Hello, all! We’d like to interrupt your end-of-quarter whirlwind to turn your attention to some truly wonderful and exciting courses being offered by the English Department this Spring Quarter. All three of these courses are new to the catalog as of last week, and we hope you’ll consider them for a spot in your spring schedule. Please see the full catalog here and see below for details on each of the three courses.

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ENG 227-301, STUDIES IN DRAMA: TWISTED/BROKEN FAMILIES. TTH 9:40-11:10 with REBECCA CAMERON

This courses focuses on representations of families in modern drama. Modern playwrights from the late 19th and 20th centuries often sought to push the boundaries of acceptable subject matter presented on stage. Instead of presenting an ideal toward which the audience might aspire, playwrights began to explore the darker side of human relationships and asked their audiences to confront social problems or to recognize the absurdities of human existence. Playwrights shocked audiences, critics, and censors through their treatments of divorce, incest, controlling parents, and disobedient or disappointing children. These family problems are usually connected to larger social forces or metaphysical conditions. In addition to examining the subject matter of these plays, we will consider how modern playwrights experiment with form or technique in presenting the darker side of family life, first by attempting to bring audiences into private family spaces through the development of dramatic realism, and then by highlighting the strangeness of everyday family life through the influence of absurdism and other non-realist techniques. The reading list for the course includes several major modern plays from Europe, Britain, and America: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession; Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms; Lilian Hellman’s Little Foxes; Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Samuel Beckett’s Endgame; Edward Albee, American Dream; August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

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ENG 377-902, TOPICS IN EDITING AND PUBLISHING: BOOK PUBLISHING. MONDAYS 6-9:15PM with COLLEEN O’CONNOR.

This book production course examines our relationship with the book as a physical object: How do the material details of a book relate to the words on the page? How do the production choices a publisher makes impact the reader’s experience with the text? What are the steps, priorities, and challenges of book production? Using DePaul’s Big Shoulder project as a guide, students in this course will examine the book production process from the points of view of publisher, author, and editor. They will learn the vocabulary, methodologies, and practice of book production, examine different book production choices such as digital, DIY, and mass market, and become knowledgeable in contemporary book production culture and practice.

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ENG 377-903 TOPICS IN PUBLISHING: MAGAZINE EDITING. THURSDAYS 6-9:15pm with GIOIA DILIBERTO.

In this course, students interested in a publishing career will explore the elements of good magazine writing and learn how to edit articles for print and on-line magazines. We will begin by considering a basic and all-important concept: What makes a good story? Students will sharpen their editing skills by first learning how to edit their own work. We will also consider story presentation, fact-checking, ethics, and line-editing. Readings from a variety of magazines will reinforce the ideas and themes discussed in class. We will read classics from the canon of great magazine writing and stories by new, young writers. The course will culminate in each student producing one story to be edited by the class in workshop.