ENGL 1001: Foundations in Rhetoric (Fall 2018 – Ongoing)

ENGL 1001: Foundations in Rhetoric (FIR) fills the Marquette University Core of Common Studies requirement and functions as a sort of fundamental methods course.  It is designed to challenge students to develop critical reading & rhetorical analysis skills, recognize ongoing conversations as they take place across scholarly & public landscapes, and tackle the rhetorical & stylistic conventions of those conversations.  FIR courses emphasize research methods, engagement with multiple genres, and methodical, sustained revision.

First launched in Fall 2018, FIR is a one-semester course that replaces the previous Rhet/Comp I and Rhet/Comp 2 cycle of the former First-Year English Program.  One of its most distinctive features is the versatility and flexibility woven into the basic architecture of the course.  Instructors are free to build their course around broad underlying questions & driving themes of their choice, and to populate their course with readings and assignments within that scope of inquiry.  Although all FIR courses hew to the same basic framework of units and assignments, individual sections have their own separate themes, emphases, and flavors.  Mine are below.

Choose Your Own Adventure (Winter 2019)
The standard FIR course model concentrates its focused research sequence into roughly 6-8 weeks beginning halfway through the semester.  This course design seeks to spread the research process throughout the semester, allowing for a more nuanced orientation to some of the finer details of academic research and more time to allow student projects to develop and narrow in scope.  Students are not expected to become experts in their field but rather to develop expertise on a single thread of the scholarly conversation.  Rhetorical expertise is developed in concert with a student’s own research, where it is far more likely to assume greater relevance and immediacy.

Foundations in Rhetoric: Nation, Patriot, Border (Fall 2018)
What is nation?  How is it constructed, and who gets – and doesn’t get – a say; who does or doesn’t get to participate?  Even if there is a dominant idea of what “nation” is, how can we imagine other forms or  versions or possibilities?  What does it mean to be patriotic, to perform patriotism, to express and identify with being a patriot?  Who governs what it means to be patriotic?  How do conceptions of nation inform & guide one’s conception of patriot?  These questions lead us invariably to questions of demarcation.  What is border?  Why is it such an extremely charged topic?  What might a border contain, preserve, identify, curate, or identify beyond the simple geographical “line” separating nations?  Why do we spend so much attention, treasure, and emotional energy on something that doesn’t actually exist in the physical sphere?  What are borders designed to keep in – and keep out?  Are there ways to imagine border that are radically different from the concept(s) we received growing up in this particular time and place and space?

Foundations in Rhetoric: Food, for Thought
In development.