English, PHD
Chairperson: Gerry Canavan, Ph.D.
Department of English website
Degree Offered
Doctor of Philosophy
Program Description
To study English is to explore the world through texts. Students of English learn how literary and cultural forms interact with history, politics and ideology to create meaning; participate in the most important conversations of our day through reflective, argumentative and creative writing; and discover their own voices as writers.
In the doctorate program in English, students of literature pursue a rigorous plan of course work that culminates in a major research-based dissertation project under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and committee. Doctoral students develop comprehensive and intensive knowledge of British, American and/or Anglophone literature; facility with textual, editorial, and critical backgrounds of major texts and authors; training in the basic tools and methods of literary research; and practical experience in the pedagogy of literature, rhetoric and composition. The program’s new focus on personal and professional formation guides students to consider the Ph.D. as preparation for a diversity of careers. Doctoral graduates have gone on to work in universities in tenure-track, administrative and teaching positions; in public health; in government; in publishing; in educational administration; in the nonprofit sector; and elsewhere.
Teaching assistantships are available on a competitive basis.
English Doctorate
Specializations: American Literature, British Literature
The doctorate in English is directed toward comprehensive and intensive knowledge of literature; the textual, critical and editorial problems and backgrounds of major texts and authors; the principles of literary criticism; post-graduate career discernment; and the basic tools, methods and application of literary and linguistic research. The program provides practical experience in teaching and research to prepare students to pursue a variety of careers in higher education.
DOCTORAL CURRICULUM
Doctoral students must show competence in a second language in which there is significant scholarly literature in their program of study. The choice of language must be approved by the director of graduate studies. Students must complete all requirements listed on the Doctoral Program Planning Form, pass a qualifying examination and successfully defend a dissertation to complete the program.
Doctoral requirements (For Students with a COMPLETED Master's degree in English or a comparable Discipline )
Students must complete a minimum of 36 credit hours after completing a master of arts degree in English: 24 credit hours of course work, 12 of which may be taken at the 5000 level with the permission of the director of graduate studies; and 12 credit hours of ENGL 8999 Doctoral Dissertation to be taken after successful completion of ENGL 8830 Dissertation Tutorial.
Required course work:
| Code | Title | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| ENGL 6820 | Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice | 3 |
| ENGL 6965 | Practicum in Teaching Writing | 3 |
| Electives: Choose 5 from the following courses: | 15 | |
| Literature to 1500 | ||
| 16th and 17th Century Literatures | ||
| Studies in Shakespeare | ||
| The Long 18th Century | ||
| Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature | ||
| Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature | ||
| Studies in American Literature from the Beginnings to 1900 | ||
| Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature | ||
| 21st Century Literatures | ||
| Studies in Transatlantic Literatures | ||
| Studies in Transnational Literatures | ||
| Studies in Genre | ||
| Study in History of Literary Criticism | ||
| Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice | ||
| Studies in Literary Criticism | ||
| Topics in English | ||
ENGL courses (5000-level or above) | ||
| Professional Project in English 1 | ||
| Pre-Dissertation Seminar | ||
| Independent Study in English 1 | ||
Graduate level (cognate) course from outside ENGL 2 | ||
| Dissertation-related credits | ||
| ENGL 8830 | Dissertation Tutorial | 3 |
| ENGL 8999 | Doctoral Dissertation | 12 |
| Total Credit Hours: | 36 | |
| 1 | A project developed in consultation with the director of graduate studies and an assigned faculty mentor (3 credits maximum). |
| 2 | Consent required from the director of graduate studies. |
Doctoral requirements (FOR STUDENTS WITHout A COMPLETED MASTER'S DEGREE IN ENGLISH OR A COMPARABLE DISCIPLINE)
Students are eligible to earn a master's degree after they complete 30 credit hours of this program. After the first 30 credits, they need to complete an additional 15 credit hours of course work (including ENGL 8830 Dissertation Tutorial) plus 12 credit hours of ENGL 8999 Doctoral Dissertation. With permission of the director of graduate studies, students may take up to 18 credits (6 courses) at the 5000 level.
Required course work:
| Code | Title | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| ENGL 6820 | Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice | 3 |
| ENGL 6965 | Practicum in Teaching Writing | 3 |
| Electives - choose 12 classes from the following: | 36 | |
| Literature to 1500 | ||
| 16th and 17th Century Literatures | ||
| Studies in Shakespeare | ||
| The Long 18th Century | ||
| Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature | ||
| Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature | ||
| Studies in American Literature from the Beginnings to 1900 | ||
| Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature | ||
| 21st Century Literatures | ||
| Studies in Transatlantic Literatures | ||
| Studies in Transnational Literatures | ||
| Studies in Genre | ||
| Study in History of Literary Criticism | ||
| Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice | ||
| Studies in Literary Criticism | ||
| Topics in English | ||
ENGL courses (5000-level or above) 1 | ||
| Professional Project in English 2 | ||
| Pre-Dissertation Seminar | ||
| Independent Study in English 2 | ||
Graduate-level (cognate) course from outside ENGL 3 | ||
| Dissertation-related credits | ||
| ENGL 8830 | Dissertation Tutorial | 3 |
| ENGL 8999 | Doctoral Dissertation | 12 |
| Total Credit Hours: | 57 | |
| 1 | No more than 18 credit hours may be taken at the 5000 level. |
| 2 | A project developed in consultation with the director of graduate studies and an assigned faculty mentor (6 credit hours maximum). |
| 3 | Consent required from the director of graduate studies. No more than 6 credit hours may be taken outside of ENGL. |
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ENGL 5110 Exploring the English Language (3 credits)
Explores how humans use a small set of sounds to express an infinite set of meanings, why dialects exist, and if other species have language. Studies the physical, cognitive and social dimensions of human language.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 5120 Anatomy of English (3 credits)
Explore the glamour of grammar (the words are related!) as we develop a working model of the structure of sounds, words and sentences of English and develop a basis for making informed decisions about style, usage and grammar pedagogy.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2019 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 5130 History of the English Language (3 credits)
Marauding Germanic tribes in a corner of Europe in the 5th century established an island society whose native tongue is now spoken by billions around the world as the language of business, technology, and diplomacy. This is the story of English from before Ælfric to present-day Zimbabwe. Explore the nature of linguistic change, major developments in the structure and use of the English language, and current variation in English worldwide.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2020 Spring Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2013 Spring Term
ENGL 5170 Studies in Language (3 credits)
Explores topics in linguistics such as language and cognition; phonology; language and gender; English as world language; and language in the city, among others. See course listings on English Department website for current topics. May be repeated if topic is different.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2018 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2015 Fall Term
ENGL 5210 Writing, Literacy, and Rhetoric Studies (3 credits)
Explores current topics within rhetoric and composition, such as community literacy, digital rhetoric, multimodal composing, women's rhetorics, rhetorics of peace, writing and race and others. Engages these (inter)disciplinary conversations by developing scholarly and/or community-based projects that combine critical thinking, research, and reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Spring Term, 2019 Spring Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term
ENGL 5220 Rhetorical Theories and Practices (3 credits)
Explores rhetoric, how a knowledge of rhetorical theories enhance critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking, listening and others by tracing rhetorical theories spanning from Greco-Roman ideas about the logic and ethics of argument to contemporary concepts of identification, performativity and raced voices and consciousness. May include opportunities to analyze texts, people and cultures and to compose and revise texts in different genres, media, contexts and styles for a variety of audiences. May not be counted as a Literature course.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2018 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 5221 The Rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (3 credits)
Examines two of the most well-known figures from the African American civil rights movement of the 1960s: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Evaluates the rhetoric of King and Malcolm X within their historical contexts and contemporary narratives about them.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term
ENGL 5230 Writing Center Theory, Practice and Research (4 credits)
Offers insight as to how conversations about writing helps writers and how writing centers promote change. Reveals the challenges and rewards of peer tutoring while studying the theory and practice of peer tutoring. Topics drawn from writing center scholarship include processes of written, oral, and multimodal composition; concepts of genre and situation; and strategies for giving writers effective feedback. Includes a required writing center “internship.” Upon completion, students can apply to become Ott Memorial Writing Center tutors.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Spring Term, 2019 Spring Term
ENGL 5250 Creative Writing: Fiction (3 credits)
Engages narrative imagination and harnesses it productively to explore the spectrum between and including tragedy to comedy. Teaches the craft and techniques of writing fiction and the creative process by analyzing published fiction from the practitioner’s perspective, by writing and revising, and by discussing participant writings in workshop. May not be counted as a Literature course.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Summer Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Spring Term
ENGL 5260 Creative Writing: Poetry (3 credits)
Discover how poetry is all about surprise and how the practice of poetry develops innovation in writing and thinking. Explore the work of living poets while developing a portfolio of drafts and revisions. The workshop format, open and accessible to all - from beginners to advanced practitioners - allows students to find their voice in the context of a supportive, rigorous and exploratory atmosphere. May not be counted as a Literature course.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2020 Spring Term
ENGL 5301 Medieval Literature and Chaucer (3 credits)
"The Canterbury Tales" sets itself in the late decades of fourteenth-century England when political upheavals and revolts against feudal hierarchy were abroad in both country and court: agricultural workers rising up against tax burdens, friars being viewed as figures of excess, women increasing pressure to compete in the marketplace and to travel, prompting thereby hundreds of treatises censuring them as unruly and dangerous to society. Chaucer, however, seems to have thrived on such havoc. His are nervy questions in his "Tales" as he explores corruption within the Church, the dangerous and comical effects of courtly love, women challenging clerical interpretation of Scripture, men who try to hold their wives “narwe in cage,” what constitutes happiness, the impulses behind our choices, and the clergy’s abuse of knowledge. The explorations are both comic and dead-serious. Text include "Troilus and Criseyde" and "The Canterbury Tales."
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2017 Summer Term, 2015 Fall Term
ENGL 5303 Studies in the Medieval Imagination (3 credits)
Discover the origin of the very discipline we now call “English”, in its emphasis on “close reading” and “critical thinking”, in the medieval habits of reading the Bible allegorically for figurative meaning. Then as now, medieval bookworms sought to uncover the hidden truths that lay just below its surface. In the process, they read, absorbed and in turn produced their own allegorical texts, in which they clothed alien concepts in layers of symbolism and myth.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 5311 Themes in Medieval Literature (3 credits)
Starting with the key sources in classical antiquity that informed English poets’ discussions of both love and war, examine the rise of English courtly love poetry in the context of a devastating and drawn-out conflict that would forever alter England’s cultural and political climate and set the stage for the birth of English nationalism: the pre-condition for the eventual formation of the British Empire and for the birth of “English” itself as an academic discipline in the university.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Spring Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 5321 British Literature of the 16th Century (3 credits)
In the decades after the Reformation, Britain was roiled by religious and political debates both intensely local and far transcending the country’s national boundaries, at the same time that its citizens were figuring out for the first time what it meant to be a nation with its own distinct language and culture. Sonnets, epics, political treatises, closet drama, and the first plays for the public stage all competed in what became the country’s first public literary marketplace, as economic and political changes helped foster the first English literature and the first conception of the person that we can call truly modern. Students make themselves present at the hotly contested beginnings of genres, categories and ideas familiar enough to them now that they take them as natural, by reading poems and plays so enduring that 400 years later they are still part of our cultural fabric.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Spring Term
ENGL 5341 British Literature of the 17th Century (3 credits)
Colonialism and empire, economic slavery, regicide, revolution, one of the earliest experiments with republicanism in the modern world, the development of scientific empiricism and positivism, the invention of newspapers… all of these events and institutions in seventeenth-century Britain, so fundamental to our own culture, not only shaped but were shaped by its literature, which was one of the central public forums in which ideas were ventured and debated. Students read poems, plays, prose, and speeches by writers both famous and (now) obscure, from Francis Bacon and Mary Wroth to John Milton and Kenelm Digby, as a window into their thinking about such central problems as love, friendship, community, beauty, profit and self-interest, and political justice.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5351 Milton (3 credits)
In our world, in which we debate how and if we can protect our freedoms, in which our use of reason has brought us such unprecedented power to communicate but also to destroy, and in which religious discourse figures so prominently, for good and for ill, Milton has particular relevance. His apparent confidence (arrogance?) in advancing his ideas, in many works but in "Paradise Lost" especially, forces each one of us to reevaluate our own. Students explore Milton’s major poetry and prose in the context of seventeenth-century England.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 5361 Literatures of Pre-Colonial and Colonial America (3 credits)
What constitutes the earliest forms of American literature? How did writing in the Americas prior to the foundation of modern nation-states grow out of and respond to the unique circumstances of contact and collision between the “Old World” of Europe and the “New World” of America? How was colonial American literature situated in the larger geopolitical arenas of the Atlantic World, the Black Atlantic, and competing imperialist projects? Students encounter the diverse genres and multiple literary traditions that converged in North America from the initial arrival of Europeans up to the American Revolution. May take a comparative transatlantic, transnational, and / or hemispheric approach, with readings drawn from the literatures of British, French and Spanish America as well as Native American cultures.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2014 Fall Term
ENGL 5402 The Novel to 1900 (3 credits)
Traces the development of the novel genre from its origins in the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth, focusing on the relationship between literary form and social change. Considers writers’ treatment of topics such as personal identity and individual psychology, gender and marriage, race and empire, industrialization and market culture, and political and social reform. Authors may include Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Spring Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 5412 Transatlantic Literature, 1700-1900 (3 credits)
Transatlantic studies reframe Anglophone literature (and sometimes literature in translation) to incorporate perspectives beyond the national. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were eras of economic and cultural exchange across the Atlantic ocean; this course tracks some of these “currents.” Individual instructors may focus on comparative revolutions, on the Black Atlantic, on transnational romanticism, travel and exploration, slavery and abolition or other topics.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 5420 Renaissance Literature: The 16th Century (3 credits)
A study of Tudor poetry, drama, and prose, with emphasis on literary and cultural issues of the Elizabethan period. Writers considered might include Lodge and More (prose); Shakespeare, Philip and Mary Sidney, Spenser, and Wyatt (lyric and narrative poetry); and Carey, Kyd, and Marlowe (drama).
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2012 Spring Term
ENGL 5422 British Literature of the Long 18th Century (3 credits)
During the "long eighteenth century" (1660-1830), England experienced unprecedented literary and cultural innovation: writers developed new forms of fiction, actresses appeared on stage for the first time and poets used verse as vehicles for satirical and public expression. Meanwhile, political parties took shape, the government expanded the reach of its empire, the nuclear family assumed its modern form, and burgeoning print media provided a stream of gossip and news. Students explore the era’s literary developments in the context of such social, cultural and political changes. Topics vary each term.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2015 Fall Term
ENGL 5423 Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment (3 credits)
Considers the centrality of law and lawlessness to eighteenth-century British fiction, while exploring the ways in which novels can help us understand the nature and consequences of illicit acts. Addresses questions concerning justice and judgment, crime and punishment, gender and marriage, and legal terror and popular violence. Authors may include Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2021 Spring Term
ENGL 5430 Renaissance Literature: The 17th Century (3 credits)
A study of English poetry, drama and prose from 1603 to the beginnings of the neoclassical period. Writers considered might include Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Jonson, and Marvell (lyric); Bacon and Wroth (prose); and Jonson, Middleton, and Webster (drama).
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2013 Spring Term, 2011 Spring Term
ENGL 5432 US Literatures of the Revolution and New Republic (3 credits)
The eighteenth century saw profound changes in America; there were revolutions not only in politics but in the ways people lived their everyday lives, in travel, in industry and in literature. While the American Revolution ended the colonial domination of European settlers and the founding of the United States, those citizens in turn were colonizing Native American lands and African labor. Women clamored to be included in the democratic conversation, and the ideology of “Republican Mortherhood” simultaneously stimulated and constrained those desires. Students look at the ways a diverse group of writers responded to these sea changes by employing a comparative transatlantic or transpacific approach or by focusing more closely on issues specific to the North American continent; issues studied may include the rise of the novel and the changes in print culture surrounding the Revolution, or may focus on the literature of women or narratives of captivity and slavery.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2017 Fall Term
ENGL 5442 US Literature from the Constitution to the Civil War (3 credits)
The first decades of the nineteenth century marked a period of innovation and abundance in the literary history of the United States. Students explore the landmark developments of the early national and antebellum periods within the broader contexts of American cultural history, paying particular attention to the influence of Romanticism and such North American variants as New England Transcendentalism and the American Gothic. They may also explore the intersections between literature and a variety of social reform movements, such as those involving abolitionism, women’s rights and Native American rights. Authors assigned may include a selection of the following: Apess (Pequot), Brockden Brown, Cooper, Irving, Poe, Sedgwick, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Wells Brown, Whitman and Stowe.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5452 British Literature of the Romantic Period, 1790-1837 (3 credits)
From the French Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, 1780-1837. How exactly did civil and human rights evolve in Great Britain? Gender, class, religious turmoil and race are also central issues in the study of works by romantic-era writers such as Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Percy Shelley, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley. Students study thematic approaches to or surveys of the literature of the period.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2015 Fall Term, 2014 Fall Term
ENGL 5453 Romanticism and Nature (3 credits)
Understand how the questions raised by Romantic thinkers in reaction to a period of radical intellectual, technological and sociopolitical changes revolutionized the western world’s attitude towards “nature.” Through experiential learning, visits to the Riverside Urban Ecology Center, examine how, in a very immediate way, today’s arguments about climate change, animal rights and ecology are products of contradictions first brought to light by Romanticism.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 5472 British Literature of the Victorian Period, 1837-1900 (3 credits)
Examines literary developments alongside broader transformations in Victorian culture, with special attention to social, political, and ethical concerns. Explores topics such as gender, marriage, and the family; industrialization and market culture; race and empire; crime and violence; and social and political reform. Studies authors such as Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2015 Spring Term
ENGL 5482 US Literature from the Civil War to the Early 20th Century (3 credits)
The period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century was one of profound social, technological and political changes in the United States. Students look at how writers reflected and responded to the world of the late nineteenth century (sometimes reaching into the early twentieth century) in literature written by American authors and, sometimes, by the European writers that influenced them during this period of intense transnational literary exchange. Course may address the waxing and waning popularity of sentimental literature, the elite enthusiasm for realist literature and the related growth of regional literature, the connection between fiction and the muckraking school of journalism, the expansion of publication in magazines and newspapers, the explosion of literatures by and about immigrants, and/or African American literary production in the eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Students may read works by Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah M. B. Piatt, Zitkala Sa, Charlotte Perkins GIlman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and a multitude of others.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 5503 British Literature since 1900 (3 credits)
Students explore English literature written since 1900, a period when writers have confronted the turbulence of modern history while defending the value of their art. The last century is marked by two world wars, the rise and fall of the British Empire, globalization, accelerating technological development, and changing gender roles and class structures. In this era, some artists have followed the modernist dictum to “make it new,” to overthrow, reimagine, and thus revitalize older forms of literary expression no longer attuned to the modern era, while others have sought to refine traditional structures for plays, poems, novels, and short stories. Against an historical backdrop that has witnessed the rise of radio, television, film, the Internet, and the 24-hour news cycle, writers have used their art to assert that (in the words of twentieth-century poet Ezra Pound) “literature is news that stays news.”
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Spring Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 5520 American Literature from 1798 to 1865 (3 credits)
A study of the literature and culture of the early-to-mid 19th century, including the periods of the American Renaissance and the Civil War. Writers studied may include: Alcott, Child, Cooper, Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Stowe, Thoreau, and Whitman.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2011 Fall Term
ENGL 5523 Modernism (3 credits)
What should literature be and do in an era of war, revolution and cataclysmic cultural change? Modernist literature emerged across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century in response to this question. Old ideas and forms suddenly seemed ill-equipped to respond to the twentieth century, which led modernist artists to rebel against convention. Writers such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., W.B. Yeats and Gertrude Stein worked across languages, national traditions and genres to reinvent the literary past and change contemporary history. In the process, they created some of the most astonishing, daring and rewarding poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Summer Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2015 Fall Term, 2013 Fall Term
ENGL 5533 US Literature: 20th-Century Beginnings to World War II (3 credits)
Students construct an overview of American literature from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of World War II, focusing on the historical contexts of literary production. The themes and formal and stylistic aspects of the different works under discussion are situated within the context of the political, social, scientific, technological and economic transformations in this period of American history. Examines the interactions between the development of modern American literature and key issues of the period including racial segregation and racial uplift, class inequality, labor and immigration debates, the feminist movement, global war, the invention of the atom bomb and the rise of mass entertainments and consumerism.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2015 Spring Term
ENGL 5543 British Literature of the Postmodernist Period (3 credits)
Students explore modern and contemporary English literature, which engages catastrophes and humiliations blared in countless headlines, from England’s near starvation by German U-boats in World War I to the loss of the Raj, the British expulsion from Suez and not long after what was once called Rhodesia, the Christine Keeler scandal and the Falklands debacle. Whether the collapse of the British empire qualifies as disaster, opportunity, retribution, graveyard or cradle depends on who is talking. And exactly who is talking, often for the first time, is the point. As Kipling feared, Conrad hoped, and Orwell predicted, the weakening empire gave new freedom and power to the once England itself. Students study the accelerating evolution of new genres, the trade-offs of dialect literature, the appropriation and/or resistance of "popular" cultures, the danger of the high-tech police state, and the search for a way to awaken the sleepwalkers and inspire the denialists without trampling their freedom, even if that freedom is enthralled to commercially motivated and cynically silenced and voiceless, not only in the former colonies and throughout the Commonwealth but within destructive mythologies. Among the storytellers and poets threading this labyrinth can be counted Auden, Orwell, Thomas, Reed, Bennett, Harrison, Wa Thiong’O, Larkin, Walcott, Hughes, Achebe, Naipaul, Heaney, Gordimer, Rushdie, Boland and Muldoon.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Spring Term, 2016 Spring Term, 2013 Spring Term, 2012 Spring Term
ENGL 5550 Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Modern Period (3 credits)
A study of American literature of the early twentieth century with particular attention to the formal experiments of modernism. Writers studied generally include Cather, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Frost, Hemingway, Hurston, Larsen, Stein, Stevens, Williams, and Wright.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2014 Spring Term, 2013 Spring Term, 2012 Spring Term, 2011 Spring Term
ENGL 5553 US Literature after World War II (3 credits)
Students explore fiction, poetry and drama composed since World War II, with special attention to the shift from modernism to postmodernism. How has American literature in the twentieth century responded to and been influenced by the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War, anti-communism, consumer culture, environmentalism, scientific and technological progress, economic crisis, and the ever-looming threat of the nuclear bomb? What are the intersections between literary culture and popular culture, and between literary culture and the state, in the high-water years of the “American Century”? Approaches vary with instructor, but authors studied are likely to include Auster, Baldwin, Barth, Bishop, Carson, Carver, DeLillo, Didion, Ellison, Erdrich, Graham, Heller, Kingston, Levine, Morrison, Nabokov, O'Connor, Ozick, Plath, Pynchon, Rich, Roth, Silko, Spiegelman, Stone, Vonnegut, Wallace, Walker and White.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Spring Term, 2013 Fall Term, 2012 Fall Term, 2011 Fall Term
ENGL 5563 Literatures of the 21st Century (3 credits)
Students study the literature of the twenty-first century from a variety of national and transnational perspectives. How have different authors responded to the rapid social changes and urgent political crises the world has undergone since the year 2000? What role has literature played in registering and shaping our collective response to these events? What is the continued relevance of literature (and literary study) for an era increasingly dominated by nonliterary and non-narrative media forms? Possible authors include Atwood, Díaz, Ishiguro, Lahiri, Mitchell, McCarthy, Morrison, Murakami, Saramago, Sebald, Smith, Rowling, Roy, Winterson and Wallace.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Spring Term
ENGL 5610 Individual Authors (3 credits)
Studies of the works of selected individual authors, usually within biographical, historical, intellectual, and/or cultural contexts. Authors studied may include Austen, the Brontes, the Brownings, Cheever and Carver, Conrad, Frost, Hardy and Hopkins, Heaney, Melville, Morrison, Wharton and Stein and Yeats. Consult Schedule of Classes or the English Department's website for specific author(s).
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 5612 J. R. R. Tolkien (3 credits)
Explore J.R.R. Tolkien's works, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century. Consider why his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy which he remade so completely in his image, remained intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term
ENGL 5615 Text in Context (3 credits)
Students engage in an in-depth, semester-long study of a “major” or “monumental” work in its cultural and historical context. Alongside a close and thorough reading of the text, such a study may include analysis of its source texts; its contemporaneous interlocutors; significant critical and theoretical responses; transmedia adaptations; unauthorized rewrites, fan fictions and sequels; and contemporary remixes. Central texts vary from year to year but may include such works as "Paradise Lost," "Hamlet," "Frankenstein," "Middlemarch," "Ulysses," "Invisible Man," "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "Beloved," "Almanac of the Dead" or "Infinite Jest."
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2019 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 5616 Moby-Dick (3 credits)
Engage in an in-depth, semester-long study of a Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick as a “major” or “monumental” work in its cultural and historical context. Alongside a close and thorough reading of the text, the study may include analysis of its source texts; its contemporaneous interlocutors; significant critical and theoretical responses; transmedia adaptations; contemporary prequels, rewrites or remixes.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Spring Term
ENGL 5617 James Joyce's Ulysses (3 credits)
Embark on one of the great adventures of an academic career: reading James Joyce’s dazzling, gorgeous, messy novel, Ulysses. The board at the Modern Library (among others) calls it the best novel of the twentieth century, which is a fitting vindication for a novel that was once put on trial in New York (in the 1934 case THE UNITED STATES vs. ONE BOOK CALLED ‘ULYSSES’). Ulysses depicts the ordinary lives of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus on a single day in Dublin in 1904 (June 16th, Bloomsday, a day celebrated around the world each year with readings, re-enactments, and revelry). Joyce began his novel during the First World War by remaking Homer’s epic of homecoming, the Odyssey, to celebrate the value of the everyday lives of ordinary men and women. We read Ulysses alongside three precursor texts that will help us to better understand it: the Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The course environment demands both serious intellectual engagement and a willingness to think in playful, creative ways.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5620 Chaucer (3 credits)
A study of Chaucer's works with emphasis on his techniques, thematic concerns, cultural contexts, and place in literary history.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2014 Spring Term, 2013 Spring Term, 2012 Spring Term, 2011 Spring Term
ENGL 5710 Studies in Genre (3 credits)
Advanced study of a particular genre and its ability to articulate meaning in historical, social and/or literary contexts. Offerings have included Romance and Epic in Early Modern England, the Family Novel, the Novella, the Epic, the Court Romance and the American Western. Consult Schedule of Classes or the English Department's website for specific topics.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2014 Spring Term, 2013 Fall Term, 2013 Spring Term, 2012 Fall Term
ENGL 5715 Children's Literature (3 credits)
How does writing for children negotiate the boundaries between instruction and entertainment? How does it engage with controversial social issues? How is it situated in the broader currents of British and American cultural history? How is it gendered and classed? Students survey an array of texts written for children but compelling for adult readers too. Students are introduced to a range of critical approaches that reveal complexity, sophistication and surprises in these seemingly “simple” texts. Readings may include fairy tales, "Alice in Wonderland," "Little Women," "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "Treasure Island," "Peter Pan", "The Secret Garden," "The Wind in the Willows," "Charlotte’s Web," and "Harry Potter," along with other classic as well as recent contributions.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term
ENGL 5716 Science Fiction/Fantasy (3 credits)
“Everything is becoming science fiction,” wrote J.G. Ballard in 1971. “From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” What has been the role of speculative and fantastic media in anticipating and articulating social change? How have creators in science fiction and fantasy used the relative safety of these genres’ unreal situations to comment on very real crises in politics, identity, economics, ecology and war? How have science fiction and fantasy provided a space for reflection upon and resistance to dominant ideologies, and where have they served instead to reproduce and augment such powers? What role does the imagination of improbable and impossible worlds play in contemporary life? Content may range from surveys of different periods in the history of science fiction and fantasy to focused study of particular themes, subgenres and authors.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 5717 Comics and Graphic Narrative (3 credits)
Students explore the production and reception of comics and graphic narrative as a literary-artistic form, with topics ranging from the early history of the genre to its ongoing fixation on the figure of the superhero to the development of an international art movement crossing gender, class and ethnic lines. Texts discussed may include DC and Marvel superhero comics, manga and anime, "Watchmen," "Maus," "Persepolis," "Fun Home," "Gemma Bovary," "Buddha," "Understanding Comics," underground and alternative comics and "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth."
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2019 Summer Term, 2016 Summer Term
ENGL 5730 What Is a Book? (3 credits)
Discover the history of reading and writing from the Mesopotamian tablet (3500 BCE) to the electronic tablet today. Explore the evolution of reading and writing technologies. Learn about Marquette’s rare books through trips to Raynor Library Special Collections and the Haggerty Museum of Art. Work hands-on with physical books. Read literary texts that exemplify the book’s evolution: stories written as letters, as comics, as Twitter feeds. Create a collaborative group project based around a rare book.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5734 The Epic (3 credits)
Epic poetry is one of the oldest literary genres, and in the western literary tradition it has always been intimately associated with exploring the unknown—whether far-off oceans, the edges of the theological universe, or the dark territory of the self. Surveys four of the most important literary epics in the western tradition: Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. All four document how exploring distant realms always, at the end of the day, means exploring yourself. These epics ask their heroes where they came from and where they’re going as ways of forcing them to understand who they are.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 5736 Fiction (3 credits)
"There is no doubt," says Doris Lessing, "that fiction makes a better job of the truth." What is the connection between fiction and truth? Why are stories (narrative fictions) so compelling? Fiction takes a variety of forms, including the novel, the short story, the story cycle, the novella, the graphic novel, etc. New media has added to these in the forms of collaborative tales, fan fiction and hypertextual works, for examples. Students focus on one specific fictional form (topics vary by term) and study it in depth. Upon completing the course, students have a firm grasp of the form’s literary conventions, relation to the cultural/historical contexts of its production and ongoing reception, and relation to other literary genres.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Summer Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 5737 Creative Nonfiction (3 credits)
Where does fact end and fiction begin? Sometimes referred to as the “literature of fact,” creative nonfiction blurs the line between literary art (poetry, fiction, and drama) and “objective” writing practices of research and reportage (history and journalism). Works of creative nonfiction have been galvanizing forces in the transformation of public opinion, influencing debates on the abolition of slavery, the environment, pacifism, women’s rights and more. Students explore different types of creative nonfiction including documentary, literary journalism, memoirs and other types of life-writing, and travel writing. Students engage creative nonfiction to explore ethical issues that might arise from practices of fictionalization including recent high-profile cases and controversies in the journalism and popular media.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5738 Poetry (3 credits)
Students engage with the discipline and pleasure of poetry, from ancient sacred lyrics to twenty-first century experimental texts. The possibilities are endless: individual sections may focus on indigenous poetry of the Americas; on the poetry of witness; on feminist poetry; on long-form poetry; on ecopoetics; or on prosody; or on a particular “school” such as Deep Image, Black Arts or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2018 Fall Term
ENGL 5745 Digital Literacies (3 credits)
What does it mean to be literate in the age of digital natives? Students explore new media forms that have arisen since the mid-twentieth century, including video games, social media, digital music and art, and Internet writing. Students address questions such as: How can or should the study of literature and film include new media? How does the production and reception of different types of new media texts challenge our ideas about writing and reading? How do available technologies impact digital genres and forms? What theoretical constructs and aesthetic frameworks do they demand? And how are new media augmenting, challenging, or changing education, including university study?
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term
ENGL 5750 American Drama (3 credits)
A study of American drama with emphasis on form and function of the genre. Course emphasis and authors taught can vary with instructor. Consult Schedule of Classes or the English Department's Web site for specific topic.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5755 Law and Literature (3 credits)
Examines the centrality of law and justice to literature as well as the ways in which literature can help us think through legal questions and concerns. Considers topics such as the nature of law; the limits of legal authority; the legal construction of gender, race, and class; and the causes and consequences of crime and punishment. Authors may include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Atwood.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2020 Spring Term
ENGL 5762 Neuroscience and Literature (3 credits)
Explores a range of psychological, behavioral, and neurological conditions through careful reading of literature that represents neurodiversity. Examines how narratives about neurodiversity register the ongoing efforts of social and political movements to expand awareness about the lives of people whose minds and brains are not neurotypical. Reflects on ways to change social structures, especially in education and medicine, in order to make the world more inclusive of neurodifference.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term
ENGL 5765 Material Cultures (3 credits)
Shifts English studies off the page toward analysis of other sorts of objects, employing methodologies from history, anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and sociology alongside literary and linguistic methods and exploring the materiality of text and other methods of representation. Topics may range from the study of archives, museums, national parks and monuments to food, clothing, toys and games; to the history of the book; to investigation of Milwaukee architecture and historical sites.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2018 Fall Term
ENGL 5770 Studies in Literature and Culture (3 credits)
Investigates the relation between literature and its culture from a variety of perspectives that might include the historical, political or anthropological. Past offerings have included the English Urban Novel, Catholicism and Literature, and Texts, Audiences and Social Change. Consult Schedule of Classes or the English Department's website for specific topic.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Summer Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 5785 Gender, Sexuality, Literature (3 credits)
Gender and sexuality can be identities, performances, prisons, or fields for exploration. They shape public and private experience – politics, economics, education, families, friendships, even one’s most personal relation to oneself. And literature is one of the central forums where writers and readers both make sense of this experience and imagine how it might be different. Students analyze changing literary representations of gender and sexuality and their intersections with other identities and categories of analysis – for instance, race and ethnicity, nationality, historical location – in order to explore the meaning and the function of these most basic building blocks in our culture.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5786 Women Writers (3 credits)
Studies selected women writers to engage and explore the effect of women’s social/cultural positions on their literary aesthetics and whether women have separate and/or multiple literary traditions. Explores the literary innovations of women writers in order to connect their use of form to their social engagement. Authors studied vary by instructor.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2019 Spring Term
ENGL 5810 Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies (3 credits)
Constructs a foundation for further study in the literatures of racialized and “ethnic” groups in the United States (e.g., African American, American Indian, Asian American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, Arab American, etc.). Presents key concepts necessary for more advanced work in comparative race and ethnic studies such as racial formation, varieties of privilege, intersectionality (of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, class, etc.), and settler colonialism, as well as literary theoretical concerns about the relationship between aesthetic form and content, the influence of historical and cultural contexts on literary production and reception, and the political role of literature in society.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Fall Term, 2019 Fall Term, 2018 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term
ENGL 5820 Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (3 credits)
Explores selected topics in critical race and literary studies with the intent of allowing in-depth exploration and analysis. Topics vary by term but range from women of color feminism to Asian American literatures to literary captivities. Consult the Department of English website each term for specific topics. Though not required, having taken English 4810 is advantageous.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Spring Term
ENGL 5825 Native American / Indigenous Literatures (3 credits)
Understand the historical and legal contexts of tribal nations within the United States and Canada and why indigenous peoples are both politically and culturally distinct from other U.S. and Canadian citizens. Read such writers as Sherman Alexie, Charles Eastman and Louise Erdrich to learn Native critical terms and concepts elucidated through oral literature, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, film and novels, primarily drawn from members of tribal nations in the United States and Canada.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 5830 Africana Literatures (3 credits)
Explores literature produced by people of African descent. Topics vary by term. Consult the Department of English website each term for specific topics. Offerings may include the Harlem Renaissance; the Great Migration; Caribbean literatures; Justice, the State and Citizenship; and Race/Literature in Milwaukee after WWII.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Spring Term, 2019 Spring Term, 2018 Fall Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 5840 Postcolonial Literatures (3 credits)
Explores literatures written in English since the 1960s from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and Great Britain. Discusses decolonization, the emergence of neocolonialism, and cultural imperialism, as well as literary responses to these issues.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2014 Fall Term, 2013 Fall Term
ENGL 5850 Global Literatures (3 credits)
Students explore authors and texts that have become prominent on a global scale. Students read Anglophone texts as well as literary works in translation focusing on global economic, social and historical issues. Emphases and texts vary depending on instructor. Topics may include notions of universal human rights, migrant labor, issues of censorship and problems of literary translation.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term
ENGL 5931 Topics in Literature (3 credits)
Topics vary according to instructor, but past offerings have included the Bible as Literature, Literary Responses to the Vietnam War, Literature and the Environment, Literature of the Holocaust, the Vikings, and Meaning and Identity. Consult the Schedule of Classes or the English Department's website for specific topics.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Fall Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Summer Term, 2017 Spring Term
ENGL 5932 Topics in Writing (3 credits)
Students study writing topics that vary according to instructor. Consult Schedule of Classes or the English Department's website for specific topic.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2019 Spring Term, 2018 Spring Term
ENGL 5953 Seminar in Literature (3 credits)
Advanced practice in the techniques and discipline of intensive literary study. Consult Schedule of Classes or the English Department's Web site.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5954 Seminar in Creative Writing (3 credits)
To paraphrase the Czech writer Milan Kundera, most people would rather believe a simple lie than a complex truth. Students learn how to write complex truths, sometimes (often? mostly?) by making stuff up. Through advanced practice in the techniques and discipline of writing, students develop proficiency with those techniques they first encountered in ENGL 4250 and 4260 and add additional techniques to their repertoire. They examine fiction, poetry, drama, or nonfiction from technical (as well as critical) viewpoints, and develop fluency in discussing writing from the practitioner’s viewpoint. Offered in fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction. Consult schedule of classes or the English department's website for specific genre.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 5988 Practicum in Literature and Language Arts (1-3 credits)
Students gain experience working in the nonprofit sector, learning key project management skills alongside more specialized skills that vary with individual placements, which range from nonprofit publishing internships to community-engaged fellowships focusing on community building through asset mapping and story facilitation.
Prerequisite: Cons. of instr.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 5997 Capstone (3 credits)
Draw together knowledge and skills developed in previous course work to integrate and improve knowledge, transfer skills to post-university life. Explore how key questions and concerns can be thought of in different ways through project design and production and self-reflection. Content varies by instructor. Consult Department of English website for information on specific sections before registering. Senior undergraduates in English M.A. accelerated degree program should take ENGL 5997.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Spring Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2017 Spring Term
ENGL 6200 Old English (3 credits)
The grammar and syntax of Anglo-Saxon. Selected readings from the prose and poetry in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 1994 Spring Term, 1993 Spring Term, 1992 Spring Term, 1990 Fall Term
ENGL 6205 Studies in Language and Linguistics (3 credits)
Topics vary.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2013 Fall Term, 2010 Fall Term, 2005 Spring Term, 2002 Summer Term
ENGL 6210 Literature to 1500 (3 credits)
Topics vary.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Spring Term, 2018 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2014 Fall Term
ENGL 6215 16th and 17th Century Literatures (3 credits)
Investigate topics in the literature, culture and politics of the Early Modern or Renaissance period in England. Topics may include: Race and Gender in Early Modern Drama; Spenser, Milton and Epic History; Literature of the Revolution (with reference to the English Civil War); and Transformations in Renaissance Humanism.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Fall Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2015 Spring Term
ENGL 6220 Studies in Shakespeare (3 credits)
Topics vary.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2019 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2015 Fall Term
ENGL 6300 The Long 18th Century (3 credits)
Topics vary.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Spring Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2016 Spring Term
ENGL 6400 Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (3 credits)
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2014 Fall Term
ENGL 6500 Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature (3 credits)
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Summer Term, 2017 Spring Term, 2016 Summer Term, 2015 Summer Term
ENGL 6600 Studies in American Literature from the Beginnings to 1900 (3 credits)
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Fall Term, 2016 Spring Term, 2015 Spring Term, 2014 Spring Term
ENGL 6700 Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature (3 credits)
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Spring Term, 2018 Spring Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term
ENGL 6710 21st Century Literatures (3 credits)
Investigates major works of 21st Century literature written in English. Explores the major concepts, methods and theoretical movements that have shaped practices of contemporary literary studies. Students write an original, self-directed scholarly essay in the field of 21st Century literary studies that intervenes in contemporary debates, with an eye toward conference presentation and eventual publication. Emphases and texts vary depending on instructor.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Summer Term
ENGL 6720 Studies in Transatlantic Literatures (3 credits)
Comparative literary and cultural relations across the Atlantic Ocean; may include literature originating in Europe, Africa, the Americas and/or the Caribbean. Emphases and texts vary depending on instructor.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 6730 Studies in Transnational Literatures (3 credits)
Investigates literary works beyond the framework of the nation-state and national literary traditions. Texts commonly include postcolonial and global literatures, including literatures translated into English. Topics may include: diaspora, postcoloniality, globalization, exile, border theory, migration, capitalism, empire, war, modernity, human rights and environmental crises. Specific emphases and texts vary depending on the instructor.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term
ENGL 6800 Studies in Genre (3 credits)
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2017 Summer Term
ENGL 6810 Study in History of Literary Criticism (3 credits)
Study of the major critics and texts in literary criticism and critical theory from the classical period to 20th century New Criticism.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2012 Fall Term, 2010 Fall Term, 2000 Fall Term, 2000 Spring Term
ENGL 6820 Studies in Modern Critical Theory and Practice (3 credits)
Presents a survey of approaches commonly used in a range of modern literary studies. The scope of epistemologies that currently shape interpretations in the discipline. Methods of archival and bibliographic research, career discernment, and new research technologies.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2019 Fall Term, 2018 Spring Term
ENGL 6830 Studies in Literary Criticism (3 credits)
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2017 Summer Term, 2013 Spring Term, 1991 Spring Term, 1986 Fall Term
ENGL 6840 Studies in Rhetoric and Composition Theory (3 credits)
Philosophy and theory of rhetoric, with emphasis on primary classical sources and the relationship of contemporary to classical theory. Provides theoretical background for the teaching of writing at the college level.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2018 Fall Term, 2017 Fall Term, 2016 Fall Term, 2015 Fall Term
ENGL 6931 Topics in English (3 credits)
Topics vary by section to offer a variety of methodological, thematic or generic approaches to bodies of literature. See Schedule of Classes or dept. website for specific topic.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 6961 Career Discernment Workshop (3 credits)
Students explore professorial, administrative and nonacademic career paths in and around the humanities. Includes preparation of materials for students planning to enter the job market.
Prerequisite: ENGL 6820.
Level of Study: Graduate
ENGL 6965 Practicum in Teaching Writing (3 credits)
Prepares doctoral students to teach in the Foundations in Rhetoric program. Students discuss pedagogical theory and practice, are paired with a faculty mentor, and design their own syllabi for the spring term.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2019 Fall Term
ENGL 6995 Independent Study in English (1-3 credits)
Faculty-supervised, independent study/research of a specific area or topic in English.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Summer Term
ENGL 6998 Professional Project in English (3 credits)
A project developed in consultation with the director of graduate studies and an assigned faculty mentor.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Summer Term
ENGL 6999 Master's Thesis (1-6 credits)
S/U grade assessment.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2020 Spring Term
ENGL 8310 Advanced Studies in British Literature (3 credits)
Focuses attention on issues that inform readings across the spectrum of British literature. Provides a forum where students can share research on topics of mutual interest.; enrollment is limited to Ph.D. students.
Prerequisite: Completion of M.A.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2007 Spring Term, 2003 Spring Term, 2001 Spring Term, 1998 Fall Term
ENGL 8350 Advanced Studies in American Literature (3 credits)
Focuses attention on issues that inform readings across the spectrum of American literature. Provides a forum where students can share research on topics of mutual interest.; enrollment is limited to Ph.D. students.
Prerequisite: Completion of M.A.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2004 Spring Term, 2000 Spring Term
ENGL 8370 Advanced Studies in Genre (3 credits)
Examines theoretical issues that inform the construction and comprehension of specific literary genres. Takes interest both in traditional conceptions of that genre and in efforts to redefine those traditional conceptions.; enrollment is limited to Ph.D. students.
Prerequisite: Completion of M.A.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2002 Spring Term
ENGL 8830 Dissertation Tutorial (3 credits)
Preparation for doctoral qualifying examination, including post-graduate career discernment. S/U grade assessment.
Prerequisite: Doctoral stndg.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 8932 Advanced Studies in Selected Topics (3 credits)
Various issues covering genres, literary periods, criticism, or language are examined in a fashion that emphasizes reading from particular critical perspectives while recognizing options for interpretation.; enrollment is limited to Ph.D. students.
Prerequisite: Completion of M.A.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2019 Summer Term, 2006 Spring Term, 2005 Spring Term, 1998 Spring Term
ENGL 8953 Pre-Dissertation Seminar (3 credits)
Students prepare for ENGL 8830 and for the process of writing their dissertation proposals by designing a summer reading list and reading calendar. They also learn to write the various components of a dissertation proposal (including an annotated bibliography, an abstract, a statement of the problem, a methodology section, career discernment, and more). Students engage in ongoing dialogue with one another and the instructor during the course about their work, their projects, and the skills they are learning.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2020 Summer Term
ENGL 8995 Independent Study in English (1-3 credits)
A course whose mode of instruction offers a student the opportunity to study or do in-depth research on a topic or subject matter not usually offered in the established curriculum, with a current Marquette faculty of his/her choice and independent of the classroom setting.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2015 Spring Term
ENGL 8999 Doctoral Dissertation (1-12 credits)
S/U grade assessment.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Summer Term, 2022 Spring Term
ENGL 9970 Graduate Standing Continuation: Less than Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Designated as less than half-time status only, cannot be used in conjunction with other courses, and does not qualify students for financial aid or loan deferment.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term, 2021 Summer Term, 2021 Spring Term
ENGL 9974 Graduate Fellowship: Full-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Designated as full-time status. If a student is already registered in other courses full time, this continuation course is not needed.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 9975 Graduate Assistant Teaching: Full-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Designated as full-time status. If a student is already registered in other courses full time, this continuation course is not needed.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 9976 Graduate Assistant Research: Full-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Designated as full-time status. If a student is already registered in other courses full time, this continuation course is not needed.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term, 2021 Fall Term
ENGL 9984 Master's Comprehensive Examination Preparation: Less than Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of less than half-time status. Requires that the student is working less than 12 hours per week toward their master's comprehensive exam.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2012 Fall Term, 2012 Spring Term, 2011 Fall Term, 2011 Spring Term
ENGL 9985 Master's Comprehensive Examination Preparation: Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of half-time status. Requires that the student is working more than 12 to less than 20 hours per week toward their master's comprehensive exam. May be taken in conjunction with credit-bearing or other non-credit courses to result in the status indicated, as deemed appropriate by the department.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2012 Spring Term, 2011 Spring Term, 2010 Spring Term, 2009 Fall Term
ENGL 9986 Master's Comprehensive Examination Preparation: Full-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of full-time status. Requires that the student is working 20 hours or more per week toward their master's comprehensive exam. May be taken in conjunction with credit-bearing or other non-credit courses to result in the status indicated, as deemed appropriate by the department.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2014 Summer Term, 2014 Spring Term, 2012 Spring Term, 2011 Spring Term
ENGL 9987 Doctoral Qualifying Examination Preparation: Less than Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of less than half-time status. Requires that the student is working less than 12 hours per week toward their doctoral qualifying exam.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2012 Spring Term, 2011 Spring Term
ENGL 9988 Doctoral Qualifying Examination Preparation: Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of half-time status. Requires that the student is working more than 12 to less than 20 hours per week toward their doctoral qualifying exam. May be taken in conjunction with credit-bearing or other non-credit courses to result in the status indicated, as deemed appropriate by the department.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2018 Fall Term, 2014 Spring Term
ENGL 9989 Doctoral Qualifying Examination Preparation: Full-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of full-time status. Requires that the student is working 20 hours or more per week toward their doctoral qualifying exam. May be taken in conjunction with credit-bearing or other non-credit courses to result in the status indicated, as deemed appropriate by the department.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term, 2019 Fall Term, 2019 Spring Term
ENGL 9997 Doctoral Dissertation Continuation: Less than Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of less than half-time status. Requires that the student is working less than 12 hours per week on their doctoral dissertation. All 12 dissertation credits required for the degree should be completed before registering for non-credit Doctoral Dissertation Continuation.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2021 Spring Term, 2020 Fall Term
ENGL 9998 Doctoral Dissertation Continuation: Half-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of half-time status. Requires that the student is working more than 12 to less than 20 hours per week on their doctoral dissertation. All 12 dissertation credits required for the degree should be completed before registering for non-credit Doctoral Dissertation Continuation.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Summer Term, 2022 Spring Term
ENGL 9999 Doctoral Dissertation Continuation: Full-Time (0 credits)
Fee. SNC/UNC grade assessment. Allows a student to be considered the equivalent of full-time status. Requires that the student is working 20 hours or more per week on their doctoral dissertation. All 12 dissertation credits required for the degree should be completed before registering for non-credit Doctoral Dissertation Continuation.
Prerequisite: Cons. of dept. ch.
Level of Study: Graduate
Last four terms offered: 2023 Summer Term, 2023 Spring Term, 2022 Fall Term, 2022 Spring Term