EDEN - March 2019 Issue - NMU English

Instructor: Dr. Sandra Burr
MW 3-4:40pm

Prerequisite: EN 111 with a grade of "C" or better, HON 101, or EN 109 with a grade of "B" or better.

True Crime is one of today’s hottest nonfiction literary and film genres. From films, TV, and podcasts to biographies, exposés, and graphic novels, Americans can’t get enough of reading, watching, listening to, and talking about murder, mayhem, and all things twisted. Why are we so fascinated with crime? How does our fascination with it shift as we experience it in different media forms? How do forensic science and psychology help us make sense of humanity’s dark sides? How do we understand major crime and pay attention to the feelings of victims and their families, friends, and communities?

Join us in Fall 2019 to explore these questions and more! Prospective material includes documentaries such as Mommy Dead and Dearest (2017), Derf Backderf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer (2012), Dave Cullen’s Columbine (2009), Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (2011), and True Crime podcasts. Guest experts on criminal justice, psychology, forensics, and other relevant topics will be invited to share their knowledge and perspectives with the class. Hope to see you there!

Instructor: Dr. Amy Hamilton
TR 11am-12:40pm
Fulfills: Social Responsibility in a Diverse World (GenEd Component) and World Cultures (Graduation Requirement)

This course examines nonfiction, short stories, and drama written by contemporary Indigenous American authors. We will approach these texts through careful close reading as well as through historical, social, and cultural contexts. What elements can we trace through the different genres? In what ways do these genres allow authors to explore particular themes and meanings in different ways? How do the particular historical and cultural contexts surrounding a text impact how we understand the text? This course will challenge you to read carefully, think critically, and write persuasively about some truly wonderful texts.

Instructor: Dr. Russ Prather
TR 4-5:40pm

The “long” eighteenth century in Britain and France was an age of reason and optimism, scientific advancement, imperialist ambition, and satiric wit. It also saw radical, sometimes violent, upheavals in politics and culture, including the industrial revolution, the American and French Revolutions and, toward the end of the century, a “Romantic” revolution.

Authors of the age include:

• Aphra Behn (Oroonoke, or The Royal Slave)
• Isaac Newton (Opticks)
• Daniel Defor (Robinson Crusoe)
• Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels)
• Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock)
• Eliza Haywood (Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions)
• British Romantic poets including William Blake, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Instructor: Dr. David Boe
MW 4-5:40pm

This course provides a comprehensive overview of modern Standard English grammar and
usage. We will begin with a brief survey of the historical development of the English language, with reference made to the evolution of prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the study of linguistic structure. We will then work our way through English grammar in a hierarchical manner, beginning with lexical categories, followed by phrase structure and clause structure, with related discussion of sentence types, nominal/adjectival/adverbial modification, and finally, punctuation. This is a required “core” course for our TESOL Certification Program, and can also be used as an M.A. Pedagogy Course. Qualified undergraduates (junior/senior status) are welcome to enroll, and no background in linguistics is necessary.

Instructor: Dr. David Wood
MW 11am-12:40pm

Welcome to the witty, passionate, and dangerous world of William Shakespeare. This course is designed to give you a thorough overview of his dramatic output, and will stress the tension between the ways in which his plays can be read historically, in their time and place, and “for all time,” as fellow playwright Ben Jonson famously noted. We will pay close attention to the various concepts of human identity that Shakespeare inherited, as a man living in that most politically, theologically, and economically volatile of periods, the Renaissance, and the ways in which his plays draw on these concepts in order to transform representations of human identity anew. In addition, we will discuss the ways that his characters meet their shifting circumstances with close attention to how power— frequently manifested as issues involving race, class, gender, and ability— circumscribes both their behaviors and their emotions. Shakespeare’s exploration of the uneasy category of the feminine, for example, led him to create a broad range of remarkable characters: from the arch viragoes, Katherine (the Taming of the Shrew), Tamora, (Queen of the Goths) (Titus Andronicus), and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth) to the fanciful unruliness and immense wit of Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), and Viola (Twelfth Night); from the hyper-sexual diva that is Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra) to the surprisingly saucy Miranda (The Tempest): this class has it all. Participants in this course should be prepared, therefore, for some challenging, but altogether fascinating, reading. The course relies on your completion of a considerable amount of reading, numerous writing assignments (both in- and out-of-class), the attentive viewing and spirited discussion of film segments, a small-group presentation, two short papers, and the completion of a long paper. What you can expect to gain in this course will be a familiarity with the work of the finest writer in the English language (or at least the one who casts the longest shadow worldwide) in a variety of his chosen dramatic genres. Having signed up for this course, please note that you will be expected to engage the texts we encounter in a spirit of honest inquiry and to show up for class both prepared and on time.

Instructor: Dr. Russ Prather
TR 12-1:40pm

This course investigates the relationship between literature and visual art—the word and the image—from cultural, historical, theoretical and practical perspectives. The first half of the course considers how images and words function (or might not function) as vehicles of representation, followed by a selective historical account of how literature and painting have been regarded in the west—from Plato to post-modernism. The second half explores contemporary intersections of visual art and literature, including vernacular or “outsider” art, artists’ books, ekphrastic texts, concrete poetry, graphic novels, contemporary art and multimedia texts, and more! The course combines critical analysis and creative practice. Accordingly, students select two of three major assignments: a research-based presentation, an argument-driven paper, or a creative work that somehow combines image and text.

Questions? Contact Russ Prather at rprather@nmu.edu.

Instructor: Dr. Robert Whalen MW 3-4:40pm

Digital culture has led to a renewed interest in the forms and even the very nature of textuality. Are digital texts to be conceived primarily as approximations of physical books, or does the advent of the digital mark a decisive break with the textual past? If the latter, how are we to imagine and maintain connection with a cultural heritage whose content was shaped by a mode of production that seems to be passing away?

This course is an introduction to a foundational discipline of the digital humanities that is also a practical response to these important questions. Students will learn the fundamentals of text encoding and principles of textual scholarship by digitizing a variety of texts in accordance with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the gold standard for the creation and preservation of platform-independent digital texts.

Though including some lecture, classes will consist mostly of hands-on workshops in which students learn how to build XML files according to TEI semantics; discuss possible approaches to the encoding of texts whose most salient features are not immediately obvious or which are otherwise problematic; and reflect on the ways in which the TEI in its current form might insufficiently account for some instances of textuality. Students will develop their own projects in consultation with the professor. There will also be opportunity to work with him on his own longterm project, a scholarly edition of seventeenth-century writer George Herbert.