Splash Chicago
5801 S. Ellis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Email: splashchicago@gmail.com
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Splash Biography



GRANT DOWLING, Humanities Major, I love to talk about ideas.




Major: Inter. Stud. Humanities

College/Employer: UChicago

Year of Graduation: 2013

Picture of Grant Dowling

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I was born in Ohio and have lived in Illinois and New York for long periods of time. I studied abroad in India, and have spent 6+ weeks in Spain, France, and Paraguay. I like art, movies, literature, and philosophy. From the last decade or two, my favorites are books by David Foster Wallace (infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), movies involving Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York, Being John Malkovich) and music by Ty Segall.

My fields of emphasis in college are Platonic Ethics, Italian Humanism, and Modern Art. I'm writing my B.A. on Joyce's "technic" of dialectic in Episode 9 of Ulysses.

If you have any questions you can reach me at gddowling@gmail.com :)



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

A1089: James Joyce's Theory of Drama in Cascade! Fall 2012 (Oct. 23, 2012)
James Joyce's intensely original fiction defined and redefined what modern writing is like. Over the course of his life his evolving style from realism to philosophical stream-of-consciousness to polyglot dream-language is accompanied by deep analysis of religion, Ireland, love, and all kinds of bodily fluids. By focusing on Joyce's conception of theater as the theme of this class, we'll isolate a strand of his thought and trace it through his life to get a sense of his changing attitudes toward art and living. This class will be modeled on the creative thinking of a college humanities class, but I'll try to use as much common sense language as possible. Lots of Joyce is confusing to everybody: even if some ideas get you lost we'll still get a good taste of how Joyce writes and what a specialized humanities class in college is like.


L1007: Young Joyce in Splash! Fall 2012 (Oct. 06, 2012)
Before James Joyce became embraced by American modernists like Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway for his searingly honest autobiography (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), or internationally notorious for inventively crude language (in Ulysses), or dismissed as a crazy writer of gibberish (Finnegans Wake), he was our age. In this class we'll look at, and discuss, a great writer's earliest ideas as a high school and college-aged student.


L601: Contemporary Classics: New Sincerity in Splash! Fall 2010 (Oct. 02, 2010)
We will explore the literary phenomenon of New Sincerity in the United States. First, we will consider its historical context as an heir to Post-Modernism. We will examine in-depth the writing styles of Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen with possible supplementary materials by the likes of Foer, Chabon, and Powers. From this analysis we will see if indeed New Sincerity can be declared a Post-Post Modernism of sorts, merely its own genre, or neither, by looking for consistently identifiable stylistic and narrative traits.