Fall 2023 // English // Marquette University

1001 Foundations in Rhetoric (Foundation Tier)

2011 Books That Matter (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Cognition, Intelligence, and Memory)

2020 Texts, Social Systems, and Values (ESSV1)

3210 Writing Practices and Processes (WRIT)

101 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Jenn Fishman
102 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jenn Fishman

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

Course Description: This course gives you, the students who sign up, a chance to define—and redefine—college writing. How? Mainly through 3 projects:

Project #1 invites you to gather and analyze personal examples that help you answer these questions: Who am I as a college writer? How did I become this writer? How can I become the other writer(s) I'd like to be?
Project #2 involves comparative analysis. Reading college writing from right after 9/11 and from the 2020 pandemics, driving questions will include: How can we better understand what past college students wrote? What can we do to help future readers understand what we, as college students, have been writing?
Project #3 is up to you. That's to say, the third project is self-designed in relation to a short list of guidelines. Previously, projects have ranged from podcasts and video documentaries to writing of all kinds. Students have produced 'zines, social media campaigns, and cookbooks as well as photo essays and children's books. Using archival and original research (e.g., surveys, interviews), 3210s have studied family genealogies, kindness, and the human stories behind Milwaukee crime stats. Some have used Project #3 to seed honors projects or writing they submit to the MLR or other public venues. Other have pursued passion projects, whether for personal or public audiences.

To support all of the above, we'll read and discuss several chapters of Bad Ideas about Writing (free) as well as one of three books by Austin Kleon: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, or Keep Going ($2-$20); there will also be regular peer exchanges (e.g., of ideas, writing). Although this course is full of surprises, the workflow is steady: we meet onsite Tuesdays and Thursdays; reading responses are due Wednesdays; weekly writing is due by Sunday night. Please note: Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors from all majors and minors are welcome. Anyone who has taken ENGL 4230 should be in touch, since we'll cover some similar ground.

3222 Writing for Health and Medicine (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Basic Needs and Justice)

101 TuTh 8:00-9:15 Professor Elizabeth Angeli

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

Course Description: What do health sciences, nursing, biomedical sciences, and humanities majors have in common? You are all writers, both here at Marquette and in your future workplaces, and you all can have vibrant careers in healthcare.

If you’re studying to be a healthcare provider or you’re a non-science major who wants to make a difference in healthcare, this class is for you.

Written communication is the lifeforce of the healthcare workplace, and healthcare providers aren’t the only people who write in this workplace. Writing connects providers, patients, and key stakeholders together across time and space, and these key stakeholders include medical writers, educators, social workers, medical examiners, attorneys, firefighters, and law enforcement officials. If you’re on one of those career paths, this class is for you, too.

Ultimately, written communication is an essential part of providing high quality patient care, and writing involves much more than typing up a patient healthcare record. Decision making, emotional literacy, and training informs patient-provider-stakeholder interactions. Put another way, how healthcare providers and stakeholders “show up” mentally and emotionally to a patient’s room, on scene, or in a meeting impacts decisions made, care provided, and records written.

To that end, in this class, you will:

Develop the habits of mind that lead to effective written communication, including active listening, reflection, sensory and situational awareness, collaboration, inquiry, curiosity, ethics, and discernment
Learn and practice the rhetorical skills that underlie effective healthcare communication
Research how writing is used in your future workplace
Craft your own “Writing Philosophy” that illustrates how you will communicate in the healthcare field

Readings: Include pieces written by rhetoricians of health and medicine (they’re experts in how language facilities action in healthcare) and articles students bring to class discussion

Assignments: Tailored to students’ professional and personal goals, assignments include analyses of healthcare documents, a document lifecycle report, a redesign of patient education documents, class presentation about students’ healthcare fields of interest, and the “Writing Philosophy.”

3240 Introduction to Creative Writing (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Individuals and Communities)

3241 Crafting the Short Story (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence)

3250 Lifewriting, Creativity, and Community (WRIT, ESSV2, Discovery Tier - Cognition Memory, and Intelligence)

4250 Creative Writing: Fiction (WRIT) (NOTE: due to high demand, this course will not count for the Discovery Tier for the 2023-2024 academic year).

4260 Creative Writing: Poetry (WRIT)

4932 Topics in Writing (WRIT)

4954 Seminar in Creative Writing (WRIT)

4986 Writing Internship

4988 Practicum in Literature and Language Arts (WRIT, ESSV2)

101 Friday 9:00-10:30 Professor Sarah Wadsworth

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

Course Description: This experiential learning course couples biweekly seminars with students’ on-the-job activities in internship or internship-like placements in nonprofit agencies. Two different “strands” are offered, in which students are clustered into either a Publishing Experience track or a Story Experience track. Regardless of the track, students work in their placement sites and attend seminars every other Friday for approximately ten hours / week altogether. Readings and classroom activities help build practical, transferable skills, while discussions extend to how students’ work and the field they are participating in engage with different social systems and value structures and their own positioning within it. One of the primary objectives of the Practicum is to help prepare students to contribute to current and future work environments in ways that are equitable, inclusive, and collaborative, while prioritizing working for the greater good and acting as people for and with others.

The Story Experience Program brings UWM and Marquette students into year-long partnership with Milwaukee-based nonprofit organizations to facilitate storying in a range of forms from oral history to poetry and story-circles. Students learn myriad skills including facilitating group and individual storytelling, mapping and building on assets of organizations, organizing and preserving story data, time management, and interviewing. Organizations and their members work with the student teams to design projects according to their own goals. If desired, the culminating project can be collected into a public archive of Milwaukee stories. This is a unique opportunity for deep experiential learning and relationship building, putting humanities and arts skills into practice to build community. Students gain invaluable work / life skills and experiences. Story Fellows beginning in AY 2023-24 will be part of a President’s and Chancellor’s Challenge Grant initiative aimed at alleviating the effects of poverty in the City of Milwaukee. Students participating in the Story Experience Program may request that the course count as a humanities course in the Individual and Community theme of the Discovery Tier.

To apply to the Story Experience Program, please complete the application form at the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSca_ygggkxuNf_87wPe1qEnoorKU6V2zMHtYTxD6pfna42XHw/viewform

Further information about the program can be found at the Story Experience Program link on the website of the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities.

Students involved in the Publishing Experience Program gain experience in various branches of the not-for-profit sector of the publishing industry, learning editorial and marketing skills while engaging in timely explorations of and conversations about the current state of the field. Areas of focus in the seminar component will include issues surrounding gender equity and diversity in the workplace as well as the contributions publishing companies and specific publications can make to representing diverse groups, disseminating diverse voices to the organization’s target audiences, and publishing content that contributes to the effort to advance social justice. Placements may include Marquette University Press, which shares in the social justice mission of Marquette University; Marquette Literary Review, which showcases the creative work of an increasingly diverse Marquette community; the English Department newsletter, a weekly multimodal publication of perspectives on all things English that will circulate to current students and faculty as well as friends and alumni of the department; and A Line Meant, a poetry-based creative-writing project founded by Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton designed to “connect the creativity of neighbors and the humanity of strangers,” including individuals who are incarcerated.

To apply to the Publishing Experience Program, students should submit by email a current resume and cover letter summarizing why they might be a good fit for this program and indicating which areas of publishing they would be most excited to work in to Drs. Ben Pladek and Sarah Wadsworth by Friday, March 31, 2023. Students with career aspirations in publishing are especially encouraged to apply.

3140 Sociolinguistics (ESSV2, Discovery Tier - Individuals and Communities)

4110 Exploring the English Language (Discovery Tier - Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence)

3000 Introduction to Literary Studies (WRIT)

101 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Tosin Gbogi

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

Course Description: This course serves as an entry point to advanced study in the discipline of English literature. We will read a variety of literary texts—poetry, short fiction, drama, novel, graphic novel, film, television—and will talk about formal, theoretical, and historical approaches to literary interpretation. We are not going to be overly concerned about themes common across these texts (though we might discover some!) but will always be thinking self-consciously about the ways we approach texts with particular expectations that can be fulfilled, frustrated, or exceeded…sometimes all in the same text. This course will help students develop fluency with academic discourses and habits of literary criticism that will serve them in their upper-division courses at Marquette, as well as develop their skills as writers and thinkers in their own right.

Readings: John Peck and Martin Coyle's Practical Criticism. Other readings will be posted on d2L.

Assignments: discussion posts (close reading), a midterm paper, an oral presentation, and a final research paper

102 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Jason Farr

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

Course Description: This course is designed to equip new majors and minors with the tools necessary for success in the field of English, with a focus on literary studies. Also welcome are students from a range of disciplines interested in developing their reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. In particular, we will learn to read and respond critically to literature in a range of forms, including short story, poetry, drama, novel, and film. In the process, we will think about the relationship between these varying forms and their content through close reading and exposure to social justice principles (i.e. antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and gender and queer theory). The course will consist of a combination of short lecture, group discussion, outside research, and individual writing assignments (discussion posts, collaborative annotations, and formal academic essays). In the process, will develop critical reading and writing skills that draw from a range of perspectives.

103 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Amy Blair

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

Course Description: This course serves as an entry point to advanced study in the discipline of English literature. We will read a variety of literary texts across many genres—poetry, short fiction, drama, novel, graphic novel—though these texts will often play with the notion of genre itself. We will always be thinking self-consciously about the ways we approach texts with expectations that can be fulfilled, frustrated, or exceeded…sometimes all at the same time. We will practice many varieties of literary critical interpretation, looking closely at language, intertextuality, and literary history to explain how we elicit and/or make meaning from our reading. This course will help students develop fluency with academic discourses and habits of literary criticism that will serve them in their upper-division courses at Marquette, as well as develop their skills as writers and thinkers in their own right.

Readings: Texts will include: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and Douglas; Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home; Octavia Butler’s Kindred; Tony Kushner’s Angels in America; a variety of poems; and a smattering of short stories.

Assignments: weekly short assignments (discussion board posts and responses, textual annotation exercises, mini research assignments); active participation in class discussions; frequent individual conferences and reflection writings; open-topic, open-modality culminating project.

3301 Here Be Monsters (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Crossing Boundaries, Honors for All)

3462 Introduction to Gothic Fiction (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Expanding Horizons)

3514 Contemporary Irish Literature (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence)

3740 Film Studies (Discovery Tier - Crossing Boundaries)

3761 Literature and Medicine (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Basic Needs and Justice)

3780 Water is Life (WRIT, ESSV2, Discovery Tier - Basic Needs and Justice)

3860 The Russian Novel and the Search for Meaning (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Expanding Horizons)

4321 British Literature of the 16th Century

4331 Shakespeare (WRIT)

4610 Individual Authors: Jonathan Swift

4715 Children's Literature (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence)

4755 Law and Literature (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Basic Needs and Justice)

101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor Rebecca Nowacek

Course Title: The Jury Project

Course Description: A vigorous democracy relies on the ability of its citizens to engage in collective deliberation on complex issues. In this class, students will be working together with classmates to solve shared problems while negotiating conflict and difference. Through in-class discussion and debate of three cases that have appeared before the Supreme Court, you will learn about what it means to argue for a particular audience about what you believe. The oral and written communication you practice in this course will help you develop skills in arguing, critiquing, analyzing, summarizing, visualizing, and listening to difficult conflicts and concepts. This course is not about the jury system in America or constitutional law, nor is it a class dominated by mock trials. This is, ultimately, a writing course-one meant to expand your idea of what it means to be a writer within a community and perhaps too what it means to be an engaged citizen of a democracy.

Readings: Texts will include the petitioner, respondent, and amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court for three cases

Assignments: Will likely include four written assignments for each of the three cases: summary of brief, synthesis map, dialogue, and final opinion. In addition, each class participant will serve as the "advocate" to represent one brief at some point in the semester, and all participants will be expected to actively participate in class-wide deliberations.

102 TuTh 11:00-12:15 Professor Melissa Ganz

Course Title: Crime and Punishment in English Fiction
Fulfills English Major Requirement: 1700-1900 requirement
Note: This is an "Honors for all" course open to all undergraduates, and enrollment is by permission number

Course Description: From thieves and murderers to bigamists and terrorists, criminals have long figured prominently in English fiction. In this course, we consider the centrality of crime and punishment to the novel tradition while exploring the ways in which novels can help us understand the causes and consequences of illicit acts. We focus on novels from the Victorian period (such as Oliver Twist and Jekyll and Hyde) and end with Margaret Atwood’s marvelous reimagining of the era’s crime fiction in Alias Grace. We pay particular attention to the implications of criminality for literary form while sampling recurring debates about the effects of reading and writing about vice. Along the way, we consider topics including the value and limits of transgression; the origins of the human capacity for evil; the role of gender, class, and nation in representations of criminality; and the relationship between law and literature. As an upper-level English class, this course places special emphasis on close reading and critical writing. There will be opportunities to participate in mock trials and debates and to consider texts and discussions in this class in relation to those in other classes in the Basic Needs and Justice theme. By the end of the course, my hope is that you will have gained a better understanding of perennial problems of criminal justice, a sense of the range and richness of nineteenth-century fiction, and a set of reading and writing skills that will serve you well in the years ahead.

Note: This class satisfies the 1700-1900 literary history requirement for English majors and counts toward the minor in Law and Society and the major/minor in Gender and Sexualities Studies. In addition, the course counts toward the Basic Needs and Justice theme of the Marquette Core Curriculum (MCC)’s Discovery Tier and satisfies the MCC Writing-Intensive requirement.

Readings: Novels and short fiction by authors such as Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Margaret Atwood, as well as selected works of literary criticism and legal/cultural history.

Assignments: Two papers; a “crime log” (reading journal); short discussion posts; and lively participation.

4765 Material Cultures (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Expanding our Horizons)

101 MWF 10:00-10:50 Professor Gerry Canavan

Course Title: Environmental Protection
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature; crosslisted with Environmental Studies major

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: Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia; Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home; Richard McGuire, Here; Daniel Quinn, Ishmael; Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future; Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

Assignments: Final critical paper or creative project; weekly sandbox posts on D2L; enthusiastic and informed class participation

4820 Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (WRIT, Discovery Tier - Basic Needs and Justice)

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Jodi Melamed

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

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

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

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

102 TuTh 2:00-3:15 Professor Heather Hathaway

Course Title: Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature Diverse Cultures for ENGA

Course Description: Biology tells us that differences based on concepts such as “race” and “ethnicity” are not grounded in scientific reality because all humans share 99.9% DNA. But these concepts have served as the foundation on which immense violence has taken place. In this course, we will examine literature that reveals how socially-constructed concepts distinguishing “self” from “other”—whether socially, biologically, politically, culturally, or ideologically, as examples—have led to history’s greatest injustices.

4830 Africana Literatures (WRIT)

4997 Capstone (WRIT)

101 TuTh 12:30-1:45 Professor Elizaveta Strakhov

Course Title: History of the Book
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Capstone Requirement for ENGL, ENGW

Course Description: What is a book? Traditionally literary scholars answer this question by thinking about characters, plot, genre, etc. The discipline of the history of the book, however, answers this question rather differently. The history of the book looks at the book’s pages and their size, its cover (soft or hardbacked), the quality of its ink and illustrations, the tightness of its binding (how hard is it to crack open?), and all the other details that make the book a physical object before we start to ask ourselves questions about characters, plot, and genre. Because, often, we understand a book’s message, purpose, and the intent behind its composition far better when we take into account its status as, first and foremost, a physical object with a concrete history behind it. This research seminar will teach you the history and development of the book from the earliest origins of oral culture through our modern-day online reading culture, paying special attention to the origins and evolutions of the technologies of reading and writing. In addition to history, you will also learn the practical side of working with material literary objects: deciphering medieval and Renaissance handwriting, for example, and understanding the physical mechanisms of page-gathering and book-binding. In the process, we will be reading literary texts that thematize books, and libraries, as physical objects worthy of study and interpretation and/or that constitute landmark developments in the evolution of the book (like the serialized novel or the graphic novel). For their capstone, each student will complete a research project tailored to their literary interests that will be built around a physical item or items within Raynor Library Special Collections and University Archives.

Readings: Texts included but not limited to: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Mark Daniliewski’s House of Leaves

6820 Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice

6931 Topics in English

6965 Practicum in Teaching Writing

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