Summer Quarter 2008: Course Descriptions

ENG 409 - Topics: Language and Style
Sirles, MW 5:45-9:00 Session 1

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.

Fulfills a requirement in the Literary Writing concentration in the MAW and may be used as an elective in both the MAE and MAW programs.

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ENG 465 -Naturalism in American Literature
Ingrasci, TTH 5:45-9:00 Session 1

The course examines fiction which emanated from deterministic worldviews, authors probing their protagonists’ free-will struggles with heredity and environment, especially the repressive forces of poverty, social caste, and capitalism’s “survival of the fittest” economic jungle. Enrollees should love reading fiction: four moderate-length novels, two short ones, and about 20 short stories by Hemingway and McCullers; total 1750 pp. = 250 pp. avg. per text. The works are listed below, by the date we’ll have read/cover them. One paper, and one essay final will be required. Prompts to prep for the final’s essays (contrasting pairs of works studied in the course) will be given to you 7 to 10 days before the exam.

NOTE: In past summers, several (eager, close-to-graduating) students have been shut out of the course, notably by people who enrolled, then DROPPED as the course BEGAN. Please be conscientious (and TIMELY) in deciding whether your time allows you to take a novels-laden course in five weeks. If you enroll, and then find your other commitments won’t allow you to do the course, PLEASE DROP by early June (or before), so that those who really need the course can enroll in time. Please: No inquiries about “missing two or three classes” = a disaster, and not acceptable for enrollees. Five-week sessions are intense and require all-out effort.

Works by dates due for plot quizzes (+ coverage) in class.
(All will be available in DePaul’s bookstore.)

6/19: Frank Norris, McTeague (1899) 386 pp. (Penguin/Signet 978-0451052891-9 - $8)

6/24: Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1926) in The Stories of Ernest Hemingway 200 pp. (Scribners 0-684-80334-8). (Plus “Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “In Another Country,” “Gambler, Nun and Radio,” “Che Te Dice La Patria?,” “The Undefeated.”)

6/26: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg Ohio (1919) 288 pp. (Penguin/Signet 978-0-451-52995-5 - $6).

7/1: Pete Dexter, Paris Trout (1988) 320 pp. (Penguin 978-014-012206-0 - $14).

7/3: Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories (1936) 100 pp. (Including stories: “The Sojourner,” “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud.”)

7/8: Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men (2005) 300 pp. (Random/Vintage 978-0=375-7066707 – $14).

7/10: Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) 144 pp. (Penguin 978-014-243761-2 - $14).

7/17: Final Exam: Essays contrasting novels in our course: prompts to prepare you for exam provided to you 7 to 10 days before the exam.

This course fulfills the Modern British or American core requirement in the MAE and may be used as an elective in both programs.

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ENG 449 - Transatlantic Romanticism: Jefferson to Byron
Gross, MW 5:45-9:00 Session 2

Thomas Jefferson may be regarded as America's first Romantic President as well as one of the first to collect a uniquely American literature in his four scrapbooks recently discovered at the University of Virginia library. This collection provides a window into the field known as transatlantic romanticism, the verse read by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. This class will explore poetry collected by Thomas Jefferson while President of the United States, including verse by Thomas Moore, Anna Barbauld, Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, and a number of lesser known Irish, Scottish, and English poets (Anne Bannerman, Joseph Cottle). We will consider why Jefferson did not collect major verse by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake, and showed little interest in the work of Keats, Byron, and Shelley. We will read major poems by the six major Romantic poets (mainly Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron) against the verse collected by Jefferson focusing on the major genres of lyric, ode, elegy, satire, and ballad. We will also read one gothic novel and several short stories.

This course fulfills the Nineteenth Century British or American core requirement in the MAE and may be used as an elective in both programs.

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ENG 469 - Topics in American Literature: Popular Romance Fiction
Selinger, TTH 5:45-9:00 Session 2

Serious academic attention to popular romance fiction begins in the 1980s, with the publication of Janice Radway's "Reading the Romance" and "Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women," by Tania Modleski. The conventions, genres, and readership of romance fiction have all evolved dramatically since this time, however, and critics have not always kept pace with them. In this course, we will explore the evolution of both romance fiction and romance criticism in the United States. Using tools from cultural studies, feminist psychoanalysis, the philosophy of love, and aesthetic analysis, we will learn to read popular romance from a variety of contemporary authors and subgenres, including some range of Regency, historical, contemporary, multicultural, paranormal, and erotic romance.

This course fulfills the Modern British or American core requirement in the MAE and may be used as an elective in both programs.

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ENG 409 - Topics: AP Institute
Bowden/ Phelan, Session 2

A new course is being offered during session two of the summer schedule. The AP Summer Institute in English Language and Composition will be held at DePaul University from August 11 to 15. We’ll meet daily from 9:00 a.m.– 4:00 p.m. for intensive work on using writing and reading as tools for learning in accelerated classes.

This year, the institute will be led by Bernie Phelan and Darsie Bowden.

Bernie Phelan has worked extensively with the AP program, having been both a reader and a table leader for the AP English Language and Composition exam for the past 20 years. For the past ten years, he has taught AP summer institutes at DePaul and other institutions. He consults with school districts about grammar, reading, and writing. For four years, 2000-2004, he served as a trustee of The College Board. He has taught high school students since 1968, currently teaching three AP classes at Homewood Flossmoor High School in the Chicago area, as well as a course for senior English majors at DePaul who are interested in becoming teachers.

Darsie Bowden is a professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul University. She directs the First-Year Writing Program at DePaul. She teaches writing to first-year college students and runs seminars on teaching writing for teachers at both secondary and post-secondary levels. She participates regularly at national conferences on composition and has published widely on writing issues.

The following is a tentative schedule of what we have planned for the institute.

Day #1: • Rhetorical Analysis, the heart of accelerated English instruction
• Teaching rhetoric, argument and style

Day #2: • Teaching reading in an accelerated course
• Assessing reading and writing via essay examinations
• Teaching and assessing critical reading

Day #3: • Developing and sequencing reading and writing assignments
• Designing writing assignments; designing prompts
• “Real World” high school writing

Day #4: • Teaching language and grammar in accelerated courses
• Understanding the assessment-instruction connections

Day #5: • Poster Session
• Conferences and small-group special interest meetings, as arranged

Questions: Please contact Darsie Bowden, dbowden@depaul.edu or 773-325-4819.


This course fulfills a requirement in the Writing Theory and Pedagogy concentration in the MAW and may be used as an elective in both programs.

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