David Michael Kaplan

Title/s:  Professor Emeritus

Office #:  Crown Center 403

Phone: 773.508.2246

Email: Professor Emeritus

About

Teaching Philosophy:
Consider what happens when we read good fiction (certain postmodernist works aside): we are transported, almost magically, into an imaginative "reality" which can seem quite as real as the "real" world we've temporarily left behind--even if that world, like Alice's Wonderland or Gulliver's Lilliput, is not strictly realistic.  And the characters who inhabit that world can seem quite as real as the real people of our lives.  Maybe even more so, since, if the writer chooses, we can inhabit their very consciousnesses, and experience their emotions as ours.  We feel, with real emotion, their pain, fear, disappointment, joy.  Moreover, we react to them with real emotion, as if they were real people--with love, or anger, or pity, or whatever.  They affect us.  Sometimes, in the fictional works that speak to us most powerfully, we are even changed by them. 

And yet--they and their conflicts and their world, are only words on a page.  Not real at all.  We have "forgotten" this, so much have we been enchanted (and I mean this in the sense of "spellbound" ) by the writer's words.  It is like a magician casting a spell over us, so that for the duration of that spell, and maybe even after, we experience as real what is not. 

So this is what I like to think we're doing in my fiction writing workshops, and what I tell my students: we are beginning the long, arduous process of learning how to become magicians.

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