Winter 2014

Winter 2014 Class Offerings

[nimble-portfolio]

courseoffering
ENGLISH 464 STUDIES IN AMERICAN AUTHORS: MELVILLE AND STOWE

Prof. Dinius W 6:00 – 9:15 PM

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) has been called the greatest American novel, yet in the nineteenth century, it was a critical and commercial flop. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was the best selling book in nineteenth century America; in the twentieth century, it was neglected by literary historians until the 1980s. We will spend the bulk of the quarter reading these two major novels closely, considering their and their authors’ opposite trajectories. In the remaining time, we will read two of Melville’s post-Moby-Dick short stories, Frederick Douglass’s fictional response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and an excerpt from Stowe’s follow-up novel Dred. In considering how Melville and Stowe became “major” American authors, we will take up the related issues of the development of a national literature and print culture in the nineteenth century, the relationship of politics and art in the antebellum period, such cultural keywords as genius, originality, property, and copyright, and the ongoing evolution of the American literary canon and continuing debates about “great” literature.

ENG 497 WRITING THE LITERATURE OF FACT

Prof. Ted Anton T 6:00-9:15 PM

This is an advanced workshop in writing true stories in novelistic style, covering the classics like Capote and Didion and contemporaries like Katharine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. Students master skills form research and reporting to composing, editing and submitting, in a fun and supportive atmosphere. We will have a guest author or editor speak and read student writing. Previous workshop experience advisable but not required.

ENG 484 WRITING WORKSHOP: THE SHORT STORY CYCLE

Prof. Dan Stolar T 6:00-9:00 PM

The short story cycle is a book that consists of individual short stories that both stand on their own and work together in more novelistic ways. For the apprentice writer, this class is a great opportunity to work on the form that is best suited to the classroom–the short story–and begin to put together what the market most wants–a book. We will read a number of short story cycles, and begin to work toward one ourselves.

ENG 484 WRITING WORKSHOP: THE PROSE POEM

Prof. Mark Turcotte M 6:00 – 9:15

Writing Workshop Topics, we will pursue the idea of the Prose Poem. Of course, students will create new poems for our weekly rotating workshop schedule. In addition, students will read and respond to the work of past and contemporary practitioners, as well as those who blur the lines with short-short prose. Students will also have the opportunity to bring their own prose work to the class with the idea of re-imagining and revising it as fodder for poetry. The class will require a certain advanced willingness on the part of students to complete exercises in which they will disassemble and rebuild poems from their portfolios/catalogs of finished work. None of the damage will be permanent.

484 WRITING WORKSHOP TOPICS: CREATIVE NONFICTION FORMS: LYRIC, ESSAY, MEMOIR, REPORTAGE

Prof. Borich M 6:00-9:15 p.m.

Creative Nonfiction Forms is a graduate workshop and seminar where we read and write across the diverse sub-genres co-existing under the contemporary creative nonfiction umbrella, including the lyric essay, the personal essay, literary reportage, the nonfiction short, literary memoir, graphic memoir, hybrids, and even video essay. Students will try out various nonfiction varieties and structures, participate in writing workshops, and turn in a substantive revision in the nonfiction form of their choosing.

ENG 484 WRITING WORKSHOP: AUTHORS AS EDITORS

Prof. Miles Harvey M 6:00 – 9:15

In this class—a unique collaboration between DePaul and the graduate creative-writing program at the University of Birmingham in England—students will act as both authors and editors to learn hands-on how a manuscript goes from draft to publication. Throughout the quarter, students will engage in on-line exchanges with their colleagues in England, sharing work, doing peer mentoring and executing close edits of each other’s work. This course is open to all fiction writers; essayists may apply with special permission of the instructor. The class will involve some joint sessions with University of Birmingham students on Saturday mornings.

ENG 478 Topics in Teaching: Teaching Creative Writing

Prof. Rebecca Johns Trissler Th 6:00-9:15

This course will familiarize students with many aspects of designing and implementing multi-genre creative writing workshops at the college and community-education levels. To that end, the course will address two topics:
• Subject matter (principles of effective fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction writing)
• Pedagogy (principles of good teaching)
By the end of this course, students will have gained experience in the following:
• Planning specific lessons, including major and minor writing assignments
• Organizing workshops
• Developing rubrics for evaluating and grading student work and writing student responses
• Designing units of instruction for each genre and across genres
• Constructing a syllabus with course objectives, units of instruction, reading and writing assignments, grading policies, course schedules, and classroom policies
• Writing a statement of teaching philosophy and a curriculum vitae
• Evaluating and choosing textbooks

477 TOPICS IN PUBLISHING: THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK

Prof. Borich W 6:00 – 9:15

“The Future of the Book” is a graduate seminar on what book publishing has been and will be, with a focus on current trends and developing technologies, especially as they apply to literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. We begin by asking what makes a book, in terms of both history and aesthetics, then read a small sampling of recently published literary texts, examining both tradition and innovation through a publishing lens. We join contemporary conversations about ways of reading, adjustments within the literary marketplace, new roles of the web and social media, possibilities for green publishing, turning old books into book art, and the impact of digital publishing on literature itself. Finally we ask again: What is a book? What do we want and need books to be? What might literary publishing become?

477 TOPICS IN PUBLISHING: THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK

Prof. Susan Harris M 6:00 – 9:00

This course will pursue close study of the role of literary editors in facilitating writers’ purposes, and will consider approaches to shaping and revising fiction, poetry, and essays. We’ll discuss editing in various publishing contexts, including books, magazines, anthologies, scholarly editions, translations, and others. Readings will include writing by and interviews with editors on editing, as well as drafts and revisions of work by authors including Raymond Carver, T. S. Eliot, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, and others. Class meetings will include lectures, discussions, individual presentations, in-class exercises, and workshops. Students will complete three short assignments and one ten- to fifteen-page final project, and will lead one class discussion.

ENG 477: TOPICS IN PUBLISHING: OUTREACH PRESS

Prof Jonathon Messenger, TH 6:00-9:15 p.m.

This course–part an innovative book-publishing sequence that gives students hands-on experience in editing, publishing, and promoting a real book—will focus on distribution and development. Students will gain hands-on experience in the distribution of How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, a book created by DePaul students in 2012-2013. They will also begin the planning and development of a new book.

Students are welcome to take any or all three of these courses. No prerequisite.

Lang/Lit/Teaching/Publishing requirement in the MAWP. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.

ENG 472 STUDIES IN LITERARY CRITICISM

Professor Johnson Gonzalez T 6:00 – 9:15

This course provides an introduction to literary theory and criticism, as these fields have changed and developed from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. More broadly, however, this is a course that will strive to raise fundamental questions about the objects, methods, and institutions of literary study. What is literature? What is the point of studying literature (or any other form of art)? Can or should literature be treated as different from other forms of discourse? Can literature help us to identify and free ourselves from ideology, or does it exist primarily to reproduce ideology? What is the relationship between author, text, and reader? Do texts have stable meanings that can be objectively and fully known? (If not, what are we teaching when we teach literature?) What is the relation between literary texts (or theoretical ideas) and the cultural and historical circumstances in which they are produced? What can linguistics, the philosophy of language, psychoanalysis, and Marxism contribute to our understanding of literary works?

ENG 471 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY RESEARCH

Shanahan, Thurs 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC

ENG 471 will be an introduction to advanced bibliography and literary research methods. We will cover theoretical topics in book and media history from the first decades of printing to today’s optical character recognition software.
This course will be a “hybrid,” or “blended,” graduate seminar. We will meet together face-to-face five times during the ten weeks. The other five weeks will be at locations such as Library Special Collections, the Library’s new Scholar’s Lab, and/or mediated through the Web. While a significant part of this course will be online it is not an “online course” in the traditional sense nor is it a “self-paced” tutorial. The online portion of the course will allow you to review lecture content and find further readings, conduct research alone and as part of a team, participate in discussions via the discussion board, take quizzes to check your understanding of the material, and prepare for upcoming class meetings.

ENG 453 MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Prof. R. Cameron Tuesdays from 6:00 – 9:15 pm

This course will provide a broad overview of British drama of the twentieth-century—a century in which dramatists sought to bring unconventional subject matter to the stage and experimented with new dramatic forms. As we read plays by Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and others, we will consider how these playwrights manipulated dramatic conventions in response to social, political, or cultural developments such as first- and second-wave feminism, twentieth-century wars, and class divisions. With the help of selected readings in dramatic theory and criticism, we will also explore such topics as modernism and postmodernism in theatre, the debate about dramatic realism, the concept of ‘absurdism’ as it relates to the theatre, stage semiotics, and theories of performance.

ENG 445 STUDIES IN 19TH CENTURY BRITISH FICTION: GENDER, THE GOTHIC, SOCIETY AND POWER

Professor James H. Murphy Thursday, 6 – 9:15 pm

It was in the nineteenth century that the novel in Britain was at its most energetic and innovative. This course does not attempt to trace a history of the development of the novel during that period. What it does seek to do is to examine the novel from three particular perspectives. The first is that of gender. Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) is an intervention, at the level of intelligentsia debate, in a discourse on feminism which went back to the Enlightenment and which had recently been energized by the French revolution. By contrast Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is an almost visceral exploration of a fraught masculinity. Gothic as a mode of exploration of the deeply troubling in human society is examined through three classic texts, Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818), Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The course finally tackles three high Victorian novels of society and power: Dickens’s indictment of industrial society in Hard Times (1854), Trollope’s canny appraisal of clerical power struggles in Barchester Towers (1857) and Collins’s dissection of the investigative forces inherent in society in the first important detective novel, The Moonstone (1868).

ENG 429 WIT AND SATIRE 1500-1800: FROM UTOPIA TO TAHITI

Prof. John Shanahan M 6:00 – 9:15

This course will cover a period of innovative wit and satire, focused on the image of “new worlds,” from More’s Utopia to the munity on the Bounty off the coast of Tahiti in 1789. Our major theme will be utopian and dystopian worldmaking. Visions of better lives, and violent attacks on them, will be our literary objects. We will explore the dramatic impact on literature of discoveries of new lands and new peoples around the globe. We’ll explore: what was civilization, and could one ever achieve it? Could humans ever emerge from savagery, and if so, how? What was proper selfhood abroad and at home? What are the proper relationships of humans to nature and to animals? What rules if any should govern the relations of nations in warfare and in trade? Along the way, we’ll also look at the volatility of early modern models of gender and sexuality as English (and some French) authors worked to accommodate novel discoveries around the world to inherited wisdom from antiquity and scripture.

Readings will include: More’s Utopia; Ben Jonson’s Alchemist; selections from Carvantes’ Don Quixote; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Bacon’s New Atlantis; Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Swift’sGulliver’s Travels; Voltaire’s Candide; selections from Rousseau and Diderot; selections from the journals of the voyages of James Cook; accounts of the munity on the Bounty.

In the MAE program, this course may count as a Renaissance period requirement OR an 18th century period requirement (but not both). Elective in the MAE and MAWP programs.

ENG 429 WIT AND SATIRE 1500-1800: FROM UTOPIA TO TAHITI

Prof. John Shanahan M 6:00 – 9:15

This course will cover a period of innovative wit and satire, focused on the image of “new worlds,” from More’s Utopia to the munity on the Bounty off the coast of Tahiti in 1789. Our major theme will be utopian and dystopian worldmaking. Visions of better lives, and violent attacks on them, will be our literary objects. We will explore the dramatic impact on literature of discoveries of new lands and new peoples around the globe. We’ll explore: what was civilization, and could one ever achieve it? Could humans ever emerge from savagery, and if so, how? What was proper selfhood abroad and at home? What are the proper relationships of humans to nature and to animals? What rules if any should govern the relations of nations in warfare and in trade? Along the way, we’ll also look at the volatility of early modern models of gender and sexuality as English (and some French) authors worked to accommodate novel discoveries around the world to inherited wisdom from antiquity and scripture.

Readings will include: More’s Utopia; Ben Jonson’s Alchemist; selections from Carvantes’ Don Quixote; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Bacon’s New Atlantis; Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Swift’sGulliver’s Travels; Voltaire’s Candide; selections from Rousseau and Diderot; selections from the journals of the voyages of James Cook; accounts of the munity on the Bounty.

In the MAE program, this course may count as a Renaissance period requirement OR an 18th century period requirement (but not both). Elective in the MAE and MAWP programs.

ENG 439 WIT AND SATIRE 1500-1800: FROM UTOPIA TO TAHITI

Prof. John Shanahan M 6:00 – 9:15

This course will cover a period of innovative wit and satire, focused on the image of “new worlds,” from More’s Utopia to the munity on the Bounty off the coast of Tahiti in 1789. Our major theme will be utopian and dystopian worldmaking. Visions of better lives, and violent attacks on them, will be our literary objects. We will explore the dramatic impact on literature of discoveries of new lands and new peoples around the globe. We’ll explore: what was civilization, and could one ever achieve it? Could humans ever emerge from savagery, and if so, how? What was proper selfhood abroad and at home? What are the proper relationships of humans to nature and to animals? What rules if any should govern the relations of nations in warfare and in trade? Along the way, we’ll also look at the volatility of early modern models of gender and sexuality as English (and some French) authors worked to accommodate novel discoveries around the world to inherited wisdom from antiquity and scripture.

Readings will include: More’s Utopia; Ben Jonson’s Alchemist; selections from Carvantes’ Don Quixote; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Bacon’s New Atlantis; Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Swift’sGulliver’s Travels; Voltaire’s Candide; selections from Rousseau and Diderot; selections from the journals of the voyages of James Cook; accounts of the munity on the Bounty.

In the MAE program, this course may count as a Renaissance period requirement OR an 18th century period requirement (but not both). Elective in the MAE and MAWP programs.

ENG 407 LANGUAGE & STYLE FOR WRITERS

Meyer, Tues 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 401 History of the English Language

Prof. Craig Sirles, Mon 6:00-9:15 p.m. LPC

This course is a systematic study of the nature, history, and usage of the English language, tracing the language from its Proto-Indo-European origins to its present status in England, North America, and the world.
Language core requirement in the MAE. Lang/Lit/Teaching/Publishing requirement in the MAWP. Elective in the MAE and MAWP.

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