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.
(2) Articulate how literary and cultural texts can transform one’s understanding of self, others, and communities.
(3) Apply the methodologies of literary criticism to representative works of literature.

ENGL 2310 —Introduction to Global Literature

3 sem. hrs.

• Professor Christine Krueger

• 101     TUTH     11:00-12:15      
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

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.
Literature Core Course Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this course you 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.
(2) Articulate how literary and cultural texts can transform one’s understanding of self, others, and communities.
(3) Apply the methodologies of literary criticism to representative works of literature.

Course-specific Objectives
When you have completed this course you will be able to:

(1) Explain the history of the dissemination of the English language and its literature.
(2) Identify the geographical, historical, and cultural contexts of the texts on our syllabus.
(3) Interpret the texts on our syllabus in terms of their geographical, historical and cultural contexts.

Readings:
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A.R. Braunmuller, Cambridge UP
Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Zoreh T. Sullivan, Norton
Kahled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, Riverhead Books
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Amstrong, Norton
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, Seal Press
Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, Washington Square Books
Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger, Penguin

Assignments:
1) 3 Examinations on reading comprehension and interpretation skills (#1--15 pts.; #2—15 pts.; final—20 pts., total 50 pts.)
2) 2 Essays demonstrating application of literary and cultural knowledge to the interpretation of texts. (15 pts. each, total 30 pts.)
3) 1 Group research/oral presentation topic explaining the significance of some feature of the dynamic between an assigned literary text and its contexts. (15 pts.)
4) Class participation—contribution of all recognition, analysis and reflection activities (5 pts.)

ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 1

3 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: ENGL 1 or equiv. and ENGL 2 or equivalent

ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 1

• Professor Staff

• 101     MWF     8:00-8:50     
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 1

• Professor Steve Karian

• 102     MW     2:00-3:15
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

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 travel. 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 the fictional uses of travel narratives.

Readings: Major works from the Anglo-Saxon period through the eighteenth century by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Rochester, Pope, Swift, and others.

Assignments: Class discussion, brief response papers, two 3-4 page papers, and three exams.

ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 1

• Professor Al Rivero              

• 103     TUTH     8:00-9:15
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: This course will offer an introductory survey of British literature from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth.

Readings: will include selections from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, selections from Shakespeare’s sonnets as well as King Lear, Behn’s Oroonoko, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Assignments: Midterm examination; comprehensive final examination; one class presentation; regular attendance; class participation; one or two short essays (5pp.).

ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 1

• Professor Amelia Zurcher

• 104     TUTH     9:30-10:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: In this course we'll read a variety of literature written in English before 1800, with an emphasis on literature as a conversation among individuals and groups -- about love, hate, beauty, how and why the world is the way it is, who makes the rules and whether they should change.  The course will

be run as a seminar, with a focus on discussion and writing.
Readings: will include lyric and narrative poems, plays, and novels
Assignments: midterm and final, short essays

ENGL 2410 —Introduction to British Literature 1

• Professor Leah Flack

• 105     TUTH    11:00-12:15
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments:

ENGL 2510 —Introduction to American Literature 1

3 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 American oral traditions and works by authors such as Adams, Bradstreet, Child, Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, Franklin, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Murray, Poe, Rpwlandson, Stowe, Thoreau, Wheatley, and Whitman.
Typically offered fall term.
Prereq: ENGL 1 or equiv. and ENGL 2 or equiv.

Introduction to American Literature 1

• Staff

• 101     MWF     9:00-9:50                         
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments:

Introduction to American Literature 1

• Professor Dana Edwards Prodoehl

• 102     MWF     10:00-10:50
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: The thematic focus of this class concerns the creation of the American identity. We will look to literature written between roughly 1600 and 1865, asking questions about how national identity is formed.  The two basic questions we will investigate are: 1) How do we define “American” with the help of the literature of America? and 2) What themes or tensions come out in American literature that give you possible answers? 

Assignments: The workload consists of two 5-7 page essays, a midterm exam, a cumulative final exam, quizzes, and in-class writing. Be prepared for a heavy reading and discussion load.

Readings: Our textbook will be the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes A&B, 7th edition.

Introduction to American Literature 1

• Professor Amy Blair

103     MWF      12:00-12:50

Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement                                 

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 ³America² from the Colonial Period through the Civil War.  We are going to be taking as our starting point a serious inquiry into what exactly ³America² entails, and by the end of the course, you may be revising your initial notions of what counts as ³Literature² as well.  In addition to poetry and imaginative prose, we will be reading explorers¹ accounts of their travels, captivity narratives, slave narratives, and political treatises, and looking at how literature both shapes and reflects our ideas of what it means to be "American."

Readings: Our textbooks will be the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes A&B, 7th edition, and Harriet Beecher Stowe¹s Uncle Tom¹s Cabin; authors studied may include Rowlandson, Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Payne, Hanna Webster Foster, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson.

Assignments: will include two essays focused on close reading; in-class close readings; a midterm; and a final exam.

Introduction to American Literature 1

• Professor Ronald Bieganowski, SJ

• 104     TUTH     12:30-1:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:  Beginning with some of the first writings documenting

experiences of the “New World,” this course will follow the developing story line of what it means to be American as told in fiction, drama, poetry, autobiography, and essays. The diverse range of characters, setting, action, narrative perspective and sequence, irony, and imagery — all help tell the story’s first part.

Readings: Readings will include those from Benjamin Franklin, Rowlandson, Royall Tyler, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and others.

Assignments: Two papers (4-5 pp.), several “Reflections” (1 p. each), a few quizzes, and final exam (essay) will be required. Discussion format.

Introduction to American Literature 1

• Professor Tom Jeffers

• 105     TUTH     2:00-3:15
• 106     TUTH     3:30-4:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:A panoramic view of major American writers from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation to, on the eve of the Civil War, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. A course like this parallels any history-department survey, though with us the emphasis is on literature--"the news that stays news." The plot, broadly speaking, concerns the planting, watering, and not infrequent weeding of what James MacGregor Burns has called the vineyard of liberty.

Assignments: Each student will write two essays of moderate length, offer an in-class reading and commentary on a particular passage, and take on a final exam.

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

3 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.

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Staff

• 101     MWF     8:00-8:50                       
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:

Readings:   

Assignments:   

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Steve Hartman Keiser        The Axe and the Frozen Sea

• 102     MWF     9:00-9:50
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

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:

1. Produce oral and written assessments of literary and cultural texts using the language and concepts of literary criticism.
    a. Respond critically to texts by writing clear, cogent, specifically supported essays.
2. Articulate how literary and cultural texts can transform one’s understanding of self, others, and communities.
    a. Describe how authors exploit language variation to construct intimacy and distance in social relationships, to define socioeconomic class, and to invoke history in their stories.
3. Apply the methodologies of literary criticism to representative works of literature.
    a. Identify the elements of fiction and the techniques of fiction writers and use these in interpreting texts.

Readings: Among the authors whose works we will read are: Baldwin, Walker, Chekhov, Oates, and Alexie.
Assignments: Oral presentation: Reading and commentary. Critical essays. Two exams.

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Staff

• 103     MWF     11:00-11:50
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments: 

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Amara Graf

• 104     MWF     12:00-12:50
• 105     MWF     1:00-1:50
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: This course examines the coming of age narratives of Latina/o authors and explores how they adapt the traditional bildüngsroman genre to reflect their specific socio-cultural contexts often blending aspects of autobiography and testimonio into their narratives. We will look at the cultural and historical forces that have both constrained and enabled the creative expression of self and communal identity among Latina/o authors. The texts will ask us to consider carefully several themes and narrative strategies; we will examine how authors address issues of nationality, migration, Diaspora, violence, loss, assimilation, language, and religion. We will also discuss how ethnicity and race along with other categories of difference, including class, gender, and sexual orientation influence identity formation. By paying proper attention to close textual readings, as well as the historical moments in which these works are occurring, we will develop a sense of the aesthetic and political stakes of Latina/o literary production.

Readings: Short stories and novels by various Latina/o authors including but not limited to Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Helena María Viramontes, and Rudolfo Anaya.

Assignments: Several short position papers, quizzes, two medium length papers, an oral presentation and final essay exam.

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Sr. Prochaska

•   106     TUTH     11:00-12:15                           
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:This course, Introduction to Fiction 042.1004 examines  the literature and perspectives expressed by writers from America, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, and beyond.  The student is invited to explore the multiple landscapes of the imagination which are engaged by writers who present various global cultures and mores.  Besides the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Willa Cather, the works studied by the students include Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, Isaac Beshavis Singer and others.  The vast world of fiction incorporates a marvelous and enriching human journey with its quests and obstacles, its glamorous visions, and its disastrous misfortunes, a journey that we all share.

Readings: Besides the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Willa Cather, the works studied by the students include Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, Isaac Beshavis Singer and others. 

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Barbara Glore

•   107     TUTH     12:30-1:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: In this class, we will engage in a shared inquiry of literary works that are focused on fictional characters engaged in the process of self-discovery and the search for personal identity.  Sometimes, these characters struggle with a sense of not belonging in new and unfamiliar settings, but oftentimes they struggle morally, politically, and socially in a place called home.  In all of these works, we will be attentive to how cultural differences of race, gender, and ethnicity can add to the way characters struggle to make sense of the present, a struggle frequently made more difficult by the burdens of the past and of memory and place.  In addition, as a way of shining a light on our readings, we will explore basic literary theories in order to approach these works through a variety of lenses.  To paraphrase English critic Terry Eagleton, constructing identity can be self-serving in helping us cope with the world around us, and oftentimes, the coping skills required of fictional characters are the same skills required of readers like us when dealing with everyday life.  In this way, as we explore the struggles and conflicts of fictional characters, we will strive to find meaning in the text so that we can learn more about ourselves, about others, and about the intersection of the two in the world.

Readings:Kafka, Hemingway, Carver, Watson, Petterson, Lahiri, Schneider, and others.

Assignments: Class participation; ten short critical responses; two five-page papers; one panel presentation; final essay exam.

ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction

• Professor Barbara Glore

•   108     TUTH     3:30-4:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: In this class, we will engage in a shared inquiry of literary works that are focused on fictional characters engaged in the process of self-discovery and the search for personal identity.  Sometimes, these characters struggle with a sense of not belonging in new and unfamiliar settings, but oftentimes they struggle morally, politically, and socially in a place called home.  In all of these works, we will be attentive to how cultural differences of race, gender, and ethnicity can add to the way characters struggle to make sense of the present, a struggle frequently made more difficult by the burdens of the past and of memory and place.  In addition, as a way of shining a light on our readings, we will explore basic literary theories in order to approach these works through a variety of lenses.  To paraphrase English critic Terry Eagleton, constructing identity can be self-serving in helping us cope with the world around us, and oftentimes, the coping skills required of fictional characters are the same skills required of readers like us when dealing with everyday life.  In this way, as we explore the struggles and conflicts of fictional characters, we will strive to find meaning in the text so that we can learn more about ourselves, about others, and about the intersection of the two in the world.

Readings:Kafka, Hemingway, Carver, Watson, Petterson, Lahiri, Schneider, and others.

Assignments: Class participation; ten short critical responses; two five-page papers; one panel presentation; final essay exam.

ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature: Drama

3 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.

ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature: Drama

• Professor Ryan Jerving

• 101    MWF     8:00
• 102    MWF     11:00
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: Course Description: William Shakespeare once wrote that “the world is a stage”; Irving Berlin, that “the stage is a world.” This course will explore that busy, troubled intersection where stage and world collide. How faithful to the “real world” is drama supposed to be? And to what or whose reality? Can a drawing-room conversation, a Broadway song-and-dance number, and a street protest all be said to contain their own kind of realism?
These questions of drama’s relationship to reality, to the real, and to the realistic – the relationship of stage to world – will shape our discussion of the theory and practice of dramatic and theatrical conventions, structures, and styles.  As we learn to analyze, discuss, and write about the unique, often collaborative, tools of dramatic technique – set and costume design, the blocking and choreography of actors’ bodies in space and through time, the place of the audience within the performance space – we’ll be reminded again and again of just how closely seemingly simple questions of craft are linked to the thorny theoretical question of whether the stage should reflect the world, deepen our understanding of it, or challenge and change that world.
Readings: Our dramatic texts will range from ancient Greek tragedies to Orson Welles’s “voodoo” production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to online viral videos of dramatic chipmunks. We will focus, in particular, on the documentary tradition crystallized in the 1930s work of the U.S. Federal Theatre Project and its heirs in dramatists as otherwise unlike as Luis Valdez, Anna Deavere Smith, and Stephen Colbert. We will also read theoretical work by Aristotle, Bertolt Brecht, John Howard Lawson, Mordecai Gorelik, Hallie Flanagan, and others.
Assignments: an analytical essay on theatrical form; a theoretical essay on stage and world; a “living newspaper” research essay to be written in playscript form; a final exam; regular in-class and online responses to class readings; attendance at performances of local theatrical productions.

ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature: Drama

• Professor Staff

• 103     MWF     1:00-1:50
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments:

•ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature: Drama

Professor Staff

• 104     TUTH    3:30-4:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments:

ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry

3 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.

ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry

• Professor Ed Block

• 101    MWF     10:00-10:50
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: A principal goal of this course has been the primary goal of education since the time when Greek literature and philosophy arose: "Know thyself."  That goal has also been part of Jesuit education since its inception in the 1540s. On a lighter note, I hope to make this course a chance to get over any fear, dislike (and distrust?) of poetry that you may have acquired in grade school or high school.   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.

     The three specific objectives of Marquette’s Core of Common Studies are also constituent parts of this course.  As much as 50% of the class will be discussion; so attendance and active, quality participation will be required, and rewarded.  A fuller list of course objectives will be available on D2L.  We shall also do a lot of reading aloud; from the second class of the semester.

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.                                                                  

Texts:  Kennedy and Gioia   An Introduction to Poetry                        Pearson/Longman

ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry

• Professor John Boly

• 102     TUTH     9:30-10:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: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.
Readings: Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Dickenson, Browning, Tennyson, Hopkins, Owen, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, Auden, Stevens, Moore, Plath, Walcott, Rich, and Heaney.
Assignments: three essays, two hourly exams.

ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry

• Professor Angela Sorby   

• 103      MW     2:00-3:15

• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description: Poems are curious objects:  part music, part plaything, part visual art. In this course, we’ll engage with poems in various ways:  memorizing them, writing them, and writing about them.   We’ll study some older poets (William Blake, Emily Dickinson) and a few newer ones (Alison Joseph Tony Hoagland).  Students will participate in regular classroom activities; additional requirements include two critical papers, a poetry notebook, and two exams.

ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry

• Professor Daniel Khalastchi

• 104      TUTH     3:30-4:45
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

Course Description:Young Americans

If you’ve ever felt confused, put-off, or even frightened by the idea of reading a poem, this is the course for you.  In this introductory survey we will conquer our fear of verse by developing our strengths as critical readers of poetry while also gaining the tools necessary to become better thinkers across genres and disciplines. Through careful reading and analysis of selected poems, essays, and engaging new collections, this class will acquaint you with historical and contemporary poetic trends to promote an informed understanding and appreciation of the art.  In this class we will look at work from a variety of authors in an attempt to arm you with the skills to confidently examine elements of the human condition you may not have considered before.  We will focus much of our attention on a booklist comprised mainly of young American poets—I’m looking forward to sharing this work with you.

Readings:

Zach Savich—Full Catastrophe Living

Arda Collins—It is Daylight

Sarah O’Brien—Catch Light

Jon Woodward—Rain

Caryl Pagel—Visions, Crisis Apparitions, & Other Exceptional Experiences

Emily Pettit—Goat in the Snow

Srikanth Reddy—Facts for Visitors

Suzanne Buffam—The Irrationalist

Shane McCrae—Mule

Kiki Petrosino—Fort Red Border

 *Additional texts will be provided by the instructor.

Assignments:  Critical reading/writing assignments, specifically: two extensive analysis papers/creative projects, two essay exams, weekly journals/responses, a group presentation, and a final.

ENGL 2740: Reading Film as Narrative

• Dr. Stephanie Quade                        

• 101    TUTH     3:30-4:45
• 401    MON      6:00-8:00
• Fulfills UCCS LPA requirement

  An introductory survey on approaches to critical analysis of film, stressing methods for analyzing and interpreting how complex verbal and non-verbal representations establish characterizations, structure narratives, and engage important ideas and events. Emphasis will be on central theories of film analysis, translation of literature to film, attention to the history of the cinema, and the integration of films into their cultural context.

ENGL 3210: Advanced Composition

• Professor Daniel Khalastchi

• 101    TUTH    11:00-12:15
• 103    TUTH     2:00-3:15

Course Description: The Essay In The City

Whether it’s watching gradual changes to the town we’ve lived in all our life, moving somewhere new, traveling abroad, or walking the streets of Milwaukee to school every morning, one way or another we’ve all been influenced by place. While some of us may think of these locations as insignificant, as writers we must remember that our environments (present and past) serve as one of the best ways to understand the culture we live in, and must be explored in order to comment on—and engage with—society as a whole. In this advanced composition workshop, we will center our writing and reading on the idea of place (specifically the construct and community that makes a “city”) and we will refine our rhetorical decision-making skills by learning how to use language in ways that effectively engage our audiences. Through three units—“place as memory” (a personal reflection),“the heart of the city” (a cultural investigation), and “talking to your neighbors” (a hybrid research experiment)—we will not only write multiple essays that require different conventions, but we will also share these pieces with our peers in a traditional workshop setting, gaining constructive criticism and ideas for revisions from the very people we hope to have in our audience. Our readings will come from a variety of authors, and will all relate in some way to ideas of place, the environment, cities, and local communities. At the end of the term, along with a final portfolio, we will discuss the possibility of creating a class magazine/chapbook to highlight the wonderful work I know we will create.

Readings: 

John D’Agata (ed.)—The Next American Essay

Eula Biss—Notes from No Man’s Land

Joan Didion—Slouching Towards Bethlehem

*Additional texts will be provided by the instructor.

Assignments:  Critical reading/writing assignments, specifically: weekly writing exercises and class journaling, three major essays, a final portfolio with revisions and a reflective response, and a final class project.

ENGL 3210: Advanced Composition

• Professor Kris Ratcliffe

• 102    TUTH      12:30-1:45

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.”
Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
1. Define analysis and apply multiple tactics of analysis as a means of critical thinking, reading, writing
2. Define creative nonfiction and write analytically within that genre
3. Analyze and apply discourse conventions for a variety of writing contexts and audiences
4. Define and demonstrate your own writing process, with a particular emphasis on the rhetorical tactics ofinvention, arrangement, revision, and style
Readings: Philip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay; The New Yorker; Rosenwasser and Stephens, Writing Analytically (5th ed)
Assignments: Participation in writing/review groups; 2 short written analyses; and 3 portfolios (each containing a short writing modeled on a New Yorker column plus a creative nonfiction essay); and participation in a final project.

ENGL 3220: Writing for the Professions

• Professor Ryan Jerving

• 101    MWF   9:00

Course Description:Course Description: Writing for the Professions teaches skills for communicating in the workplace, in student groups and other volunteer organizations, and in your role as a critically engaged consumer, citizen, and "man or woman for others." Professional communication takes place in concrete, four-dimensional time such that any particular act of writing, speaking, or posting is rarely the last (or the first) word. Therefore, the emphasis in this course is on developing a purpose-driven and reader-centered approach to writing that aims at both short-term practical results and long-term reputation and relationship building.
We'll explore this approach through a hands-on, workshop classroom environment focused on analyzing and producing actual, imperfect, real-world documents (including documents produced as part of a service learning project). We'll likewise explore a number of larger issues concerning how professional communication is being reshaped by emerging technologies, globalization, changing workplace demographics, intellectual property concerns, and the blurring of public/private life (for examples, see our class blog, Writing That Works, at http://writingthatworks.wordpress.com).
Readings: Our texts will include Paul V. Anderson's Technical Communication (6th ed.), regular online readings concerning issues in professional communication, and a wide range of primary documents (memos, letters, updates, tweets, reports, grad school admissions essays, etc.) that you and your peers will play a large part in discovering and bringing to our attention.
Assignments:Group report and presentation proposing alternative approaches to current issues in professional communication; individual reflection on service learning project producing documents for a local non-profit; report on the communication demands of your intended profession; job search portfolio; collaborative class wiki project; weekly blogging and online discussion.

ENGL 4027/5027: Teaching English in Secondary School

• Professor Sharon Chubbuck

• 701    TUES   4:30-7:10

Course Description: 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 4027. This course typically precedes the semester of student teaching.

ENGL 4110/5110: Linguistics

• Professor Steve Keiser

• 101    MWF    10:00
• 102    MWF    12:00

Course Description:Course Title & Subtitle: Structured Noise, Structured Motion: An Introduction to Language and 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.  Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

1. Describe the features of human language that differentiate it from animal communication.
2. Collect and transcribe language data from natural conversation.
3. Analyze the structure of sounds, words, and sentences in English by describing the relationships between the units that compose them.
4. Describe the systematic, rule-governed features of several important language varieties in the US, including ASL and Ebonics.

Critically evaluate statements and attitudes (including your own) about language and human beings as language speakers.

Readings.  Language Files 10.

Assignments.  Weekly homeworks on language data collection from natural conversations and analysis of language.  Two-three exams.  Major research project on language and/or language data.

ENGL 4170/5170: Studies in Language: OLD ENGLISH

• Professor Tim Machan

• 101    MWF      9:00

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to Old English, the form of the English language spoken and written from 600 to 1100.  We will begin with intensive study of grammar, and will then translate a number of pieces of prose and poetry.  Our focus will be translation, but attention also will be given to verse forms, style, and genres of Anglo-Saxon culture.  This course fulfills the language requirement for English majors.

Readings: select poetry and prose including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Dream of the Rood, the Seafarer, and the Battle of Maldon.

Assignments: in-class translation; quizzes; exams

ENGL 4210: The Processof Writing

• Professor Rebecca Nowacek

• 101    MWF    11:00
• 102    FRI      12:00 (discussion)

Course Description: The purpose of this course is three-fold.  It is designed to help you reflect on and improve your own writing.  It is designed to help you explore and understand the complex processes involved in written composition.  It is also designed to prepare you to become a peer tutor at the Ott Memorial Writing Center.  As a tutor you will be able to apply the knowledge you are gaining in the course to help other students improve their writing.  To accomplish these goals, we will (a) examine what researchers and theorists have said about writing, (b) examine what theorists and practitioners have said about teaching in a conference setting, and (c) observe, examine, and reflect upon our own experience as writers and tutors.

Readings:Texts will likely include The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, by Gillespie and Lerner and The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, by Murphy and Sherwood.

Assignments: will likely include three reflective papers, a longer inquiry project, a writer’s journal, an oral presentation on grammar, and 20 hours of participation in tutoring sessions (mostly as an observer but perhaps also as a tutor) in the Ott Memorial Writing Center.

E

ENGL 4250/5250:  Creative Writing: Fiction

• Professor Larry Watson

• 101    MW    2:00-3:15
• 102    MW    3:30-4:45

Course Description: A course in writing fiction, organized as a lecture/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.

Text: Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway

ENGL 4250/5250:  Creative Writing: Fiction

• Professor Clifton Spargo

• 103    TTH    11:00-12:15

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments:

ENGL 4150/5260:  Creative Writing: Poetry

• Professor Angela Sorby

• 101    TTH    9:30-10:45

Course Description:Course Description:

In an informal and yet rigorous setting, students will learn to write excellent contemporary poetry.  Each student will develop a personal sense of taste (no one has to love everything!) and, in conjunction with this, will develop a distinctive voice. Participation is imperative in any workshop setting; additional requirements include weekly poems and a midterm/final portfolio.

ENGL 4410/5410:  British Literature, the Beginnings to 1500

• Professor MC Bodden

• 101    MW     2:00-3:15

Course Description: The course offers a brief introduction to both Old English and Middle English Literature. Old English Literature will include Beowulf, AThe Wife's Lament,@and AThe Wanderer.@  Middle English literature will look at Dante's Purgatorio (portions of it), Pearl Anonymous, Tristan and Iseult, Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte Darthur and, if time, a Sundance Festival award winning film encoded with medieval themes, especially the figure of the Intruder Hero, and the crisis in the transfer of power. We=ll begin by looking at the poetic techniques of Old English poetry, the concept of kingship, the nature of the Intruder Hero, the medieval theory of knowledge, the nature of obsessive love, comedic love, and courtly love. In the second half of the course, we will examine the way that both men and women contested the inherited social and political roles which shaped their identities. We will consider the controversial depiction of gender roles, as well.

Readings: Pearl Anonymous will be read in bi-lingual edition of Middle English and Modern English.

ENGL 4440/5440: Age of Dryden and Pope 1660-1744

• Professor:  Al Rivero

• 101    TTH   9:30-10:45

Course Description: This course surveys the great age of satire in Britain as well as the beginnings of the English novel.

Readings: will include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, a selection of poems by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Shamela, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.

Assignments: Midterm examination; comprehensive final examination; one class  presentation; regular attendance; class participation; fully researched term paper (ca. 12pp.).

ENGL 4460/5460: The Romantic Period:  1790-1837

• Staff

101    TTH   12:30-1:45

ENGL 4480/5480: The Modernist Period in Brit Lit

• Professor:  Leah Flack

101    TTH   2:00-3:15

Course Description:

Readings:

Assignments:

ENGL 4510/5510: Colonial American Lit from the Beginnings to 1798

• Professor:  Amy Blair             Enlightenment and Sentiment

101    MWF  1:00

Course Description: Why were novels of psychosis and seduction all the rage during the decades surrounding the triumph in Enlightement Rationalism that was the American Revolution?  How did the partisans of the novel defend themselves against charges of immorality and irrelevance?  And who was reading novels in the first place?  This course will focus on American literature from the late eighteenth century through the first year of the nineteenth century.  We will look at the ways American authors reinterpreted Enlightenment thought in their debates over the form literature should take in a new Republic; we will consider the literature of the late eighteenth century as a postcolonial literature, and will spend considerable time exploring the birth of the novel in America and the philosophical bases for sentimentality and Romance. 

Readings: In addition to a generous selection of secondary readings and primary contextual readings, we will look at Benjamin Franklin¹s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, William Hill Brown¹s The Power of Sympathy, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Susannah Rowson¹s Charlotte Temple, and Charles Brockden Brown¹s Ormond.

ENGL 4560/5560: The Contemporary Period in American Literature: 1945-present

The World is a Ghetto: Contemporary American Literature and Economic Disaster

• Professor:  Jodi Melamed

101    TTH   3:30-4:45

Course Description: Globalization might be the defining phenomenon of our time, but it is also a problem of knowledge. U.S. global leadership after World War II puts in place a geopolitical framework that naturalizes a relationship between freedom, democracy and capitalism.  Yet cultural production in the U.S. after World War II often calls this framework into question. In this course, we explore how American literature and culture after World War II might not only offer us a different description of globalization, but it might also present us with other hermeneutics for inquiry, interpretation, and understanding of uneven global accumulation and spin-offs from economic disaster, including war, poverty, resource depletion, and social oppression.

Readings: Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead, Jamaica Kincaid, In a Small Place, James Baldwin, Evidence of Things Unseen, Toni Cade Bambara, Salt-Eaters stories and poetry from Grace Paley, Jessica Hagedorn, Junot Diaz, Karen Yamashita, June Jordan, and Allison Hedge Coke, among others

Assignments: Class discussion, response papers, one 5-6 page paper, one 10-12 page paper

ENGL 4610/5610: Individual Author

• Professor:  John Boly                    GEORGE ORWELL

101    TTH   11:00    

Course Description: Hailed by his contemporaries as the "conscience of a generation," English writer George Orwell (Eric Blair) is a good test of whether the pen really can be mightier than the sword. Journalist, literary critic, social commentator, novelist, and fabulist, Orwell left few genres untouched, or unchanged, in his impassioned drive to haul the modern era before the court of a scathing and relentless honesty. In an era that watched helplessly as news was turned into entertainment, politics into theater, and war into an obscene nationalist sacrament, Orwell fearlessly raised a lonely voice against official hypocrisy, sham, and deceit. The foe of class snobbery and intellectual pretense, he cast his lot with the forgotten, the bullied, and the expendable, whether it meant washing dishes in Paris or taking a sniper’s bullet through the neck in Spain.

Readings: In this course we will survey the range of Orwell’s varied writings, from his literary essays and war journalism, to his novels, nonfiction, and allegory. We will finish with his genre-bending dystopia, 1984, which, for anyone brave enough to look, reveals the lock-step march of the modern corporate-controlled state into a fascist hell. Substantial reading. Lecture-discussion format.

Assignments: Two inclass exams and three 5-6 page essays.

ENGL 4610/5610: Individual Author ENGL 4610/5610: Individual Author

• Professor:  Angela Sorby              WHITMAN AND DICKINSON

102    TTH   12:30    

Course Description: The nineteenth-century American poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were both creative risk-takers, inspired by Transcendental romantic philosophy but not bound by it.  In this course, we will explore major works of poetry and prose by Whitman and Dickinson; we’ll also explore other writers, artists, and musicians (from Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Switchblade Kittens) who influenced, or were influenced by, them. 

Readings: Our readings will be grounded in cultural forces—for example, the Civil War—that affected the poems when they were written, as well as later movements, like feminism, queer theory, and cultural studies. 

Assignments: Students will write two papers, take two exams, and complete several shorter assignments. 

ENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeares Major Plays

• Professor:  John Curran

101    MWF     11:000    

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

ENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeares Major PlaysEnglldlldlldldlEENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeares Major Plays

ENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeares Major Plays

• Professor:  Steve Karian

102    MW    3:30-4:45    

Course Description: This course will examine Shakespeare's most important tragedies, with an emphasis on the generic and cultural conventions of tragedy. We will also focus on the particular qualities of each play to emphasize the considerable diversity of tragedies that Shakespeare wrote. We will study these tragedies in pairs: tragedies of revenge (Titus Andronicus and Hamlet), tragedies of love (Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra), tragedies of ambition (Julius Caesar and Macbeth), and tragedies of the flawed hero (Othello and King Lear).

Readings:The eight plays listed above and selected secondary readings.

Assignments: Class discussion, response papers, one 3-4 page paper, one 7-8 page paper, and two exams.

ENGL 4710/5710: Studie in Genre:  CATHOLIC IMAGINATION IN RECENT AMERICAN                                                                   WRITINGS

• Professor:  Ron Bieganowski, SJ         

101    TTH   9:30-10:45   

Course Description: Flannery O’Connor’s stories along with her essays will help identify how writers might reflect a Catholic way of viewing the world of their experience rather than describing a Catholic world. For O’Connor such writing, Catholic writing, ....can’t be categorized by subject matter, but only by what it assumes about human and divine reality.... It will see him [the human] as incomplete in himself, as prone to evil, but as redeemable when his own efforts are assisted by grace. And it will see this grace as working through nature, but as entirely transcending it, so that a door is always open to possibility and the unexpected in the human soul.  But you don’t write fiction with assumptions. The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all.....This discovery of being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work

into real human perspective for him.

Readings: Depending on close reading of a range of more recent American writing, class discussion will look to identify and explicate some of the assumptions that seem latent within those texts. Readings will be from O’Connor and from A. Manette Ansay, Patricia Hampl, Ron Hansen, Jon Hassler, Oscar Hijuelos.

Assignments:Written work will include several reflections ( 1p) , two medium length papers (4-5 pp.), and a final essay exam as an overview of the course’s reading and discussion. Discussion format.

ENGL 4800/5800/4996.701:  Studies in Literature/Culture

SENIOR EXPERIENCE

• Professor:  Christine Krueger           LITERATURE AND LAW

701    WED   5:30-8:15    

Course Description: Can literature make a difference?  This course examines the proposition that just social policy and ethical action demand comprehensive and critical thinking that include empathy and imagination as well as logical analysis.  We will address this proposition in relation to four themes:  1) economic justice; 2) racial discrimination;  3) gender discrimination; and 4) intellectual property rights.  In addition to literary modes of representation and argument, readings include legal, historical, and journalistic materials.  The purpose of this multidisciplinary approach is to enable students to master a variety of interpretive and rhetorical skills. 

Required Texts

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Norton)

Richard Wright, Native Son (Harper)

Waldo E. Martin, Jr., ed., Brown v. Board of Education

Bryan and Wolf, Midnight Assassin (Algonquin)

Susan Glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers (Kessinger)

Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (Mariner)

Graded Assignments:

Writing

Three assignments (@ 10 pts. ea.) consisting of thesis statements and annotated bibliographies on assigned topics are intended to build toward your final paper.

Research Paper (30 pts.) 12-15 pages; the culmination of your reading and research in this course. 

Oral Presentation and Discussion

One Oral Argument (15 pts.)

One Jury Deliberation (15 pts.)

Discussion(10 pts. for substantive, regular and informed participation)

Library Research Workshop (5 pts. deducted for absence)

GRADING: A (100-95); AB(94-90); B(89-85); BC(84-80); C(79-75); CD(74-70); D(69-65)

ENGL 4810/5810: Race, Ethnicity, Identity

• Professor:  Heather Hathaway

101   MWF   10:00

102   MWF   12:00

Course Description: African American author James Baldwin claimed that in the United States, “our passion for categorization, life fitted neatly into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; . . . [to] confusion, a breakdown of meaning . . .” (Notes of Native Son, 1955). Part of our purpose this semester is to examine the categories that have been constructed surrounding race and ethnicity, and to consider the ways in which these concepts are both meaningful and meaningless. What, for example, is “ethnicity”? Who, exactly, is “ethnic” and by whose definition. Is it determined by self or other? What constitutes ethnic writing in the United States? Is it determined simply by the identity of its author? Does ethnic writing include stories that tell about ethnic groups, regardless of by whom they are written? Or does some particular literary style or trope characterize ethnic writing? In this course, we will consider all of these issues. Through an investigation of selected American poetry, fiction, and drama, read in conjunction with classic essays in ethnic theory, we will 1) examine how race and ethnicity have been defined in the contemporary United States; 2) analyze the social, political, and cultural consequences of these definitions; and 3) obtain an introductory understanding of ethnic literature and theory which can then be built upon in later courses.
Assignments: Papers, midterm exam, final exam.

ENGL 4840/5840: Post Colonial LiteratureNPost cosor:  Ron Bieganowski, SJ GL e - p• Professor:  John Su

101    TTH   3:30-4:45

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 4931/5931/4996.101:  Topics   (COMBINED WITH FOLA 4931/4996)

SENIOR EXPERIENCE

• Professor:  Ed Block                          MILOSZ & MERTON

101    MW   3:30-4:45    

Course Description: The works of Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Merton are powerful reflections of the intellectual and spiritual life amidst the turmoil and chaos of the 20th century. The poet Milosz and the monk Merton developed a deep friendship and their correspondence –together with their essays and poetry--presents an ongoing conversation, commentary, and critique of their age.  The course will focus on each man’s insistence on the truth of his own experience in an age when war, ideology, repressive governments, radical changes in culture challenged the understanding of individuality, civilization, and the human person. The course brings together poetry, politics, spirituality and culture in a way that intersects student experiences from a range of disciplines. Readings will also include such important women writers as Denise Levertov, Carolyn Forché, Wyslawa Szymborska, and Hannah Arendt.

     This is a Manresa course. Students will be encouraged to reflect on their own growing sense of what gives meaning to their lives, and how their Marquette education has contributed to that search.  The heart of the course’s writing assignments will be a reflective journal; a number of entries will focus on issues of vocation.  Each student will also make an oral presentation on an aspect of Milosz’s or Merton’s life or work; or one of his contemporaries. Each student will also write one paper, analyzing a selection of texts read for class.  The second-last assignment will be a research-based paper, focusing on some aspect of Merton’s or Milosz’s life or work. The final assignment of the semester will be a short “vocation” paper, summarizing and reflecting on the student’s vocation journal entries.

Readings:

Milosz, Czeslaw   - Collected Poems

                           The Captive Mind

Merton, Thomas   - A Merton Reader

                            Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

ENGL 6205: Studies in Language/Linguistics:    WHAT IS ENGLISH?

• Professor:  Tim Machan                 

101    MW   2:00-3:15

Course Description: This course asks the question, What is English, how do we know, and why do we care? It is a historical question, addressing the language’s past and future as well as its present – a question whose answers might be as simple as “English is what I speak,” as complex as “English is a sociological argument that appropriates structural data,” or as evasive as “English is what the grammars and dictionaries say it is.” And it is a question that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when monoglot and bilingual Anglophones together account for perhaps 1.5 billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people, has become increasingly difficult to answer satisfactorily. What matters in such definitions is typically something far greater than linguistic or literary niceties: it is a sense of who constitutes the group of Anglophones with whom any one speaker can be understood to share concepts like history, ethnicity, and nationhood. Equally important are the institutional ways in which these concepts play out – in matters like voting and educational rights, for instance, or citizenship, or commercial opportunities. Very simply, to be regarded as a speaker of English provides certain cultural and economic benefits denied to those who are not included among its speakers.

Readings: historical and contemporary materials on lexicography, grammars, pidgins and creoles, language legislation, and language contact, change and variation

Assignments: in-class discussion; presentations; research paper

ENGL 6210: British Literature to 1500:    GENDER AND CRIME

• Professor:  MC Bodden

101    MW   3:30-4:45

Course Description: What sort of behavior was considered “criminal” behavior that so large a proportion of people in medieval and early modern England were at some stage in their lives accused of misdemeanors and (less often) felonies?  How does literature (including court records, letters and depositions) represent the actions that people took to deal with the inequities of class structure, of the economy, the bias of the law, and domestic violence?  How did popular literature represent “the female crime wave,” (mid-late 1600's) whereby more than half of the defendants brought up on charges of theft were women?  Topics examined in this course will include taverns and brawling, homicide and the medieval household, disharmony and poverty in small communities, rape,  religion and ‘crime,’ treason by imagination, marital discord and crime, subversive women, cross-dressing, and the “female crime wave” of the late 1600's.

Readings:Canterbury Tales’ General Prologue, Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, The Reeve’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale, The Chaste Wright’s Wife, Morte Darthur, Tristan and Iseult, Book of Margery Kempe, The Roaring Girl.

ENGL 6400: Studies in 19th Century British Literature:   THE MAJOR FIGURES

• Professor:  Tom Jeffers

101    TTH   11:00-12:15

Course Description:  This will be a survey of some major Victorian writers: the verse of Tennyson, Robert Browning, Hopkins, Hardy, et al.; the fiction of George Eliot (Silas Marner) and Trollope (Barchester Towers); and the nonfiction prose of Arnold and Ruskin.

Assignments:Each student will write three essays (two short, one more sustained) and make an in-class report

ENGL 6700: Studies in 20th Century American Literature

• Professor:  Jodi Melamed

701    THURS.    5:30-8:15

Studies in 20th Century American Literature: Setting Difference to Work

Course Description: Since the 1980s, questions and concerns that we can bring together under the rubric of ‘difference’ have energized the field of American literary studies, critical theory, and the production of American literature itself.  Keywords that capture the intellectual itinerary of this fertile cross-conversation include the Other, alterity, subalternity, Queer, minority, multiculturalism, diaspora, globalization, indigeneity, and refugee.  Following a genealogical approach, the course investigates the productivity of representing  and theorizing ‘difference’ in literary scholarship, critical theory, and 20th century American literature.  The ultimate goal is to prepare graduate students to cautiously approach these issues in their own scholarship. To this end, we will spend some time considering the material politics of knowledge, in particular, the conditions under which ‘multicultural literature’ comes to be seen as a tool for American to get to know ‘difference’ with some degree of intimacy. Concurrently, we will take seriously the bid to de-hegemonize knowledge, which preoccupies U.S. minority literatures after World War II.

Readings: Scholars: Hazel Carby, David Palumbo-Liu, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Roderick Ferguson, Judith Halberstam, Lisa Lowe, Robert Warrior, James Lee, Grace Hong

Authors: Richard Wright, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Chang-Rae Lee

Assignments: in-class discussion; presentations; journal article length research essay

ENGL 6810: Study in History of Literary Criticism

• Professor: John Boly      

101    TTH   2:00-3:15

Studies in the History of Literary Criticism.

ENGL 6840: Studies in Rhetoric and Composition Theory

• Professor:  Rebecca Nowacek

101    MWF   10:00

Course Description: This course is designed to help you develop a theoretical framework for your teaching.  Such a framework is vital, as it gives you a way of planning, understanding, challenging, and reflecting on your classroom practices. Throughout this semester (and throughout your teaching career) I hope you will ask yourself how your classroom experiences and your theoretical / empirical readings might inform one another.  Toward that end, we will spend the semester reading contemporary and classical theories of rhetoric and composition.  Of each theory we will ask two basic questions.  First, what does this theory imply about the relationships among an individual rhetor, her audience, her thoughts, her language, and learning?  Second, what implications might this theory have for teaching?

Readings: Texts will likely include Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cross Talk in Comp Theory by Villanueva, and Between Talk and Text by Black.

Assignments:will likely include three positioning papers, an outside reading project, a teaching portfolio (including a statement of teaching philosophy and an annotated artifact of your teaching), a turn at serving as discussion leader, and a lengthier inquiry project.  Students in this course will also participate in a “poster conference” to be held at UWMilwaukee with new teaching assistants in that program.