UPCOMING COURSES

ARCHIVE OF COURSES



UNIVERSITY CORE LITERATURE COURSES (ENGL 1301-2931)

ENGL courses numbers 1301-2740 fulfill the University Core of Common Studies requirement in Literature/Performing Arts (LPA)

UCCS Learning Objectives for Literature and Performing Arts (LPA)
Upon completing these courses, students will be able to:
(1) Produce oral and written assessments of literary and cultural texts and/or performances using the language and concepts of the discipline of literary studies.
(2) Articulate how literary and cultural texts can transform one’s understanding of self, others, and communities.
(3) Apply the methodologies of literary criticism to representative works of literature.


1302 Honors English 2

Thematic Title: Writing on Writers and Writing

Description (including outcomes): What is the purpose of writing?  What role do writers play in society at large?  What’s the point of stories that aren’t even true?  Since the early decades of the 19th century, such questions have obsessed the minds of readers in the English-speaking world.  In this course, we’ll examine how authors themselves imagine their roles by looking at works that focus on writers and the writing process.  What’s the relationship between the writer and the world around him?  In many of these texts, characters struggle to write what they feel or to make their work relevant to disinterested readers.  What power structures, ideologies, and prejudices keep certain writers from being published and read?  We shall pay special attention to stories where characters must struggle against various “-isms” – racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. – to have their voices heard.  At the end of the course, students will be able to describe the evolution of the writer’s role in Western literature since the 19th century and critically evaluate its representation in works of fiction.

Readings: Readings will take a variety of forms and will include The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and shorter works (stories, poems, and essays) by TS Eliot, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Willa Cather, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, and others.

Assignments: This is a course about writers. Consequently, students will be expected to write.  The bulk of the work in the course will involve three critical/analytical essays, three shorter formal analyses, and weekly informal responses.  There will also be objective assessments in the form of quizzes on terms and key concepts.

 

Thematic Title: FYE Honors: Perception and Misperception in Modern British Literature

Description: This course will cover major works and authors from the early nineteenth century through the first decade of the twenty-first century and will include works by Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, and others. In our study of a range of literary works, we will be interested in how writers represent the ways the human mind interprets and misinterprets its surroundings.  We will examine the ways that literature asks how culture, nationality, gender, and class shape the ways people understand and misunderstand themselves and others. We will be attentive in our readings to both literary style and to the historical contexts of the works we read. This is a reading-intensive course, filled with rich, interesting novels and plays. Students should expect to read 50-75 pages per class.

Readings will include: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview); Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Penguin); Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Oxford); Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (Norton); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt Brace); Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Vintage); and Ian McEwan, Atonement (Anchor Books)

Assignments: Weekly D2L posts; 2 papers; 2 exams; active, informed participation

 

Goals and Content: English 1302 counts towards the University Core of Common Studies requirement in literature and performing arts and is a version of a course required of English literature majors. This course will provide students with a broad experience of British writing between c. 1800 and c. 1950, including poetry, drama, novels, and non-fiction prose. As an historical survey, it considers the significance of cultural context to literary production and reading. Political, religious, economic, sexual, and scientific histories will inform our discussions of works. But as an introduction to advanced literary analysis for majors and non-majors alike, this course also teaches basic concepts of literary forms and genres. To understand and explain how a work conveys a theme or an impression, you need to grasp versification, figures of speech, imagery, characterization, plotting devices, and the like. Readings, lecture, discussion, essays, and exams are all meant to encourage you to master these materials and skills. Students will demonstrate achievement of course goals in 2 essays and 3 exams.

 

2310 Intro to Global Lit

 

2420 Intro to British 2

Description: Beginning with William Blake and the Romantic poets, this course will examine the Age of Revolution and its effect on literature. Major Romantics studied will be Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Next the Age of Realism will encompass major Victorian essayists like Mill and Carlyle, novelists, and poets, particularly Tennyson. Representing Realist novelists is Charles Dickens with his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, nicely situating itself in the Romantic time of the French Revolution to cast a look at Victorian society's ills. The more contemporary writer Winston Graham gives a latter-day Romantic view of a dashing character seeing the American revolution from the other side, with the eyes of a British soldier who is wounded in that war and gives a good view of England's class system in Ross Poldark, A Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787. A third novel, Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear, brings a view of World War I with its own effect on the class system as well as emphasizing the Modernist views of the poetry the war engendered. Throughout the course, the elements of Romanticism and Romanticism-gone-wrong, as originally depicted in the Arthurian legends so many English authors have examined, both enlighten and inform the literature.

Required Reading:The Norton Anthology ofEnglish  Literature, ninth edition: vols.  D, E, and F; Charles Dickens,  A Tale of Two Cities;Winston Graham, Ross Poldark: a Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787; and

 Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs.

 

Description: Civil rights, relations of power, colonialism, capitalism, the supernatural, fantasy and horror, obsession for control in matters of religion, morality, sexuality are some of the issues explored by writers of this period as away of grappling with new freedoms and a new understanding of self and the world. This course will situate the development of literary forms and themes against the background of the rise of capitalism, the decline of the empire, the advent of experimental science, and the development of the worker as a political movement.

Writers: Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, William Wordsworth, A. Lord Tennyson, W. B.Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw and others.

 

 

Thematic Title: Mediating Minds: Emotion and Memory in English Literature since 1800

Course Description: Whether opposing the rising industrial revolution, staunchly positioning itself against rationalism, or defying the tenets of realism, literature has historically persisted in its adherence to the value of the imagination or metempirical. In The Statesman’s Manual (1816), Coleridge argues that only the imagination can reconcile oppositions. Keeping this in mind, we will trace the power of the literary “mind’s eye” and its invocation of emotion and memory, as a means to mediating class, gender, and racial tensions through four major periods of English literature (Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Contemporary). We will consider the following questions: How does literature serve as a blueprint for the cultivation of constructive imagination? How do various forms of literary art (poetry, drama, the novel) inform mimetic experience? Can imagination push beyond the confines of an oppressive patriarchy to generate new perspectives, or is it restricted by the culture within which it exists? Ultimately, is it possible for literature to mediate interpersonal conflict?

Required Reading: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Baillie, Mary Shelley, Austen, Brontë, Tennyson, Stevenson, Conrad, Wilde, Woolf, and Tóibín.

Assignments: Two essays, two exams, two position papers, D2L posts, and class participation.


2520 Intro to American 2

Thematic Title: Thrill and Dread in the American Century
Description (including outcomes): “To be modern,” Marshall Berman wrote, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” This course traces the development of this tension between hope and disaster, between "thrill" and "dread," in American literature since the Civil War. In this course we will examine and interrogate this explosive sense of what it means to be “modern” with respect to themes of history and futurity, identity and difference, politics, community, war, empire, and the environment. From the private lives of individuals and families to the very public relationships that exist in and between diverse communities to the nation’s assent to global superpower status in the context of a nuclear-powered Cold War, we will find America in the post-Civil-War period understands itself as a place where anything can happen—in good ways, and in bad.
Outcomes: In addition, at the conclusion of this course the student will be able to:
* Identify and understand various formal characteristics of contemporary American poetry and prose;
* Demonstrate understanding of the cultural, historical, and political * contexts in which American literature since 1865 has been produced;
* Apply techniques of critical analysis appropriate to various literary forms and genres;
* Use literary study to develop skills for careful reading and clear writing;
* Read and discuss literature on the levels of both form and content.
Readings: Norton Anthology C,D,E; Nabokov's Lolita (1958); Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993)
Assignments: two shorter papers and one final paper, weekly forum posts, presentation, class participation

 

Course Description: This course will introduce students to literature written in or about the United States (broadly construed) from the end of the Civil War to the present.  While this will necessarily be a whirlwind tour, students will, by the end of the course, be conversant in the major literary movements and thematic and historical concerns in American literature of the period, and will have a solid historical and literary critical framework for their own future study and pleasure reading.  Paying close attention to the processes of national self-definition during the post-bellum period of reconciliation, we will concentrate for the first half of the semester on American Literary Realism, including Naturalism and Regionalism.  We will look at the impact of industrialization on both the content and the production and distribution of pre-WWI literature, and will address literature written by African Americans and recent immigrants to the United States.  In the second half of the semester, we will spend a good deal of time in the Harlem Renaissance as we begin to notice the shift to a Modernist sensibility in the wake of the world wars and the Great Depression, and will close with a look at Postmodern and contemporary American literature. 

Readings:Readings will include poetry and prose from authors such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Ralph Ellison, Sherman Alexie, Dorothy Allison, David Foster Wallace, and Junot Diaz.

 

 

Course Description:A study of major American writers, 1865 to the late twentieth century. Larger texts include Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James’s Daisy Miller, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. There will be plays such as Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. And poetry by Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, et al. Goals: understanding, enjoying, and esteeming these writers.

Assignments: two essays, an oral report, a final exam.

 

Thematic Title: “What does it mean to be American?”

Course Description:This course will trace the outlines of the continuing story of what it means to be American as told in fiction, drama, and poetry by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Amy Tan, and Bernard Malamud, along with others such as Denise Levertov, T. S. Eliot, and August Wilson. The diverse range of action, characters, setting, narrative perspective, irony, and imagery — all help tell the story.
Readings: Readings will include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “Daisy Miller,” The Hairy Ape, “Neighbour Rosicky,” “The Bear,” “Big Two-Hearted River,”Fences, and “Sonny’s Blues.”
Assignments: Two papers (4-5 pp.), several “Reflections” (1 p. each), a few quizzes, and final exam (essay) will be required. Class will be primarily discussion format because “it takes a whole class to get at what stories are about.”

 

Thematic Title: Dreams of Loss

Description (including outcomes):

This course is designed to introduce students to key authors, works, and literary movements in American literature during the period spanning from the end of the Civil War to the present. Proceeding chronologically through history and literary history, we will practice both formalist and historicist modes of literary analysis. Thematically, the course will be oriented toward developing a critical understanding of cultural ideas of America, ranging from “American Exceptionalism” to “the American Dream.” We will explore how creative writers have engaged these ideas, whether reverentially, melancholically, or critically, in a range of literary genres. 

Readings: Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of Pointed Firs, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America

Assignments: 2 essays, 1 exam

 


2710 Intro to Lit: Fiction

Thematic Title: The Axe and the Frozen Sea (Introduction to Fiction)

Our primary goal is to encounter and enjoy important works of fiction. Good stories touch us at our truest core, spurring us to reflect on and reassess our lives: what it means to be—and what it means to be responsible for our choices in speaking and acting. Franz Kafka said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” In this course we will learn to become better axe-wielders. One way we will do this is by looking at the remarkable variation in the English language around the world and how authors use this to build their stories and characters.

 

Description: The values of a culture can often be determined by what its members deem unacceptable, or by how and why an individual feels he or she does not “belong.” In this course, we will examine works of literature that deal with the role of the outsider in his or her society. Definitions of madness, difference, and otherness will be considered in order to determine what it takes to “fit in” and why certain characters seem unable to do so.

Readings: will primarily take the form of the novel, represented in works by Hemingway, Plath, and Diaz, among others.

Assignments: include a midterm, final exam, paper, and weekly quizzes/responses.

 

This course, INTRODUCTION TO FICTION, is designed to engage the student in a reading experience of participation in discovering the meaning and multiple meanings of the written word.  In studying this GLOBAL FICTION, the student is invited to relate to the world where we live, while responding to the thoughts, ideas, and perspectives expressed by writers from America, Ireland, Spain, Russia, China, England, and beyond.  Students are invited to let their viewpoints wander through the multiple landscapes of imagination, while giving expression and understanding to the literature, which is basically a reflection of our humanity.  The world of fiction incorporates a marvelous and enriching human journey with its quests and obstacles, its glamorous visions and its disastrous misfortunes, a journey that we all share.


 

 

Description: The values of a culture can often be determined by what its members deem unacceptable, or by how and why an individual feels he or she does not “belong.” In this course, we will examine works of literature that deal with the role of the outsider in his or her society. Definitions of madness, difference, and otherness will be considered in order to determine what it takes to “fit in” and why certain characters seem unable to do so.

Readings: will primarily take the form of the novel, represented in works by Hemingway, Plath, and Diaz, among others.

Assignments: include a midterm, final exam, paper, and weekly quizzes/responses.

 

Thematic Title:  Imagining the Criminal

Description: From thieves and murderers to bigamists and terrorists, criminals have long figured prominently in English fiction.  In this course, we read crime narratives from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining changing views of the causes and consequences of illicit acts.  Our investigations take us through all of the major subgenres of criminal literature, from Gothic and Newgate fiction to sensation and detective fiction to modernist parodies and revisions.  We pay particular attention to the relationship between criminality and literary form, while considering the value and limits of transgression; the origins of the human capacity for evil; the role of gender, race, and class in the criminal imagination; and the relationship between law and literature. As we consider these questions, we work on honing your close reading and critical writing skills.  The course introduces you to the tools and methods of literary study, while teaching you to craft lively, clear, and sophisticated prose.  By the end of the course, you should have a better understanding of perennial problems in criminal justice as well as a set of reading and writing skills that will serve you well in the years ahead. 

Readings:  Stories and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, and Margaret Atwood.

Requirements:  Two papers; a final exam; class participation; quizzes and/or short writing assignments.

 


2720 Intro to Lit: Drama

Thematic Title: The British and Irish Stage

Description:This class will investigate the renowned world of British and Irish Drama from its infancy to the present day. We will examine some of the finest dramas from, both sides of the Irish Sea beginning with the late 15th century morality play Everymanand concluding with a relatively new (and oft challenging) Irish playwright. This class will involve readings and discussions of what are generally considered to be the finest plays (perhaps masterpieces) of major English and Irish dramatists from the last five centuries. Along with Everyman we will read and discuss the following authors and plays: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, G.B. Shaw’s Saint Joan, Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Brian Friel’s Translations, Marian Carr’s Portia Coughlan, and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.

Assignments: three critical papers, group presentation, weekly reading and writing assignments, quizzes, midterm and final exam.

 

 

Description, including Readings and Performances: “The Play's the Thing…”

…that catches our consciousness, drawing us to question not only the characters in the “world of the play” but ourselves as well. We will use the template of Aristotle’s Poetics to probe the secrets of plays that span the great ages of theatre, from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to Mamet's Oleanna. We will test Aristotle’s idea of “catharsis” — do we cry? do we laugh? — by attending, as a class, three productions: A Doll House, Ibsen’s tradition-shattering drama of a family threatened by freedom, performed at Marquette’s own Helfaer Theatre (including a tour of the theatre facility and a conversation with students involved in the production); Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s wildly comedic treatment of race and real estate, produced by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre; and Raisin in the Sun, a landmark production of Lorraine Hansberry’s great American classic, also staged by the Milwaukee Rep (our evening there includes “Rep in Depth” and a backstage tour). Having focused on Aristotle’s study of plot, we will also look at the importance of character development in modern drama: we will invite characters from August Wilson’s Fences to tell us their back stories and do a Keirsey analysis of the personalities in Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire. Our semester will include a class at MU's Haggerty Art Museum, where we will compare themes in dramatic and visual arts.

Assignments:Assessment is based on twelve five-minute quizzes; two exams; three critiques; a text/production comparison or final thematic analysis; and on class participation. There will be several possibilities for extra credit across the semester.


2730 Intro to Lit: Poetry

 

Description:Poetry is the work of making art with words.  One might argue that poetry is the work of making a human connections through words.  In this class students will explore poetic forms, conventions, and genres in the service of being able to engage poetry with confidence as a reader - or in the case of some spoken word and popular music - as a listener. Students will also

explore ways to connect with the world through poetry themselves, and to make critical choices towards the poetry that resonate with the student. The course should facilitate the student in beginning a lifelong appreciation and exploration of poetry.

Readings: We will supplement the Norton Introduction to Poetry (9th Ed.) ISBN

978-0-393-92857-0 with at least one book of poetry by a contemporary poet (TBA) and other readings made available on reserve.

Assignments: Students will provide a close reading of a poem, a short comparison paper of multiple poems, some short response papers, a midterm, and a final exam. Students should expect to attend at least one poetry reading outside of class as a required component of the course.

 

Description: This course introduces the elements of literary stylistics relevant to enjoying and understanding good poetry: rhythm, meter, lineation, grammar, diction, tone, imagery, figuration, and genre. By the end of this course you will definitely be able to interpret poetry more thoughtfully, to share your insights more lucidly, and to frame your arguments more persuasively. And who knows? You might even be able to impress your friends and amaze your dog by explaining the crucial differences between an exophora and an endophora!

Readings: from Perrine’s classic, Sound & Sense, as well as a few other chestnuts posted to D2L.

Assignments: homework, quizzes, two inclass exams, and three essays.


2740 Reading Film as Narrative & Discussion section

Description: Is film “truth 24 times per second” as Godard suggests or is Herzog right when he asserts that “Film is not the art of scholars, but illiterates”? Using a variety of thematic lenses, this survey covers a wide array of works in different genres, with special attention to how film editing, music and other techniques inform narrative. Films studied include American classics, lesser-known works, plus several international films, including an introduction to the French New Wave. Readings and in-class discussion will focus on critical approaches to film studies, in part through a comparative study of how works of fiction are translated into movies. Students will be challenged to consider the particular contributions film makes to our understanding of human nature.

Readings:essays from Cartmell & WhelehanThe Cambridge Guide to Literature on Screen andJeffrey Eugenides'The Virgin Suicides.

Assignments:4 quizzes, two 5 - 7 page essays, 2 short writes, mid-term, final.

 


2931 Topics in Lit and Culture: Antique Origins of English Lit

Description: So why did Medea boil Aeson, incinerate Glauce, or kill her own children? Is it really necessary to beware Greeks bearing gifts? And how can all roads lead to Rome? To answer questions like these, we need to do what centuries of the greatest writers in English have done – read the classics. And in this course that’s just what we’ll do, as we try to understand the remarkable influence ancient Greek and Roman poetry and prose have had on English literature from its beginnings to the present day. Whether as source material or inspiration, the narratives, individuals, and social concerns of the Antique in fact have sustained everything from Chaucer’s account of star-crossed medieval lovers in Troilus and Criseyde, to Milton’s epic framework in Paradise Lost, to T. S. Eliot’s imagery of desolation in the Waste Land. In this course, we focus on these Antique origins, reading a wide range of poems, prose, and plays to gain a sense of their literary achievement and complexity, as well as the opportunities they provided for later English writers.

Readings: The Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, the Theban dramatic trilogy, selections from the Greek historians, and the Consolation of Philosophy.

Assignments: one paper, one oral presentation, two exams




SITE MENU

English Department

Marquette University, Coughlin Hall, 335
P.O. Box 1881
607 N 13th St.
Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881
(414) 288-7179
Visit our contact page for more information.