Courses Offered (Summer 2023)

101 Professor Jenna Green (5/22-7/1/2023, 100% distance learning)
102 Professor Jackielee Derk (7/10-8/12/23, MTWThF 8:00-9:30)
103 Professor Sarah Stanley (7/10-8/12/23, MTWThF 9:45-11:15)
104 Professor Paul Gagliardi (7/10-8/12/23, MTWThF 8:00-9:30)
105 Professor Grant Gosizk (7/10-8/12/23, 100% distance learning)

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.

101 Professor Elizabeth Angeli (session 1, 100% distance learning)

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

Course Description:  How will you use your Marquette experience in the workplace and in the community? Are you looking for an internship, a job, or a graduate program? Have you struggled with writing and want to improve? 

This course introduces you to the written communication practices you’ll use off-campus, also known as professional communication. Professional communication is essential to succeeding in workplaces and organizations of all types where effective communicators adapt their writing for a variety of audiences and purposes.

This class, in content and form, models successful professional communication practices so that you become confident in your own skills. 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:

• Develop the mindset and habits of an ethical, effective professional communicator
• Discern how the skills and knowledge you’ve learned at Marquette have prepared you to be a competitive job/graduate school applicant regardless of major
• Learn workplace research methods, including interviews, survey design, and usability testing
• Craft your document design skills and learn design software, like InDesign
• Hone your writing skills by planning, drafting, revising, and editing workplace documents, like proposals, presentations, reports, and instructions

Readings: We will be using two textbooks that must be purchased through Perusall, which you will access through D2L (Johnson-Sheehan’s Technical Communication Today, 6^th edition and Williams’s The Non-Designers Design Book, 4^th edition). Course assignments will be linked to the readings through Perusall, so do not buy the books through another website. If you do, you’ll need to purchase the books again through Persuall to complete course assignments. See D2L for more information.

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

101 Professor Lilly Campbell (session 1, 100% distance learning)

Course Title: Writing for Health and Medicine
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: While most would agree that healthcare is a basic need and right, simply providing access to healthcare does not guarantee equitable treatment for populations with diverse backgrounds and experiences. Language and communication are frequently at the heart of discrepancies in healthcare – whether it be a condescending doctor who overlooks a female patient’s pain symptoms or a well-meaning public health professional who cannot account for the ways her cultural biases interfere with her care of patients. By focusing on writing in health and medicine, this course encourages both future health professionals and future communication professionals to critically reflect on the importance of their language choices in shaping how various populations can access and use healthcare. *No scientific background required.* 

Assignments:  Will include a reading journal, a Health Narrative, a Rhetorical Analysis, a Document Life Cycle Report, a Redesign, and a Health Writing Reflection. Assignments are open-ended to meet a variety of goals, needs, and interests.

101 Professor Tyler Farrell (Session 1, 100% distance learning)

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

Course Description: Learn to write creatively in multiple genres. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “Literature belongs not to the department of general ideas, but to the department of specific words and images.” In this course, students will learn to read and write short/flash fiction, poetry, and a short drama/screenplay. We will focus on our writing community and place attention on word choice, sound, voice, subject matter, style, and revision in all of our work. All students will read and write weekly while also engaging in workshops to critique and offer/receive guidance. Time and space to practice writing and learn technique is our constant aim. A supportive community of writers will help to cultivate a helpful atmosphere and a final portfolio of work in at least two genres. Go writing!

101 Professor Katherine Zlabek (Session 1, 100% distance learning)

Course Title: Crafting the Short Story
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: Students will produce fresh, original writing that appeals to an audience’s imagination in this intermediate-level journey into short fiction. In it, we will be discussing the various elements of fiction, including concrete and specific detail, voice, atmosphere, and plot, to name a few. Students will explore the formal elements of writing alongside fiction that exemplifies or challenges these formal elements. Each story will be examined critically for its form as well as its representation of social, cultural beliefs and values, economic or global conditions, and environmental circumstances. In a workshop setting, we will critique one another’s creative writing, and discuss strategies for revising creative writing effectively.   

Readings:  Stories and craft essays will be posted on D2L. 

Assignments: Thoughtful attention to published work, and the work of peers; considerate workshop participation; short stories; outside reading and short presentation; final portfolio.

 

102 Professor Megan Paonessa (Session 2, 100% distance learning)

Course Title: Crafting the Short Story
Fulfills English Major Requirement: ENGA and ENGW writing elective requirement and ENGL major elective requirement.

Course Description: Following the outline Jeff Vandermeer provides in “Wonderbook,” this course will focus on the craft involved in writing short stories. We will explore the core elements of fiction, like character, point of view, dialogue, description, and style, as well as some of the lesser mysteries of writing and the role of the imagination. Taking cues from celebrated short stories that exemplify or challenge these core elements of short story writing, we will build our critical and analytical skills while also composing short pieces that experiment with these core concepts from a more creative perspective.

101 Professor Leah Flack (session 2, 100% distance learning)

Course Title: The Art of War

Course Description: Nearly three millennia ago, the Western literary tradition began with Homer’s pair of epic stories about war and the agonizing return to peace. In our own era, we face the urgent problems of escalating global warfare, which prompts us to become informed citizens with a critical awareness of how war is represented and justified. To this end, we have much to learn from the literary tradition.  

This course will teach students to become empowered readers of war narratives through an intensive study of short stories, novels, and films about war and peace, most of which were written in the past 60 years. We will explore several features of representations of war in literature: the celebratory, commemorative, and protest functions of literature; representations of the body in war narratives; representations of various forms of psychological, physical, and cultural damage caused by war; the difficulty of return and recovery from war; and war’s challenges to traditional narrative forms as writers struggle to define, as Tim O’Brien writes, “how to tell a true war story.” 

101 Professor Heather Hathaway (session 1, 100% distance learning)

Course Title: Modernism

Course Description: “Modernism” is tough to define. Its expression in artistic, architectural, and philosophical forms are wide-ranging. Its relationship to “post-modernism” is a matter of debate. Traditionally, “literary modernism” referred to avant-garde and experimental writing and art that emerged between World War I and II, exemplified by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and H.D., F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, and Gertrude Stein, among others.  Whether though poetry or fiction, all of these authors sought to challenge Victorian modes of literary formalism, ornate diction, and classical conventional plot devices. But equally interesting are writers whose work explores the historical and cultural conditions of modernity that eventually led to literary experimentation—post-war angst, turn-of-the century immigration, urbanization and industrialization. In this course, we take an interdisciplinary approach to studying modernity writ large and the range of writers who represent it, from the high-modernists referenced above as well as Edith Wharton, W.E.B. DuBois, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, artists engaged in the Harlem Renaissance, and “ethnic modernists” such as Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, Américo Parades, and Ralph Ellison.

Our goals are to:

• Identify patterns and shifts in literary style, form, and themes that characterize modernism as an aesthetic, and particularly a literary, movement.
• Apply the methodologies of a variety of schools of literary criticism to a variety of modernist texts.
• Explain how the cultural, historical, and political contexts of modernity shape the literary experimentation and thematic concerns characteristic to modernist writing.
• Produce oral and written assessments of modernist works using the language and concepts of literary critical analysis.
• Articulate how literary and cultural texts, using modernist works as your primary examples, can transform one’s understanding of self, others, and communities.
• Explain how categories of human diversity (such as race, gender, ethnicity) influenced  and are expressed in modernist writing.
• Critically reflect upon your personal and cultural presuppositions about “what art is” and how these affect your values and relationships.

101 Professor Tyler Farrell

Course Title: Poetry - International

The program, trip and class will be led by Dr. Tyler Farrell, visiting assistant professor of English. This 4-week trip (2 weeks in Galway, 2 weeks in Dublin) and class will be held at two Universities (NUI-Galway and UC-Dublin) and is a lecture and discussion-based course but also one where all students will be immersed in Irish places and culture. The class will focus on Irish literature, history and culture and examine common themes that can be seen through some of Ireland’s best and most prominent writers. (James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland, James Liddy, W.B. Yeats, Michael Hartnett and others.) Students will read Irish writers of the 20th century, reflecting on how they portray the Irish in fiction, non-fiction, drama, short stories, and poetry. We will together examine how the authors use their native land and its inhabitants to inform their writing and how they use of place to create a certain mood and overarching moral for their work. Readings will be assigned with ample class time to discuss themes, motifs, symbolism, ideas, etc. We will also engage in the culture of Ireland with various tours of historic places, a play at the Abbey Theater, walking tours and cultural events. Students will learn to analyze literature and its historical and cultural contexts in a self-conscious, logical, and rigorous manner. The starting point for both our reading and writing will be our personal responses to the texts, both as works of literature and as windows into the Irish world. The class will also focus on how these writers use their native land and its inhabitants to inform their writing, the use of place and surroundings to show and create a certain mood and overarching moral. Most of this class will involve lecture and discussion, and in-person engagement with all things Irish. We will also look at specific places in Ireland to ground the readings in actual history and place of Ireland. We will engage in deep class discussion and use time to allow students to present information with in-depth reflection and critical analysis. We will discuss and contemplate the places we will visit and experience. Go Ireland! Go Learning!