Summer Sessions Class Schedules & Descriptions
Summer Session I (June 17-July 18)
ENG 407 – Language & Style for Writers
Sirles, M/W 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC
A comprehensive examination of structural and stylistic devices that accomplished writers use in creative and literary nonfiction contexts. Topics include sentence emphasis and rhythm, coherence, point of view, authorial stance, and rhetorical aspects of sentence structure, repetition, and punctuation.
Language and style core requirement in the MAE and MAWP. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.
ENG 459 – Topics in Modern British Literature: Modern British Literature
Fairhall, M/W 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC
Modern British Literature, is a brief survey of canonical early 20th-century British writers of fiction, poetry, and drama. By “British” I mean residents of the British Isles including Ireland, even though Ireland has a separate (though tragically interconnected) history from England’s and has been independent since 1922. By “modern” I mean artists who were in their prime between 1900 and the end of the 20th century. By “canonical” I mean authors with established reputations as outstanding writers. The canon is always changing, if slowly, and these are far from being the only significant authors of their day. The main reason I’ve chosen them—apart from liking their work—is that English majors should be familiar with these canonical figures so as to understand the movement called “Modernism” in a British context.
20th/21st Century Requirement in the MAE. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.
ENG 484 — Writing Workshop Topics: Narrative Shorts
Morano, T/TH 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC
Writing shorter means compressing, distilling, and tightening so that every word counts, and this workshop will offer lots of practice. We’ll read and write various forms of short-short narratives, including prose poetry, micro stories and brief essays. We’ll focus intensively on style and structure, as well as on what it means to tell the truth on the page. Questions we’ll consider include: What role do imagination and memory play in different modes of creative writing? What ethical concerns come up when we write nonfiction vs. fiction vs. poetry? How can our stylistic experience in one genre transfer to the other? This course offers a kind of writing boot camp, perfect for those of us who need a little help working every single day.
Writing Workshop requirement in the MAWP. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.
ENG 484 — Writing Workshop Topics: The Art of Revision
Stolar, T/TH 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC
This course is ideal for students who have taken at least two workshops in prose (fiction and nonfiction) and amassed material they would like to work on further. Students will come into the class with previously workshopped short stories and/or essays and will practice developing the material more fully, on both the global level (rethinking form and content) and the local level (crafting graceful sentences and paragraphs). We will work toward submission of materials to literary journals and small magazines.
Writing Workshop requirement in the MAWP. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.
Summer Session II (July 22- August 22)
ENG 475 — Topics in Literature: Literature and New Media
Shanahan, T/TH 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC
In this course we will examine N. Katherine Hayles’ influential claim that over the last decade or so all literature, print and not, bears the “mark of the digital.” As a class we will try to map out the present and possible futures of the literary in the age of new media. We will read several examples of contemporary experimental fiction (both print and electronic in form) as well as critical analyses of interactivity, originality, and various ‘gamespace’ approaches to hypertext and print fiction.
20th/21st Century Requirement in the MAE. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.
ENG 484 — Writing Workshop Topics: Narrative Clarity
Jones, M/W 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC
Narrative Clarity is a course in reading and writing poetry and short prose scenes and vignettes. Vignettes and scenes are economical: brief narratives and sketches characterized by great precision and accuracy of composition. Our primary genre will be poetry and prose poems. We will study the craft of writing by closely examining selected poems and model prose paragraphs, and through intensive, daily in-class writing and the critical analysis of student writing.
Writing Workshop requirement in the MAWP. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.