Courses Offered (Spring 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 113 and 114 are service-learning mandatory sections that require a minimum of 18 hours of service during the semester.

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Jenn Fishman

Course Title: Writing Community Change

Course Description: In this course students earn WRIT and ESSV 2 credit while making history through hands-on research and writing for the 10^th anniversary of Near West Side Partners (NWSP), a nonprofit organization anchored by 5 Milwaukee institutions, including Marquette.

Backstory: This spring NWSP will celebrate a decade of forging meaningful, productive and sustaining partnerships with individuals and groups in Milwaukee’s “neighborhood of neighborhoods.” Geographically, the Near West Side is bounded by Highway 175, Interstates 94 and 43, Vliet Street, and Highland Boulevard. It includes Avenues West, Cold Spring Park, Concordia, Merrill Park, Martin Drive, Miller Valley, and The Valley/Piggsville. Home to approximately 30,000 people, this storied portion of the city of Milwaukee encompasses not only Marquette’s campus but also headquarters for Aurora Health Care, Harley-Davidson, Molson Coors, and Potawatomi Ventures.

Opportunity: Since 2015, NWSP has developed a deep roster of successful programs and initiatives; however, NWSP has not developed parallel mechanisms for chronicling these efforts, and as a result much stands to be lost, starting with ephemera and first-hand accounts of participants’ experiences. In the years to come, NWSP will prioritize the establishment of a formal archive and the implementation of related protocols for collecting, organizing, and sharing materials with relevant audiences, including community members, students, and scholars from across disciplines.

Contribution: To complement NWSP’s programmatic long-range efforts to establish an archive, students who take ENGL 2001 in Spring 2025 will pilot a mixed-methods multimodal approach to documenting NWSP history. After learning about NWSP and relevant writing research methods (Weeks 1-7), students will pitch and then conduct inquiry-based projects for the NWSP 10^th anniversary celebration and/or the NWSP archive (weeks 8-15).

Specifically, students in this class will:

• Review extant materials to gain a sense of NWSP and its histories, both told and (as yet) untold.
• Learn methods of inquiry relevant to documenting an organization’s history (e.g., bibliographic research, conducting interviews and focus groups, curating documents and artifacts).
• Pitch a project based on options offered by NWSP colleagues.
• Complete a project documenting NWSP’s past activities using two or more methods of inquiry.
• Report out via multimodal writing and presentations for the NWSP 10^th anniversary and archive.
• Reflect regularly on course activities in relation to writing, researching, connecting with others, and working toward personal, civic, and professional goals.

In partnership: This course is a collaboration with Kelsey Otero, Senior Director of Community Engagement; Lindsey St. Arnold Bell, Executive Director of NWSP; Rana Altenburg, Associate Vice President of Public Affairs and President of NWSP; Tara Baillargeon, Dean of Raynor Library; and the Near West Side community members who accept our invitation to participate.

Who can—and should—enroll? Students of all years and majors are encouraged to take this course! The only prereq is ENGL 1001, HOPR 1955H, or an equivalent; no prior research experience or knowledge of NWSP is required.

Please note: As per the Registrar, this 3-unit course includes 2.5 weekly contact hours or face-to-face meetings plus up to 6 hours for course-related tasks, including (but not limited to) reading, research, and writing. Attendance and timely completion of assignments will be expected. Class projects will invite—but not require—local, off-campus travel and collaborative work. All students should feel confident their needs, including ODS accommodations, can be met.

101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Sebastian Bitticks
102 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 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Tyler Farrell
102 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Tyler Farrell

Course Title: Well Versed: Poetry, Myth, and Life

Course Description: This course is for anyone who has ever struggled with poetry—with understanding it or liking it—as well as for anyone who already loves poetry and wants to deepen their appreciation. We’ll survey a variety of poetic forms while practicing the basics of poetic reading: focusing tightly on language, including how words look and sound; learning key figurative devices; and (often but not always) using rhyme and meter to analyze meaning. Learning how to interpret poetry will help you become a better reader of prose, since a poem’s condensed language teaches you to focus your attention simultaneously on a work’s broad and small movements. Finally, reading poetry is a deeply joyful process. This class will encourage the delight that comes from engaging with poetic language in a focused way and hopes that you’ll leave with at least one new favorite writer. We’ll be reading a wide range of poets, from medieval to modern, and practicing listening and reading poetry together in class—from ancient Greek poets to Contemporary Spoken-Word artists, poetry can be appreciated in many forms. After all Poetry is the oldest written art form and can address almost any subject. Poetry is also powerful and can awaken an awareness of ideas of history, love, lessons, politics, war, society, and revolution. Poetry can As Carolyn Forche writes, “[A poet’s] voice is the saying of the witness, which is not a translation of experience into poetry but is itself experience.” Go poetry!

We will look at a wide range of poets including: W.B. Yeats, Lorine Niedecker,, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, James Liddy, Terrance Hayes, Carolyn Forche, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Marie Louis Kaschnitz, Roberto Bolano, Juana Ines de la Cruz, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Nicholas Moore, Osip Mandelstam, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Spicer, George Oppen, Alice Notley, James Wright, Jim Chapson, and many others. We will also look at poems written about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and look deeply at how this myth informs the voice of poets from many backgrounds and eras.

This class will focus on analysis, active discussion in small and large groups, and writing informed by deep consideration of poetry from many eras.

Assignments: weekly reading assignments and short (1-2 page) reflections, group presentation, class discussions, two formal critical papers, midterm and final exam.

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Jenna Green

Course Title: Multimodal Workshop
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Writing Practices and Processes requirement for ENGA and ENGW majors. Fulfills ENGL major Elective requirement.  

Course Description: This workshop-based course is designed to help you develop your habits and skills as a writer in a digital age. Writing now includes many forms of creation in multiple modes and genres. This course will introduce you to theories of rhetoric and writing, provide opportunities to experiment with new writing processes and practices, and help you create a portfolio of nonfiction writing in multiple genres. 

We will analyze the ways writers compose texts by examining how meaning is constructed across genres through the use of text, images, sounds, and medium. The course is designed around the workshop method to allow frequent chances to write, revise, collaborate, and both give and receive feedback.

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jenna Green
102 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Jenna Green

Course Title: Writing for Workplaces
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Fulfills ENGL major Elective requirement.

Course Description: Professional communication is essential to the workplace, and this course helps you become an effective professional communicator. Professional communication is the presentation of workplace material in written and visual formats, and as communicators, you must write, design and speak across multiple audiences and for multiple purposes; professional fields require these skills. This class, in content and form, models these successful communication practices, and will help you learn effective strategies to communicate by working individually and collaboratively to complete course projects that are tailored to your personal and career goals. 
 
The course covers the following principle topics: 

• Nature and importance of ethical, effective professional communication 
• Workplace research methods, including interviews and usability testing 
• Planning, drafting, revising, and editing workplace documents, like proposals and reports 
• Elements of organization and document design 
• Design and delivery of documents and oral presentations 
• Style in multiple mediums and genres 

Readings: Textbook to be determined with additional readings on D2L.  

Assignments: You will create a professional career portfolio that will include deliverables such as a cover letter or personal statement, résumé, proposal, documentation/instructions, reports, memos, and reflections. Students will partner with community organizations and collaborate in writing documents requested by the organizations. All projects are individualized to meet students’ individual goals, needs, and interests. 

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 you become a better technical communicator. Think you’re not a technical communicator? Think you’re going into a career that doesn’t include technical communication? Think again. 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. All fields, careers, and contexts 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 technical description, an instructions document and usability report, presentations, and reflections, along with a midterm and final exam. Students tailor each project to fit their interests and goals.

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 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)

102 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Laura Misco

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

Course Description: The poet Mary Oliver wrote, "To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work." In this course, students will pay attention to their different realms and realities and bring those observations to writing and revising fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. This course helps students tap into their own creativity, express their ideas in clear, lively prose, and understand the vital connection between reading comparatively and writing well. 

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Katherine Zlabek
102 MWF 11:00-11:50 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 Ben Pladek

Course Title: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: Short Speculative Fiction
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: In this course we will explore the unique joys and challenges of writing less-than-totally-realist short fiction through a combination of literary study, discussions of craft, and peer workshops. The class will begin by analyzing speculative short stories from the 20^th and 21^st-centuries, with bias towards recent works from what’s been called the post-2000s short speculative fiction renaissance. We’ll talk about what differentiates “realist” fiction from “not-totally-realist” fiction (it’s both less and more than you’ve been told!), as well as common genre formats and expectations. Students will write brief in-class exercises that let them practice key storytelling techniques: world-building, inhabiting a point-of-view, building characters, plotting, and scene-setting. Students will then write, workshop, and revise their own short stories. In a supportive workshop environment, students will offer one another feedback that they will use to 1) better understand themselves as writers, and 2) improve their work—both by revising stories they’ve already written and becoming more intentional and attentive when writing new ones. At the end of class, students will submit a portfolio of their revised stories.   

Readings: All readings will be posted on d2L. Exercises will be drawn from Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft; short stories may include work from Ted Chiang, Sarah Pinsker, Sofia Samatar, Angela Carter, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Charlie Jane Anders, and others. 

Assignments: Lively participation; in-class writing exercises; one flash story; one longer short story; and edit letters for fellow writers in workshop. 

101 Tuesday 6:00-8:30 Professor Angela Sorby

Course Title: Creativity and Community

Course Description: Experiment with multiple forms of writing (drawing, storytelling, comedy) and low-stakes performance games (group improv) to explore life-writing modes beyond the traditional essay. 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. Attendance and participation are exceptionally important aspects of this course so students should plan accordingly. This course is co-sponsored by the EPP program and requires a permission number.

NOTE:

• Application required to enroll in this course
• EPP application opens on October 28^th and can be found on the EPP website and checkmarq
• All questions regarding this course should be directed to Alexandra Gambacorta

101 TuTh 3:30-4:45 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 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Danielle Harms
103 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Danielle Harms

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

Course Description: 

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Rebecca Nowacek
601 F 12:00-12:50 (Discussion) Professor Rebecca Nowacek

Course Title: Writing Center Theory, Practice and Research
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: Participants in this course will study the theoretical and practical aspects of peer tutoring of writing—a topic that may have relevance not only in the short term (for students looking to gain employment at Marquette’s Ott Memorial Writing Center and other campus programs that hire peer writing tutors) but also in the long term (for students looking to cultivate written and oral communication skills attractive to employers in a wide range of professions). Topics of inquiry include the complex processes involved in written, oral, and multi-modal composition; the exploration of the different genres and contexts of writing; the theory and practice of providing feedback on work in progress; and writing center scholarship more broadly. Observation, examination, and reflection upon our own experiences as writers and tutors is a central dimension of the course. Permission of the instructor after a process of application is required for registration. Please contact Dr. Rebecca Nowacek (Director of the Ott Memorial Writing Center) at rebecca.nowacek@marquette.edu.

Readings: Texts will include scholarly sources made available through electronic reserve as well as original texts composed by current and previous participants in the course.

Assignments: Will likely include two reflective papers, a longer inquiry project, and 15 hours of participation in a “writing center internship” in Marquette’s Ott Memorial Writing Center. 

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

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

Course Description: This course in short fiction will focus on generating new material, critically analyzing that material from both a craft and cultural perspective, and revising our work in relation to what we’ve learned in our analysis. Our example readings will include works of surrealism, magical realism, unreliable or unhinged narrators, guidebooks, letters, and horrors. By heavy-handedly forcing frames and forms onto our stories in the writing prompts I provide, we will distance ourselves, however slightly, from the emotional ties of our work so we can better understand the techniques and tools available to us as writers and form intentional fictions. 

Assignments: In addition to weekly writing prompts and reflections, students will be expected to produce 10-15 pages of polished work in a final portfolio. This can consist of one or two longer short stories, or a small collection of flash fictions. 

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Laura Misco

Course Title:  Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 

Course Description: ENGL 4270 is a creative writing workshop exploring literary nonfiction, with an emphasis on developing an awareness of style. Together, we will read a selection of essays and analyze them not only in terms of what they say, but also how they say it. We will investigate various rhetorical and stylistic techniques to assess their effectiveness in communicating ideas. Students will craft nonfiction essays of their own, mining their memories and relying on experiences, interests and expertise to craft their own stories and find their voices. 

101 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Tyler Farrell

Course Title: Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry of Myth and Place
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement 

Course Description: In the upper world / He had forced the stones to listen. / It wasn’t quite the same. And the people he remembered / Weren’t quite the same either. He began looking at faces / Wondering if all of hell were without music.

-Jack Spicer, “Orpheus in Hell”

Poetry is the oldest written art form and this class will examine the history of poetry, the impact it has on society, and the way we write and construct work about and from the writer. What do you write about when you write? How do you construct poetry that reflects the writer’s interests and insights? What authors inspire you to write? How can we examine poetry as a form of writing that inspires and forces us to look inward in order to create a meaningful and interesting poem that looks outward? These are questions that we will examine as we write and workshop poetry and poetic forms throughout this class. Our themes will be place and myth and we will examine poets who engage in these themes such as: Jack Spicer, Rilke, Carolyn Forche, W.B. Yeats, Lorine Niedecker, Fernando Pessoa, Ovid, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, James Liddy, Jim Chapson, John Berryman, and many more. 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 and we will write and workshop poems and ideas. 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 and poetry with lots of examples from poets that the writer would like to emulate. Pick a poet or poets and also a theme or themes and incorporate into works from the writer. We will then use class time for brainstorming, writing, percolating ideas, and revising and will workshop writings at various stages of the final writing project.  Your instructor will be writing alongside you working on his own project. As Fernando Pessoa once wrote: “Where we are is who we are.” And as D.H. Lawrence wrote, “Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.” We will contemplate these quotes as we write and create. A final portfolio of about 40-50 pages will be the aim followed by a reading of a few poems from your work. Go Poetry!

The Writing Internship Course, English 4986, enables both English Literature majors and minors and Writing-Intensive majors and minors to earn three hours of academic credit (“S” or “U”) for "real-world” writing experience. Such internships may be paid or unpaid. For more information, visit our internships page.

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

Course Title: Practicum in Literature and Language Arts
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Writing Elective

Course Description: This guided experience is designed for students participating in spring internships or serving as Marquette Literary Review editors. It combines professional mentoring and reflection with humanities-related work on- or off- campus. Students should contact Angela Sorby for permission numbers and for help with planning/placement.

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

Course Title: Sociolinguistics
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Language study

Course Description: Every day simply by speaking we reconstruct the world and our place in it: our age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, place of origin, and more. Speaking is an act of identity. Language—our voice—is perhaps the most fundamental way we identify ourselves to each other and the world. (And by “speaking” we must include visual/gestural languages like ASL.) This course will consider how language variation is correlated with social variation, and it will engage social justice by critiquing the ways that linguistic discrimination is often a stand-in for racism, classism, and sexism.

102 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Gitte Frandsen
103 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Gitte Frandsen

Course Title: Sociolinguistics
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Language study

Course Description: The special topic this semester, “Linguistic Justice”, focuses on how language and writing are tied up with identity, privilege, and power. We study this through the lens of race, ethnicity, and citizenship. Developing a critical language awareness will allow us to see – and challenge – how some writers’ and speakers’ language is valued while other writers’ and speakers’ language is devalued. We also examine how we can move towards greater linguistic justice by disrupting implicit bias and oppressive ideologies that may be present in our own and others’ attitudes and actions. 

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

Course Title: History of the English Language
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Language study
Note: This is an "Honors for all" course open to all undergraduates, and enrollment is by permission number

Course Description: Migrating Germanic tribes in a corner of Europe in the 5th century established an island society whose language is now spoken by billions around the world as the lingua franca for business, technology, entertainment, and diplomacy. This is the story of English from before Ælfric to present-day Zimbabwe. In this course we visit the Tolkien archives, learn how to recite Old English, explain the relationships within the Indo-European language family, analyze the histories of words, describe the rule-governed structures of Anglo American English and African American English, and predict the future of the English languages.

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Paul Gagliardi

Course Title: Introduction to Literary Studies
ENGL 3000 fulfills 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.

102 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jacob Riyeff
103 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Jacob Riyeff

Course Title:  Introduction to Literary Studies
ENGL 3000 fulfills the foundation course requirement in the major sequence for ENGA, ENGL, and ENGW majors.

Course Description: In this foundational course for all majors, students learn key questions and practices for understanding and producing knowledge within the disciplinary contexts of literary studies. Students gain a more sophisticated ability to draw upon historical and cultural contexts to understand literary works. Students also begin to use prominent methods or theories to explore significant questions in light of current debates within the disciplines.

The present course will set a trajectory toward a more survey-oriented engagement, ranging thru periods and genres for content. This lack of thematic/generic cohesion will enable the prioritization of literary criticism itself and the critic's (that's you) reflective understanding of the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical bases and suppositions upon which the critical process rests and toward which it works in any given iteration. That is, we'll self-consciously focus on what it means to be a (scholarly) critic and press ourselves to develop our own abilities to take up the position of critic by doing so.

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

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

Course Description: This course will explore American theater of roughly the last sixty years, focusing on aesthetic change of the stage and theater's changing cultural status, as well its capacity for social commentary. We will examine a range of genres and approaches to theater, ranging from the blockbuster musicals of the 1980s to surrealist drama of the 1990s to more social-realist fare from Annie Baker and Samuel Hunter. We will also consider contemporary issues of theater, including discussions of representation, financial instability of the art form, and the corporatization of Broadway. Plays to be discussed may include Tennesse Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Anna Deavere-Smith's Twilight Los Angeles, 1992, Suzi Lori-Parks's Top Dog/Underdog, Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb's Chicago, Samuel Hunter's The Whale, and Annie Baker's The Flick. 

Assignments: Will consist of research responses, a semester project, and a performance review.

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 Austen is that the novels themselves are often trivialized or not read with care. In this course, we will read Austen’s six novels with the close critical attention they demand and deserve. 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. 10pp.); midterm examination; comprehensive final examination; class participation; and regular attendance.

101 M 5:00-7:30 Professor Paul Gagliardi
102 W 5:00-7:30 Professor Paul Gagliardi

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

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 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 MWF 2:00-2:50 Professor Grant Gosizk

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

Course Description: 

1001 TuTh 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 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Sarah Stanley

Course Title: LGBTQ+ Narratives: Literature, Film, Theory
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature. Also fulfills humanities requirement for Gender and Sexualities Studies

Course Description: As attacks on LGBTQ+ rights continue escalating, it is more important than ever before for individuals on the queer spectrum as well as for allies to become better versed in the history of queer oppression and the legacies of political activism against it. However, it is equally important to highlight queer hope, especially for younger generations, as well as to revel in the breadth of queer diversity and fluidity. In this course, we will read broadly across the spectrum of queer identities, exploring narratives connected to as many “letters of the rainbow” as possible.

The semester will introduce you to the core concepts of queer theory through engagement with an array of texts across numerous formats, including graphic novels, YA novels, and films. Through reading, writing, and discussion, you will develop analytical and critical thinking skills, an interpretive toolbox, and a deepened awareness of the spectrum of queer identities. As a class, we will interrogate the innerworkings of interwoven systems of oppression including heteronormativity, transphobia, racism, and sexism so that together we may imagine interventions against their perpetuation.

Readings: Likely texts include: Queer: A Graphic History, Like a Love Story, Ash, Loveless, Felix Ever After, and Just Ash.

Assignments: There will be one formal Media Research Paper, which asks you to look beyond our required texts to explore LGBTQ+ representation in any pop culture text or franchise from any period and any modality (novel, poem, film, comic, videogame, etc.). There will also be one Creative Research Project, which asks you to imaginatively communicate what you’ve learned using a medium of your choice. There will be no exams or quizzes. Instead, for each class period expect to write a Reading Response of approximately 150-words, which will strengthen your understanding of the assigned texts and provide a starting point for in-class discussions.

101 MWF 10:00-12:50 Professor John Curran

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

Course Description: This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s art and some of its major themes. The readings will include representatives of Shakespeare’s four major dramatic genres--comedy, romance, history, and tragedy—organized into three units.

Readings: A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,  As You Like It, and The Tempest;  1 Henry IV, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra; Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear.

Assignments: Students will be expected to come prepared to discuss specific problems they discern in the plays, read passages aloud in class, and serve as discussion leaders on at least three occasions. Further assignments will include three analytic papers (5 pages each) and nine response paragraphs.

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor John Curran

Course Title: Milton
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700

Course Description: An examination of Milton’s life, times, art, and thought, this course concentrates heavily on Paradise Lost. While we will work with specimens of the minor poetry and prose and with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, our primary task is to wrestle with the problems and questions emanating from Milton’s great epic.

Readings: Paradise Lost, selected minor poems, selected major prose including Areopagitica

Assignments: Two response paragraphs, a short paper (3-5 pages), a long paper (7 pages), and a comparative final.

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

Course Title: Moby Dick
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900, American Literature

Course Description: “A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing . . . and the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think.”—Moby-Dick chapter 5, “Breakfast”

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a hilarious book. It is also encyclopedic. Its narrator, Ishmael, thinks of himself as a philosopher, a naturalist, an engineer, a social critic, a poet, an historian, and a competent sailor—he both is and is not all of these things. Melville’s novel was a critical flop when it was published: “it repels the reader,” wrote a critic for the London Spectator. But they just didn’t get the joke, or the metaphysics. After this seminar, in which we will read the entirety of Moby-Dick, you will have a profound appreciation for Melville’s subversive sense of humor and his radical politics. Alongside the novel we will read things other people have said about this literary/scientific/historical masterpiece, from perspectives literary-critical (Charles Olsen’s Call Me Ishmael), postcolonial-political-theoretical (C. L. R. James’s Mariners Renegades and Castaways) and sci-fi-ecocritical-blockbustery(Avatar: The Way of Water and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). We will cherish all of Melville’s bawdy humor, as well as the very funny world of Melville social media, will check out Emoji Dick and the star-studded Moby-Dick Big Read, will contemplate our own versions of Captain Ahab’s Pequod Crew Onboarding HR/Instructables videos, and will almost certainly indulge in a sea shanty or two (and might come to blows over whether they are “shantys” “chanteys” or “chantys”).

“Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”—Moby-Dick chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand”

Assignments: Active participation in class discussion; weekly short writing and annotation assignments; final researched project (modality to be determined by student) and final reflective-and-literary-analytical essay.

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Heather Hathaway 
102 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Heather Hathaway

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

Course Description: Toni Morrison has been a formidable force shaping 20^th (and now 21^st) century American literary history. As an editor at Random House, she played a pivotal role in selecting contemporary fiction for publication and mentoring a generation of young African American writers, in particular. As a literary critic, she worked toward transforming scholarly understandings of how race functions in fiction. As an educator, she helped students understand the richness, depth, and changing nature of the American literary canon. Most importantly, as a writer, she provided the reading public with novels, short fiction, drama, children’s literature, a libretti, and non-fiction novels—an oeuvre for which she was awarded the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for literature and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In this course we will study Morrison’s role in American literary history by studying on her primary texts, both fictional and critical, within the historical, cultural and political contexts framing their production.

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Sarah Stanley

Course Title: Comics and Graphic Narrative
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900

Course Description: For over a century, the landscape of popular culture has been shaped by characters, archetypes, and narratives that originated in comics or graphic narratives. The most powerful of these stories have always transcended their original publication contexts. Even before the advent of television, radio play adaptations were bringing the fall of Krypton to listeners who had never picked up a comic book. As entertainment media has increasingly evolved and stratified, so too have comics adaptations, which repeat, remediate, and retcon existing narratives. And comic books themselves participate in this continual negotiation of canons and continuities, as do manga and graphic novels. Central to such negotiations are questions concerning who graphic narratives are for and whom they’re about. Because of their central position in pop culture, as well as their frequent emphasis on justice, comics and graphic narratives provide an especially rich field for interrogating systems of oppression, exploring intersections of identity, and envisioning institutional change. In this course, we will read broadly across the intertwining traditions of superhero comics, manga (as well as manhwa and manhua), and graphic novels. Examining stories from vastly differing eras, cultures, and (sub)genres, we will explore how comics and graphic narratives function as modern mythology.

Assignments: There will be one formal Media Research Paper, which asks you to look beyond our required texts to choose, analyze, and research a piece of media connected to comics and/or graphic narrative from any period and any modality (comics, film, television, videogames, etc.). There will also be one Creative Research Project, which asks you to imaginatively communicate what you’ve learned throughout the semester. There will be no exams or quizzes. Instead, for each class period expect to write a Reading Response of approximately 150-words, which will strengthen your understanding of the assigned texts and provide a starting point for in-class discussions.

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

Course Title: Material Cultures: The Midwest
Fulfills English Major Requirement: American Literature

Course Description: “Flyover Country.” “The Heartland.” “Chicagoland.” There are lots of synonyms for the region of the U. S. also known as the “Midwest,” each of which implies a definition of and attitude towards “midwestern” people and places.  In this course we won’t necessarily define this place for ourselves, but we will look at how it has been represented in literature and material culture from the 18^th through the 21^st centuries.

This course will appeal to and benefit from students in multiple disciplines, because we will be looking at the Midwest from a lot of different angles.

• Interested in business, history, environmental studies, or urban planning? We will consider the ways that Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Detroit were figured as urban spaces that were supported by and reached into the rural spaces (or “hinterlands”) of the “Great West.” We will see how the Midwest was imaginatively and literally constructed as a hub for goods, people, and culture between the coasts.
• Interested in technology, science, medicine, anthropology, international affairs? We will begin with the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, during which Chicago laid its claim to twentieth-century significance by encompassing the world (and erasing its material past). We will also spend a lot of time looking at how the Midwest was framed as an “innovation hub” by boosters like those for whom Chicago was nicknamed (the “Windy City” is not about air currents, it’s about civic hype men).
• Interested in WGST, REIS, or—yes—literature? We will read poetry, short fiction, and novels that consider the possibilities and dangers of the metropolis for women, immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, and East-coasters. We will also read contemporaneous magazines and newspapers for cultural images of the Midwest.
• Along the way we will talk quite a bit about architecture, wheat, pigs, trains, rivers and shoes.

Readings: May include but are not limited to: L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Zitkála-Sá’s collected works; Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek; Upton Sinclair, The Jungle; Ida B. Wells Barnett’s journalism, Eve Ewing, 1919, Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, Louise Erdrich, The Sentence, and poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Assignments: Will include a final critical paper or creative project; weekly sandbox posts on D2L; enthusiastic participation in seminar and in site visits.

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Jodi Melamed

Course Title: Race and Racism in Milwaukee: Cultural Critique
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Post-1900, American Literature Diverse Cultures for ENGA

Course Description: How is it that Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today can be known as both “the All American City” and “The Most Segregated City in America”?  What makes Milwaukee both a paragon of multicultural America (“Festival City”)  and a symbol of the entrenchment of racialized privilege and inequality?  Focusing specifically on the post-World War II history, the course seeks to make the study of race and ethnicity intellectually rigorous and immediately relevant for students at Marquette University.  In particular, we will seek to understand racialization – a process that stigmatizes some forms of humanity and privileges others – as a complex factor that has deeply shaped the cultural, economic, political and social fabric of Milwaukee, as well as the experiences and consciousness of all its inhabitants. To do so, we will familiarize ourselves with the global and local histories of the city’s multiple social groups: white, African American, American Indian, Latinx, Asian and Arab American, and LGBTQ.  Rather than consider these groups as unified and static, we will consider how each undergoes constant change  and is constantly hybridized by a multiplicity of other factors, including national origin, class, gender, religion, and sexuality.  An equally important focus will be on the interaction between the literary text and the social text (the signs through which we “read” or make meaning of our social worlds). 

Readings: Will likely include:  John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee; Allison Hedge Coke, Blood Run; Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street;  Kathleen Tigerman, Wisconsin Indian Literature

Assignments: Two short essays (4-5 pages), one long essay (10-12 pages), one oral presentation, final exam. 

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Tosin Gbogi

Course Title: Afro-Atlantic Movements: Harlem Renaissance and Négritude
Fulfills English Major Requirement:  Post-1900, American Literature Diverse Cultures for ENGA

Course Description: This course examines Harlem Renaissance and Négritude as a network of Afro-Atlantic exchanges of ideas and/or two continental variations on similar sociocultural engagements. Using the two movements as entry points to exploring the connections between Africa and its diasporas (including Europe, the Caribbean, and North America), the course will examine the major cultural, racial, colonial, and identity questions that inform both movements. While a wide range of historical, philosophical, artistic, and aesthetic concerns will be engaged in making sense of these movements, the major emphasis of the class will be on the literary issues and figures that define both movements. Possible authors to be read include W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Claude Mckay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, David Diop, Birago Diop, and Wole Soyinka (whose “tigritude” critique of négritude provides a useful counterpoint to the movement’s major concerns).

TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Tosin Gbogi

Course Title: Capstone: Literature and Worldmaking

Course Description: Across cultures, periods, and artistic traditions, the functional life of literature has almost always yielded different interpretations. Whether understood as a site of pleasure and entertainment, seen as a symbolic ground for cultivating empathy, read for its construction of cultural identities and “realities,” or approached in terms of its insights into personal and collective crises—including personal grief, plagues and pandemics, wars and revolutions, among others—literature allows for an expansive understanding of the world and worldmaking. In this capstone class—which is oriented toward English majors and minors at the end of their program—students will have the opportunity to draw on both their personal backgrounds and the English curriculum to reflect on the connections between literature, society, and worldmaking.

We will read self-consciously, have fun, reflect on career paths and prospects for English graduates, and work together, in a series of writing workshops, on students’ research interests relating to the theme of literature and worldmaking.

Readings will include a broad range of genres: short novels, poems, films, and critical essays posted on D2L.

101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Ben Pladek

Course Title: Romanticism Then and Now

Course Description: “Romanticism” describes both a literary era bridging the 18th and 19th centuries and a complex set of aesthetic principles that is directly responsible for many of our current assumptions about what “literature” is and means. Do you believe that poetry should convey deep feelings? That creativity is an act of mysterious genius? That castles are spooky, wilderness sublime, and history progressive? Do you enjoy novels of fantasy, romance, horror, history, “coming of age,” or any combination thereof? You have Romanticism to thank (and blame). The argument of this class is that understanding contemporary anglophone literature requires understanding literary history—in this case, the explosive years between 1790 and 1850, and how they changed English writing forever. We’ll begin with a deep dive into Romanticism as a historical era, examining how an age of triple revolution (political, industrial, scientific) sparked a revolution in literary aesthetics. We’ll end by examining works of contemporary literature for their—usually fraught—Romantic ancestry. Warning: this is a reading-heavy class, where you’ll be expected to read and digest a good deal of history as well as poetry and occasional bits of philosophy.

Readings: TBA, but will likely include Mary Shelley, John Keats, Olaudah Equiano, Kaveh Akbar, and some contemporary gothic fantasy; secondary scholarship; and historical surveys.

Assignments: Discussion leader for two classes; attendance; a research-based final project (including prospectus, annotated bibliography, and drafts).

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Samantha Majhor

Course Title: Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice

Course Description:

101 Tuesday 3:30-6:00 Professor Jodi Melamed

Course Title: Topics in English: Critical Race Theory and Contemporary Literary Theory: Intersections”

Course Description: Scholars trace Critical Race Theory to a legal theory workshop at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) in 1989. There law professors of color, including Derrick Bell and Kimberle´ Crenshaw, came together to think about what Crenshaw describes as “the viability of race as a unit of analysis and the utility of race consciousness in deconstructing hierarchy.”
These scholars were concerned with how law mediated racial oppression after the end of de jure or legalized discrimination. They thought about how the legal text and conventional legal thinking preclude knowing gendered racialization as an enduring structure of domination and how the gulf is maintained between actual and formal equality. They recast the role of law, challenging the liberal notion that antidiscrimination law guaranteed racial progress, considering
instead the ways that law has been and remains complicit in upholding hierarchies of gender, race, class, sexuality, and more. At roughly the same time, contemporary literary theorists affiliated with Black feminism, women of color feminism, postcolonialism, and other interdisciplinary fields began to examine
the use of “aesthetics” and “culture” in liberal humanist traditions to narrowly constitute the ‘Human’ as ‘Western Man’. In groundbreaking literary theory– Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts and more – scholars posed questions about the role of cultural narratives and discursive power in maintaining racial, gendered, colonial, and class oppression in ways that resonate with Critical Race Theorists’ consideration of law: They considered how dominant U.S. cultural narratives
(including the literary canon) erased Black presence; how a global public sphere normed by European epistemes distorted subaltern speech; and how the sensibilities, aesthetics, and common sense of liberalism (or Enlightenment thinking) have given impunity to racial terror, gendered violence, and the dispossession of peoples, cultures, and lands in the name of “civilization” and “the common good.” This course provides students with a robust introduction to Critical Race Theory and Contemporary Literary Theory by examining their intersections from the 1990s to the present. In particular, it will foreground the importance of storytelling to both fields as a methodology and practice that “speaks back.” Storytelling offers complex, textured, intersectional, and embodied modes of knowing that not only reveal how lines are truly drawn between the valued and the devalued, but, importantly, help us imagine – and do worldmaking – otherwise. 

Readings:  We will read key figures in both traditions including Cheryl Harris, Patricia Williams, Kimber Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Kendall Thomas, Dean Spade, Leti Volpp, for Critical Race Theory, and Toni Morrison, Lisa Lowe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, and Jodi Byrd, for contemporary literary theory. There will be room for the syllabus to reflect the interests of students in the class.

Please see the 4000 level courses for course descriptions

5130 - History of the English Language
5351 - Milton
5616 - Moby Dick
5830 - Afrircana Literature
5988 - Practicum in Literature and Language Arts
5997 - Capstone