Kreuter, Nathan
W 9:10 AM
Park Hall 0067
Theories and Experiments in Prose Style
Style, one of the original five canons of classical rhetoric, was largely (not completely) neglected in modern theorizations of rhetoric and persuasion until approximately 2002. At that time, rhetoricians began to re-engage with style as an area of theoretical inquiry more vigorously than they had for the previous 70 years.
In this graduate course we will study style in two ways, one conventional, and the other unconventional. The course meets once a week for three hours.
In the first half of each class session we will discuss readings from theorists seeking to understand the rhetorical functioning of prose style. After a brief overview of classical understandings of style (which were sophisticated) we will move into the work of recent theorists. Our goal is to try to define style (a much harder task than it may initially seem) and to understand how style influences the reactions of readers.
In the second half of each class session we will relish in our unconventional approach to prose style. It will be a workshop-style format wherein we focus on prose style exclusively at the sentence level. Students will submit brief written assignments for this half of class every week. The exercise and format are based on the undergraduate prose style class that I teach. The description for that class is pasted below to give you an idea of what to expect for these workshop/experiment sessions.
Any graduate student working in prose will benefit from this class, regardless of whether they are focused on critical/academic writing, fiction, or nonfiction. Students who aren't sure what to expect or whether this class is a good fit for them are welcome to email any time for more information or to pose questions, kreuter@uga.edu. No prior coursework in rhetoric is necessary to benefit from this course.
Texts will include but not be limited to:
The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
Building Great Sentences, by Brooks Landon
Out of Style, by Paul Butler
Articles by Catherine Prendergast, Susan Peck MacDonald, Robert Connors, David Foster Wallace, and others
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Undergraduate Prose Style Course Description:
Just sentences. Whatever we can learn about how they work, what they do, how we can think and talk about them in ways that will help both our own writing and our understanding of prose style. From that perspective, we will also consider the role of individual sentences and diverse prose styles in persuasion. Students should perhaps think of this course more as an unregulated laboratory of language than as a traditional workshop. In our lab students will be both encouraged and expected to conduct radical experiments with language, experiments that will no doubt run the gamut, from facilitating brilliant new linguistic discoveries, to terrifying us all in the dramatic rampages of sentences that have horribly mutated and run amuck. But that is the point. The point of our sentences and experiments with prose style.
Students will produce writing, their experiments, so to speak, for every single class, and to share their writing with the class in a workshop format. The course is reading light and writing heavy. In addition to the daily writing requirements, students will keep a digital portfolio of their work, as well as compiling an additional portfolio of sentences both generated by students, and discovered in outside reading, with meta-commentaries, to be turned in to the instructor at the end of the semester. The class will benefit students in all areas of writing, whether that writing is academic, creative, or related to the specific demands of a particular profession.