Courses Offered (Fall 2025)

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 120, 133, 134, and 139 are service-learning mandatory sections that require a minimum of 18 hours of service during the semester.

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Leah Flack

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Sebastian Bitticks

Course Title: Books That Matter: Resonant Spaces

Course Description: Sociologist Hartmut Rosa has recently proposed a “theory of resonance” to explain how people find meaning in their lives. As Rosa defines it, “resonance is a kind of relationship to the world...in which subject and world are mutually affected and transformed.” When the landscape on a hike or the medium of a craft seem to “sing”, we resonate with them. When a work of art or a material in making “speaks to us”, we resonate with them. When we feel “seen and heard” by family and friends, even by animals or objects, we resonate with them.

In this course, we will take this idea of resonance as a touchstone and guide, both as readers and writers. Literature is a way for writers to remember, better understand, and share resonant experiences in their lives. The act of writing can itself be a resonant experience, in which language and story can “sing”. Reading, like any encounter with art, can be a resonant experience: we can feel “seen” by a book which seems to “speak to us” as though it were written specifically for us. We read and write to “feel more human”: we read and write to resonate.

101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Paul Gagliardi

Course Title: Texts, Social Systems, and Values

Course Description: This course will explore some of the most popular film genres and why they resonate with audiences. We will examine several specific genres of film including but not limited to the slasher film, the domestic melodrama, and the biopic from both American and other cinematic traditions. Over the course of the term, we will consider how genres evolve and the evolution of their popularity --- such as the prevalence of the backstage musical during the post-World War II period -- and how different generations of filmmakers have reinterpreted generic conventions for different cultural and historical contexts. Additionally, this course will study how films of various genres address issues of gender, race, and identity representation, as well as reinforcing or challenging social norms at various points. We will also explore the scholarly tradition of film studies and some of the long-standing debates over the notion of genre and its impact on audiences (as well as audience expectations of these genres).

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Jenn Fishman
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Writing Practices and Processes fulfills a requirement for ENGA and ENGW majors; it also fulfills an elective requirement for ENGL majors, and starting F25 it serves as a gateway course for disciplinary honors.

Course Title: Writing Practices and Processes: Just in Time

Course Description: This course is an exploration of some of the many ways writing is related to time and timing. This includes how we tell time and how we experience it. Did waiting in that line feel like 5 seconds or 5 hours? Did you have a good time? Were they giving you a hard time? Need a time out? Is it time?

Along with plenty of word play, we’ll use in-class writing exercises, weekly readings, and weekly writing assignments to explore how writing and writers change over time. To start, we will study ourselves, learning methods that researchers use to better understand writers and the writing they do. That’s the first four-week class project. Next, we’ll study other people’s writing in relation to specific moments in time (e.g., unprecedented events, historical eras, available technology). That’s the second four-week class project. Each member of 3210 will also develop and complete a writing-based project that involves inquiry and one or more real-world genres appropriate to their timeline(s) as a writer. That’s the third class project, and it takes the entire second half of the semester: from midterms through finals. 

Students who succeed in ENGL 3210 are students who are game to expand their repertoires as writers, hone skills they can use beyond their classes, and dedicate real time to projects that count, whether the measure is personal, professional, or academic. Although this course is full of surprises, the workflow is steady: attend and participate on Tuesdays and Thursdays; complete weekly readings (due Thursdays); and complete weekly writing assignments (due Sundays).

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
102 TuTh 9:30-10:45 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 1:00-1:50 Professor Tyler Farrell
102 MWF 2:00-2:50 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!

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

—Novalis

Assignments: weekly writing assignments- in two or more genres, class discussions and workshops, final portfolio of writing (20-25 pages)

101 TuTh 8:00-9:15 Professor Katherine Zlabek
102 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 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 and critiqued for its form as well as its representation of social and 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; experiments; short stories; outside reading; revision. 

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Megan Paonessa

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

Course Description: In this course, students will analyze a diverse array of life-writing forms such as memoir and the personal narrative, discussing how each work attempts to convey an author’s lived/real/felt self. We will explore questions of language and representation, memory and imagination, creativity and authenticity, and individual and group identities. At the same time, students will practice writing their own memories into narrative, exploring the complexities, ironies, contradictions, and poetry wrapped into their identities and the places and spaces they share with others.

102 MWF 11:00-11:50 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 Jenna Green

Course Title: Rhetorics of Irish Storytelling
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: How do rhetoricians employ storytelling as a way of knowing, identifying, remembering, and making? We’ll embark on these questions by reading and analyzing contemporary Irish writers. Ireland is well-known for its traditions of promoting “the telling of stories, stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and of social justice” as former Irish president Mary Robinson explained in her inaugural speech (1990). We’ll utilize rhetorical analysis to examine how stories represent significant cultural shifts and attempt answers to ongoing questions including: the relationship between tradition and innovation; the uses of memory, history, and the past; national identity in an era of globalization; immigration and diaspora; representations of trauma and survival; and gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race in contemporary Ireland. Irish authors will help us discern the transformative power of stories to make sense of our pasts, craft our present, and imagine our futures.

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 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 11:00-12:15 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 9:30-10:45 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 Laura Misco

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

Course Description: A famous quote about the writing process states, “The writer is the one who stays in the room.” Of course, determining how to “stay in the room” and develop a life-long habit of art takes practice and dedication and is the focus of this course. Together, we’ll read contemporary fiction, discuss publishing, and workshop original pieces. Students will complete a culminating long-form project. Prior writing experience is assumed.

101 MWF 8:00-8:50 Professor Steve Hartman Keiser
102 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Steve Hartman Keiser

Course Title: Sociolinguistics: Language and Gender
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Language study

Course Description:  Every day, simply by speaking, we reconstruct the world and our place in it as gendered beings: feminine, masculine, androgynous, straight, lesbian, gay, bi, trans, cis, questioning. In this course we investigate the communicative practices that form the culture of everyday life (our conversations, the media) to uncover the links between language and cognition and the ways that language both reflects and creates social organization—including categories such as gender, ethnicity, and class. Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

1. Analyze the structure of language at the level of sounds, words, sentences, and conversations, and explain how these linguistic structures correlate with and are performances of social structure, power, and culturally-enshrined views of gender. (Individuals and Communities outcome)
2. Critique various accounts of gender-differentiated language use and the implications of these accounts for social advantage or disadvantage. In other words, analyze language as a key site in the reproduction of gender inequality. (ESSV2 outcome)
3. Engage in critical self-reflection on how you perform gender and how you evaluate others’ performances of gender as you adopt a variety of stances, styles, and personae. (ESSV2 outcome)

Readings: Kiesling, Scott F. 2024. Language, Gender, and Sexuality: An Introduction. 2^nd edition. Routledge.

Assignments:  Responses to readings and class discussions. Collection and analyses of language data. Midterm essay.

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Paul Gagliardi
102 MWF 2:00-2:50 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.

103 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Tosin Gbogi

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 to advanced study in the discipline of English literature. We will read a variety of literary texts—poetry, short fiction, drama, novel, graphic novel, film, television—and will talk about formal, theoretical, and historical approaches to literary interpretation. We are not going to be overly concerned about themes common across these texts (though we might discover some!) but will always be thinking self-consciously about the ways we approach texts with particular expectations that can be fulfilled, frustrated, or exceeded…sometimes all in the same text. This course will help students develop fluency with academic discourses and habits of literary criticism that will serve them in their upper-division courses at Marquette, as well as develop their skills as writers and thinkers in their own right.

Readings: John Peck and Martin Coyle's Practical Criticism. Other readings will be posted on d2L. 

Assignments: discussion posts (close reading), a midterm paper, an oral presentation, and a final research paper 

101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Elizaveta Strakhov
102 TuTh 11:00-12:15 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 Dante’s Inferno, 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: Marie de France, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Geoffrey Chaucer

Assignments: May include papers, a creative assignment, a multimodal presentation, and discussion posts

101 TuTh 8:00-9:15 Professor Al Rivero

Course Title: Jane Austen
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900

Course Description: Jane Austen is huge these days. Dozens of television, film, and theatrical adaptations of her novels have appeared and will continue to appear. Merchandise featuring her image, or the images of her characters is everywhere. Only Shakespeare exceeds her in cultural capital. The downside of our current obsession with all things Austen is that the novels themselves are often trivialized or not read with care. In this course, we will read all six of Austen’s published novels with the close attention they demand and deserve. But, depending on your access to them, we will also discuss film and TV adaptations because they enrich our appreciation of her novels and help us better understand her role as a cultural icon.  

Whether Austen was a feminist in our modern sense is debatable. What is beyond dispute is that her novels aim to represent the plight of women in a patriarchal society rigged against them. Austen’s novels are not the fantasy machines for which they are often mistaken but pedagogical interventions in a culture which, while ostensibly valuing women, kept them from achieving their full human potential. This is a truth not universally acknowledged either in Austen’s time or in ours. 

Readings: Norton Critical Editions of Northanger Abbey; Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; and Persuasion.

Assignments: One or two oral presentations, one researched term paper (ca. 8-10pp.); midterm examination; comprehensive final examination; class participation; and regular attendance.

101 Wednesday 5:00-7:30pm Professor James Pribek, S.J.

Course Title: Ulysses
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900

Course Description: Much could be said about the prominence of James Joyce’s Ulysses: it is consistently rated among the most influential works of the 20^th century, and scholars have written more about its author than about Shakespeare.  Though Joyce’s work may correspond loosely to Homer’s Odyssey, it belongs to no clear genre, form, or movement.  It is less a literary work, traditional or modern, as it is an attempt to record one day on paper, using words, music, symbols, and sensations.  Do not expect a plot: there is none.  What the book features is a wonderful place—Dublin—and three extraordinarily compelling main characters whose minds and souls we enter in a direct way.  In doing so, we see their chance encounters prove momentous.  But we also observe and experience much of what it means to be human: to love, to grieve, to feel regret, to philosophize, to fantasize, to argue, to age, and ultimately to say “yes” to life, in all its poverty and grandeur.  Not many human deeds, from the most earthy to the most exalted, do not find their way into this book.  If you love a place and people—if you love words—if you love life, chances are good that you will love this book!  Join a lively group for weekly discussion and occasional writing, as Joyce’s Ulysses fosters humanity and builds community.

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

Course Title: Introduction to Health Humanities
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  1700-1900

Course Description: This course introduces students to the Health Humanities. A vibrant and growing field, the Health Humanities brings together an array of disciplines and perspectives in the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences to conceptualize the human experience of health, illness, disability, and medicine. With a commitment to interdisciplinarity at the forefront, we will focus on the literary, historical, philosophical, and cultural underpinnings of health, illness, disability, and medicine. Intersectionality likewise plays an important role in this course. Students will gain an understanding of how systemic inequities–such as ableism, racism, and homo- and transphobia–shape health and impinge upon the basic need of health for social justice. Students will develop writing and communication and collaborative skills along with a deeper understanding of the experiences of various populations of patients and health care providers.

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Grant Gosizk

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

Course Description: Susan Sontag said that ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. […] Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.’ In other words, the experience of being ill is often complicated by prejudices, stereotypes, and moral/ethical meanings that are attributed to illnesses within particular cultural contexts. This section of “Literature and Medicine” focuses on how fiction, theatre, poetry and prose participate in the cultural act of defining the limits and meanings of illness and wellness. To focus this inquiry, we will be taking one particular illness as a case study: addiction. We’ll spend the semester exploring the various ways that addiction has been defined by American doctors (and how this has changed throughout history), how these definitions have been embraced, denounced, and analogized by literature, and how the metaphorization of addiction has had real world political consequences.

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Samantha Majhor
102 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Samantha Majhor

Course Title: Water is Life: Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, Multicultural American Literature, American Literature

Course Description: This course focuses on Native American and Indigenous efforts to address changing climates with a focus on water protection. We will delve into the history of water relations by looking at various indigenous and non-indigenous texts, stories, poetry, maps, artworks, and cultural materials that speak to the history and ongoing water relationships in the region. Our inquiries will reveal how this vital element has shaped our relationships to each other and to the state. The course will include experiential learning opportunities and the possibility to connect, collaborate, and present research with fellow undergraduates at other universities who are exploring the same topic.

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

Course Title: Introduction to Critical 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 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Leah Flack

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

Course Description: This course will read three of the greatest novels ever written: The Brothers Karamazov (by Fyodor Dostoevsky), Anna Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy), and The Master and Margarita (by Mikhail Bulgakov). These novels are universally admired because they make enormous and unusual promises to readers: if you read these novels thoughtfully, you will not only discover the meaning of life, but you will have an opportunity to reflect on how we make sense of ourselves, others, and life's big unanswered questions: what does it mean to live a good life? why must human beings suffer? how can we maintain faith in a world where terrible things happen to good people? why are we here, and what are our obligations to one another? And finally, what role might literature play in helping us to find meaning?

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

CourseTitle: Themes in Medieval Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700

Course Description: A well-known saying holds that "history is written by the victors." The devastating Hundred Years War, lasting over one hundred years from 1337 to 1453, popularized the now common war tactics of siege and scorched-earth raids and targeted acts of terror on local civilian populations. A new chapter in war, it also had a huge impact on contemporary literature. In this class, we will be exploring both historical and literary medieval writing about war by looking at medieval war chronicles with conflicting accounts of the conflict, the remarkable courtroom testimony and trial of nineteen-year-old Joan of Arc, a girl from a rural village who led the French army to victory before being captured and burned at the stake, and fictional treatments of war in contemporary literature. We will focus on the difficult question of truth in times of war. Who tells the truth? Who gets to tell the truth? Who gets believed? How do we ever know what really happened? And how may the challenges of discerning the truth in the past help us discern it in our current complex political moment?

Readings: Medieval chronicles, The Trial of Joan of Arc, excerpts from Virgil's Aeneid, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Assignments: May include papers, a creative assignment, a multimodal presentation, and discussion posts

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

Course Title: Shakespeare
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 12:30-1:45 Professor Melissa Ganz

Course Title: Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900

Course Description: From bigamy and robbery to treason and murder, eighteenth-century novels obsessively depict illicit behavior.  In this course, we consider the centrality of law and lawlessness to early British fiction while exploring the ways in which novels can help us understand the nature and consequences of illicit acts.  Reading novels alongside criminal biographies, statutes, and treatises, we take up questions concerning justice and judgment, crime and punishment, gender and marriage, testimony and evidence, and legal terror and popular violence.  At the same time, we examine the emergence and development of the novel genre.  We will read texts such as Daniel Defoe’s lively and checkered fictional autobiography of Moll Flanders, a four-time bigamist and successful thief who claims to have repented even as she proudly narrates her crimes; a work of Gothic fiction by the radical philosopher William Godwin, detailing the abuse of police power; and the anonymous Woman of Colour, recounting the challenges experienced by a bi-racial heiress from Jamaica whose father arranges for her to marry her cousin in England.  We will also examine Austen’s treatment of marriage and inheritance in Pride and Prejudice and watch the 2013 PBS/Masterpiece film adaptation of P.D. James’s continuation, Death Comes to Pemberley—timed to coincide with international celebrations of the 250^th anniversary of Austen’s birth in December 1775.  The course should appeal to students with interests in law and ethics as well as anyone with an appetite for stories about transgression, punishment, and revenge. 

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, it counts toward the Basic Needs and Justice theme of the Marquette Core Curriculum (MCC) and satisfies the MCC Writing-Intensive requirement.

Readings:  Novels by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen; secondary readings by Martha Nussbaum, Douglas Hay, Michel Foucault, and others.

Requirements:  Two papers (with drafts/revision); a reading journal (“crime log”); short reading responses (in the form of D2L posts); and lively participation.

101 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Sarah Wadsworth

Course Title: US Literature from the Constitution to the Civil War: The Concord Group
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900, American Literature
Note: This is an "Honors for all" course open to all undergraduates, and enrollment is by permission number

Course Description: In the mid-nineteenth century, a period of artistic experimentation, philosophical exploration, and influential reform movements, Concord, Massachusetts emerged as both the birthplace of the movement known as New England Transcendentalism and the center of the American Renaissance, a cultural landmark renowned for the vast influence its writers would have on the development of American literature. In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the work of the writers and thinkers who gravitated to Concord—especially, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott—along with close affiliates and occasional visitors to this cultural hub, including Margaret Fuller, whose groundbreaking work helped lay the foundations of first-wave feminism. Our aim will be to explore the tensions, contradictions, and creative energies of this interconnected group of writers and their distinctive contributions to influential strands of American thought, including New England Transcendentalism, the American Gothic, and the foundations of enduring social movements that would advance racial justice, women’s rights, and environmentalism.

Readings: Readings in the first half of the course will draw on Emerson’s essays and poems, Thoreau’s Walden, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. In the second half of the course, we will examine the varied contributions of a single author, Louisa May Alcott, including her literary novel Moods, the sensation novel Behind a Mask, and shorter works of fiction such as Hospital Sketches, “Transcendental Wild Oats” and “My Contraband.” For contemporary perspective, we will also explore Little Women and its “afterlives,” including movies and stage adaptations.

Assignments: Several short papers and one longer one, completed in stages; lively and informed participation in class discussions; and a presentation.

101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title: Science Fiction/Fantasy: Frank Herbert's Dune
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature

Course Description: Frank Herbert’s innovative, hyper-influential, and devilishly fun novel Dune was published 60 years ago this year—and, with the recent Denis Villeneuve adaptations, the series may be at its all-time peak of popularity and cultural influence. This year’s Science Fiction/Fantasy course is devoted entirely to the series, with special focus on the first two books, Dune and Dune Messiah, and a closing unit focused on the fourth book in the series, God Emperor of Dune. Dune, alongside its sequels, remains a tentpole work in the history of science fiction, marking a major pivot point for the genre: in addition to being one of the first works of classic science fiction to truly take the environment, and environmental constraint, seriously, it is also a work that troubles the typical imperial and galactic-cosmopolitan leanings of writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Roddenberry by siding instead with the colonized subjects of the Galactic Empire. (It is noteworthy that the key word in the final half of Dune is “jihad”—and that the text is on the side of the jihadis.) In Dune Messiah (the basis for the upcoming Villeneuve movie, expected in 2026), this approach to revolutionary violence is then itself critiqued, leaving the main character despairing, and deconstructing the “chosen one” narrative common in genre fiction in ways that were decades ahead of its time.

We will supplement our study of Dune with key works of postcolonial theory, ecological critique, adaptation studies, franchise studies, religion and secularity studies, and artificial intelligence theory to better understand Dune not only in its context but in ours. Partially funded by a grant from the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, we will also attend to how Dune speaks to the ways societies manage conflict, internally and externally, especially around resource management and cultural difference; among the many things Dune is about, it is centrally about the singular importance of oil to industrial capitalism, and about how the “resource curse” of oil has dominated global politics for a century, leading to conflicts we continue to try to untangle even as the oil age is, itself, slowly starting to come to its end. Dune is a gripping story, but it is also a powerful allegory, one that has helped critics and fans better understand the world situation since its first publication sixty years ago and remains intensely relevant (in good ways and bad!) today. Along the way, we will also study Dune’s many adaptations, from Lynch in 1984 to the Syfy Channel in 2000 to Villeneuve in the 2020s, as well as some of the many other works it has inspired, perhaps chief among them George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode Four—A New Hope.

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

Readings: Dune; Dune Messiah; God Emperor of Dune, and selected additional readings and screenings

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Heather Hathaway

Course Title: Banned Books
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: 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 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Heather Hathaway

Course Title: Africana Literature
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900; Multicultural American Literature, 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, Caneby Jean Toomer, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Song of Solomonand Beloved by Toni Morrison. 

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jenn Fishman

Course Title: Capstone: Essays at the End of English
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Capstone Requirement for ENGL, ENGW

Course Description: This capstone is for English majors and minors nearing the end of their undergraduate studies. It is an invitation to spend the semester reveling in Englishy-ness as readers, thinkers, and writers. Our collective merrymaking will involve good fun as well as serious play with our own and others' words, ideas, hopes, dares, and more—all through the study and production of short- and long-form essays.

Wait! Don't panic, especially if you saw the word "essay" and broke into a cold sweat. Rest assured. It's going to be okay—or better.* This class is not an academic essay mill, and no one will be allowed to write anything that resembles that exhausted school genre, “the research paper.” Instead, for common ground, we'll read photo essays, sonic essays, and manifestos against "the essay" alongside both renowned examples of essay mastery and recent attempts to see what essays can do. We'll also write** with the goal of emerging from the semester with substantial work that everyone feels proud of.

Course materials will include a variety of electronic sources, all free and available via D2L.

Coursework will include a steady flow of reading, reading responses, and class participation on Tuesdays and Thursdays plus writing due each Sunday. Everyone will also join the Ott Scholars Program and, starting the third week of classes, attend a weekly 30-minute appointment at the Ott Writing Center. Anyone with an essayistic project in-progress should talk with me no later than the first day of class to discuss continuing to work on it for course credit; anyone with preliminary ideas or questions should also be in touch: jenn.fishman@marquette.edu.

*If, when you read the word "essay," your heart rejoiced, I see you and look forward to working with you.

**We'll define "writing" quite broadly, and we'll work across media and essay types as available resources (e.g., time, tech, wherewithal, knowhow) allow. 

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

Course Title: Studies in 19th Century British Literature: Gothic Fiction and Form

Course Description: This course will focus on British gothic novels published during the later eighteenth century and Romantic period, covering the 1760s through the 1830s. We will discuss the form and conventions of the gothic mode that Horace Walpole popularized with his 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto. Other novelists may include Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, James Hogg, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. We will examine how gothic novels depict monsters and “the double” through what Freud deemed “the uncanny,” and the way that gothic spaces—castles, monasteries, and abbeys—contribute to the terror or horror that these novels mobilize. Secondary readings will illuminate cultural and literary histories of the gothic, including scholarship grounded in disability studies and gender, sexuality, and queer studies. At times, we will also discuss the afterlives of the gothic–how it persists in our cultural imaginary today through novels, films, music, and other media.

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Sarah Wadsworth

Course Title: Studies in American Literature from the Beginning to 1900: Writing in the 1850s

Course Description: Both a period course and a methods course, this seminar introduces students to the History of the Book as a field of study and scholarly approach while focusing on U.S. literature during the cultural watershed of the 1850s. Tracing the emergence of modern authorship and publishing on a national scale, we will examine the overlapping trajectories of popular and belletristic writing at the height of the American Renaissance—a period of remarkable literary achievement punctuated by many “firsts.” Course readings will be anchored by texts that have come to form the foundation of both traditional and revisionist literary canons and include the first national “bestsellers,” the first novel by a Native American writer, the first novel by an African American woman, a sampling of the era’s periodicals, popular verse of the Fireside Poets, and early works of two proto-modernist U.S. poets: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Along the way, we will pay attention to the political and cultural climate of the decade following the Seneca Falls Convention (the first women’s rights convention) and poised between the U.S.–Mexican War and the U.S. Civil War, as we examine the shifting dynamics of the maturing literary marketplace and the rich cultural record of the mid-nineteenth century.

Readings: Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative; Ralph Waldo Emerson, selected poetry and prose; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, and the earliest poems of Emily Dickinson.

Assignments: A few short assignments; regular informal presentations of research in progress; lively participation in seminar discussions; a substantial seminar paper shaped around individual student interests; participation in end-of-semester class conference.  

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

Course Title: Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice

Course Description: This course examines major developments, concerns, debates, and principles in literary theory and criticism. Although the historical arc of the class will constantly take us across periods, our major emphasis will be on theories and critical approaches that have developed over the last several centuries. Such theories and critical approaches are wide ranging and include Close Reading, Distant Reading, Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Symptomatic Reading, Contrapuntal Reading, New Criticism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Feminism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction, New Historicism, Postcolonialism, Decolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Theory, among others. Using a selected number of texts, we will test how these theories and critical approaches apply in concrete terms to the analyses of literature and other cultural materials.

101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Lilly Campbell

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

5747 - Banned Books
5988 - Practicum in Literature and Language Arts