Graduate Courses, Spring 2005

English 509: Sociolinguistics and the Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Thursdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

This course examines the social foundation of language and the linguistic foundation of social life. More specifically, the course explores how language and society intersect to construct and, in many ways, control both individual and group identity. The relationship between language and society has relevance to the teaching of writing in that both teachers and students possess socially constructed knowledge of language that undergirds their understanding of writing competence. The course explores how sociolinguistic constructions such as class, race, gender, academic discourse, and education might impact upon writing performance. The course analyzes sociolinguistic theory and practice, including the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Shirley Brice Heath, Lisa Delpit, David Bartholomae, Claude Steele, and Sandra Lipsitz Bem.

English 520: Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Wednesdays
4:10 pm to 6:00 pm

This course will focus on writing the personal essay. The first few weeks will be devoted to reading personal essays by established authors and analyzing their form, their style, the rhetorical strategies they employ, and their use of language. Then we will move on to a workshop format in which students' essays are read and discussed in detail. Each student will be expected to produce two developed 10-15 page personal essays (or one longer piece) by the end of the term. Readings will include works by Phillip Lopate, George Orwell, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Williams, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, Gayle Pemberton, Richard Rodriguez, and others.

English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor John High
Tuesdays
6:10 pm to 8:30 pm

During the semester we will explore improvisational techniques of writing in order to scrape beneath the veneer of fictional form and to more fully engage the texts that matter in our lives & stories. What is the illusion of form, and how do characters via our self-imaginings masquerade behind the screens of fiction? How do techniques of rupture & interruption expose a deeper awareness of craft & content? We will work with automatic writing, detective scripts, and fictional autobiographies, experimenting as well with exercises in which we play with fictional diaries and epistles. We will also explore writing in the form of short-shorts, found artifacts, and postcard stories. As the semester progresses we will dovetail into the illusion of film as text, writing mini-paper-movies for our "detective potboilers" and emerging characters. Each week will include group discussion concerning the intentions of our individual writing, in-class writing games and informal critiquing of our explorations with improvisational forms. Andrei Tarkovsky's " Sculpting In Time," John Berger's "Ways Of Seeing," and selected writings of Simone Weil will be among the course reading, and there will be home viewing of films to be announced. The goal of the course includes completing a portfolio of our work, and a revised text for a class anthology, group reading & party.

English525: Playwriting Workshop
Professor Dennis Moritz
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:30 pm

Art originates in the subjective, a personal take. Each artist approaches art differently, making a voice or style, be it AR Gurney, Sam Shepherd, Ntosake Shange, or Susan Lori Parks. Miles Davis said, "It is the style, I only listen to the style." Through a series of exercises and readings we will work to catch our first impulses and intuitive responses as we write, craft and structure, and proceed from there. Since these are performance or theater works, we will emphasize words as spoken or acted. Writings will be experienced out loud and up on their feet. The course will emphasize process and expect product.

Dennis Moritz has written over thirty theater pieces that have received professional productions. Venues in New York City include the Joseph Papp Public Theater (New Works Project), BACA Downtown, the Nuyorican Poets Café, St. Marks Poetry Project and HERE Center for Contemporary Arts. Venues in Philadelphia include The Painted Bride Arts Center, Freedom Theater, MTI, Walnut Street Theater, Theatre Double and Theater Center Philadelphia. His play, "Just the Boys" was published by Scribners in Action: the Nuyorican Poets Theater Festival. His book Something to Hold On To (Nine Theater Pieces) was published by United Artists Books. Dennis was an artistic director and resident playwright of Theatre Double Repertory Company for seven years. His works have been supported by many granting agencies. He has been a long time member of the New Works Project at BACA Downtown and the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Dennis was a founding member of the Theatre Double Children's Repertory Company, writing many pieces performed by the ensemble.

English 571: The Eighteenth-Century English Novel
Professor Srividhya Swaminathan
Mondays
4:10 pm to 6:00 pm

Politics, satire, romance, and violence--the eighteenth century novel has it all. Authors experimented with literary form, taboo subjects, and character construction. The central question developed in this course will be: How did the novel emerge as the dominant literary form in eighteenth-century Britain? Beginning with Aphra Behn's controversial novella,Oroonoko, students will trace the various types of novels to gain popularity. This class will cover a bestseller list like no other! Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen. This course will cover the movement from romance to epistolary to bildungsroman to gothic traditions. Research requirements for the course include a term paper, an in-class presentation, and an annotated bibliography. Students will also have the opportunity to exercise creative writing talents in developing and constructing assignments.

English 624: African American Short Fiction
Professor Louis Parascandola
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

This course will examine twentieth century masterpieces of African American short fiction. We will begin with Harlem Renaissance authors Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay, work through key figures including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, and end with up-and-coming talents like Z.Z. Packer. Author Randall Kenan (Let the Dead Bury Their Dead) will be visiting during one class period to read and discuss his work.

English 700: Practicum in Teaching Composition
Professor Xiao-Ming Li
Thursdays
4:10 pm to 6:00 pm

This class was cancelled and did not run.

Intended as a source of support and forum for discussion for novice writing instructors, this course will focus on practical approaches to everyday issues in the classroom. The primary texts for this course will be two textbooks and a collection of student papers, supplemented by articles written by so-called "experts." The class is to be organized around three major components in the teaching of writing: classroom discussions and exercises, writing assignments, and responding to students' writing. Each participant will assemble a portfolio that consists of a syllabus, two writing assignments, two classroom exercises, and one student profile. The portfolio is due at the end of the semester, but will be examined and swapped with your peers in the class throughout the semester.

English 707: Methods of Research and Criticism
Professor Sealy Gilles
Mondays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

This course has two goals: to introduce students to the pleasures and challenges of reading theoretically, and to train students in research methods appropriate for graduate level work. We will be concentrating on three critical approaches: gender theory, new historicism, and post-colonialism. Students will be asked to apply these theories to two primary texts, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), as well as poetry selections from across the literary spectrum. As we test abstract critical theories against these fascinating and problematic novels, each student will develop an individual research project, including a proposal, an annotated bibliography based on a theoretical point of view, and a research essay. As individual projects develop, students will receive coaching in library skills, research, documentation, and presentations.

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2005

English 104 section 1: Creative Writing
Professor John High
Tuesdays & Thursdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

This class is designed for anyone who has ever wanted to write creatively, yet who is not sure how to begin or how to move beyond where they are presently in their own writing. Topics include getting started, establishing a passionate discipline, making time, focusing on ideas and feelings and giving them shape through the language of fiction, poetry, and drama. The course will also zero in on backbone issues of style and technique ranging from those of characterization and plot, continuity, and vividness of imagery, clarity of diction, and use of phrasing and structure in the writing of our worlds--the various ways that elements of craft inherently dovetail with content. There will be weekly creative writing exercises and group discussions, as well as commentary on the writing process and how to make it come alive for you. The course offers relaxed, though thorough and individualized investigation of the participants' work in relation to craft, theme and content writing. What do we mean when we talk about issues of style, form, and voice(s)? What is fiction, what is metaphor, what is the magic of language, the ghost of echoes, which reflect your own vision of the world, your experience or part, your dreams or visions? What do we mean when we talk about the lyric, about experimentations, about taking chances in writing? We'll look at the work of Modern and contemporary writers ranging from Baldwin to Akhmatova to Borges to that of younger writers publishing today. Students will also read and respond to one another's exercises in an environment that offers encouragement and direction. Critiques will focus on motivating the student to tap the undefined territory of his or her own imagination in order to more fully cultivate and mature her or his own voice/s and styles. Writing which moves beyond the so-called boundaries between genres in a spirit of exploration will also be encouraged. The goal of the course includes completing a portfolio of your work, and a revised text for a class anthology, group reading, and party.

English 104 section 2: Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning
Wednesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short stories. During the first half of each workshop, we will discuss examples of poems and stories. Then I will provide a specific assignment for the following workshop. The main text for the remaining class time will be student writing; we will workshop each poem and story, helping each other improve each others' drafts. The emphasis will be on form and structure, especially learning to be particular with writing, rather than general, including images and detail in both stories and poems. A midterm and final portfolio will include revised poems and stories, as well as a review of learning and a self-evaluation. There will be a packet of assignments and Xeroxed fiction. Recommended text: The Handbook of Poetic Forms.

English 129: British Literature II
(Re-) Writing Religion in Modern British Literature
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course explores the ways in which works of modern British literature engage issues of religious belief, worship, and church doctrine. Each of the assigned texts, drawn from poetry, novel, drama, and essay, variously celebrates, questions, or subverts fundamental aspects of religion. For instance, Frankenstein dramatizes man's desire to create life, like God; Graham Greene puzzles over the meaning of divine grace, as it appears to be lavished on a corrupt Mexican priest; Murder in the Cathedral thematizes the justifications for (deliberate) martyrdom; Kingsley Amis presents a dystopian world in which the reformation never took place; and Philip Pullman's fiction turns all major tenets of Christianity, including divine providence, redemption, and original sin, upside down. This course does not endorse any particular religious or anti-religious outlook, nor does it require students to practice any religion at all. It merely presumes that while religion is of immense importance to many people and societies, the specific manifestations and meanings of spirituality, faith, and doctrine are complex, manifold, and often contested.

English 137: Shakespeare
Professor Joan Templeton
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course will examine Shakespeare's plays both as texts and as theatrical performances. If possible, we will attend a Shakespeare production. Plays to be studied include Romeo and Juliet,The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. Students must have completed English 61, 62, or 63, 64 and the core seminar (or English 17) to register for the course.

English 150: Introduction to Caribbean Literature
Professor Rosamond King
Mondays & Wednesdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

This course will survey the diverse tradition of Caribbean literature through texts from English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries (including Haiti, Cuba, and Trinidad & Tobago). We will examine major themes such as slavery, colonialism, racial diversity, and immigration, and we will discuss what, other than geographic location, unities Caribbean countries and the Caribbean literature.

English 159: Literature of the U.S. II
Professor Carol Allen
Mondays & Wednesdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

This is a survey that covers American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. The course will provide general information about the major writers and texts that have contributed to the great, diverse tradition of American letters. We will chart our discoveries by peering through the lens of representation, asking such questions as who names and describes the newly unified, post-civil war America, how do turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century creative artists revision America during an age of Western imperialism/expansion/colonialism, how does literature compete with the new technologies that produce representation as well (photography, film, television), what is meant by and what are the politics of "American" modernism and post-modernism, and finally, how does literature both document and "undocument" American experience? We will concentrate on three vital prolific periods: nineteenth-century regional writing, Modernism (1912-1936), and contemporary, post-war production.

English 166: Fiction Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays & Thursdays
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

This workshop will focus on the way autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. The premise is that the source of most fiction is fading memories, whether we're aware of it or not. Though Jack Kerouac is the most obvious exponent of this method, we'll look at other writers of the last century (Marguerite Duras, Peter Handke, Lydia Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Georges Perec, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Laura Riding, Raymond Queneau, Jamaica Kincaid, James Ellroy, Maurice Blanchot) who struggle to cross the borders between fiction and life story. We'll concentrate on the conventions of fiction--plot, character, conflict--with an eye towards expanding on what's already been done. Our writing project will include working with secrets, memories, observations, opinions, overheard conversations--fragments of everything.

English 169: Nonwestern/Postcolonial Literature
Professor Maria McGarrity
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

This class was cancelled and did not run.

Post-colonialism as a critical impulse has had a profound impact on literary and cultural studies in recent years. This course will examine the theories and fictions that characterize post-colonialism by focusing on the encounter between the centralized colonial metropolis and its global peripheries in the twentieth century. The creative works in this course from the Caribbean include writers from African, Asian, and European traditions. This diversity of perspective allows for the examination of the post-colonial imagination from both the centers and margins of the empire. These works will allow us to frame our global theoretical inquiries by using the specificities of particular cultural experiences. We will attempt to determine what unites the islands of the Caribbean archipelago and what may connect or separate them from Latin America. We will explore foundational texts in the field and complicate the following topics: globalism and local culture; the psychology of colonialism; resistance/accommodation/complicity; indigeneity and constructions of the Other; and imagining nationalisms.

English 190: Senior Seminar
Professor Leah Dilworth
Mondays & Wednesdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

This course will guide students through the process of writing a long research paper (20-25 pages) on topics of their own choosing. Students will use a range of research resources and write an informal proposal, a formal proposal, a first draft, and a final draft of the paper. Students will also read and critique each other's work. Required reading will include essays on research methods and writing as well as "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with selected critical essays.

Undergraduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2004

Summer 2004

English 103

Workshop in the Essay
Professor Deborah Mutnick
MTWTH 11:00 am to 12:50 pm

This course gives students the opportunity to develop, share, and get feedback on their writing in a workshop format. The focus is on the essay, a genre we will explore from a variety of angles: formal, informal, personal, academic, traditional, and experimental. Through juxtaposing one type of essay with another, students will expand their repertoire of strategies and practice the art of shaping writing for particular occasions, audiences, and purposes. We will study different, often mixed approaches to the essay, including autobiography, critical analysis, literary techniques, and ethnographic methods such as oral histories. Students will benefit from a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of their work, and constructive criticism. There is an option of fieldwork as the basis for one required essay.

Readings include essays by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Vivian Gornick, Susan Griffin, and Alice Walker. Students will present their writing in weekly workshops at least twice during the semester. Writing requirements include a course journal, two short (3-5 page) essays and one longer (8-12 page) essay or the equivalent.

Fall 2004

English 101: Introduction to English Studies
Professor Melissa Antinori
Mondays & Wednesdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

What does one need to know to be an English major or minor? What do English majors and minors study and learn? What kinds of careers and educational opportunities await those who graduate with a degree in English? This course is designed to familiarize students with the diversity and scope of English studies and to introduce students to contemporary debates concerning such issues as the connection between reading and writing, the relationship among different interpretive/critical strategies, and the nature and politics of the literary canon. In this course, we will 1) learn about the rise of English as a discipline and how the profession of English has changed over time; 2) analyze the formation and politics of the literary canon; 2) engage in close readings of literary texts; and 4) examine and experiment with numerous methods of literary criticism and analysis. This course will be conducted as a seminar, and students will be expected to participate in and take responsibility for class discussions.

Eng. 103: Workshop in the Essay
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Mondays & Wednesdays
1:30 pm. to 2:45 pm

This course gives students the opportunity to develop, share, and get feedback on their writing in a workshop format. The focus is on the essay, a genre we will explore from a variety of angles: formal, informal, personal, academic, traditional, and experimental. Through juxtaposing one type of essay with another, students will expand their repertoire of strategies and practice the art of shaping writing for particular occasions, audiences, and purposes. We will study different, often mixed approaches to the essay, including autobiography, critical analysis, literary techniques, and ethnographic methods such as oral histories. Students will benefit from a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of their work, and constructive criticism. There is an option of fieldwork as the basis for one required essay.

Readings include essays by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Vivian Gornick, Susan Griffin, and Alice Walker. Students will present their writing in weekly workshops at least twice during the semester. Writing requirements include a course journal, three short (3-5) page essays and one longer (8-12 page) essay or the equivalent.

English 104 section 1: Creative Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays & Wednesdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short stories. During the first half of each workshop, we will discuss examples of poems and stories. Then I will provide a specific assignment for the following workshop. The main text for the remaining class time will be student writing; we will workshop each poem and story, helping each other improve each other's drafts. The emphasis will be on form and structure, especially learning to be particular with writing, rather than general, including images and detail in both stories and poems. A midterm and final portfolio will include revised poems and stories, as well as a review of learning and a self-evaluation. Thee will be a packet of assignments and Xeroxed fiction. Recommended text: The Handbook of Poetic Forms.

English 104 section 2: Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

The goal of the workshop is to expand our ideas of "what is a poem" and "what is a work of fiction." Are poetry and fiction exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will question preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways to transcribe thought processes and experiences into writing. Work by Marguerite Duras, Ted Berrigan, Frank O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop and Andre Breton and others will be discussed in class, and used as models, but much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing our own writing. A final portfolio of work will be required.

English 126 section 1: News Writing (same as Journalism 126)
Staff from the Department of Journalism
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:50 pm

English 126 section 2: News Writing (same as Journalism 126)
Staff from the Department of Journalism
Tuesdays
6:00 pm to 8:50 pm

English 128: The Voyage from Beowulf to Hamlet
Professor Joan Templeton
Tuesdays & Thursdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

A study of masterpieces of English literature from the Old English period through Shakespeare through the motif of the voyage. Readings include the Old-English epic poem Beowulf, the medieval morality play Everyman, selections from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, selections from Shakespeare's sonnets, andHamlet. Students will write essays based on the readings and class discussions. 

English 158: Literature of the United States I
Professor Michael Bennett
Wednesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course will examine the works of literature written before 1865 in what is now the United States. The theme of the course is "American Myths, U.S. Realities." We will explore the contrasts between the myths that have produced America and the lived realities of those who reside within the borders of the United States. Rather than focusing on a few "masterpieces," we will read a wide variety of short prose pieces and poetry, much of which has not received a great deal of study. We will also discuss the "major authors" traditionally associated with the period, but we will examine them from a comparative perspective: Cooper's version of the frontier juxtaposed with that of Native American narratives; Emerson's transcendentalism compared with the immanent concerns of abolitionist writers; Hawthorne's romanticism versus that of the women writers he flippantly dismissed. In order to make such comparisons, we will examine the contexts as Native, European, African, Hispanic--to provide an historically grounded survey of early American Literature.

English 165: Poetry Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays & Wednesdays
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

In this undergraduate poetry workshop, we will review some of the history of poetry, practicing traditional forms as well as experimental variations. While there will be some open workshops, assignments will be provided most of the time. Some of the forms and approaches we will study will include sonnets, free verse, blues & jazz poetry, personism, cubism, etc. Students will be required to write poetry every week, to keep a journal, and to rewrite their poems for a final portfolio. We will also attend two poetry readings during the semester. The text for the class will be The Handbook of Poetic Forms.

English 233: The Radical Decade--British Literature in the l930s
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

THIS COURSE DID NOT RUN.

The l930s in England were a crisis-ridden and anxiety-producing yet also artistically fertile period. This course will take a broadly historicist approach, examining literary manifestations of the socio-political and cultural parameters that shaped the decade between the stock-market crash in l929 and the beginning of WW II in l939. Our attention will focus on how British intellectuals of the time engaged the issues of domestic ideological radicalization, the gender question, decolonization, the rise of totalitarianism, and the Spanish Civil War. Through close and comparative readings of novels, poems, travel books, and essays by the period's most outstanding writers (including Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, George Orwell, and W. H. Auden), we will discover how literary texts not only represented their historical context but also transcended, and possibly shaped the external reality of contemporary socio-political conditions.

Assigned Texts: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (l932); Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (l930); Graham Greene, It's a Battlefield (l934); George Orwell,Homage to Calalonia (l938) & "A Hanging" (l931); Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (l938); Rebecca West, "Woman as Artist and Thinker" (l932); Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (l939); W.H. Auden, poems; and Stephen Spender, poems.

English 234: The Twenties--New York & Paris
Professor Howard Silverstein
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

In America the end of World War I inaugurated a new decade sometimes referred to as "The Jazz Age" or "The Roaring Twenties." Old orders had fallen after the war: dreams, values, conduct had been shattered and the world prior to l914 had irrevocably been changed. One of the profound changes in the United States was the initiation of the Volstead Act, more commonly know as Prohibition. In its wake came the "speakeasy" and the rise of gangsterism. The constitutional amendment which gave women the right to vote influenced the twenties phenomenon known as the "flapper": young women danced the Charleston in skirts that rose above the knees and wore their hair bobbed. New York City became one of the cultural capitals of the world, especially in the literary scene that saw the birth of writers like Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and distinguished members of the Harlem Renaissance as well as the rise of such magazines as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In Paris, Gertrude Stein, who held court on the left bank, referred to the twenties as the era of "the lost generation." Boatload after boatload arrived, carrying young American expatriates. Fleeing what they felt was the Puritanism of American life, they fell in love with a city that was a bargain to live in, that championed "free love" and that had no laws about alcoholic abstinence.

In the New York section of the course, students will be required to read John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Nella Larsen's Passing, and Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Our examination of the expatriate movement in Paris will focus on Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. A trip to the Museum of Modern Art will be scheduled as well as the screening of some silent films. Three short critical papers and an oral presentation are required.

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2004

Summer 2004

English 624
From Fiction to Film
Professor Howard Silverstein
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 4:00 to 6:15 pm

From the birth of film, producers, screenwriters, and directors have turned to fiction as a source for their inspiration. For the director and the screenwriter, the essential problem has always been the same: how does one adapt a novel into a film? By what chemistry does a five hundred-page novel transform itself into a two-hour film? In class we will discuss the fidelity of the moving image to its written source. Can a change of setting, incident, or character still maintain the integrity of the work of fiction? This course will focus on four novels that develop the theme of the individual sensibility in conflict with the demands of a restrictive society. The novels to be discussed are Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Henry James's Washington Square, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Students will be required to write four short critical papers comparing the novel to the film. Most of the screenings will take place in class, but one or two may require outside viewing.

English 636: Seminar on Postcoloniality and Desire
Professor Huma Ibrahim
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:00 to 3:15 pm

This course is going to traverse the connections between postcolonial discourse and issues of the other's desire. One of the segments for excavation into postcolonial discourse is the idea of the native identity. Identity is related to human desire and is an under-explored aspect of postcolonial studies.

We will read secondary material as well as primary texts in order to explore issues connected to agency within desire for both men and women in the "other" world. Often this seems to suggest interracial desire, but that is not the concern of this course. What we will be looking at is where desire intersects with identity in the postcolonial context.

Some texts we will be reading are The Gender Sexuality Reader, Tayeb Saleh'sSeason of Migration to the North, Bessie Head's A Question of Power, Alifa Riffat's Distant View of a Minaret, and some others.

FALL 2004

English 522: Academic Writing Workshop 
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course is an intensive, advanced writing workshop for graduate students (across the disciplines) who wish to develop their academic writing skills. The main emphases will be on critical analysis, argumentation, and research. Students will write several short essays in response to common course readings and one longer research paper. There will also be discussion of effective rhetorical strategies for analytic, persuasive prose. Assignments will be derived from readings by intellectual figures with broad interdisciplinary relevance-for example, Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Darwin, Baldwin, Machiavelli, Marx, Lao-Tzu, Arendt, Rousseau, Douglass, Rachel Carson, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This workshop explores both the art and the craft of fiction writing. Frequent writing assignments and exercises will concentrate on the conventions of fiction-description, dialogue, characterization-as well as more experimental possibilities such as fragmentation and shifting point of view. Focus will be on the ways autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. Among the models we will look at are stories and novels by Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, and James Ellroy. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing student work.

English 524: Poetry Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This graduate poetry workshop will have an emphasis on innovative and experimental poetry. I will provide you with a list of experiments and handouts, but the workshop for the most part will be open. One of the requirements will be that you explore at least three different approaches to writing during the semester. Some of the approaches/forms we will study will include blues & jazz poems, sonnets, prose poetry, Oulipo constraints, projective verse, cubism, and personism. Besides writing and workshopping a group of poems, we will examine the structure, history and ways the form/approach has been accepted and/or transgressed. There will be a required handbook and an anthology.

English 526: Writing Media I--Story
Professor Claire Goodman (Media Arts Department)
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:50 pm

This cross-listed course is an introduction to the methods and principles of great storytellin in the media. It is the cornerstone course for all forms of story: commercials, sitcoms, movies, experimental shorts, even documentaries and photographic essays. In the first half of the semester, by means of screenings and discussion, students will learn to recognize and analyze basic story elements such as narrative structure, character, setting, plot, design, irony, and comedy. In the second half, in workshop-style classes, students will work on creating their own stories using these elements. Each student will develop a movie--short screenplay and treatment--as a final project. A professional screenwriter will be a guest speaker at one of the classes.

Requirements: access to a computer, purchase of Final Draft writing software, permission of instructor to take the course.

English 625: Nineteenth Century American Literature
Professor Carol Allen
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

This course will focus on representation and masking and will assume minstrelsy to be a dominant nineteenth century trope that bridges the gap between sentimentality and "realism." Connections will be made between this aesthetic mode and the writing of such artists as Melville, Chesnutt, Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Hopkins, Cooper, Stowe, Douglass, and Jewett. Supplemental, critical and theoretical material will be introduced as well. The requirements include close reading and research assignments.

English 643: Seminar in Shakespeare
Professor Seymour Kleinberg
Tuesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

Seminar in Shakespeare emphasizes close reading of selected comedies and tragedies, as well as the sonnets, to explore character and theme in the works of one of our greatest writers.

English 646: Individual and Small Group Writing Instruction
Professor Patricia Stephens
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

In this course, students will examine the theory and practice of individual and small group writing instruction. We will examine a range of strategies for working with students one-on-one as we locate that work within its various theoretical and historical contexts. Our work will focus on the following: structuring sessions and establishing priorities; assessing, diagnosing, and responding to student writing; strategies for intervention, planning, drafting, revising, proofreading, and editing; helping students with grammatical and mechanical concerns; helping students improve reading comprehension; working with ESL students; attending to interpersonal dynamics and cultural and ethnic differences; and tutoring online.

Students who enroll in the course will be required to tutor for one hour per week during the semester at the Writing Center and to audio- and/or videotape one session with a student. The taped session will be transcribed and analyzed by the student for use in a self-study. Classes will be conducted as seminars/workshops so that all students have the opportunity to participate in class presentations, mock tutorials, etc. Each student will generate her/his own idea/s for a final written (and/or action) project, based on topics of interest that arise during the semester.

Possible Texts: Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers; Meyer and Smith, The Practical Tutor; Bouquet, Noise from the Writing Center; Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar; and, Murphy and Law, Landmark Essays on Writing Centers.