Summer Session I
June 2, -July 3, 2009
E. 876: Writing Nonfiction (31532)
(Online, w/3 face to face classes)
Dr. Derek Owens
In this writing workshop students will compose in a variety of
nonfiction forms that might include memoir, literary journalism,
travel writing, life writing, the personal essay, manifesto, photo
essay, or various cross-genre and hybrid approaches to nonfiction
writing. The primary focus of the course will be responding to each
other’s writing, with a secondary focus on reading excerpts from 2
outside texts: John D’Agata’s edited collection The Next
American Essay and Telling True Stories, ed. Mark
Kramer and Wendy Call. Students will write 2 pieces of nonfiction
prose each week and submit a final portfolio of revised material.
This will be an online course. However, we will meet as one large
group on the first and last days of the course from 11:00 AM – 1:00
PM (Tue June 2 and Wed July 3) in the Institute for Writing Studies
conference room (1st floor, St. Augustine Hall Library), as well as
one meeting midway through the course, time TBA. I will also meet
with students for individual conferences throughout the
course.
Summer Session II
July 7 – August 10, 2009
E. 370: Topics in Shakespeare (31533)
(Online)
"Borges, Shakespeare, and the Dream of Global Literature"
Dr. Steve Mentz
What does a blind Argentine librarian who lived for most of the
twentieth-century with his mother have to do with the preeminent
dramatist of Elizabethan London? Surprisingly, these two
powerful and strange writers share quite a lot. They each
present, in their different idioms and times, an ambivalent vision
of the power and reach of literary culture. This online
graduate seminar will explore ideas of literary culture across
time, space, and language as we debate and discuss a series of
Shakespeare’s plays in connection with Borges’s work as fiction
writer, critic, and poet. Our investigations and readings
will be divided into the following categories:
Mind: Hamlet; “Funes the Memorious”
“Shakespeare’s Memory” “Three Versions of Judas” “Borges and
I”
Imagination: The Tempest; “The Immortal”
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote” “The Garden of the Forking
Paths” “The Aleph”
Violence: Henry V; “Emma Zunz”
“Deutsches Requiem” “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”
The World: Antony and Cleopatra;
“Ragnorok” “Death and the Compass” “Dreamtigers” “The Other
Tiger”
Students who wish to begin reading in advance can use any good
modern edition of these four plays, plus Andrew Hurley’s
translations of Borges: Collected Fictions, Selected Non-Fictions,
and (optionally) Selected Poems.