2017 - Spring

A Person on the Page

Course Number: JOUR-GA 1231.001

Day & Time: Thursday, 6:00pm-9:40pm

Location: Rm 652

Instructor: Bruce Weber

The course will examine different ways that writers make the people they write about compelling to read about. To that end, we’ll read and write in a variety of forms in fiction and non-fiction – for example the profile, the obituary, the monologue, the personal essay, the short story – in which the subject is a person and the writer’s object is to make the reader care about that person.

Questions we’ll ask (and from time to time try to answer) include:

What do we mean by the writer’s “voice”?
How can speech reveal a person’s character?
What sorts of observed details reveal a person’s character?
How can the setting of a piece of writing reveal a person’s character?
When a person is your subject, is revealing character always the desired result?
What do we mean by character anyway?