Here is the lineup!
ENG 620: Bestsellers and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace
Dr. Kersti Powell
Mondays, 6:30-9:15 pm Online
CRN: 10696
Area I
Bestsellers and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace will give you an opportunity to explore the most recent trends in contemporary British and Irish fiction. By focusing on marketing and the literary canon, this course will give you an opportunity to reconsider contemporary literature from a new and exciting perspective. Each novel on our reading list will facilitate a case study of a different marketing issue. Thus, we will read John Banville’s Booker-Prize-winning The Sea in order to study literary prizes and their effect on marketing and to highlight the crucial part that literary reviews can play in the “making of an author.” Arundhati Roy’s first novel will help us to investigate literary celebrity culture, race and gender; Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) to explore the rise of small publishing houses; and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) to illustrate how daily talk shows can promote a difficult text to the status of a bestseller. We will end the course with the most recent sensation from Ireland, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which topped the bestseller list during the lockdown in spring 2020.
ENG 560: Rhetoric Then and Now
Dr. Melissa Goldthwaite
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm Online
CRN: 10695
Core Class
How do writers use rhetoric? How do we balance attention to genre, purpose,
audience, context, and our own sense of style? In Rhetoric Then and Now, we will
consider these and other questions, exploring rhetoric’s classical origins and studying
the work of 20th and 21st century rhetorical theorists and writers in order to understand how rhetorical concerns shape our own writing practices, approaches to education, and ways of communicating. This course will be discussion-based and include a workshop component. In addition to short weekly assignments, students will conduct a semester-long project exploring the relevance of rhetorical theory to their own writing or area of interest.
ENG 670: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Tenaya Darlington
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm Online
CRN: 10697
Area III
This class is designed to make you a better fiction writer – to teach you about the craft, to give you a space in which to explore your voice, and to push you beyond the familiar. There is also a workshop component, which will give you the chance to receive feedback from the group about your work. You’ll write hard, read widely, and learn stylistic devices that can be used in many areas of your writing. This is a portfolio-based class; you’ll write two major short stories and revise them for final submission at the end of the term.