Courses Offered (Fall 2024)

Various days and times, see Snapshot
English 1001, Foundations in Rhetoric

Students learn to:

• Critically engage scholarly communication by identifying and analyzing the main rhetorical features of variously mediated texts used by scholars to express ideas in academic settings;
• Pursue inquiry with rigor and responsibility by formulating feasible and meaningful research questions and revising them while conducting thorough, ethical inquiries using appropriate available resources;
• Understand writing as a purpose-driven, audience-oriented, multimodal activity that involves writers in making continuous ethical and informed choices;
• Develop writing by engaging in overlapping phases of invention, synthesis of ideas and information, and revision undertaken in response to others' feedback and self-critique;
• Deliver writing by making full use of appropriate available media, genres, formats and styles;
• Write with exigence by addressing issues of importance with the goal of increasing one's own and others' understanding as a foundation for future action of various kinds;
• Develop an appropriate ethos by meeting academic audiences' expectations for credibility, consistency, and integrity.

Note: Sections 115, 116, 117, and 118 are service-learning mandatory sections that require a minimum of 18 hours of service during the semester.

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Rebecca Nowacek
102 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Rebecca Nowacek

Course Title: Analyzing American Culture through the American Musical

Course Description: The genre of the American musical is nearly a century old and has always offered a fascinating lens on changing attitudes towards gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and what it means to be American.  This course will focus on four musicals from different historical eras: Showboat (1927), Oklahoma! (1943), Cabaret (1966), and Hamilton (2015).  We’ll learn about how those musicals responded to their historical moments (channeling and sometimes challenging beliefs of the time) and discuss how subsequent productions sometimes changed substantially in new historical moments.  We’ll be thinking about how issues of gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity and what it means to be American get represented in the very American genre of the musical.  In short, our main activities will be close reading and critical analysis: the staples of most English courses. 

This is not a course that requires that you arrive with any particular knowledge about musicals or even be a big fan of musicals.  I will confess that (no surprise) I do love musicals—and if you actively dislike musicals this course may well give you a semester-long headache.  Nevertheless, our focus will be on analyzing a handful of shows closely and critically, so what matters most is that you develop the knowledge and the ability to analyze musicals in their historical and cultural contexts.

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Jenn Fishman
102 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jenn Fishman

Course Title: College Writing: Before, During, & Beyond
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Writing Practices and Processes is a requirement for ENGA and ENGW majors; it also fulfills an elective requirement for ENGL majors.

Course Description: This course is designed to give you, the students who sign up, new perspectives on college writing. How? Through 3 projects, which invite you to think about writing before, during, and after college itself:

• Project #1 invites you to gather and analyze past examples of your own writing in order to answer questions like these: Who am I as a writer? How did I get here? And how do I move on to become the writer(s) I'd like to be?
• Project #2 puts you in charge of your own editorial project, giving you a chance to create a reader (e.g., a collection of your own and/or other people’s writing) that reflects who you are now, what interests you, and an audience you want to connect with.
• Project #3 is up to you, save for a short list of requirements and guidelines, and I’ll encourage you to pick something related to your hopes, dreams, and plans for life beyond college. Previous projects have ranged from podcasts and video documentaries to 'zines, social media campaigns, and cookbooks as well as photo essays and children's books. Using archival and original research as well as a host of secondary sources, 3210s have studied family genealogies, kindness, and the human stories behind Milwaukee crime stats. Some students use this assignment to pursue passion projects; others seed honors projects or write with an eye to future publication.

To support all of the above, we'll read and discuss several chapters of Bad Ideas about Writing (free) as well as one of three books by Austin Kleon: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, or Keep Going ($2-$20); there will also be regular peer exchanges (e.g., of ideas, writing). Although this course is full of surprises, the workflow is steady: we meet onsite Tuesdays and Thursdays; reading responses are due Wednesdays; and weekly writing is due by Sunday at 11:59pm Central.

Please note: Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors from all majors and minors are welcome to enroll in this WRIT course. Anyone who has taken ENGL 4230 should be in touch, since we’ll cover some familiar ground.

101 TuTh 8:00-9:15 Professor Elizabeth Angeli

Course Title: Technical Writing
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: English 3221 helps students become better technical communicators.Technical communication is the presentation of technical material in written and visual formats. These formats are user centered and respond to their audience and context.

As communicators, you must write and speak across multiple audiences and for multiple purposes. Technical and professional fields require these skills. Beyond field-specific knowledge and experience, successful and ethical communication drives the professional world. This class, in content and form, models these successful practices. You will learn effective communication strategies by working individually and collaboratively. To succeed, you must display the ability to thrive in the workplace and develop informative and visually effective print and electronic documents.

We will be covering the following principle topics:

• Nature and importance of ethical, effective technical communication
• Information gathering and message planning
• Effective writing process: Planning, drafting, revising, and editing
• Elements of organization, style, persuasion, and document design
• Effective use of visual aids to display information graphically
• Design and delivery of effective manuals, reports, and oral reports
• Review of grammar, i.e., common later order concerns

Class projects include a career report, a technical description, a document redesign and postmortem report, and an instructions document and usability report.

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Tyler Farrell
102 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Tyler Farrell

Course Title: Introduction to Creative Writing 
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: Learn to write creatively in multiple genres. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “Literature belongs not to the department of general ideas, but to the department of specific words and images.” In this course, students will learn to read and write short/flash fiction, poetry, and a short drama/screenplay. We will focus on our writing community and place attention on word choice, sound, voice, subject matter, style, and revision in all of our work. All students will read and write weekly while also engaging in workshops to critique and offer/receive guidance. Time and space to practice writing and learn technique is our constant aim. A supportive community of writers will help to cultivate a helpful atmosphere and a final portfolio of work in at least two genres. Go writing!

101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Katherine Zlabek

Course Title:  Crafting the Short Story
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: Students will produce fresh, original writing that appeals to an audience’s imagination in this intermediate-level journey into short fiction. In it, we will be discussing the various elements of fiction, including concrete and specific detail, voice, atmosphere, and plot, to name a few. Students will explore the formal elements of writing alongside fiction that exemplifies or challenges these formal elements. Each story will be examined critically for its form as well as its representation of social, cultural beliefs and values, economic or global conditions, and environmental circumstances. In a workshop setting, we will critique one another’s creative writing, and discuss strategies for revising creative writing effectively.   

Readings:  Stories and craft essays will be posted on D2L. 

Assignments: Thoughtful attention to published work, and the work of peers; considerate workshop participation; short stories; outside reading and short presentation; final portfolio.

102 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Megan Paonessa

Course Title:Crafting the Short Story
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: Following the outline Jeff Vandermeer provides in “Wonderbook,” this course will focus on the craft involved in writing short stories. We will explore the core elements of fiction, like character, point of view, dialogue, description, and style, as well as some of the lesser mysteries of writing and the role of the imagination. Taking cues from celebrated short stories that exemplify or challenge these core elements of short story writing, we will build our critical and analytical skills while also composing short pieces that experiment with these core concepts from a more creative perspective.

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Angela Sorby

Course Title: Creativity and Community
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement

Course Description: Experiment with multiple forms of writing (journaling, poetry, comedy), performance (group improv), and visual art (collage, blackout texts). Absolute beginner? Absolutely fine! This course is rooted in research-based theories of amateurism, wabi sabi (imperfect beauty), and "serious play." Students will cultivate the widely applicable, lifelong skills of risk-taking, improvisation, re-visioning, and community-building. Field experiences will connect students to diverse off-campus artists and spaces. Attendance and participation are exceptionally important aspects of this course so students should plan accordingly.

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Sebastian Bitticks

Course Title: Lifewriting, Creativity, and Community
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: This class breaks down barriers, between the campus and community, between "creative" and "analytical" disciplines, between nonfiction and other creative writing forms. In this course, we will read and write lived stories, both our own and those of people close to us. In our notebooks, we will explore memory, imagination, representation and records, reading memoir, personal essays and hybrid forms. We will also work to represent the stories of other people through interviewing and shared experiences, reading profiles, participant narrative and oral histories.

101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Elizabeth Angeli

Course Title: The Career Class
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: “What will you do with that major?” It’s a question many of us have heard before. If you haven’t known how to answer that question, this class is for you.

Some majors don’t neatly translate to job titles, which can be scary – yet it’s also incredibly freeing because it is rich in possibility and potential. Likewise, managing your career requires managing uncertainty. To develop career management skills, we need self-awareness, intention, reflection, and a commitment to ourselves. How can you do that? One way is to develop a process where you know how to make decisions in alignment with your values, unique purpose, and integrity. At Marquette, we call that process “discernment.”

This writing class uses writing to support your discernment process while learning how to apply for next-step opportunities, like jobs or graduate school. We will explore questions like: 

• How do I determine “what’s next” for me?  
• How my major prepared me for my life after graduation?
• What values and skills do I have? How do I explain them to other people? 
• What jobs, careers, or graduate school options are out? Is there more out there than I’m aware of? (Spoiler alert: Yes.)  
• How can writing help you learn answers—or more questions—to these questions?

Class work includes weekly reflections, informational interviews, class presentations, application materials for next step opportunities (e.g., cover letters, resumes, and personal statements), and a final project.

**If you felt nervous, anxious, or afraid while reading this course description, you are not alone. Thinking about life after graduation can be intimidating. This class was created to support you and prepare you for what’s next.** 

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Laura Misco

Course Title: Creative Writing:  Fiction
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: This course focuses on studying, understanding, and crafting short fiction. Students will encounter diverse readings and analyze key elements of the genre, while actively participating in workshop sessions with an eye toward revision. Additionally, this course investigates how the art of fiction shapes and reflects societal realities. 

101 TuTh 8:00-9:15 Professor Angela Sorby

Course Title:  Creative Writing: Poetry
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: This course encourages writers to engage with the field of contemporary poetry and to find their voices within it.  Students will read widely in addition to writing new poems every week.  We will explore a range of sub-genres from documentary verse to formalism to spoken word.  Most of our class sessions will follow the Iowa Workshop model, which involves peer feedback within the context of a deliberately supportive community.

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Ben Pladek

Course Title: Advanced Fiction Workshop
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Capstone requirement for ENGW

Course Description: Serious writers working in any genre will benefit from this deep dive into writing and revising fiction. We'll read short fiction from several genres and a few exemplary novels; we'll discuss publishing; and of course we'll workshop original pieces. By the end of the semester students will complete a culminating project, either a portfolio of short stories or several sample chapters and a plan for a novel. Prior writing experience (in courses or independently) is assumed.

101 MWF 8:00-8:50 Professor Steve Hartman Keiser

Course Title: Language in the City
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Language study

Course Description: “Milwaukee”, “The good place”, “Gathering place by the water”, “The German Athens of America”, “Mawaukee”, “Cream City”—the many names reflect a few of the many cultures that have made this corner of the world their home. We will explore the languages of our city as a key component of its social geography, including the history and current status of

• Native American languages such as Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk
• Early immigrant languages such as German, Italian, and Polish
• Recent immigrant languages such as Spanish, Hmong, and Arabic
• Anglo- and African American English
• Deaf culture and ASL
• Legislation related to language use

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Steve Hartman Keiser

Course Title: Exploring the English Language
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Language study

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. (CMI outcome)
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. (CMI outcome)
4. Describe the systematic, rule-governed features of several important language varieties in the US, including ASL and African American English (CMI outcome)
5. Critically evaluate statements and attitudes—including your own—about language and human beings as language speakers.

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Leah Flack

Course Title: Introduction to Literary Studies: How to Read and Write like an English Major
Fulfills English Major Requirement: The foundation course requirement in the major sequence for ENGA, ENGL, and ENGW majors.

Course Description: Students will leave this class feeling more confident about how to read different kinds of texts—plays, poems, fiction, film, music, art, stand-up comedy, speeches, media—from different moments in history and different cultural traditions. We will learn to pay attention to genre, form, and context as we read. We will also learn how different kinds of discourses and genres understand what it means to tell the truth. Most of the course’s texts will be short so that we can privilege attentive, slow reading in order to appreciate how to have meaningful experiences of reading. Students will also learn how to ask and answer different kinds of questions about texts so that they leave class with flexible and useful set of tools that will serve them well in future classes.  Students will write in multiple genres and media to understand how the purpose and audience of their writing can help them make informed choices about form, format, length, and medium. Regular informal writing will help students to become deliberate, purposeful writers of lively sentences, lucid paragraphs, and readable, engaging, powerful papers when they put it all together.

This class prepares students for upper-level English classes and  is required for English majors and minors. It is also available for anyone interested in a class that helps them to think more clearly, read more skillfully, and write more powerfully.

Readings: Texts will include: Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Samuel Beckett, Endgame; Ali Smith, Autumn; Mike Birbiglia, The Old Man and the Pool (stand-up comedy special); Hannah Gadsby, Douglas (stand-up comedy special); Derek DelGaudio, In and Of Itself (filmed theatrical performance); Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer (album and film); Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (album); Memento (film); Get Out (film).

Assignments: Weekly writing exercises; completing all reading in a thoughtful, focused way; informed, consistent class participation; 6 short papers; final exam.

102 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Paul Gagliardi

Course Title: Introduction to Literary Studies
Fulfills English Major Requirement: The foundation course requirement in the major sequence for ENGA, ENGL, and ENGW majors.

Course Description: This course serves as an entry point for the advanced study in the discipline of English literature. While the course is oriented toward new majors and minors, it is also open to anyone interested in honing their critical skills in the interpretation and evaluation of works that fall under the purview of literary studies. Our readings will range mainly thru twentieth and twenty-first century works of literature, poetry, drama, film, and television, and we will also consider these works through various critical, theoretical, and scholarly lenses. This course will consist of a series of various multi-media projects, informal writing assignments, as well as more formal academic essays, that will develop critical reading and writing skills that draw from a range of perspectives.

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Elizaveta Strakhov

Course Title: Here Be Monsters
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700

Course Description: In this course we will be exploring the unknown and its monsters—or is the unknown and our monsters? From our very childhood when we beg our parents to shut the closet door at night, we have filled dark, empty spaces with the terrifying creatures of our imagination, as if to leave it empty would be worse. This course will explore the monster myths of medieval Europe: from that perhaps most famous of medieval monsters, Beowulf’s Grendel, to the first medieval European werewolf story, to Arthurian romance, to texts that use monstrosity in inventive ways to think through questions of gender and sexuality. In exploring these, we will ask ourselves several questions. How did monsters allow medieval Europeans to construct socially accepted ideas of masculinity and femininity? How did they represent and deal with physical disability? How did they foster the condemnation of ethnic and religious difference? And, finally, can the uses to which monster myths were put in the medieval period shed any light on our contemporary social and political attitudes towards ethnic, religious, and sexual difference?  

Readings: Texts included but not limited to: Beowulf, Marie de France, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others

101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Grant Gosizk

Course Title: Drama
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature

Course Description: “Domestic drama” is a genre of theatre that explores roles within families and the conflicts that precipitate from them. What does it mean to be a mother? A child? A father? Adopted? Or, Disowned? These questions aren’t small – our understanding of these roles fundamentally inform the people that we are – and, paradoxically, they often reveal wider, societal issues that influence our answers. What does war mean to a family who has lost a son? What do economic policies look like when a family is forced to live them? Something about watching a family onstage, living lives that are not so unlike our own, has captivated audiences for generations. Join us as we explore these questions by reading and watching the plays of diverse authors, such as Lillian Hellman, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Henrik Ibsen, and more. 

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor James Pribek, S.J.

Course Title: Contemporary Irish Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900

Course Description: The island of Ireland is only about the size of Maine, with a population close to Tennessee.  And yet it features the oldest vernacular literary tradition in Western Europe, one that has flourished in the Modern Era as four of its citizens have received the Noble Prize for Literature.  This class’s first project will be to determine what accounts for this success.  We will employ eleven “lenses” on the past and present to determine what makes Irish Literature lively and distinctive; we’ll then apply these to longer works of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.  Lastly, we will use what we have learned about this culture and ethnicity to shed light on all of our backgrounds and the important part they continue to play in forming our identities and enhancing our world.

101 Wed 5:00-7:30pm Professor Paul Gagliardi

Course Title: Cult Cinema
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Post-1900, American Literature

Course Description: This course will explore the art and discourse surrounding cult films or cult classics – films that have developed passionate fan bases that have formed their own unique subcultures. Over the course of the term, students will be given historical, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts for studying cult films, while also considering the political and cultural transgressions of many of the films we examine. We will also explore the development of cult fandoms, as well as manufactured cult cinema of the modern media environment. Films to be discussed may include Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994),  They LiveJohn Carpenter, 1988), Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967), Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), and Saving Face (Alice Wu, 2004).

Assignments: Will consist of film responses, and a creative scholarly mid-term and final project. 

101 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Jason Farr

Course Title: Disability and Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900

Course Description: This class will examine the writing and representation of disabled people in fiction and non-fiction from various time periods and genres. In our reading of disability narratives, we will contemplate questions of ethics, social justice, and representation as they relate to the lived experience of disability. Students will be asked to think and write critically about accessibility, social justice, and intersectionality, among other disability-oriented themes.

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Tosin Gbogi

Course Title: Global Hip Hop
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, Multicultural American Literature

Course Description: This course examines the literary qualities of hip hop across different world contexts. Drawing insights from literary and cultural studies, the course will open with a series of questions such as: What is literature? What is genre? How are ideas about literature and literariness shaped by “ideology,” audience reception, canonicity, temporality, and spatiality? And, more importantly, how does a popular musical genre such as hip hop enter the discourse of literary studies? In this class, we will engage in a rigorous close reading of hip hop lyrical and filmic texts from different countries and continents (e.g., U.S., Nigeria, Ghana, France, Canada, Britain, Germany, Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, Senegal, Kenya, South Africa, Hong Kong, etc.), studying them comparatively in terms of their rhetorical strategies, narrative structures, and reinvention of oral literary traditions. Beyond questions of verbal artistic and literary inventiveness, this course will also explore the leitmotif of global hip hop productions, which Halifu Osumare systematizes through her theoretical formulation of “connective marginalities.” In this part of the course, we will consider how hip hop artists (and other hip hoppers) mobilize the symbolic force of hip hop to engage with marginalities that are connected to race, place, ethnicity, class, culture, language, gender and sexuality, and age.

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Al Rivero

Course Title: Shakespeare’s Major Plays
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700, Shakespeare

Course Description: We will read such representative major plays as The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest, drawn from the four major genres: tragedy, history, romance, and comedy. Our class discussions will focus on the plays, their language, themes, and dramatic techniques. 

Readings: William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Essential Plays/The Sonnets, 3^rd ed (Norton) 

Assignments: One oral presentation; one researched term paper (ca. 10pp.); midterm examination; comprehensive final examination; class participation; and regular attendance. 

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Jason Farr

Course Title: The Novel to 1900: Novel Bodies
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900

Course Description: Deaf prophets. Sex-crazed monks. Cross-dressing sapphists. Noble characters of color. This list encapsulates just a smattering of the variable representations of embodiment that may be found in eighteenth-century British fiction. While these narratives’ emphasis on the body may (or may not) seem peculiar to us today, such close attention to the flesh, and to disability, race, gender, and sexuality generally, was quite typical of the period. In this course, we will examine variably-embodied characters in eighteenth-century novels, and we will discuss what such representations tell us about the cultural history of the body. We will also think about how categories—gender, sexuality, and race—intersect with disability to shore up corporeal codes during this period. Finally, we will think about how the novel form stages vital debates about embodiment that are still relevant to us today.

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title: J.R.R. Tolkien
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900

Course Description: The last decade has seen the hundredth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle-Earth (The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917) alongside the completion of Peter Jackson’s career-defining twenty-year project to adapt The Lord of the Rings for film (1995-2015) and the inauguration of a new cycle of adaptation on Amazon Prime (The Rings of Power, 2022-), in anime (The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, 2024), and in countless games. This course asks the question: Who is J.R.R. Tolkien, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century? Why have his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy which he remade so completely in his image, remained so intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them? Our study will primarily trace the history, development, and reception of Tolkien’s incredible magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-1949, published 1954-1956) — but we will also take up Tolkien’s contested place in the literary canon of the twentieth century, the uses and abuses of Tolkien in Jackson’s blockbuster films, the special appeal of Tolkien in politically troubled times, and the ongoing critical interests and investments of Tolkien fandom today. As Tolkien scholars we will also have the privilege of drawing upon the remarkable J.R.R. Tolkien Collection at Raynor Library, which contains the original manuscripts for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.

Note: No prior knowledge of Tolkien is required. The course is designed for a mix of first-time readers, frequent re-readers, and people who are returning to the books for the first time as adults after many years away.

Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and selected additional readings 

Assignments: Final critical paper or creative project; weekly sandbox posts on D2L; enthusiastic and informed class participation

101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Amy Blair

Course Title: Text in Context: Angels in America
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature
Note: This is an "Honors for all" course open to all undergraduates, and enrollment is by permission number

Course Description:

“The world only spins forward.”

Is this a paradox? Perhaps, but it also neatly describes the prescience and ever-increasing relevance of Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. First performed in 1991, and set in 1985, amid the pre-treatment years of the AIDS epidemic, Angels is “about” AIDS, the queer community, mourning, the U. S. medical establishment, Roy Cohn, Mormonism, the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, social justice protests, the hole in the ozone layer—it is also, we will discover, “about” the 2020s…Covid, the queer community, mourning, the U. S. medical establishment, Trump, InstaMoms, Anthony Fauci, Putin, social justice protests, climate change.  In this course, we will approach Angels from multiple angles: literary, philosophical, theological, historical, socio-political, epidemiological. We will look at the play as it has been performed and think about ways that it might be performed in a world that knows Covid. We will read the plays multiple times and will supplement our readings with important intertexts for Kushner’s work, with other literary and documentary treatments of the 1980s, and with histories of the play itself and the events it portrays. We will look at Marquette’s relationship to some of the key figures in the play and will experiment with performance in various venues on and off campus.

Along with Kushner’s play, we will read poetry by Walt Whitman, a history of Mormonism, and an oral history of Angels; will screen multiple documentaries about the AIDS crisis, Roy Cohn, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and 1980s popular music; will read secondary criticism in performance studies; and will watch and/or read at least one additional contemporaneous account of the AIDS crisis.

Enthusiastic and consistent participation in seminar meetings and conscientious reading are the most essential requirements of the course. Other assignments will include weekly discussion posts and/or creative responses to the class readings and a culminating essay or multimodal project of the student’s own design.

101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor John Curran
102 MWF 2:00-2:50 Professor John Curran

Course Title: The Epic
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700

Course Description: Epic poetry is one of the oldest literary genres, and in the western literary tradition it has always been intimately associated with exploring the unknown - whether far-off oceans, the edges of the theological universe, or the dark territory of the self.  Surveys four of the most important literary epics in the western tradition: Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lostand Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. All four document how exploring distant realms always, at the end of the day, means exploring yourself. These epics ask their heroes where they came from and where they're going as ways of forcing them to understand who they are. 

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Leah Flack

Course Title: Narrative 4: Storytelling for Hope, Justice and Community
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900

Course Description: In this new course, students will learn to think in new, transformative ways about the work stories do in their own lives, the lives of others, and in our communities. The class will have four emphases:

1. Creativity. We will study experimental literature and art to consider how to tell and understand stories that might otherwise get silenced in traditional narrative forms.  Students will try out different methods such as telling stories in a graphic medium, via podcast, via social media, and other forms. Students will be asked to play and to engage the world through their imaginations during in-class exercises and creative practice journals.
2. Storytelling for Empathy. Students will become certified Narrative 4 story exchange facilitators. The training they will get broadly prepares them to convene group discussions, to become better listeners, and to build community. These skills are broadly useful and this credential is one students will take with them to graduate and professional school and in their careers. Students will collaborate to consider how storytelling exercises might be used to build community on campus.  
3. Collaborative research. The class will collaborate around a few shared research questions, such as: What impact do experiences of beauty and awe have on mental health? On our capacity to engage with the pressing issues of our time? What can creative exercises have on our capacity to concentrate and focus? What can stories do to help us to develop a hopeful orientation to the future? Students will have the opportunity to help shape research studies in these areas currently underway. And, they will be led through a process of designing their own studies based on their own questions.
4. Community engagement. Members of class will have several opportunities to develop leadership skills and work with community partners such as the Florentine Opera Company, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Haggerty Museum, the Milwaukee Rep Theater, and others. We will also consider how public storytelling can be used to call for justice or to perpetuate injustice.  Students will assemble a portfolio of their experiences and their visions and ideas for applied storytelling in their lives and futures.

There are no traditional essays in this class—see the unit descriptions to get a sense of the kind of work you can expect to do. Each unit will feature a handful of writers, artists, and public figures—some of whom will speak to our class—as exemplars to learn from.  Class expectations include: energetic engagement, willingness to try out new forms of creativity, meaningful contributions to research and community projects, keeping a creative practice journal, 4 unit assignments, and a final presentation.

This is an ideal class for English majors or minors who have wondered “what can I do with what I am learning in my English classes?” and for those with an interest in humanities, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Political Science, and Health Science disciplines such as Nursing, Physical Therapy, Speech Therapy, and Occupational Therapy.

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Melissa Ganz

Course Title: Crime and Punishment in English Fiction
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900
Note: This is an "Honors for all" course open to all undergraduates, and enrollment is by permission number

Course Description:  From thieves and murderers to bigamists and terrorists, criminals have long figured prominently in English fiction.  In this course, we consider the centrality of crime and punishment to the novel tradition while exploring the ways in which novels can help us understand the causes and consequences of illicit acts.  We focus on novels from the Victorian period (such as Oliver Twist and Jekyll and Hyde) and end with Margaret Atwood’s marvelous reimagining of the era’s crime fiction in Alias Grace.  We pay particular attention to the implications of criminality for literary form while sampling recurring debates about the effects of reading and writing about vice.  Along the way, we consider topics including the value and limits of transgression; the origins of the human capacity for evil; the role of gender, class, and nation in representations of criminality; and the relationship between law and literature. As an upper-level English class, this course places special emphasis on close reading and critical writing.  There will be opportunities to participate in mock trials and debates and to consider texts and discussions in this class in relation to those in other classes in the Basic Needs and Justice theme.  By the end of the course, my hope is that you will have gained a better understanding of perennial problems of criminal justice, a sense of the range and richness of nineteenth-century fiction, and a set of reading and writing skills that will serve you well in the years ahead.

Note:  This class satisfies the 1700-1900 literary history requirement for English majors and counts toward the minor in Law and Society and the major/minor in Gender and Sexualities Studies.  In addition, the course counts toward the Basic Needs and Justice theme of the Marquette Core Curriculum (MCC)’s Discovery Tier and satisfies the MCC Writing-Intensive requirement.

Readings: Novels and short fiction by authors such as Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Margaret Atwood, as well as selected works of literary criticism and legal/cultural history.

Assignments: Two papers; a “crime log” (reading journal); short discussion posts; and lively participation. 

101 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Heather Hathaway

Course Title: Studies in Literature and Culture
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature

Course Description: When Toni Morrison received a notice from the Texas Bureau of Corrections stating that her novel, Paradise, was banned because “it might stir up a riot,” she joked, “how powerful is that?! I could tear up the whole place,” just through words! Words, as Richard Wright has stated, are seen as “weapons” because they can open minds, expose new worlds, and introduce experiences different from our own. This brilliance has always terrified. In this course, we will examine writing that has been defined as too dangerous to read in an effort to understand just what book banners find so terrifying. Works will be studied in their political, historical, and cultural contexts, so students from a variety of disciplines beyond English will also benefit from our inquiry.

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Jodi Melamed
102 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Jodi Melamed

Course Title: Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Multicultural American Literature, UCCS Diverse Cultures, Post-1900

Course Description: The course examines the construction and deployment of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity in U.S. culture and society over the course of the last 100 years up until our present moment, in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. In particular, it examines the centrality of literature for understanding cultural and political negotiations around race,  ethnicity, and indigeneity. 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, ethnic, and Indigenous studies and featuring literary texts from authors identified with European American, African American, Asian American, Latino/a, American Indian, 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. Especially toward the end of class, we will use the case of Milwaukee to think about the history and presence 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: Critical race theory including texts by Howard Winant, bell hooks, George Lipsitz, David Roediger, Lisa Lowe and Roderick Ferguson. Literature including Richard Wright, Native Son and Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We are All Looking For.

Assignments: Critical reflection papers, 2 short papers, one longer research essay, oral presentation.

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Heather Hathaway

Course Title: Africana Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900; UCCS Diverse Cultures, Multicultural American Literature

Course Description: African American literature is best understood with the many contexts of its creation: sociological, historical, literary, political, and cultural. In this course, we will read a variety of African American literary classics from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, approaching them from an interdisciplinary perspective. You will learn a lot about Black literature and Black history and culture, too. Be prepared to dig into some of the best writing you’ve ever read!

Readings: Likely texts include The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Cane by Jean Toomer, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Song of Solomon and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Amy Blair

Course Title: The Researched Passion Project
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Capstone Requirement for ENGL, ENGW

Course Description: What is your Intellectual Passion Project? The Big Question that has dogged you throughout your undergraduate (and high school? And before?) life? Are you unsure whether you have one? Excited to get creditfor some work discerning and launching it? As a capstone course, English 4997 is designed to enable each student to pull together knowledge and skills from previous experiences and coursework, both within the English major and throughout the undergraduate curriculum. During this class, which will be run like a writing workshop, you will imagine and complete a substantial independent project involving research, critical thinking, reflection, originality, and writing.  This course is structured to bridge the transition between college and the beginning of a career or a graduate program by pulling together and honing skills and knowledge developed over the duration of the undergraduate years and building habits for long-term independent work. We will talk about mindset, time management, and stress management. Students will begin working on their own independent project from the first day of the semester, building individual primary reading lists based on the proposed and approved project. Seminar meetings will discuss shared readings on methodology, will be jam sessions for writing and percolating ideas, and will workshop writings at various stages of the research project.  Your instructor will be writing alongside you on her own project! We will conclude the semester with a class conference to present our work to the University community.

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Elizaveta Strakhov

Course Title: Medieval Literature – Chaucer and “English Studies”

Course Description: A vital skill for graduate level work is the ability to map out, make sense of, and discern the main scholarly debates comprising a specific subfield. A broad understanding of the larger trends in the field of English studies is further a crucial element of graduate student formation in English. This seminar will focus on the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, famously termed by John Dryden as the “father of English poetry” and variously held up as a star of the premodern syllabus, which makes him a central figure through which to think about English studies as a whole. We will focus on Chaucer and the field of Chaucer studies in a semester-long practicum in working with secondary sources and getting to know a scholarly field. We will work our way through some of the major works in Chaucer’s œuvre, chosen with a specific eye to major scholarly debates, adjacent theoretical fields, and methodological approaches that define the field. In the process, we will focus on efficiently skimming and outlining research and mapping out and eloquently articulating scholarly interventions in our own writing. Over the course of the semester we will think increasingly about the role of Chaucer and medieval studies within popular perceptions of the Middle Ages and the humanities as a whole.

Readings: Texts included but not limited to: the Norton Chaucer and surrounding secondary scholarship

101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Al Rivero

Course Title: The Long 18th Century: What is Jane Austen?

Course Description: In 1997, I was asked by our then department chair to teach an undergraduate course on Jane Austen. I had read all her novels, some of them as a child, but had taught only one of them, Sense and Sensibility, as part of an undergraduate survey on British literature from 1800 to the present. I was not an expert, nor had I done any appreciable research on Austen or her works, so I assumed this would be a one-term assignment. I was wrong.

The course was enormously popular, with many students unable to enroll because of our cap of 30 for undergraduate classes. All the students in that first class were women. Twenty-seven years later, I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Austen every year. The occasional male student has wandered into my classroom, but this has remained a course that appeals primarily to women. I could speculate as to why this is the case, but the truth, universally acknowledged of course, is that Austen’s novels address what her sister novelist, Frances Burney, called ‘female difficulties’. Those difficulties, mostly due to economic circumstances, seem to be dismissed in the fairy-tale ending of Pride and Prejudice. They are squarely confronted in the darker Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, but these two novels also conclude with the heroine’s marriage to the man she loves, a suitably sentimental payoff for readers. Thus, typically but mistakenly regarded as fantasy machines, Austen’s novels have come to occupy a prominent place in our popular culture, with Austen herself becoming a mega-celebrity on a par with Shakespeare.

When I began teaching Austen under the blanket course descriptor of ‘major author’ in 1997, I was interested in learning more about who was Jane Austen, the author of these amazing novels. Almost three decades later, with the Austen course now having its own dedicated number in our course catalogue, I’m intrigued by a more fascinating question: What is Jane Austen? This is the question we’ll attempt to answer in this graduate seminar by not only reading her works but by examining the social and academic institutions underwriting her status as cultural icon.

Readings: Austen’s novels (Norton); supplemental readings.

Assignments: Discussion leader for two classes; one annotated bibliography or syllabus for ‘major authors’ course; one researched final project; class participation; and regular attendance.

101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Tosin Gbogi

Course Title: Literature, Theory, and the Crisis of Modernity

Course Description: Writing in Phonographies, Alexander G. Weheliye notes that “prostheses of modern origins emphasize the ascent and proliferation of reason, secularization, progress, humanism, individualism, rationalization, industrialization, and so on.” However, what such definitions and engagements often gloss over, Weheliye adds, is that “slavery, colonialism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust are not, as has often been assumed, aberrations from the ‘higher’ ideals of the modern but lie at its molten nucleus.” Using literary and, by extension, expressive cultures as entry points, this class will examine the promises, limits, and contradictions of the modern project. We will begin our inquiries from the discursive articulations of modernity within the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and then read outwards from there to how modernity is critiqued, challenged, and re-historicized from what Enrique Dussel calls its “underside.” We will read between and across a wide range of theories—e.g., postcolonialism, decolonial theory, Afropessimism, and Afrofuturism—that are sometimes seen as antagonistic but that in reality are united by their subversive interrogations of the legacies of modernity. We will also examine literary texts, films, and songs that will allow us to further track the transnational itineraries of the modern and how they are reimagined in literary and other aesthetic works from across the world.

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jenna Green

Course Title: Teaching Writing: Inclusive Pedagogy

Course description: This course will introduce current research in writing studies and the core debates and politics that have shaped the practice, teaching, and study of writing. The course will also examine the assumptions that guide different approaches with consideration of whose interests they serve, so that all members of the class can become more self-reflective readers, writers, and teachers. We will discuss anti-racist and translingual pedagogical approaches as well as strategies for equitable curriculum design and assessment.

Assignments: Will include a reading journal, a teaching ethnography, a bibliography and research presentation, and a teaching portfolio. 

Please see the 4000 level courses for course descriptions

5110 - Exploring the English Language
5402 - The Novel to 1990
5612 - J.R.R. Tolkien
5615 - Text in Context
5755 - Law and Literature
5770 - Studies in Literature and Culture
5830 - Africana Literatures