UNDERGRADUATE COURSES UNIVERSITY CORE LITERATURE COURSES (1301-2740)
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. |
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ENGL 1301: World and the Text I (Freshman Honors Seminar) • Professor Christopher Wachal
ENGL 1301: World and the Text I (Freshman Honors Seminar) • Professor Lacey Conley
ENGL 1301: World and the Text I (Freshman Honors Seminar) • Professor Lacey Conley
ENGL 1301: World and the Text I (Freshman Honors Seminar) • Professor Amelia Zurcher
In this intensive reading and writing seminar, students will be introduced to a few of the foundational texts of western literature prior to about 1700. Issues discussed will include narrative form; genre; figuration; character, agency, and subjectivity; and how to think about the relation among literary texts, culture, and history. The primary requirements will be reading carefully, participating in class discussion, and writing several papers.
ENGL 2310: Introduction to Global Literature • Professor Christopher Wachal l
Thematic Title: Description: Readings: Assignments:
ENGL 2310: Introduction to Global Literature • Professor Christopher Wachal
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ENGL 2410: Introduction to British Literature 1 • Professor Tim Machan
Thematic Title: Introduction to British Literature Description: This course surveys a selection of literature written prior to the end of the eighteenth century. We will concentrate on a variety of authors who have come to be considered significant for a variety of reasons, whether for their artistic achievements, their commentary on society, or their contribution to notions of literary history. Although attention will be given to historical perspective, the course will emphasize close reading and classroom discussion. Readings: Beowulf, selections from the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected lyrics, Book 1 of the Faerie Queene, the Tempest, selections from Paradise Lost. Assignments: attendance and participation; two papers; two exams
ENGL 2410: Introduction to British Literature 1 • Professor Carol Klees-Starks 102 MWF 12:00-12:50
ENGL 2410: Introduction to British Literature 1 • Professor Melissa Ganz
Description: This course traces the development of British literature from the fourteenth century through the late eighteenth, focusing on formal innovations as well as cultural concerns. As we move from medieval poetry to Renaissance drama to early fiction, we consider topics including the nature of familial and political authority, the relationship between the sexes, the growth of England’s overseas empire, the encounter of racial and religious difference, and the emergence of modern commercial culture. Throughout the course, we will work on honing your close reading and critical writing skills, while probing the role of literature in social change.
Readings: Likely authors include William Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Thomas More, Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Webster, John Donne, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, William Cowper, Olaudah Equiano, Edmund Burke, and Charlotte Smith.
ENGL 2410: Introduction to British Literature 1 • Professor Al Rivero
Thematic Title: Best of the Early British Survey, in Poems, Plays, and Prose Description: This course aims to introduce beginning students of British literature to anumber of classic works from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century in their literary and historical contexts. Readings: Readings will includeselections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other medieval poems; plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare; prose works by Aphra Behn and Jonathan Swift. Assignments: Several papers and examinations designed to enhance students' critical thinking as well as theirreading and writing skills.One or two oral reports.
ENGL 2510: Introduction to American Literature 1 • Professor Sarah Wadsworth
Thematic Title: Introduction to American Literature to 1865 In this course, we will read, discuss, and analyze a variety of American texts dating from the sixteenth century through the Civil War. Our purpose will be to investigate the origins and early development of the many literary traditions of the North American colonies and the United States. In the first segment of the course, we will make an in-depth study of the Spanish, African, and English roots of American life writing by reading accounts of exploration, captivity, and the quest for freedom and self-reliance. Next we will turn to fiction and drama to see how writers of the New Republic and antebellum period enlisted these literary forms to entertain as well as to stimulate thought, prompt reflection, influence behavior, and provoke social change. Finally, we will turn to poetry, paying particular attention to the tension between convention and innovation. This course aims to cultivatethe kind of close-reading techniques necessary for the detailed analysis of literary texts and to strengthen broadly transferable writing and critical thinking skills. Readings: Authors to be read will likely include Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, William Bradford, Olaudah Equiano, Susanna Rowson, Royall Tyler, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, . Assignments: Two 5-page essays, six 1-page reflections, midterm exam, final exam, in-class participation.
ENGL 2510: Introduction to American Literature 1 • Professor Tom Jeffers
Description: This is a survey of major writers in America, from the beginnings to the Civil War. Readings: Highlights include Ben Franklin's Autobiography; samples of the Federalist Papers; tales by Washington Irving, Edgar AllanPoe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, plus the latter's The Scarlet Letter; essays by Waldo Emerson and H. D. Thoreau, with selections from his Walden; and poems by Anne Bradstreet, Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Attention, also, goes to the history of American art, insofar as it illuminates the literature. Assignments: Besides building their listening and speaking skills in discussion, students get to write three short essays and give a formal report on some off-syllabus text.
ENGL 2510: Introduction to American Literature 1 • Professor Josh Steffey
Thematic Title: Anxiety and Development: Burgeoning Nation, Cultivating Individuals Description: This course surveys significant works of American literature from the colonial period through the Civil War. In addition to fulfilling the University Core of Common Studies objectives listed above, the readings, discussions, and written tasks of this course will foster the intensive explication of literary works of various genres (poetry, fiction and nonfiction prose, and drama) and a deeper understanding of the socio-historical contexts that give rise to these literary expressions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the psychological and social anxieties that pervade and constitute American conceptions of individual and national identity with the express purpose of identifying and appreciating the diversity of American experience. To that end, we will employ a recursive and open-ended developmental paradigm for studying early American literary and cultural history as an anxiety-ridden journey through the stages of birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity, decline, and back again. In addition to exploring the tensions between the private and public domains, as well as social constructs like the family, the church, the state, and the nation, we will pay special attention to the constructs of womanhood and manhood as they are defined, adapted, and revised throughout the literature we study. Readings: Among the authors whose works we will likely read are Alcott, Bradford, Bradstreet, Dickinson, Douglass, Edwards, Emerson, Franklin, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Rowlandson, Poe, Stowe, Thoreau, Wheatley, and Whitman. Assignments: Written assignments will include at least one diagnostic position paper (2pp.), weekly D2L discussion board posts, and two analytical essays (5-6pp.). Active discussion will take precedence; therefore, students will also be asked to contribute brief individual reports on contemporary contexts and how they reflect on the themes of the course and to participate in one longer group presentation. A comprehensive final exam will conclude the semester.
ENGL 2510: Introduction to American Literature 1 • Professor Ron Bieganowski, SJ
Thematic Title: “ What does it mean to be an American? The Story: Part One"
ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction • Professor Barbara Glore
Thematic Title: Constructing the Self: The Importance of Memory and Place Description: In this class, we will engage in a shared inquiry of literary works that are focused on characters caught in memories from the past while trying to construct a self in the present. Sometimes, these characters struggle with a sense of not belonging in new and unfamiliar settings, but oftentimes they struggle in a place called home. In all of these works, we will be attentive to how cultural differences of race, gender, ethnicity, and national identity can add to the ways characters work to make sense of their lives, frequently made difficult by the burdens of memory and place. Importantly, we will focus on the basic elements of fiction: plot, character, setting, point of view, style, theme, and more. And, as a way of shining a light on our readings, we will explore basic literary theories in order to approach these works through a variety of lenses. To paraphrase John Gardner, a true work of fiction is more than a simple thing; it is a "shining performance" that is both elegant and efficient. With this in mind, then, we will read a variety of authors' works, paying critical attention to the ways that authors consciously provoke our sensibilities and stretch our imaginations, because oftentimes the very struggles and conflicts of fictional characters on the page are the same experienced by readers like us when dealing with everyday life off the page. In this way, as we explore the "shining performance" of each author, we will strive to find meaning in the text so that we can learn more about ourselves, about others, and about the intersection of the two in the world. Readings: Kafka, Hemingway, Watson, Petterson, Satrapi, Garcia-Marquez, Cheever, and others. Assignments: Class participation; ten short critical responses; two five-page papers; one panel presentation; final essay exam.
ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction • Professor Corinna Lee
This course introduces students to the art of literary fiction. “Stories,” “tales,” “narratives,” “fabrication,” “illusion,” “lies,” “make believe”…fiction has been called by many provocative names. Despite their variety, what many of these names commonly convey is fiction’s power to transport readers to other worlds and other lives through the medium of language. About his beloved craft, the prolific Henry James once wrote, “It is still expected […] that a production which is after all only a "make believe" (for what else is a "story"?) shall be in some degree apologetic--shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life.” Ever a champion of the art of fiction, James asserts, “the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.” Over the course of this semester, we will examine the ways different types of fiction “compete with life.” Does life precede fiction or fiction precede life? Where do stories come from? And how are those stories told? Together we will engage these questions through the discussion and analysis of different fictional works.
ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction • Professor Marques Redd
Thematic Title: Initiation and Mythic Journeys in Literature from Antiquity to the Present
Description:This class provides an introduction to literary fiction from antiquity to the present. We will focus specifically on how to understand literature as a vehicle for spiritual development and transcendence. Through an examination of mythic images like the Great Goddess; the labyrinth; the underworld; eye, river, and mountain symbolism; and sacred doorways and corridors, we will study how archetypal symbols recur in these narratives, elusively cutting across temporal and cultural boundaries. Drawing from many disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, comparative mythology, and religion, we will look at how these texts outline powerful mythic journeys that involve three stages – separation, initiation, and return – with threshold crossings and guardians, helpers, trials, and ordeals, all leading to a transformation of the consciousness of the hero/ heroine, the society in which they live, and the natural world. The larger goal is to understand the mythic journey as a metaphor not only for the transformation of the self and society, but also as a metaphor for the process by which stories are created (poesis) and interpreted (hermeneusis). We will use these narratives, in other words, as a means of reflecting on the mysteries of the creative process and as a means to give mythic shape and significance to our lives.
Readings: Sir Ernest Wallis Budge (translator), The Egyptian Heaven and Hell; Apuleius, The Golden Ass; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival; Sir Richard Burton (translator), The Arabian Nights, Tales from A Thousand and One Nights; Gerard de Nerval, Selected Writings; Malidoma Some, Of Water and the Spirit Assignments: Two exams, weekly papers, final paper
ENGL 2710: Introduction to Literature: Fiction • Professor Gerry Canavan
Thematic Title: Contemporary American Fiction Description: “Those who are truly contemporary,” Giorgio Agamben writes, “who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to it. … To perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot—this is what it means to be contemporary.” This course traces the sense that truly contemporary literature is always slightly out of sync with its present, and always striving towards a moment that is yet to come, across American fiction since 1960. We will seek out this vertiginous sense of the “contemporary” in literary explorations of identity and difference, history and futurity, politics and community, and war 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, to the discovery that the environmental costs of consumer capitalism have now begun to threaten all life on Earth, we will find that American fiction in the postwar period is always looking forward, with both hope and trepidation, towards an unknown and very uncertain future. Readings: We will read five novels: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1984), Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Additional short readings will be occasionally be distributed electronically. Assignments: midterm, final exam, two papers, weekly responses
ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature: Drama • Professor Brandon Chitwood
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ENGL 2720: Introduction to Literature: Drama • Professor Eric Dunnum
Description: This course will explore playwrights’ reactions to and representations of capitalism and a free market economy. As we continue to struggle through this global economic downturn, its worth reflecting on the nature of capitalism – the institution we are fighting so hard to maintain. What is capitalism? What is our place within this economic system? What effect does capitalism have on the individual? What is capitalism’s relationship to ethics? What is its relationship to love and marriage? We will be reading plays that explore these and related questions. Readings: The course will focus primarily on twentieth century and contemporary playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill, Arthur Miller and David Mamet, but we will also read plays by Shakespeare that examine early formations of capitalism. Assignments: Several theoretical essays by Karl Marx and Milton Friedman will also be assigned to further our understanding of capitalism and aid our exploration of the plays. Several writing assignments, reading quizzes, group presentations and a final exam.
ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry • Professor John Boly
Description: The course focuses on acquiring the skills needed for the analysis and interpretation of English poetry. Assignments: Routine homework and quizzes, a midterm exam, and three essays.
ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry • Professor Bernadette Prochaska
Description: Introduction to Poetry, Engl 2730 - 102 addresses "Poetry of the Inner Spirit." With a philosophical base, the poetry studied will engage Plato's "Truth, goodness and Beauty" and move on to Husserl's "Intersubjectivity" and Heidegger's focus on "Language,"with associations also to Wlfgang Iser's "Act of Reading." Poetry read in the course will be from the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY, fifth edition, (ISBN 0-393-97921--0 pbk) and will include (among others) the Pearl Poet, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, E. Allen Poe, John Keats, Andrew Marvel, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson
ENGL 2730: Introduction to Literature: Poetry • Professor Dan Burke
Description: Readings Assignments: ENGL 2740: Reading Film as Narrative • Professor Stephanie Quade
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.
UPPER DIVISION COURSES
ENGL 3210: Advanced Composition • Professor Beth Godbee
Thematic Title: Ethnography of the University: Developing an Inquiry State of Mind Description: This course asks you to become an author of our campus community—through writing about your own experiences, researching university life, and submitting proposals for change that could enhance the university in some important way. This structure—what we’ll call “ethnography of the university”—is designed to give you practice in written, oral, visual, and multi-modal communication; in applying theory and research on writing and methodology; and in experimenting with different genres of writing for different audiences. Specifically, you’ll design and implement an in-depth research project motivated by a driving question or problem you identify through previous projects, including a narrative essay and qualitative sketch, and you’ll do a range of field research—e.g., making observations and conducting interviews—which involves writing and rhetorical awareness. The class will culminate in a research showcase in which we’ll invite other members of the campus community to see the original research you’ve conducted and to take notice of the proposals you develop. As you engage in this range of writing and research, you’ll create a portfolio and compose a carefully crafted cover letter (twice during the semester, at midterms and finals), reflecting on your agency and growth within the process. These reflective moments provide opportunities to assess your work and to set new goals for future writing and research, this semester and beyond. Readings: Although much of your work will be writing, researching, and responding to your colleagues’ texts, we’ll also read the book-length ethnography My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan (Penguin, 2005). This book will be supplemented by either a course reader with a range of articles we’ll read together OR the methods textbook Becoming a Writing Researcher by Ann Blakeslee and Cathy Fleischer (Routledge, 2010). Assignments: The course is centered around your original research project, culminating in a substantial and revised paper, oral-visual presentation, and research poster, which build on related assignments, including a formal proposal, annotated bibliography, narrative essay, and qualitative sketch. Additional assignments include portfolio cover letters, peer review notes, informal reading responses, and self-assessments.
ENGL 3210: Advanced Composition • Professor Jenn Fishman
Thematic Title:Writing and Writing Education for a Digital Age CourseDescription:In this section of English3210we will spend the semester investigating writing and writing education for a digital age. As a class, it will be our shared goal to discover and communicate informed answers to the following overarching questions:
To begin, in Unit 1 (weeks 1-3) we will consider whether and how current definitions and uses of writing are shaped by available digital resources and related cultural expectations. Similarly, in Unit 2 (weeks 4-7) we will study whether and how current college-level writing instruction reflects available digital resources and related cultural expectations. Last, in Unit 3 (weeks 8-16) we will focus on writing and writing education at Marquette, examining where and how our university is helping students prepare to "be the difference" digitally. Materials:Assigned readings, videos, and audio recordings will be available through D2L or Ares. To use these resources effectively,everyone must have regular access to the Internet, and everyone who has a laptop, iPad, or tablet should plan to bring it daily to class.In addition, everyone must have a print copy of Stuart Selber's bookMultiliteracies for a Digital Age(2004) and 12GB (minimum) of memory (e.g., free gigs on a laptop hard drive, space on an external hard drive or flash drive, cloud storage).
ENGL 3210: Advanced Composition • Professor Kris Ratcliffe
Course Description:: According to ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians, the study of rhetoric teaches students to express their own ideas, values, and beliefs in ways that their audiences can actually hear them. Long before the western world separated the rational from the imaginative, Isocrates (a classical Greek rhetorician who lived from 436-338 BCE and who studied with both Socrates and the sophists) argued that the study of rhetoric should combine analytical thinking and creative imagination; this combined educational focus, he believed, develops better thinkers, readers, speakers, and writers. This semester, we will test this theory by studying analysis and creative non-fiction. We will study classical and contemporary rhetorical tactics to expand our repertoire of reading and writing choices. We will use those tactics to read and analyze a variety of essays—some famous, some not so famous—to develop our eyes and ears. Most importantly, we will write, critique each other's writings, and rewrite. And we will keep in mind Virginia Woolf injunction that “a good essay . . . must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”
ENGL 4027/5027: Teaching English in Secondary School • Professor Sharon Chubbuck
Description: a 3 credit advanced methods class designed to introduce pre-service teachers to knowledge of pedagogy, content pedagogy, and critical pedagogy for the secondary English classroom. Theories of reading and writing will be studied, with a variety of pedagogical methods modeled for students to understand the nature of teaching. Students will engage in a variety of activities and discussions to meld theory into practice. Throughout the course, the lenses of race, class, and gender will be used to interpret both readings and field experiences. Forty hours of field placement are included in ENGL 4027. This course typically precedes the semester of student teaching.
ENGL 4110/5110: Linguistics • Professor Steve Hartman Keiser
Thematic Title: Structured Noise, Structured Motion: An Introduction to Language and English Linguistics Description: The aim of this course is to wow you with the wonder of language: its complexity, systematicity, and diversity. We will take a scientific approach to the investigation of language, that is, we will collect data, analyze it, and consider testable hypotheses to account for it. In the process you will evaluate your beliefs and attitudes about language and human beings as language speakers. Upon completion of this course you will be able to:
Critically evaluate statements and attitudes (including your own) about language and human beings as language speakers. Readings: Language Files 10 Assignments: Weekly homeworks on language data collection from natural conversations and analysis of language;Two-three exams; Major research project on language and/or language data.
ENGL 4170/5170 Studies in Language: Rebuilding Babel: English as World Language • Professor Steve Hartman Keiser
ENGL 4210: The Process of Writing • Professors Rebecca Nowacek & Beth Godbee
Description
This co-taught course is four-credits. We meet as a class for the equivalent of three hours a week. You earn the fourth credit (a quarter of the total coursework) through fifteen hours of internship—observations, ethnographic research, and peer tutoring at the Ott Memorial Writing Center—and through your regular attendance at a weekly writing center staff meeting on Fridays at noon. These meetings will be led by members of the writing center’s staff and invited guests. ENGL 4250/5250: Creative Writing: Fiction • Professor CJ Hribal
Description:This course gives students an opportunity both to exercise their narrative imagination and toharness it productively. Some student work will be generated by assignment; some will be self-generated. The emphasis in both cases will be on learning craft. The class will be organized as a workshop, with lectures as necessary. Students will learn the mechanics of writingfiction through observation, analysis, and practice. By reading, discussing, and analyzing short fiction from a technical, practitioner’s perspective, students will learn, describe and interpret fiction’s various styles,techniques, and effects. Through writing exercises, and analysis of those exercises, students will understand and demonstrate a proficiency in the specifics of craft: characterization, setting, voice, narrative structure, etc. Through writing fully-developed stories, and through workshopping and revising those stories, students will both refine and integrate those techniques while furthering their understanding of the creative process. Readings:On Writing Short Stories(Oxford),Tom Bailey, ed. + student work generated during the semester. Assignments: In addition to writing several exercises (2-4 pages each) covering the basics of craft, students will write at least one short story, approximately 8-15 pages. They will also write three short annotations examining some aspect of narrative craft on stories from On Writing Short Stories. A portfolio (15-20 pages) of their best creative work will be due at the end of the semester.
ENGL 4250/5250: Creative Writing: Fiction • Professor Larry Watson
Course Description: A course in writing fiction, organized as a discussion/workshop. In addition to writing exercises covering the basics of the craft, students will produce 30-40 pages of fiction by the end of the semester. They will also discuss each other’s works and write critical responses to a number of short stories. Readings: Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and student short stories. Assignments: Exercises in fictional techniques, at least one complete short story, and critical responses to workshop fiction.
ENGL 4260/5260: Creative Writing: Poetry • Professor Larry Watson
Course Description: A course in writing poetry, organized as a discussion/workshop. In addition to writing exercises covering the basics of the craft, students will produce 20--30 pages of poetry by the end of the semester. They will also discuss each other’s poetry and write critical responses to a number of poems. Assignments: Exercises in poetic techniques, critical responses to workshop poetry, review of a volume of contemporary poetry, and the compilation of a portfolio of poems.
ENGL 4410/5410: British Literature, the Beginnings to 1500: Beowulf through Morte D'arthur • Professor MC Bodden
The course will survey major works in Old English and Middle English Literature. Old English Literature will include Beowulf, The Wife's Lament, and The Wanderer focusing especially on the concepts of kingship, the crisis of the transfer of power, the doomed heroic life, fame in the face of possible oblivion, and the rich poetic techniques that give this poetry its superior status among early surviving literatures. With Middle English literature we will look at Dante's Purgatorio (portions of it), Pearl Anonymous, Tristan and Iseult, Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte Darthur. In this half of the course, we'll examine the nature of the Intruder Hero, the medieval theory of knowledge, the nature of obsessive love, comedic love, and courtly love, and the ways in which men and women contested the inherited social and political roles that shaped their identities. We will consider the controversial depiction of gender roles, as well. If time allows, we will examine a Sundance Festival award winning film encoded with medieval themes. (Pearl Anonymous will be read in bi-lingual edition of Middle English and Modern English).
ENGL 4440/5440 Dryden and Pope • Professor Melissa Ganz
Thematic Title:The Rise of the Novel Authors include Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen.
ENGL 4460/5460: The Romantic Period: 1790-1837 • Professor Marques Redd
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ENGL 4480/5480: The Modernist Period in Brit Lit • Professor John Boly
Thematic Title: Modern British Literature Readings: Hardy, Conrad, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Owen, Yeats, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, Beckett.
ENGL 4510/5510: American Literature to 1798 • Professor Amy Blair
Description: Why were novels of psychosis and seduction all the rage during the decades surrounding the triumph in Enlightenment Rationalism that was the American Revolution? How did the partisans of the novel defend themselves against charges of immorality and irrelevance? And who was reading novels in the first place? This course will focus on American literature from the late eighteenth century through the first year of the nineteenth century. We will look at the ways American authors reinterpreted Enlightenment thought in their debates over the form literature should take in a new Republic; we will consider the implications of reading the literature of the late eighteenth century as a post-colonial literature; and we will spend considerable time exploring the birth of the novel in America and the philosophical bases for sentimentality and Romance.
ENGL 4560/5560: The Contemporary Period in American Literature: 1945-present • Professor Gerry Canavan
Thematic Title: Comics as Literature Description: Beginning with Batman and Superman, passing through R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Maus, and moving into the contemporary era of Persepolis and Dykes to Watch Out For, this course will survey the history and reception of comics and graphic narrative since 1945. We will explore the history of the comics form from its origins to the present moment, watching as the medium shifts from a predominantly American, predominantly male fixation on the superhero towards an increasingly popular international art movement crossing gender, class and ethnic lines. In addition to studying comics as literary scholars, along the way we will also consider alternative modes of comics reception, including the great comic book panic of the 1950s, underground “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and Internet fandom today. Readings: Texts will include superhero comics, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, as well as Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and additional selected excerpts. Assignments: midterm, one paper, one final project, in-class presentations, weekly responses ENGL 4610/5610: Individual Authors – J. R. R. Tolkien • Professor Tim Machan
Description: One of the most prolific authors in the modern period – the author of the twentieth century, according to one admirer – Tolkien is also one of the most influential, controversial, and challenging. He inspired a craze for fantasy literature that persists today and that itself has influenced the movies, games, and images of pop culture. As often as readers praise his novels, however, critics (particularly scholars) vilify them for their plots, style, and characters. Further complicating this reception is the fact that as a writer Tolkien, who by trade was a medievalist and philologist at the University of Oxford, produced far more than his well-known books on Middle Earth. In an effort to get a broad understanding of Tolkien as a writer, we’ll read these blockbusters, but also some of his original poetry, several of his academic articles, and his translations of medieval poems. And with the assistance of the Raynor Archives, which house the original manuscripts of several of Tolkien’s fantasy works, we’ll consider what it meant to be a writer when Tolkien was, including the way he balanced teaching and writing, the importance of his writers’ group (the Inklings), and the process by which his sometimes illegible handwritten drafts found their way (changing in the process) to the finished products that shook the literary world. Readings: The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings; “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son"; translations of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Orfeo; “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”; “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale”; “On Fairy Stories”; “English and Welsh” Assignments: attendance and participation; the desire to read a lot; two papers and two exams; presence at several events sponsored by the Archives to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the publication of the Hobbit.
ENGL 4610/5610: Individual Authors 4610/5610: Individual Author: Leslie Marman Silko • Professor Tol Foster
This single-author study will focus on Laguna Pueblo writer and photographer Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-), with an emphasis in not only introducing her oeuvre to students, but also to contextualize her work within the circles and contexts of U.S. / Mexico / Native borderlands, the resistance to neoliberalism in the Global South, 20th century indigenous women’s writings, Native American photography and film, Insider/Outsider anthropology, American Indian literatures, political writing and art, and the contribution Silko has made to world literature overall. Texts will include: her novels (Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, andGardens in the Dunes), selections from her poetry (Laguna Woman) but also her hybrid text Storytellerand her nonfiction production, including essays (Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit), memoir (The Turquoise Ledge), and narrative photography (Sacred Water).We will also use a critical reference book by Mary Snodgrass, Leslie Marmon Silko: A Literary Companion. Assignments: will consist of the creation of five page contextual research papers on elements and themes introduced by the work, comparative study of materials within and outside the course readings, short close reading responses, and a final fifteen-page research paper and in-class presentation.
ENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeare’s Major Plays • Professor John Curran
Course Description: This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s art and some of its major themes. The course will include representatives of Shakespeare’ four major dramatic genres, comedy, romance, history, and tragedy. Readings: A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, The Tempest, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear. Assignments: Students will be expected to come prepared to discuss specific problems they discern in the plays, read passages aloud in class, and serve as discussion leaders on at least three occasions. Further assignments will include three analytic papers (5 pages each) and a final exam.
ENGL 4630/5630: Shakespeare’s Major Plays • Professor Lacey Conley
Description: Readings: Assignments:
ENGL 4710/5710: Studies in Genre: 19th Century American Poetry • Professor Ron Bieganowski, SJ
ENGL 4710/5710: Studies in Genre: Children's Literature • Professor Amy Blair
Course Description: This course will focus on changing notions of childhood, and changing conceptions of literature “for” children, from the eighteenth century through the present. Using archives and primary sources, we will examine early alphabet books, primers, fairy-tale collections and poetry, as well as classic children’s novels such as Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Harry Potter. We will study how children’s texts reflect adult ideologies, but also how they make space for play and even rebellion. Requirements will include response papers, one exam, two research-based project papers, and a group presentation.
ENGL 4800/5800: Studies in Literature/Culture: Playing God: Theatrical Expressions of Divinity • Professor Fr. Scott Pilarz
Description: Overview of this course: Playwrights from Aeschylus to Tony Kushner have attempted to stage the divine in various manners and manifestations. This course will explore some of these attempts with an eye toward what they, as cultural products, reveal about the various contexts in which these plays were written and performed. Representative readings from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and our own era will be considered, as will the always-complicated relationship between organized religion and the stage. Readings: Playwrights we will study: Aeschylus, Euripides, Christopher Marlowe, John Osborne, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Tony Kushner, John Patrick Shanley, and others. Requirements: We will study texts together and discuss them; this is not a lecture course. Students will submit a weekly brief of no more than one page, single-spaced reacting to the readings of the day. Students will also write a final paper of 7-10 pages.
ENGL 4810/5810: Race, Ethnicity, Identity
• Professor Heather Hathaway
African American author James Baldwin claimed that in the United States, “our passion for categorization, life fitted neatly into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; . . . [to] confusion, a breakdown of meaning . . .” (Notes of Native Son, 1955). Part of our purpose this semester is to examine the categories that have been constructed surrounding “race,” “ethnicity,” and “identity” (both individual and collective) in order to consider the ways in which these concepts are both meaningful and meaningless. What, for example, is “ethnicity”? What is “race”? Who, exactly, is “ethnic” and by whose definition? How do other categories, such as “class” and “nation,” stand in relation to “race” and “ethnicity”? Most importantly, what constitutes “ethnic” or “race” writing in the United States? Is it determined simply by the identity of its author? Does it include stories that tell about specific cultural groups, regardless of by whom they are written? Or is it characterized by some particular literary styles or tropes? In this course, we will consider all of these issues. Through an investigation of 20th and 21st century fiction and drama, read in conjunction with contemporary and classic essays in ethnic and critical race theory, we will 1) examine how “race,” “ethnicity,” “class” and “nation” have been defined and depicted literarily in United States and 2) consider the aesthetic, social, political, and cultural consequences of these depictions in order to 3) explore the relationship between “American” and “ethnic/race” literature over the past century.
ENGL 4810/5810: Race, Ethnicity, Identity
• Professor Tol Foster
ENGL 4860/5860: Survey of Women's Literature: The Politics of Aesthetics • Professor Christine Krueger
English 4860 is an upper-division course that focuses on key issues in the study of women and literature. It presupposes that you bring the skills of critical reading, analytical and argumentative writing, and research mastered in First Year English. Gender and the condition of women have emerged as key topics in contemporary thinking on global development and security. As is evident from the sub-heading of this course—“The Politics of Aesthetics”—our subject matter rewards an interdisciplinary approach to these issues. Therefore, bring to bear on our discussions, essays, and exams your experience with the full range of courses you have taken in literature, philosophy, theology, psychology, economics, politics, and statistics. Our readings include fiction and non-fiction, and trace crucial stages in the development of Anglo-American women’s writing in relation to feminism from the late eighteenth century to the present. Throughout, we will be concerned with how aesthetic features of texts (genre, rhetoric, plotting, characterization, allusion, point-of-view, etc.) are interrelated with political issues (equality, autonomy, enfranchisement, economic opportunity, property rights, etc.). You will be expected to respond in discussion to the questions framed for each meeting, and to the related issues they imply; to master skills of literary analysis; to apply those skills to interpreting the relationship between aesthetics and politics in essays; to conduct and present research in collaboration with a group. By the end of this course, I would hope that you have a command of the course content and oral, writing, and research skills that would enable me to write a recommendation for you for professional employment or post-baccalaureate study. Writing Assignments and Exams:
4. Essay 2: 1,500 words 2O pts. Along the lines of our editions that supply critical, biographical, and historical materials as contexts for Rights of Woman, or Jane Eyre, e.g., create your own critical edition for The Wind Done Gone or Memoirs of a Geisha. Find the best example you can of one of each of the following: 1) a review of the novel; 2) biographical material on the author, such as an interview; 3) an article or essay on a significant issue relevant to the novel. Provide photocopies of these texts and write a 1,500 word introduction to your edition, explaining how the secondary materials you have chosen illuminate the novel. 5. Cumulative Final Exam 20 pts. Required Texts: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
GRADUATE COURSES
ENGL 6210: British Literature to 1500: • Professor MC Bodden
Thematic Title: Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence Course Description: This course ends with the films, Natural Born Killers and Shawshank Rebellion. Your final project will likewise require your choice of two 20th-21st century films, “brilliantly conceived and brilliantly photographed,” as John Bailly says (in other words, not some B level film)—that “cast an unflinching look at violence in America,” concluding the trajectory of both theory and performance of the violence of representation and the representation of violence. The course begins with late medieval texts and, then, early modern English drama whose texts’ discourse of love, beauty and desire within the rhetoric of violence; Btexts, in other words, that Aexpose the violence of desire,@ and the desire of violence, where the spectator=s (or the character=s) awe is Astimulated because of the scene=s violent essence,@ and the author=s representation of violence transmutes into the violence of representation. Some questions to be examined: how does the author evoke the violence, the sexed bodies, the grotesque acts of revenge? If every scene in any literary work is being filtered through the writer=s sensibilities, is it largely frisson, then, that is aimed for when reducing women (and men), at times, to stage props or dismemberment? What is lost when the writer reaches for a poetics of violence; and what are the ethical and political implications of that loss? Our materials cross multiple disciplines, dealing with literary, cinematic, performative and documentary texts. Readings: Slaughter of the Innocents, The Passion of the Christ, The Miller=s Tale, The Wright’s Chaste Wife, Arden of Faversham, Edward II, Titus Andronicus, Revenger=s Tragedy, Hamlet, Tis Pity she=s a Whore, Kill Bill (excerpts), Natural Born Killers.
ENGL 6220: Studies in Shakespeare: His Contemporaries and Greatness • Professor John Curran
Description:In this seminar we investigate the issue of greatness as it seems to be reflected in Shakespeare’s drama. The idea of individual human greatness has accounted for much of the attention Shakespeare’s characters have enjoyed, but more recently they have been deemed interesting to the extent he undermines or interrogates this concept. Does Shakespeare cast his characters as “great”? What is greatness? What theoretical, political, or theological implications does it carry? In considering these questions with regard to Shakespeare’s characters, we also consider his own greatness. What makes him stand apart in our minds from his fellow Renaissance dramatists? Does he capture greatness better than they? Or does he rise above them for complicating the idea in ways they cannot? We will concentrate on Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, examining each play in tandem with an analogous selection from another dramatist. Selections will include plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Chapman, Massinger, and Webster.
ENGL 6400: Studies in 19th Century British Literature: ROMANTICISM AND RELIGION Professor Diane Hoeveler
Description:In his On the Constitution of the Church and State, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that “Religion, true or false, is and ever has been the centre of gravity in a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves.” That supposed “centre of gravity,” however, was actually more like a vortex in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rife with religious anxieties, reform movements, and fanatical doomsday prophets, from the followers of Mother Ann Lee to the Christian Israelites, Britain was peopled with radical Protestant sects that vied with mainstream Anglicans for control over the hearts and minds of the British population. Catholics, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims appeared in the literature of the period, but generally depicted as fringe figures or dangerous groups of malcontents. And then there were the atheists. This course will examine how canonical and non-canonical poets and novelists confronted the major religious controversies of their day. From the rabid anti-Catholicism of the gothic novel to the vehement atheistic pamphlets produced by William Godwin and Percy Shelley, religious sensibilities were of primary concern as this literary culture negotiated its conflicts about the evolving nature and status of divinity and the supernatural. A book review, an oral report, a conference paper, and major research paper will be requirements for the course. Readings:William Blake, The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; annotations Percy Shelley, “The Necessity of Atheism”; “A Refutation of Deism”; “The Wandering Jew”; “Mont Blanc”; “The Triumph of Life”; Julian and Maddolo”; “Essay on the Devil and Devils”; “Peter Bell the Third”; “Homeric Hymns” Hannah More, excerpts from Cheap Repository Tracts: Betty Brown, Black Giles, The Shepherd of Salisbury A L Barbauld, “A Summer’s Evening Meditation.” Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), some of her Hymns in Prose for Children, Devotional Pieces William Godwin, essays from The Genius of Christianity Unveiled William Wordsworth, excerpts from The Excursion, Lyrical Ballads and Ecclesiastical Sonnets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner,” and excerpts from The Statesman’s Manual; Lay Sermons, the Aids to Reflection, and On the Constitution of Church and State Byron, Cain, The Giaour James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer Joanna Southcott, A Dispute Between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (1802), A True Picture of the World and a Looking-Glass For All Men (1809), and The Third Book of Wonders (1814) Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times Coda: Jane Rogers, Mr. Wroe’s Virgins
ENGL 6700: Studies in 20th Century American Literature • Professor Heather Hathaway
Thematic Title: Postmodernism & Difference In this course, based on your requests, we will study theories of postmodernity and postmodern literature written in the United States, paying particular attention to postmodernism’s revision of unifying modernist grand narratives into considerations of difference, plurality, and fragmentation. (For those who took my modernism course last spring, this course is an excellent sequel. Enrollment is not predicated, however, on having taken the modernism course.) To do so, we will begin with a focus on a few classic postmodern novels (e.g. Pychon, DeLillo, Coover) and then turn our attention to the ways in which authors allegedly marked by “difference(s)” engage and critique conditions of postmodernity: e.g., Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, Morrison, Jazz; Butler, Lillith’s Brood; Tei Yamashita, I Hotel or Tropic of Orange; Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them. (Though the specific novels we’ll read are not yet determined, the Norton reader, Postmodern American Fiction, will definitely be required. Feel free to buy that now and peruse it through the summer!) Our goal is to establish a foundational knowledge of post-1965 U.S. literature and theory that can inform your future research or teaching. Requirements: Article “prospectus” modeled on that required for a dissertation prospectus; 20-page paper; class presentations.
ENGL 6810: Studies in the History of Literary Criticism: Major Literary Theorists from Plato to T. S. Eliot." • Professor John Boly
Description: Ever since Plato, that poet manqué, figured it would be an excellent idea to boot all the other poets out of his ideal Republic, and Aristotle, that Macedonian pragmatist, lept to literature’s defense with his ingenious physiological metaphor of katharsis, literary critics and theorists have faced a tough choice. Take the high road and augustly repress the uncouth Platonic interlopers? Or, hit back as Aristotle did, and promote literature’s real time value to human societies? This survey of critical theory will be organized around the Aristotelian project of finding, fabricating, or fantasizing an answer to Plato’s surly challenge: Literature, who needs it? Readings: Because this question has provoked such divergent responses, from the earliest stirring of western civilization to the present, it casts a net which is millennial in its reach. Besides Plato and Aristotle, the syllabus will cover works by Longinus, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Carl Jung, Kenneth Burke, and I.A. Richards. Assignments: regular analytical abstracts, two exams, two essays. ENGL 6840: Studies in Rhetoric and Composition Theory • Professor Jenn Fishman
Thematic Title: Teaching Writers in the Twenty-First Century Description: ENGL 6840 is designed to help new teachers as well as teachers new to college-level writing instruction develop historically informed, theory-based, data-driven approaches to FYE and other writing-focused courses. Our twice-weekly meetings will emphasize discussion of readings, writing assignments, and teaching-related research. Everyone will have opportunities to complete scholarly projects that include (if desired) creative and/or digital components, and the class will host an end-semester pedagogy conference in collaboration with UWM graduate students and faculty.
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English Department
