of oral culture through our modern-day online reading culture, paying special attention to the origins and evolutions of the technologies of reading and writing. In addition to history, you will also learn the practical side of working with material literary objects: deciphering medieval and Renaissance handwriting, for example, and understanding the physical mechanisms of page-gathering and book-binding. In the process, we will be reading literary texts that thematize books, and libraries, as physical objects worthy of study and interpretation and/or that constitute landmark developments in the evolution of the book (like the the serialized novel or the graphic novel). We will also attend sessions at the MARVL lab, as well as the Haggerty Museum of Art and Raynor Library Special Collections, in order to experience texts as objects in a variety of beyond-the-classroom settings, both material and digital. For their capstone, each student will complete a research project tailored to his or her literary interests that will be centered on a physical item or items within Raynor Library Special Collections.
Readings: Texts included but not limited to: the Odyssey with Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Guillaume de Machaut’s Book of the True Story, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Mark Daniliewski’s House of Leaves, and David Levy’s Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age.
English Department
