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.