Courses Offered (Fall 2018)

Undergraduate Courses


First-Year English (UCCS Rhetoric Requirement)

1001 Foundations in Rhetoric

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.
  • For additional details, including unit-by-unit syllabi, contact either Dr. Rebecca Nowacek or Dr. Amelia Zurcher.

1002 Rhetoric and Composition 2

Various days and times, see Snapshot
English 1002, Rhetoric and Composition 2

Students learn to:

  • Critically engage public discourse by identifying and analyzing the main rhetorical features of variously mediated publicly circulating texts;
  • 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—and exceeding—public audiences' expectations for credibility, consistency, and integrity.
  • For additional details, including unit-by-unit syllabi, contact either Dr. Rebecca Nowacek or Dr. Amelia Zurcher.

 

UCCS Literature and Performing Arts Requirements

Pre-2018 University Core Literature Courses (ENGL 2000 and 2010)

ENGL course numbers 2000 and 2010 fulfill the University Core of Common Studies requirement in Literature/Performing Arts (LPA) for students enrolled prior to Fall 2018.

2000 Literature, History and Culture

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Sebastian Bitticks
Course Title: Recognizing the Wild

Course Description:
Today scenes of awe-inspiring wilderness are tied to a sense of American identity, but it wasn't always the case. Early European colonists and later westward homesteaders viewed uncultivated landscape, in the words of historian Bruce Kelly, "as a dark, interminable menace to be kept out of one's ordered life, to be controlled." In the mid 1800's a transformation took place that influenced the minds of Americans for generations to come and initiated some of the most interesting and influential literature and philosophy produced by Americans. What is nature, and how do human beings fit into it? What connects us to the land, and how do those connections pass from one generation to the next? Writers, poets and philosophers have engaged with these questions in beautiful and challenging ways. In this course, we will retrace some of their steps, encountering American writing of and about the wild from its earliest inklings to today. As we read the work of others, we will also write about our own experiences with nature, working to recognize and articulate the landscapes that inspire and define us.

Readings: Will include selections from Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Camille Dungy, Emily Dickenson, Luther Standing Bear, Aldo Leopold, N. Scott Momaday, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, William Cronon, and others.

Assignments: Include readings and discussion, two short essays, one final essay, and a reader's journal.

102 MWF 2:00-2:50 Professor Brian Kenna
Course Title: Violence in the Twentieth Century

Course Description: Among the defining features of the twentieth century was the transforming character of violence: where and how it occurred, how it was experienced, and how it was portrayed in literature. This course asks why this transformation came about. Why is it that, in a century associated with astonishing advances in technology and social organization, we so often found ourselves confronting (or committing) inexplicable violence? What new shapes did this violence take? How did people experience these new forms of violence, and how did writers and artists go about communicating them? We will address these questions by reading and discussing a variety of texts composed during and about the twentieth century. In doing so, we will pay particular attention to such historical and cultural contexts as the World Wars, the emergence of urban warfare in the Irish Revolution, racial and colonial violence in the Americas and abroad, and what we might call the casual violence that became a cultural fascination late in the century.

Readings: In this class, we will read book length works, short stories, and essays, as well as films. Potential authors to be considered include Robert Graves, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Tim O’Brien and the Coen Brothers.

Assignments: Regular reading assignments, two short papers, class participation, discussion forum posts, and a final paper.

103 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Andy Hoffmann
Course Title: Questioning Progress

Course Description: The United States of America is very interested in progress.  We are inundated with measurements that suggest things are either “improving” or “getting worse.”  But what is progress, and who experiences progress in a way that materially benefits them?  What do we use as baseline for progress?  There have been recent social justice movements aimed at changing the status quo including the #me too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the fight over immigration and the status of the Dreamers, and the seemingly unending constant struggle for equal rights of the LBGTQ community, women, and people of color.  Are these movements achieving their goals?  Have they made progress?  This class looks at literature that addresses these sorts of social concerns with an eye to discuss what progress has been made, what has been lost, and what has remained the same.

Readings: Possible readings include Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street, Milton Muriyama’s All I Asking for is My Body, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories, selections from The Harlem Renaissance, and short stories from Kurt Vonnegut, Ted Chiang, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others.

Assignments: Include reading, participation, short writes, attendance, quizzes, two short essays, and final research essay.

104 MWF 3:00-3:50 Professor Sebastian Bitticks
Course Title: Recognizing the Wild

Course Description:
Today scenes of awe-inspiring wilderness are tied to a sense of American identity, but it wasn't always the case. Early European colonists and later westward homesteaders viewed uncultivated landscape, in the words of historian Bruce Kelly, "as a dark, interminable menace to be kept out of one's ordered life, to be controlled." In the mid 1800's a transformation took place that influenced the minds of Americans for generations to come and initiated some of the most interesting and influential literature and philosophy produced by Americans. What is nature, and how do human beings fit into it? What connects us to the land, and how do those connections pass from one generation to the next? Writers, poets and philosophers have engaged with these questions in beautiful and challenging ways. In this course, we will retrace some of their steps, encountering American writing of and about the wild from its earliest inklings to today. As we read the work of others, we will also write about our own experiences with nature, working to recognize and articulate the landscapes that inspire and define us.

Readings: Will include selections from Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Camille Dungy, Emily Dickenson, Luther Standing Bear, Aldo Leopold, N. Scott Momaday, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, William Cronon, and others.

Assignments: Include readings and discussion, two short essays, one final essay, and a reader's journal.

701 Tues 5:30-9:30 pm (2nd session) Professor Thomas Simons
Course Title: American Noir: Crime in Literature and Film from 1934-1950

Course Description: This course will investigate the issue of crime in American novels and films from the 1930s to 1950. We will consider crime not simply as the breaking of a law but more abstractly as a transgression of societal codes, norms, and structures. We will also explore how the novels and films relate and respond to their historical and cultural moments. Finally, we will evolve a working definition of “noir” as an aesthetic mode and worldview and trace how the works studied exemplify, develop, or contest these concepts. Novels and films (to be shown in class) will include Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past(1947), James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (1937), Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948), Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943), Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall (1947), Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (1949), Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), Mitchell Leisen’s No Man of Her Own (1950), Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946), John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950).

Readings: Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s, Robert Polito ed. (New York: Library of America, 1997). Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s, Sarah Weinman ed. (New York: Library of America, 2015).

Assignments: Active participation in class discussions, reading journal, a midterm and final examination, and a course paper.

 

2010 Literature and Genre

101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Jacob Riyeff
Course Title: The Earliest English Poetry

Course Description: The acclaimed twentieth-century poet W.H. Auden noted once that, after hearing J.R.R. Tolkien recite a long passage of Beowulf, he knew that “this poetry…was going to be my dish.” Many people from the nineteenth-century through today have been moved and enticed by the charm of the earliest English poetry, but why?

Poetry from the Old English period (ca. 450-1100 CE) is filled with saintly kings, warrior saints, lonesome wanderers, dragons, demons, wisdom poetry, elves, and riddles—plenty to catch our attention and make us listen to a thousand-year-old past on its own merit. In visiting the early medieval past through Old English poetry, we find what the poet Geoffrey Hill has called a “strange likeness.” Some aspects of the world and the human that we find represented in this poetry are odd, baffling, frustrating, even disturbing. And yet, other aspects can seem familiar, inviting, a refuge from the modern world and its anxieties. In discerning which aspects strike us in these different ways, thinking about our own reactions to the surviving corpus of Old English poetry can help us not only to understand the distant past better but also ourselves and our contemporary world. In this class we will explore: a wide range of subgenres of Old English poetry, how poets used poetry to ruminate on a variety of themes and human problems, ideas of what poetry was for in the minds of the earliest English poets and audiences, Beowulf(!), and modern interest in Old English poetics. Various non-poetic texts and artifacts will help us situate all this in context. No experience with Old English or medieval history is necessary, and all texts will be in translation.

How and what Old English poetry as a genre specifically contributes to an understanding of literature more generally will be our “proximate goals” for this course. Our “final goals” will be to gain a keener understanding of the ways in which we can fathom and communicate with the past in productive and accurate ways on the one hand and how humans shape understanding through art on the other.

102 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Sherri Hoffman
103 MWF 8:00-8:50 Professor Sherri Hoffman

Course Title: Sports Literature

Course Description: This course is the study of sports as it is portrayed across genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, and drama. Additional readings will provide supportive contexts. We will explore how our relationship with sports represents, reframes, resists, or reinforces our cultural beliefs and values. Each text is an invitation to gain an understanding about what drives us to compete, challenges our limits, bonds teams, divides loyalties, and reveals our humanity.

Readings: Katherine Dunn, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, Daniel James Brown, Gail Mazur, Robert Coover, D'Arcy McNickle, Philip Roth, Gay Talese, John Updike, May Swenson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Red Smith, Robert Frost, Stephen King, Mark Twain, Nancy Lemann, Ann Bauleke, James Welch, Jackie Robinson, James Baldwin, Sherwood Anderson, Jane Smiley, Nick Hornby, and others.

Assignments: Weekly reading, weekly short response posts, team presentations, four topic proposals, midterm review quiz, one short critical paper (4-6 pgs), and a final long critical paper (8-10 pgs).

104 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Tyler Farrell
Course Title: The British and Irish Stage

Course 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 Everyman, and 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: Two critical papers, group presentation, weekly reading and writing assignments, quizzes, midterm and final exam.

105 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jenna Green Azab
Course Title: Storytelling in Contemporary Society

Course Description: What makes a story good? How are stories crafted? How do we use narrative to construct reality, ourselves, and our contexts? How do the stories we read and tell shape our culture, identity, and sense of purpose? We’ll use these questions as guiding points to critically read and rhetorically analyze contemporary stories across genre. We’ll consider the origins and elements of storytelling (plot, setting, structure, character) and study techniques of successful short fiction writers and poets. To explore how digital technologies have created new approaches to storytelling, we’ll analyze genres of film, social media, podcasts, video, and performance. Students will also reflect on connections between storytelling techniques and their own academic, professional, and/or personal goals.

Readings: Short fiction from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Shirley Jackson, Kristen Roupenian, and George Saunders; critical essays, and selections of digital storytelling through performance, social media, and film.

Assignments: Active participation in class discussions, weekly reading, writing and viewing assignments, two critical papers, group presentation, quizzes, midterm and final exam.

106 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Anna Scanlon
Course Title: Representations of Medicine in 19th and 20th Century Literature

Course Description: This course blends the study of medicine with the study of literature by focusing on texts from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. As our class engages with these texts, we’ll ask important questions about how scholars of both medicine and literature write about disease, what place illness and wellness have within narratives, and the ways in which texts focused on illness have or have not changed over time. By studying these texts, this class will engage with discourses about both literature and medicine and focus on the ways in which these discourses encourage or impede thoughts about how disease and medicine have — or have not — progressed in the twentieth century.

Readings: A Midwife’s Tale, Martha Ballard, The Diary of Alice James, Alice James, Miss Evers’ Boys, David Feldshuh, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, The Hours, Michael Cunningham

Assignments: One close reading paper, approximately 5 pages; one genre-focused paper, approximately 6 pages; one final research paper, 8 to 10 pages

107 TuTh 3:30-4:45 Professor Tyler Farrell
Course Title: 20th Century Poetry

Course Description: Through the lens of five twentieth century poets we will look at how poetry relates to, and is possibly defined by, influence and place. A poet’s muse can appear in a variety of forms – family, religion, background, upbringing, environs, famous or historic people, other poets, writers, publishers, artists, and friends. This class will look at how poets are formed, what part of the world they are from, who was included in their immediate circle of friends, and which influences were allowed entrance far enough to inform a particular poetic voice.

The five poets we will be concerned with most are: W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and James Liddy (1934-2008). However, we will also look at poems by Walt Whitman, Hart Crance, 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.

This class will focus on analysis, active discussion in small and large groups, and writing informed by deep consideration of primarily 20th century poetry and the surroundings in which poets wrote.

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

 


Post-2018 Marquette Core Courses (ENGL 2020 and 2030)

ENGL course numbers 2020 and 2030 fulfill the Marquette Core of Common Studies requirement for students enrolled in Fall 2018 and later.

2020 Text, Social Systems, and Values

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Cedric Burrows
Course Title: I Am We: Memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement​

Course Description: This course will focus on narratives written by participants in the Black Freedom Movement (1955-1975). We will study how these participants used their narratives to give voice to those who are often overlooked in mainstream narratives about the era. The course will also investigate how the authors used their accounts to respond to common perceptions (and misperceptions) about the movement. In the process, we will explore the Civil Rights Movement as a grassroots movement occurring in several locations that created a national movement.

Readings: Readings will include: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It—JoAnn Gibson Robinson; March Trilogy—John Lewis; The Autobiography of Malcolm X—Malcolm X; Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community—Martin Luther King, Jr.; Revolutionary Suicide—Huey P. Newton

Assignments: Reading Responses; Quizzes; Presentation; Midterm; Final; Class Participation

102 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Ella Mershon
103 MWF 2:00-2:50 Professor Ella Mershon
Course Title: “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, Trans*Atlantic”

Course Description: With the emergence of an interdisciplinary “oceanic turn,” the ocean has come to represent utopian possibilities for reimagining and redefining the boundaries that distinguish peoples, territories, and typologies. Meanwhile, within literary studies, the Atlantic is understood to be an important space for interrogating the crosscurrents of African, American, English, and Caribbean histories and cultures. Accordingly, this course will consider how recent developments in oceanic studies might reframe and re-contextualize debates about race, class, gender, and sexuality central to theorizations of the Atlantic. Attending to the discursive construction of the Atlantic—it has been labeled Black, White, and Red, as well as Long, Queer, and Trans*—we will consider how texts shape and have been shaped by the region’s transnational and multicultural social systems and values. Following Christina Sharpe’s call to place an asterisk after “trans” in order to “hold the place open for thinking (from and into that position),” we will reflect upon our own values and socio-cultural positions and consider how we might hold the place open for thinking about and with, through and alongside, the diverse peoples, literatures, and cultures of the Trans*Atlantic world.

Readings: May include: Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; E. A. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; Mat Johnson, Pym; Melville, Benito Cereno; Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave; Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong; Dione Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon, Ana-Maurine Lara, Erzulie’s Skirt; Thomas Glave, “Jamaica Octopus”

2030 Global Literatures

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Paul Gagliardi
102 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Paul Gagliardi
Course Title: Lower Class Experiences and Modern Drama

Course Description: This course examines plays written by playwrights from different historical and cultural backgrounds that explore the lives of the lower classes. We will consider how playwrights project their own identities through their work, as well as how they represent issues of class and the lives of the lower classes in their works. By comparing the themes of these plays, we will explore how class is constructed by different societies, and how these concepts are used to “define” people from all walks of life. We will also consider how the medium of theatre – a form in contemporary society usually associated with “high-art” – can adequately address the issues of the working classes and the poor. In addition, we will discuss how these plays propose solutions to economic and social inequality, and if those ideas can be adopted by us for social change. Through course content and assignments, you will be challenged to recognize your own class positions in societies and to consider how different societies construct class.

Readings: Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths, Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of Ghost, Suzi Lori-Parks, Topdog / Underdog, Martin McDonnagh, Beauty Queen of Leenane

701 M 5:30-9:30 pm Professor Jodi Melamed (8 weeks, 1st session)
Course Title: Literature, History, and Culture: Refugee Experiences and Global Capitalism in 21st Century Film

Course Description: One of the most important dynamics structuring our contemporary world system is the contradiction between the movement of capital and the movement of people. Finance capital itself is borderless, but in order for it to turn over and increase, finance capital needs to keep borders alive. Even as global connectedness increases exponentially in some areas (information, technology, trade), national borders are highly securitized and policed. While so-called “global citizens” of economic means make the entire world their home, people who are dispossessed, migrants, refugees and many others face new dangers. If the novel helped people to imagine themselves as part of nations and empires in the 19th and 20th centuries, today in the 21st century, we think the globe through film. Film, unlike English language texts, crosses class, language and national boundaries, symbolizing a new transnational commons, perhaps. In this course, we will examine 21st century films that provide tools for honing our critical thinking about migration, refugee experiences, borders, and global capitalism. In doing so, we will learn how to analyze films in a rigorous manner and to write convincing arguments about films in all their aesthetic, narrative and cultural political complexity.

Readings/Films: Ed Sikov, Film Studies: An Introduction; possible films include Stephanie Black, Life and Debt, Charles Ferguson, Inside Job, Neill Blomkamp, District 9, and Adam McKay, The Big Short.

Assignments: Reading, participation, attendance, quizzes, short writes, group presentation: scene analysis, film technique analysis, literary analysis essay, final research essay, final exam

 

 

ESSV New 2018 Core Requirements

2020 Text, Social Systems, and Values

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Cedric Burrows
Course Title: I Am We: Memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement​

Course Description: This course will focus on narratives written by participants in the Black Freedom Movement (1955-1975). We will study how these participants used their narratives to give voice to those who are often overlooked in mainstream narratives about the era. The course will also investigate how the authors used their accounts to respond to common perceptions (and misperceptions) about the movement. In the process, we will explore the Civil Rights Movement as a grassroots movement occurring in several locations that created a national movement.

Readings: Readings will include: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It—JoAnn Gibson Robinson; March Trilogy—John Lewis; The Autobiography of Malcolm X—Malcolm X; Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community—Martin Luther King, Jr.; Revolutionary Suicide—Huey P. Newton

Assignments: Reading Responses; Quizzes; Presentation; Midterm; Final; Class Participation

102 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Ella Mershon
103 MWF 2:00-2:50 Professor Ella Mershon
Course Title: “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, Trans*Atlantic”

Course Description: With the emergence of an interdisciplinary “oceanic turn,” the ocean has come to represent utopian possibilities for reimagining and redefining the boundaries that distinguish peoples, territories, and typologies. Meanwhile, within literary studies, the Atlantic is understood to be an important space for interrogating the crosscurrents of African, American, English, and Caribbean histories and cultures. Accordingly, this course will consider how recent developments in oceanic studies might reframe and re-contextualize debates about race, class, gender, and sexuality central to theorizations of the Atlantic. Attending to the discursive construction of the Atlantic—it has been labeled Black, White, and Red, as well as Long, Queer, and Trans*—we will consider how texts shape and have been shaped by the region’s transnational and multicultural social systems and values. Following Christina Sharpe’s call to place an asterisk after “trans” in order to “hold the place open for thinking (from and into that position),” we will reflect upon our own values and socio-cultural positions and consider how we might hold the place open for thinking about and with, through and alongside, the diverse peoples, literatures, and cultures of the Trans*Atlantic world.

Readings: May include: Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; E. A. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; Mat Johnson, Pym; Melville, Benito Cereno; Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave; Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts, M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong; Dione Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon, Ana-Maurine Lara, Erzulie’s Skirt; Thomas Glave, “Jamaica Octopus”

2030 Global Literatures

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Paul Gagliardi
102 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Paul Gagliardi
Course Title: Lower Class Experiences and Modern Drama

Course Description: This course examines plays written by playwrights from different historical and cultural backgrounds that explore the lives of the lower classes. We will consider how playwrights project their own identities through their work, as well as how they represent issues of class and the lives of the lower classes in their works. By comparing the themes of these plays, we will explore how class is constructed by different societies, and how these concepts are used to “define” people from all walks of life. We will also consider how the medium of theatre – a form in contemporary society usually associated with “high-art” – can adequately address the issues of the working classes and the poor. In addition, we will discuss how these plays propose solutions to economic and social inequality, and if those ideas can be adopted by us for social change. Through course content and assignments, you will be challenged to recognize your own class positions in societies and to consider how different societies construct class.

Readings: Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths, Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of Ghost, Suzi Lori-Parks, Topdog / Underdog, Martin McDonnagh, Beauty Queen of Leenane

701 M 5:30-9:30 pm Professor Jodi Melamed (8 weeks, 1st session)
Course Title: Literature, History, and Culture: Refugee Experiences and Global Capitalism in 21st Century Film

Course Description: One of the most important dynamics structuring our contemporary world system is the contradiction between the movement of capital and the movement of people. Finance capital itself is borderless, but in order for it to turn over and increase, finance capital needs to keep borders alive. Even as global connectedness increases exponentially in some areas (information, technology, trade), national borders are highly securitized and policed. While so-called “global citizens” of economic means make the entire world their home, people who are dispossessed, migrants, refugees and many others face new dangers. If the novel helped people to imagine themselves as part of nations and empires in the 19th and 20th centuries, today in the 21st century, we think the globe through film. Film, unlike English language texts, crosses class, language and national boundaries, symbolizing a new transnational commons, perhaps. In this course, we will examine 21st century films that provide tools for honing our critical thinking about migration, refugee experiences, borders, and global capitalism. In doing so, we will learn how to analyze films in a rigorous manner and to write convincing arguments about films in all their aesthetic, narrative and cultural political complexity.

Readings/Films: Ed Sikov, Film Studies: An Introduction; possible films include Stephanie Black, Life and Debt, Charles Ferguson, Inside Job, Neill Blomkamp, District 9, and Adam McKay, The Big Short.

Assignments: Reading, participation, attendance, quizzes, short writes, group presentation: scene analysis, film technique analysis, literary analysis essay, final research essay, final exam

 

Writing Courses

3210 Writing Practices and Processes

101 MWF 1:00-1:50 Professor Jenn Fishman
Course Title: Danger! Writing

Course Description: For the last two decades, scientists have gathered annually on the Edge, an online publication, to discuss ideas that need to die: popular notions or widely held beliefs that, one way or another, hinder scientific pursuits. This advanced rhetoric and composition class will take up similar, similarly dangerous ideas about writing. For the first third of the semester, we will read and wrestle with chapters from the recently published open-access book Bad Ideas about Writing. During the next third of the semester, students will respond by proposing and developing their own projects. During the final third of the semester, students will bring their work to life by presenting, performing, or otherwise "enacting" their ideas, good, bad, and otherwise.

Assignments: Regular reading, writing, peer work, and reflection; a major project individualized to meet students’ individual goals, needs, and interests.

3220 Writing for Workplaces

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Elizabeth Angeli
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 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 you will 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, survey design, and usability testing
  • Planning, drafting, revising, and editing workplace documents, like documentation and reports
  • Elements of organization and document design, including an introduction to InDesign
  • Design and delivery of documents and oral presentations

Readings: Johnson-Sheehan, Richard. Technical Communication Today. 6thed., Pearson/Longman, 2018.

Assignments: You will create a professional career portfolio that includes a cover letter or personal statement, résumé, documentation/instructions, reports, memos, and reflections. All projects are individualized to meet students’ individual goals, needs, and interests.

3240 Introduction to Creative Writing

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Angela Sorby
Course Title: Introduction to Creative Writing. 


Course Description: This course proceeds from the assumption that creativity can be learned and that it is broadly applicable to every life path. Students will read flash fiction, micro-essays, and lyric poetry. As they become skilled readers they will also produce and revise work in each of the three genres. The culminating course project is an online portfolio of curated and original writing.

4220 Rhetorical Theories and Practices

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Angela Sorby
Course Title: Introduction to Creative Writing.

Course Description: This course proceeds from the assumption that creativity can be learned and that it is broadly applicable to every life path. Students will read flash fiction, micro-essays, and lyric poetry. As they become skilled readers they will also produce and revise work in each of the three genres. The culminating course project is an online portfolio of curated and original writing.

4250 Creative Writing: Fiction

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor C.J. Hribal
101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor C.J. Hribal
Course Title: Creative Writing: Fiction


Course Description:
This course gives students an opportunity both to exercise their narrative imagination and to harness 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 writing fiction by reading, discussing, and analyzing fiction from a technical, practitioner’s perspective, and by writing it themselves. Students will learn to describe and interpret fiction’s various styles, techniques, and effects through annotations and writing exercises focused on the specifics of craft: characterization, setting, voice, narrative structure, etc. Through writing fully-developed stories, and through workshopping and revising and reflecting on those stories, students will both refine and integrate those techniques while furthering their understanding of the creative process.

Readings: On Writing Short Stories (Oxford, 2nd edition), 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.

4260 Creative Writing: Poetry 

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Angela Sorby

Course Description: This is a course – but it’s also a community.  Every week, we share each other’s work in an atmosphere of trust and support.  We also read the best poets publishing today, from Patricia Smith to Li-Young Lee.  And we always try to take at least one field trip ... destination TBA.  Poetry-writing is appropriate for anyone who wants to be more creative, from advanced practitioners to absolute beginners.

4986 Writing Internship

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.

 

Language Courses

4170 Studies in Language

101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Professor Steve Hartman-Keiser
Course Title: African American English: Language, Race, Power

Course Description: We will explore the history, structure, and cultural significance of this important yet contested American language. Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

  1. Explain the processes of language change and language contact that have shaped all varieties of English including African American English (AAE) and the development of creole languages.
  2. Identify and describe the systematic structures of AAE, that is, its lexicon, phonology, and syntax.
  3. Analyze AAE in literary texts to show how authors use language to invoke history, class, ethnicity, conflict, and solidarity.
  4. Describe the factors that shape the use of AAE in the public sphere: in education, journalism, music, law, and politics.
  5. Critique ideologies of race and language that shape public commentary of AAE—the last bastion of overt racism in the United States.

Readings: Spoken Soul (Rickford and Rickford 2000). Book chapters, journal articles, short stories by James Baldwin, John McWhorter, Ta Nehisi Coates, Trevor Noah, Geneva Smitherman, Elaine Richardson, among others.

Assignments: Analysis of language and conversation. Midterm exam. Class discussion of a literary text. Research project and presentation.

 

Upper Division Literature Courses

3000 Critical Practices and Processes in Literary Studies

101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Melissa Ganz
Course Title: Protest and Rebellion in the British Tradition

Course Description: This course introduces you to the skills and methods of literary study, while tracing developments in British writing from the late eighteenth century to the present day.  Focusing on the motif of protest and rebellion, we consider the ways in which writers working in a range of genres give expression to political, moral, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of dissent.  From William Wordsworth and Jane Austen to Emily Brontë and Oscar Wilde to W.H. Auden and Kazuo Ishiguro, imaginative writers take up a range of controversies, addressing issues such as gender roles and sexual relations, industrialization, colonial expansion, and world war.  In addition to considering how writers respond to and participate in such cultural and political debates, we examine their subtle rebellions against—and revisions to—the literary tradition.  Over the course of the term, you will sharpen your close reading and critical writing skills and become familiar with a range of approaches to literary interpretation.  The course ultimately aims to show you the value and pleasures of literary study, while giving you a set of reading and writing skills that will serve you well in the years ahead.

Readings:  Primary texts will likely include Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day; essays by Matthew Arnold, Thomas Henry Huxley, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Nguigi Wa Thiong’o; poems by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, Claude McKay, and more!

Assignments:  Two essays; a final exam; lively participation; short writing and other assignments.

4331 Shakespeare

101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Al Rivero
Course Title: Shakespeare’s Major Plays
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Shakespeare; Pre-1700

Course Description: We will read such representative plays as Hamlet, The Tempest, and King Lear, drawn from the four major genres: tragedy, history, romance, and comedy. Our class discussions will focus on the plays, their language, themes and dramatic techniques.

Readings: William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Essential Plays/The Sonnets (Norton)

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

4738 Poetry

101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Ron Bieganowski, S.J.
Course Title: Poetry
Fulfills English Major Requirement:
1700-1900; American Literature Elective

The middle of the 19th century found two striking assessments of American writing, suggestive of the new nation’s efforts at defining itself in verse.  Margaret Fuller concluded:

“it does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature..... Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores.”

A few years later in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proposed:

 “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.  The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” And he concluded,

 “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” 

While the 19th century American poetry may not begin with an “original idea” or distinctive “voice,” by its end, Dickinson, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman make substantive contributions to such self-definition.

Readings from The Library of America’s American Poetry: the Nineteenth
Century (College Edition) will include poems of Bryant, Dickinson, Emerson, Longfellow, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and others along with some of the most popular poems. Also we will read Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” as well as Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Relying on close readings, class discussion will explicate these voices, looking to identify recurrent strategies and issues which may begin to offer a profile of an emerging distinctive national character.  Written work will include several reflections, two medium length papers, and a final overview of the course’s reading and discussion.  Class work will combine discussion with some lecture.

4755 Law and Literature

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Christine Krueger
Course Title: Reading for the Law: Shakespeare and Dickens
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Pre-1700; 1700-1900; MCC Discovery Tier "Basic Needs and Justice"

Course Description: William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens are among the greats of English literature.  They have also profoundly influenced our ideas about the law.  Some of our most iconographic representations of law originate in their works, from Portia disguised as a judge declaring “the quality of mercy is not strained” in Merchant of Venice, to the lawyer Sidney Carton “doing a far, far better thing” by taking his friend’s place in the guillotine in Tale of Two Cites.  These characters embody ideals of justice and selflessness and criticize legal abuses.  But the law also inspired Shakespeare and Dickens to craft juicy plots about murder, revenge, sex, revolution, blackmail, etc.  These guys could make even contract theory (see Merchant of Venice) and will probate (see Bleak House) interesting and ethically significant.  Though Shakespeare and Dickens are separated by over two centuries, treating them together reveals persistent ideas involving evidence, equity, advocacy, property, and political legitimacy.  Elizabethan witchcraft prosecutions may have concerned Shakespeare, while the new Victorian police force interested Dickens, yet their representations of law reveal surprising continuities.

Readings: We will read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure: and Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House.

Assignments: Students will write two brief research essays on legal topics relevant to these texts and present them to the class. There will be a midterm and a final exam. 2 essays @ 15 pts.; 2 presentations @ 15 pts.; midterm 15 pts; final 15 pts.; participation 10 pts.

4765 Material Cultures

101 TuTh 9:30-10:45 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: Environmental Protection
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900

Course Description: Recently, “sustainability” has become a powerful concept in both academic discourse and popular debate; however, since the time of Heraclitus in Ancient Greece philosophers have recognized that change is inevitable and that there is always tension between what we should preserve and what is disposable. This course will use interdisciplinary scholarship to probe the central question underlying all environmental protection: what should we value enough to pass on to future generations? It will ask students to confront this dilemma by interrogating what precisely makes a natural resource sufficiently valuable to cherish and keep. In our time, the concept of “value” is dominated by economic language, but this view is crucially incomplete: what gives objects value is not their exchangeability but the fact that humans care about them and are willing to preserve and maintain them. A park is just open land, after all, until someone declares it worthy of protection. Establishing and asserting these sorts of non-economic values has long been a defining characteristic of study in the humanities, which have always appreciated how shared heritage links us to the past, creates meaning and relevance in the present, and allows us to shape our collective future. In that spirit we will examine a wide variety of political, philosophical, and aesthetic questions around sustainability, and environmental protection, and develop a framework for engaging pressing contemporary debates about the preservation of our shared natural heritage.

Readings: Coursepack; films; novels; the news

Assignments: Final paper, group project, weekly forum posts, class participation

4810 Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies

101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Jodi Melamed
Course Title: Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature Elective, Multicultural American Literature Elective; UCCS Diverse Cultures 

Course Description: The course examines the construction and deployment of race and ethnicity in U.S. culture and society over the course of the last 100 years up until our present moment, in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. In particular, it examines the centrality of literature for understanding cultural and political negotiations around race and ethnicity. We will consider the role of literature in maintaining “common-sense” ideas about race and ethnicity and as an instrument for trying to over-turn conventional notions. We will work comparatively within and between sequences focused on a key word or concept from race and ethnic studies and featuring literary texts from authors identified with European American, African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American and Arab American literary traditions. Throughout, our challenge will be to understand racialization – a process that stigmatizes some forms of humanity for the profit, pleasure, comfort and privilege of others – as a complex factor that has deeply shaped the social fabric of our own location (Marquette and Milwaukee), the U.S. and the modern world. Especially toward the end of class, we will use the case of Milwaukee to think about the history and presence of racial and ethnic differences at work on the level of both macro-institutions (such as law, economy, and government) and microstructures (such as everyday living and individual experience).

Readings: Critical race theory including texts by Howard Winant, bell hooks, George Lipsitz, David Roediger, Lisa Lowe and Roderick Ferguson. Literature including Richard Wright, Native Son, Sherman Alexie Flight, and Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We are All Looking For.

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

4830 Africana Literatures

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: Afrofuturism
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900; UCCS Diverse Cultures

Course Description: Greg Tate has said that "Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine." This course takes up the nexus of intersections between black history and the radical black imagination that is commonly called Afrofuturism, focusing in particular of figurations of Africa as a space of science fictional possibility from both sides of the Atlantic. If Afrofuturism has been, as Kodwo Eshun has said, "a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection," how does the rise of Africa as a global economic powerhouse in the twenty-first-century transform our understanding of black futurity? 2018's smash hit Black Panther is only the most vivid registration of the ongoing global importance of the Afrofuturist imagination; from comics to film and television to literature to music videos to social media we will trace Afrofuturism across the twenty-first century cultural landscape.

Readings: Texts will likely include Black Panther (2018 film and Marvel comics, 1966-present), Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, Lauren Beukes's Zoo City, Abdourahman Waberi's In the United States of Africa, short stories from across the African diaspora, the music of Sun Ra, Janelle Monáe, and others, Get Out, Pumzi, Afronauts, District 9, and Star Trek.

Assignments: Long and short papers, group project, weekly forum posts, class participation.


Graduate Seminars

6210 Studies in British Literature, the Beginnings to 1500

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Leah Flack
Course Title: Homer in the Ancient and Modern Worlds

Course Description: This course will engage in an intensive study of two of the founding works of the Western literary tradition, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. We will consider the translation, transmission, and reception of these epics by reading a variety of works from the past century by authors such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Louise Gluck, Christopher Logue, and Colm Toibin. We will work to develop a diverse set of methodological approaches to our study of classical literature and modern responses to it. We will also focus on developing scholarly arguments. In lieu of a single seminar paper, students will produce three shorter papers. Students will also keep a critical journal and lead one discussion. Learning in this course will be collaborative, and all students are expected to contribute actively and thoughtfully.

6400 Studies in 19th Century British Literature

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Brittany Pladek
Course Title: Epic in the Nineteenth Century

Course Description: “The critics say that epics have died out / With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods; / I’ll not believe it,” writes Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her great Victorian epic, Aurora Leigh. The nineteenth century was an era of major change for the epic poem. Anxious about the fortunes of poetry in an increasingly prose-focused age, and ambitious to insert themselves into what was seen as an elite literary tradition, nineteenth-century poets like Barrett Browning and William Wordsworth explored new approaches to this traditional genre, revising prior models focused on the exploits of gods and heroes to argue for the legitimacy of inner life, contemporary politics, and artistic development as “epic” themes. In this course, we will survey the literary epic as a nineteenth-century genre by returning to its lineage in pre-modern epic poems like Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno. By familiarizing ourselves with these influential pre-modern epics, then examining their nineteenth-century reception by poets like Blake, Barrett Browning, and Wordsworth, we will also grapple with wider questions about genre. What is at stake in classifying a work by genre? Do genres have an inherent politics or ethics? How do genres change, and how much can they change before becoming something else? How do genres interact with other formal categories like medium and mode? Are genres useful or limiting ways of thinking about literature?

Note: It is recommended that students be familiar with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey before taking this course, or that students take this course in conjunction with Dr. Leah Flack’s class, “Homer in the Ancient and Modern Worlds.”

Readings: The reading load is heavy: we’ll be moving through several long epic poems at a fast clip while also reading secondary sources in genre theory. Probable primary-text readings include Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost,Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Keats’s Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion, and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.

Assignments: Several short papers, a presentation, and a final research paper.

6840 Studies in Rhetoric and Composition Theory

101 W 3:30-4:45 pm (50% online)
Course Title: Foundations in Rhetoric pedagogy theory and practice

Course Description: This course will provide training in pedagogy in preparation for teaching the Foundations in Rhetoric class and other courses in critical writing and reading. Course is 50/50 online and in person, with weekly practicum and workshop sessions involving all members of the English department. By the end of the term, students will have created their own course and lesson plans for teaching in the spring 2019 term.