| UNIVERSITY CORE LITERATURE COURSES |
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UCCS Learning Objectives for Literature and Performing Arts (LPA)Upon completing these courses, students will be able to: (1) Produce oral and written assessments of literary and cultural texts and/or performances using the language and concepts of the discipline of literary studies. |
ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 13 sem. hrs. General Description: An introductory survey of British literary traditions from the beginnings to the late 18th century. Approaches vary with instructor; authors likely to be studied include Behn, Carey, Chaucer, Marie de France, Fielding, Johnson, Lanyer, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Swift, and Wroth. Typically offered every fall term Prereq: English 1 or equiv. and English 2 or equivalent • Professor Tim Machan
Course Description: This course surveys a selection of literature written prior to the end of the eighteenth century. We will concentrate on a variety of authors who have come to be considered significant for a variety of reasons, whether for their artistic achievements, their commentary on society, or their contribution to notions of literary history. Although attention will be given to historical perspective, the course will emphasize close reading and classroom discussion. • Professor Ed Duffy
Course Description:In this survey course, we will start with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, move on to some representaive poets of the English Renaissance and lastly to (mostly) the prose of the eighteenth-century, including a novel. The effort throughout will be to learn how to read these writers from far away and long ago, a process that begins with realizing that you do have to learn how to read them and just might end up with your realizing that their works still speak to us. • Professor Steve Karian
Course Description: This course will examine major works of British literature from the Anglo-Saxon period through the eighteenth century. We will study these works in relation to three major topics: heroism, love, and discovery. The structure for this course will therefore permit a comparative approach that allows us to understand the changes and continuities evident in pre-1800 British literature, and specifically how British writers and readers grappled with ideals of heroism, patterns of romantic attachment, and attitudes toward non-Europeans. • Professor Al Rivero
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ENGL 2510 —Introduction to American Literature 13 sem. hrs. General Description: An introductory survey of American literary traditions from the beginnings to the Civil War. Approaches vary with instructor; authors likely to be studied include early Native Maerican oral traditions and works by authors such as Adams, Bradstreet, Child, Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, Franklin, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Murray, Poe, Rpwlandson, Stoew, Thoreau, Wheatley, and Whitman. Prereq: English 1 or equiv. and English 2 or equiv. • Professor Sarah Wadsworth
Course Description: In this course, we will read, discuss, and analyze a variety of American texts dating from the sixteenth century through the Civil War. Our purpose will be to investigate the origins and early development of the many literary traditions of the American colonies and the United States. In the first segment of the course, we will study a range of colonial texts, representing the period’s most significant authors, genres, and themes. The latter portions of the course look at imaginative literature of the early national and antebellum periods, paying particular attention to the Transcendentalists, the American Renaissance, and the impact of slavery and abolitionism on the development of American literature. Throughout the course, we will examine the tensions between convention and innovation and explore the ways in which literary expression reflects and critiques prevailing cultural values. The format of the course is a mix of lecture and discussion, with strong emphasis placed on student participation. Assignments: Two papers (five pages each), a midterm exam, a final exam, and brief reading quizzes given at intervals throughout the semester. • Professor Amy Blair
Course Description: This course is designed to give you a general overview of the themes and issues that have concerned people writing in or about “America” from the Colonial Period to the Civil War. We are going to be taking as our starting point a serious inquiry into what exactly “America” entails, and by the end of the course, you may be revising your initial notions of what counts as “Literature” as well. We will be moving roughly chronologically, looking at the development of literary genres and discussing the history of publication throughout the course. We will learn the fundamentals of literary analysis (“close reading” will become our mantra this semester), while we investigate the effects of historical and cultural contexts on authors and works. • Professor Angela Sorby
Course Description: In this course we will examine literary expressions of bondage and freedom, focusing on texts from the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. We will read the tortured, oddly erotic poetry of a Puritan minister; we’ll follow the adventures of a woman captured by Indians during King Philip’s War; we’ll trace the trials of an 18th century woman who can’t quite bring herself to marry; and we’ll witness the daring escape of Eliza across the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Along the way, students will come to appreciate American literature as a living facet of American history, while honing their writing, speaking, and listening skills. Readings: Douglass, Narrative of the Life; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Whitman, Song of Myself, and others. Assignments: two papers, two exams, one in-class presentation, 3-5 pop quizzes, and class participation. |
ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature; Fiction3 semester hours General Description: An introduction to various types of fiction (e.g., fable, short story, novel) representing a range of cultural perspectives with emphasis on techniques for analyzing the conventions, structure and style of fiction. Offered every term. Prereq: English 1 or equiv. and English 2 or equiv. • Professor Steve Hartman Keiser
Course Description: Our primary goal is to encounter and enjoy important works of fiction. Good stories touch us at our truest core, spurring us to reflect on and reassess our lives: what it means to be—and what it means to be responsible for our choices in speaking and acting. Franz Kafka said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” In this course we will learn to become better axe-wielders. One way we will do this is by looking at the remarkable variation in the English language around the world and how authors use this to build their stories and characters. Upon completion of this course you will be able to:
Readings. Among the authors whose works we will read are: Baldwin, Walker, Chekhov, Oates, and Alexie. • Professor Amara Graf
• Professor Aesha Adams
Course Description: At a recent Fashion in Fiction conference at the University of Technology Sydney, literary critics took under consideration Roland Barthes’ claim that fashion was not an 'industry' but rather a set of fictions. In this section of Introduction to Fiction, we will enter that conversation and focus on the interesting connections between Fashion and Fiction. In addition to examining how fashion functions in short stories and novels we will also consider questions like: when is fiction considered fashionable? In what ways might the production and consumption of fashion parallel the production and consumption of fiction? In what ways might the portrayal of fashion in literary texts reflect, complicate ,and challenge society’s fictions about gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, etc? Readings: Mainly short stories and some novels. • Professor Erik Ankerberg
• Professor Ronald Bieganowski, S.J. Mystery Incarnated in Human Life
Course Description: Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.” (Mystery and Manners). This section of Introduction to Literature: Fiction will engage the breadth and depth of the mystery incarnated in human life through stories created by some of the most imaginative writers, particularly American writers. The readings, reflection, and discussion of stories of human mystery will lend an individual tone to what James Baldwin describes as the artist’s task: “...while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell...." (“Sonny’s Blues”) Readings: Included will be stories by Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin as well as several others. Assignments: Writing assignments will include several brief papers, two medium length papers, and a final essay exam. Class will be primarily discussion format because “it takes a whole class to get at what stories are about.” • Professor Larry Watson
Course Description: Our primary goal in this course will be understand and appreciate fiction (mostly short stories but with a few novels thrown in as well), and we’ll proceed under the assumption that greater understanding leads to greater appreciation (and vice versa). We’ll read a variety of fiction (but concentrate on 20th and 21st century practitioners), and we’ll employ a variety of critical approaches. Readings: Carver, Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway, Munro, Oates, Updike, and others. Assignments: Mid-term and final exams, one critical essay, one review, and a series of very short reaction papers.
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ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature; Drama3 semester hours General Description: An Introduction to the forms and principles of drama, often surveying its development from its origins in ancient Greece to the contemporary theater, with emphasis on techniques for analyzing the conventions, structures and styles of dramatic literature. Class will typically read works from a number of centuries and study authors from continental, British and American traditions. Classes usually include at least one play by Shakespeare. Offered every term. Prereq: English 1 or equiv. and English 2 or equiv. • Staff
• Professor Mary Colleen Willenbring 102 MWF 9:00
• ProfessorMary Beth Tallon
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ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature; Poetry3 semester hours General Description: An introduction to poetry from variety of traditions. Emphasis on close reading of poems to learn how formal techniques of verse (e.g., symbolism, metaphor, simile, imagery, persona, meter, rhythm) combine for poetic effect. Offered every term. Prereq: English 1 or equiv. and English 2 or equiv. • Professor Heather Hathaway
Course Description: The goal of this class is twofold: 1) to learn how to listen to, read, and analyze poetry, and 2) to come to enjoy doing so! We will study a wide variety of writers, as well as poems ranging from classic to contemporary, in order to come to a better understanding of the literary conventions that shape the genre. Readings: Authors include those you expect to see in a poetry class—such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Mary Oliver—as well as those you might not--such as Matsuo Basho, Lawson Inada, and Tato Laviera. By the end of the semester, you’ll want to join Garrison Keillor’s “Poem of the Day” club! • Professor Ed Block
Course Description: The principal goal of this course is what has been the primary goal of education since the time when Greek literature and philosophy arose: "Know thyself." That goal has been part of Jesuit education since its inception in the 1540s. Reflective self-knowledge, then; after that, substantial knowledge of a subject matter (English, American, world poetry). Other goals include nurturing the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual skills necessary to appreciate and benefit from the experience of poetry. Finally, the start of a life-long process of self-reflection, here linked to a growing appreciation of one of the most ancient, and enduring forms of art: the poem. As a literature course within Marquette’s Core of Common Studies, the three specific objectives of that component of the core are also parts of this course. Assignments: Graded work will include: quizzes, participation, a response paper, a "stylistic" analysis, a literary critical analysis, a reflective paper, and a mid-term and a final examination. Extra credit will include a poetry notebook and the memorization of sixty lines of poetry, before the start of the last week of classes. • Professor MC Bodden
Course Description: This Introduction to Poetry course has four aims: 1) to acquaint you with the variety and range of poems by poets from broad perspectives of culture, history, race, gender and sexuality. 2) To become familiar with different forms of poetry: sonnet, blues stanza, ballad, lyric, free verse, terza rima, the villanelle, etc. 3) To develop the your knowledge of literary critical methods enabling you to read and to evaluate what makes good poetry, and 4) to develop skills of critical thinking through writing and close reading of these poems. Critical writing means, that along with analyzing forty-some poems in class, the students themselves undertake a project in which they develop a poem from its single theme and tone to incorporating more sophisticated internal elements (extended metaphor, meter, figures of speech, images, and if they wish, rhyme schemes) as a means of learning through writing. Assignments: Two essay-exams, quizzes, mid-term and final exams, and the poetry writing project. • Professor John Boly
Course Description: Ever felt completely flummoxed by poetry? Or been intimidated by those things with the ragged right margins that people give each other in times of deep passion, or need, or regret, like forgetting to water the peperomia, or accidentally making the hash out of canned catfood? Well have no fear: this course is the answer to your prayers. You will learn to fathom the thematic depths and acoustic intricacies of even the most abstruse poetry. Through your mastery of the verse patternings of such subtle linguistic features as stress and rhythm, grammar and syntax, diction, imagery, tone, lineation, rhyme, metaphor, and other figurations, you will become an indisputable expert in the unraveling of poetic perplexities. Want to impress your parents, wow your boy/girl friend, and finally get some respect from the dog? Then you have got to take this course. |
ENGL 2740: Reading Film as Narrative• Staff
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ENGL 2931: Topics in Literature and Culture: Global English Literatures• Professor Chris Krueger
Course Description: English has become a global language that disseminates an increasingly global “hybrid” culture. Not only are the cultural products of native speakers of English spread around the world, but textual artists who are not native speakers nevertheless produce novels, poems, screenplays, etc., in English in order to reach a wider readership, a more lucrative market, or a globally-dominant audience. The purpose of this course is to examine the history of this phenomenon and to assess its importance for those readers whose first language is English as well as for those who are non-native readers. Additionally, we will consider the significance of English literature evolving into a global—not merely national—cultural tradition.
Course-specific Objectives
Readings: Assignments: |
| UPPER DIVISION COURSES |
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ENGL 3210: Advanced Composition• Professor Rebecca Nowacek
Course Description: This course is designed to help you develop your skills as a writer: to increase your control over the process of writing and to 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. Ultimately, my goal is to help the writers enrolled in this course develop two qualities as authors: fluency and flexibility. Toward that end, this course is designed around the workshop method—which means working in groups to share your own writing and respond thoughtfully to that of others—and on a deferred grading system that encourages significant revision throughout the semester. • Professor Kris Ratcliffe
Course Description: According to ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians, the study of rhetoric teaches students to express their own ideas, values, and beliefs in ways that their audiences can actually hear them. Long before the western world separated the rational from the imaginative, Isocrates (a classical Greek rhetorician who lived from 436-338 BCE and who studied with both Socrates and the sophists) argued that the study of rhetoric should combine analytical thinking and creative imagination; this combined educational focus, he believed, develops better thinkers, readers, speakers, and writers. This semester, we will test this theory by studying analysis and creative non-fiction. We will study classical and contemporary rhetorical tactics to expand our repertoire of reading and writing choices. We will use those tactics to read and analyze a variety of essays—some famous, some not so famous—to develop our eyes and ears. Most importantly, we will write, critique each other's writings, and rewrite. And we will keep in mind Virginia Woolf injunction that “a good essay . . . must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.” |
ENGL 3220: Writing for the Professions• Dr. Donna Schuster
Course Description: The primary goal is to help you learn how to produce documents for the workplace—documents that are quite different from what students produce for academic purposes. Workplace documents are practical, highly contextualized, and results-oriented. Their purpose is not to demonstrate that you have learned a concept or a set of facts but to get work done in the world. Indeed, the processes and products of workplace writing are quite different from what you probably have become used to in college. On-the-job writing is inevitably situational and goal-oriented. Thus, we will talk frequently about how to analyze workplace contexts and how to use written texts to get the results you want, from getting a job to getting a proposal approved to coordinating and reporting results of an assigned project. This analysis will be guided by four major concepts/factors that typically define a document’s context: audience, purpose, use, and genre. Some of the content areas on which we will focus include job market analysis, visual and statistical literacy, and the use and benefits of the technology necessary to successfully function in a contemporary, global workplace environment. Students will be required to complete a job search portfolio, a variety of letters and memos, design visuals for collateral materials, a client proposal portfolio, and a final, collaborative project which includes performance assessments. While it doesn’t sound glamorous, Writing for the Professions will help you learn how to effectively function in a variety of workplace environments as you consider your move out of the academic sphere and into the workplace. Course format run as a workplace and workshop environment and will include regular collaboration as well as consistent peer and teacher feedback. Readings: |
ENGL 4027/5027: Teaching English in the Secondary School• Professor Sharon Chubuck
Course Description:ENGL 190 is a 3 credit advanced methods class designed to introduce pre-service teachers to knowledge of pedagogy, content pedagogy, and critical pedagogy for the secondary English classroom. Theories of reading and writing will be studied, with a variety of pedagogical methods modeled for students to understand the nature of teaching. Students will engage in a variety of activities and discussions to meld theory into practice. Throughout the course, the lenses of race, class, and gender will be used to interpret both readings and field experiences. Forty hours of field placement are included in ENGL 190. This course typically precedes the semester of student teaching. |
ENGL 4110/5110: English Linguistics• Professor Steve Keiser Structured Noise, Structured Motion: An Introduction to Language & English Linguistics.
Course Description: The aim of this course is to wow you with the wonder of language: its complexity, systematicity, and diversity. We will take a scientific approach to the investigation of language, that is, we will collect data, analyze it, and consider testable hypotheses to account for it. In the process you will evaluate your beliefs and attitudes about language and human beings as language speakers.
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ENGL 4210: Processes of Writing• Professor Rebecca Nowacek 4 credit hours
Course Description: This course is designed for students who would like to learn more about the nature of written composition and/or become tutors in the Ott Memorial Writing Center. It is open to all students. English 192 is a four-credit course. The fourth credit is earned by observing and, when you are ready, tutoring in the writing center. Students are also required to attend the writing center staff meeting held weekly from 12:00-12:50 on Fridays. We will study both theoretical and practical aspects of the nature and development of composing processes. Topics we will cover include: (1) strategies for using a one-to-one conference setting to help people improve their writing, (2) theory and research which tell us about how experienced writers find good ideas and revise their drafts effectively, (3) rhetorical principles of writing for specific audiences and purposes, and (4) ways to help people learn how to correct grammar and usage errors in their own writing. Written assignments: Likely to include ... two short papers analyzing and reporting upon published articles in composition or writing centers, two reflection papers about the peer tutoring experience, participation in an electronic forum, and a longer paper relating the theory and practice of tutoring. |
ENGL 4250/5250: Creative Writing; Fiction• Professor CJ Hribal
Course Description: A course in writing fiction, organized as a discussion/workshop. The first third of the semester will be a variety of writing exercises and readings and small group workshops moving into a full class workshop. The last two thirds of the semester will be workshopping student short stories or novel chapters and discussing published works of fiction from a technical, craft-oriented perspective. Readings: On Writing Short Stories, Tom Bailey, and the students’ own work. Assignments: In addition to writing numerous exercises covering the basics of craft, students will produce a portfolio of 20 pages of fiction by semester’s end. They will also discuss and analyze each other’s work and write critical annotations analyzing aspects of craft in a number of short stories, including a letter to the author of each workshopped story discussing their work. Expect, too, to write many more pages of fiction than the 20 that will comprise the final portfolio. • Professor Larry Watson
Course Description: A course in writing fiction, organized as a discussion/workshop. In addition to writing exercises covering the basics of the craft, students will produce 30-40 pages of fiction by the end of the semester. They will also discuss each other’s works and write critical responses to a number of short stories. Readings: Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and student short stories. Assignments: Exercises in fictional techniques, at least one complete short story, and critical responses to workshop fiction.
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ENGL 4260/5260: Creative Writing; Poetry• Professor Angela Sorby
Course Description: In this rigorous course, students will learn to write contemporary poetry through the workshop process. Weekly assignments will enable students to stretch and surprise themselves, while regular readings will support their creative development by providing models and inspiration. This course is appropriate for both beginning and advanced writers; everyone will be challenged in an atmosphere of positive support. Readings: Among the poets studied will be Cornelius Eady, David Kirby, Alison Joseph, Billy Collins, and Sharon Olds. Assignments: A portfolio of finished work, a public reading, and participation in the workshop process.
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ENGL 4460/5460: The Romantic Period 1790-1837• Professor Diane Long Hoeveler
Course Description: Race, class and gender have emerged during the past two decades as central to the study of the literature of the British Romantic period. This class examines the major Romantic texts in relation to a complex of issues--authorial voice, imagery patterns, symbolism, structuring principles, and ideological configurations--that can be read differently when one takes race, class, and gender into consideration. More specifically, we will examine the issues of slavery and abolition, the class anxieties caused by rapid industrialization and economic growth, and the use of the feminine as a representation in texts written by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley. Readings: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley. Some of the novels or longer works that we will read will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and Frankenstein, and Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative of his slavery and escape. Assignments: Requirements include an avid interest in sharing your ideas and insights with the class, a take-home midterm and final exam, and two research/interpretive papers.
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ENGL 4480/5480: The Modernist Period in Brit Lit• Professor John Boly
Course Description: The first half of the twentieth century, though broadly known as the modernist era, in fact comprises a period of intense experimentation. Writers struggled to make sense of the breakneck speed with which one disaster after another overtook western culture. Novelists and poets sought ways to reconcile the staid and settled forms inherited from the Victorian tradition with the new demands and pressures of their inchoate lives. In this course we will study the practices, compromises, brilliant discoveries, and cunning evasions with which the major modern writers of fiction and poetry sought to protect their momentary stays against confusion. Students will have ample opportunity to practice new interpretive methods, to hone their writing skills, and to contribute to energetic and provocative discussions. |
ENGL 4510/5510: Colonial American Lit from the Beginnings to 1798• Professor Amy Blair
Course Description:This course will focus on the simultaneous rise of imaginative literature and representative democracy in the United States, paying particular attention to the rise of the American novel. A brief study of the dialogue between the “New World” and the “Old World” that attempted to define what “America” was or could become will be the foundation of our studies; we will look, for example, not only at the descriptions explorers wrote of their travels, but at the imaginative reworking of those tales by canonical British authors. We will spend most of the semester looking at 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. Readings: a diverse set of authors that encompasses women, Africans both slave and free, and Native American writers, will include: travel and captivity narratives; popular ballads; political and philosophical tracts; poetry; autobiographies; diaries; and early American novels. |
ENGL 4550/5550: 20th-Century American Literature; The Modern Period• Professor Milt Bates
Course Description: A study of some of the major American fiction and poetry published between 1900 and World War II. Among other objectives, the course will investigate the formal strategies of modernism in the literature and visual art of the period. Classes will proceed by lecture and discussion. |
ENGL 4610/5610: Individual Author• Professor Heather Hathaway
Course Description: Toni Morrison has been a formidable force shaping 20the century American literary history. As an editor at Random House, she played a pivotal role in selecting contemporary fiction for publication. As a literary critic, she has worked toward transforming scholarly understanding of the role of race in American literature. As an educator, she has helped a generation of readers understand the changing nature of the American literary canon. Most importantly, as an author, she has produced an oeuvre of fiction, criticism, and cultural commentary which earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this course we will study Morrison’s role in American literary history by examining selected works. Readings: Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise, A Mercy and Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. • Professor Ed Block
Course Description: This course, on the British-born poet, Denise Levertov, who lived and worked for most of her life in the United States, proposes to highlight the life of a prominent twentieth-century woman writer who responded in a special way to her sense of poetic calling. Besides presenting her career as the unfolding of a multi-faceted vocation -- as poet, peace activist, ecologist, and feminist -- we shall consider her work in light of the development of lyric poetry in twentieth-century American and British literature. Assignments: Levertov's poetic process involves attentive observation as well as reflection on perceptions and lived experiences. Besides having students keep a reflective journal, the course will offer them the opportuniy to observe, record, and turn into poetry the fruits of their reflection. Other assignments will include oral presentations, two literary analyses, and a term paper. The final assignment will be a short reflection paper, enabling students to look back on the course, and their Marquette experience, for how they have sharpened awareness of their skills and/or shaped their life goals and sense of vocation. |
ENGL 4620/5620: Chaucer• Professor MC Bodden
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ENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeares Major Plays• Professor Ed Duffy
Course Description:We will study the major genres that Shakespeare worked in -- comedy, history play, tragedy, romance -- with three continuing emphases: how individual plays explore, use and transform these genres; how in different ways they hold a dramatic mirror up to (human) nature and the times; the language of the plays. • Professor John Curran
Course Description: This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s art and some of its major themes. The course will include representatives of Shakespeare’ 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, 1 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. • Professor Amelia Zurcher
Course Description: In this course we’ll read plays representative of each of the four major genres (comedy, history, tragedy, and romance). We’ll pay close attention to the plays’ cultural and historical context, as well as their language and themes, and we will also consider issues of performance. Assignments: Requirements will include two essays, a midterm and final, and a small group project. |
ENGL 4710/5710: Studies in Genre• Professor Sarah Wadsworth
Course Description: This course investigates various ways in which creative writers have attempted to create a sense of the American past and comprehend its legacies of conflict and conquest through the medium of fiction. Readings will cluster around several key contexts in American history, including the European exploration of the New World; the colonization of New England; the settling of the West; and imperialism. Readings: Primary texts ranging from documentary accounts to historical romance to contemporary experimental novels will bring into focus questions concerning the relationship between fact and fiction, authority and authenticity, history and historiography, narrative and counter-narrative; conflict and resolution. Assignments: Students should expect to complete a research paper and several brief response papers, in addition to substantial readings and a final exam. • Professor Tom Jeffers
Course Description: We will read, relish, and criticize some novels that focus on the realities of family life, starting with courtship and having children, and moving on to the weal and woe of living together as parents and offspring in societies that pose their own challenges, and sometimes offer help. Assignments: Short papers, reports, panels, readings aloud with commentaries, and daily discussions. |
ENGL 4810/5810: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity (Subtitle?)• Professor Jodi Melamed
Course Description: The course examines the construction and deployment of race and ethnicity in U.S. culture and society over the course of the last 100 years up until our present moment, post-9/11 and in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. In particular, it examines the centrality of literature for understanding cultural and political negotiations around race and ethnicity. We will consider the role of literature in maintaining “common-sense” ideas about race and ethnicity and as an instrument for trying to over-turn conventional notions. We will work comparatively within and between sequences focused on a key word or concept from race and ethnic studies and featuring literary texts from authors identified with European American, African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American and Arab American literary traditions. Throughout, our challenge will be to understand racialization – a process that stigmatizes some forms of humanity for the profit, pleasure, comfort and privilege of others – as a complex factor that has deeply shaped the social fabric of our own location (Marquette and Milwaukee), the U.S. and the modern world. We will also try to understand the politics of our social locations – our identities - at particular intersections of culture/history/gender/race/class/ethnicity/sexuality and nation. Especially toward the end of class, we will use the case of Milwaukee to think about the history and present of racial and ethnic differences at work on the level of both macro-institutions (such as law, economy, and government) and microstructures (such as everyday living and individual experience). Readings: Texts from European American, African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American and Arab American literary traditions. |
ENGL 4830/5830: African America Lit• Professor Jodi Melamed
Course Description: A study of major works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and drama by African American authors writing from slavery through the present day. Works will be situated in their historical, biographical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. In particular, we will examine how the trope of the nation and national belonging develops in African American literature in critical difference with dominant discourses of U.S. nationalism. This will lead us into a discussion of Black internationalism as a cultural, political, and intellectual phenomenon. Throughout, we will look at what African American discourses on citizenship have to offer us now, as we rethink citizenship in light of contemporary globalization and the increasing importance of international law, international civil society, and global regulatory regimes. Readings: Authors to be studied will likely include Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid. |
ENGL 4840/5840: Post Colonial Literature• Professor John Su
Course Description: In this course, we will explore the literatures of former British colonies since the 1950s. At its apex, the British Empire spanned the globe, and its power was not only military and economic but cultural. The challenge facing a writer from one of the former colonies is how to interact with and appropriate British models of culture. For one of the harshest truths to be faced is the impossibility of restoring a pre-colonial purity. From the first moment of the colonial encounter, peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas have had to learn to accommodate themselves to the presence of a foreign power. This presence leaves enduring traces even after colonists themselves leave. Yet, the colonial encounter has proven to be a transformative experience for the British colonists as well. Indeed, the very notion of British identity becomes indelibly linked to empire and the colonial project. We will explore the cultural conversations and clashes between the center and periphery of empire as it is recorded by twentieth-century novelists. In this high stakes encounter of rewriting the past and imagining the future, our guiding question will be: how can British cultural systems and indigenous beliefs be reconciled? We will investigate how novelists in the colonies create imaginary communities whose formation is not determined by the historical implications of the colonial project. In turn, we will explore how novelists in Britain use the colonies to define British identity. And finally we will see how the re-reading and rewriting of the British historical record by postcolonial authors offers unique insights into the cultures of both Great Britain and its former colonies. Possible readings include: Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ngugi, J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid |
ENGL 4860/5860: Survey of Women's Literature• Professor Christine Krueger
Course Description: This course focuses on key issues in the study of women and literature, particularly how aesthetic features of texts (genre, rhetoric, plotting, characterization, allusion, point-of-view, etc.) are interrelated with political issues (equality, autonomy, enfranchisement, economic opportunity, property rights, etc.). As an upper-division course, it presupposes that students bring the skills of critical reading, analytical and argumentative writing, and research mastered in First Year English and L/PA courses. As is suggested by its subtitle—“The Politics of Aesthetics”—the course takes an interdisciplinary approach and invites students to bring to bear on discussions, essays, and exams their experience in courses in literature, philosophy, theology, psychology, etc. Readings include fiction and non-fiction, and trace crucial stages in the development of Anglo-American women’s writing in relation to feminism from the late eighteenth century to the present. Students will be expected to respond in discussion to the questions framed for each meeting, and to the related issues they imply; to master skills of literary analysis; to apply those skills to interpreting the relationship between aesthetics and politics in essays; to conduct and present research in collaboration with a group. By the end of this course, students will have a command of the course content and oral, writing, and research skills. Readings: Assignments: 2 Essays; Midterm and Final Exams; Group Oral Presentation |
ENGL 4931/5931: Special Topics in Literature and Writing• Professor Steve Karian
Course Description: This course explores the phenomenon of classic literary works that have been adapted by writers of a later generation. We will consider a series of questions while studying these paired works: how do the remakes make manifest something latent in the classic works? do the classic works anticipate the responses in the remakes? how do these readings affect our notions of literary originality? Ultimately, how do we define a classic and what do such definitions owe to its power to inspire remakes (whether respectful or critical)? The course will also engage with concepts of originality, parody, adaptation, and imitation. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to explore the inter-historical dialogue between these paired works, analyze them in a comparative way, and offer persuasive, interpretive arguments about them in written essays. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead • Professor Al Rivero
Course Description: Beginning with William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) and focusing on six other works written between the seventeenth and twentieth century, this course examines how race—specifically ‘race’ as defined within the context of slavery and its aftermath—is represented by authors writing at different historical moments, from different historical perspectives, circumstances, and locations. Written by both men and women, of different nationalities and ethnicities, set in Europe, Africa, and the so-called new world of the Americas, these works will help students understand how their own attitudes and beliefs about race have been shaped by a long and complex historical process. Whatever their ethnic and racial backgrounds, twenty-first century Marquette students inhabit a historical moment in which diversity is not only an ineluctable fact but also appears to be a good thing. It has not always been so, as the readings in both primary and secondary texts in this course will remind them. • Professor Milt Bates
Course Description: The course will begin with an overview of shorter responses to the American landscape from early European contact to about 1900. During the second half of the semester we will consider longer works that suggest the variety of environmental writing in the twentieth century. We will read historical and theoretical essays in tandem with the primary texts.
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ENGL 6210: Studies in English Lit the Beginnings to 1500; Chaucer• Professor Tim Machan
Course Description: This course has two primary concerns. First, to read a representative sample of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, concentrating particularly on the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Second, to consider how a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers read Chaucer’s works, style, and cultural significance. In this way, we will examine how Chaucer was transformed from a medieval poet to the “father of English poetry” by early modern editors, poets, and critics |
ENGL 6400: Studies in 19th-c Brit Lit: Wordsworth and Byron• Professor Ed Duffy
Course Description: A study in contrasts between solemn Wordsworth and mad and madly funny Byron, but with a shared ambition to write the epic of the nineteenth century, and a shared preoccupation with the textual performance or recuperation of the individual self. Readings: The initial text will be Wordsworth, The Prelude, followed by the so-called “romantic” and more or less Wordsworthian Byron of Childe Harold and then the “satiric” Byron of A Vision of Judgement and Don Juan. Assignments: Some informal class presentations, two short papers and one long (about 10-15 pages) |
ENGL 6700: Seminar in 20th Century American Literature; Modern Poetry• Professor Milt Bates
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ENGL 6840: Studies in Rhetoric and Composition Theory• Professor Aesha Adams
Course Description: In this course we will examine the histories and theories of teaching writing. The primary objectives are to help you understand the ongoing conversations about theory and practice in composition studies and to equip you to position yourself in these conversations so that you can begin to develop a theoretical framework for your own teaching. Part of what we’ll come to see is that theorizing is a dynamic process. In doing so we’ll talk about what theoretical assumptions you may already hold regarding the teaching of writing, which assumptions may lead you to adopt one theory and reject another, and why others may not even appear on your radar! Readings: The Norton Book of Composition Studies as well as supplemental readings on Electronic Reserve. |
ENGL 6931: Special Topics: The Memory of Injustice in Post-Holocaust America• Professor R. Clifton Spargo
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ENGL 6931: Special Topics: Catholic/Anti-Catholic Literature and Culture• Professor Diane Long Hoeveler
Course Description: When Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons recently swept the best-seller lists it should have been no surprise to anyone who understands the long history of Catholic and anti-Catholic themes in popular literature and culture. Looking back as far as Chaucer and earlier, the Roman Catholic Church has been constructed as a powerful disciplinary structure that has not always adhered to its own principles. In this course we will examine the shape and ideological configurations of Catholic and anti-Catholic themes from late eighteenth century British literature through the films of Alfred Hitchcock (I Confess). Specifically, we will begin with a brief survey of works influenced by the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and then move to the major gothic, romantic, Victorian, and contemporary classics of religious fiction. Readings: Some of the works to be read are Matthew Lewis’s The Monk; Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian; Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary; Frances Trollope’s Father Eustace; John Cardinal Newman’s Loss and Gain; Graham Greene’s Power and Glory and The End of the Affair. Assignments: An oral report, a book review, a conference paper, and a research paper are the requirements for the course. |
ENGL 8282: Studies in Contemporary Literary Criticism• Professor John Boly
Course Description: This seminar is designed as a reading course whose primary objectives are to give all students a solid background in the history and development of the main movements in twentieth century literary theory, and to assist Ph.D. candidates in particular to develop critical models which facilitate the interpretive insight and scholarly value of their dissertations. The classes are very much hands-on in that their discussions are substantially guided by the interests and concerns of seminar participants themselves. The assignments are oriented, wherever possible, to helping advanced students prepare for actual dissertation sections and chapters. |
English Department
