Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2008

English 101: Introduction to English Studies
Professor Mary Hallet
Mondays 6:00-8:30pm

This course is REQUIRED for English majors in all three concentrations (Literature, Creative Writing, Writing & Rhetoric). You MUST take ENG 101 within the first two semesters after completing the core English courses (ENG 16 and two courses from ENG 61-62-63-64). If you are at this stage and you don't take ENG 101 in Spring 2008, then you MUST take it in Fall 2008. You MAY take other ENG courses at the same time as ENG 101.

What, exactly, is an English major? What can you do with a degree in English? This course will introduce students to the three concentrations in the English major: Literary Studies; Creative Writing; and Writing & Rhetoric. We will perform close readings of literary texts to understand better the underlying meaning of the work. A brief introduction to the field of literary criticism will allow students to practice analyzing texts using literary theory. The study of creative writing provides an opportunity to exercise creative talents and workshop a piece of writing with the entire class. Finally, the study of writing and rhetoric will enable students to trace the types of persuasion used in an argument and to craft a more persuasive argument in their own work. The class will end with a seminar on the career opportunities available to students who pursue a degree in English.

English 104: Introduction To Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays & Thursdays 3:00-4:15 pm

This course is a prerequisite for ENG 165, 166 and 167. This course is required in the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

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 of transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. We will also attempt to engage the present moment--the issues of our time, if any, that influence our writing. Is it possible to write in a vacuum while ignoring the rest of the world? What is the writer’s responsibility? Can writing change the world? We will read as models the work of Maurgarite Duras, Lydia Davis, William Carlos Williams, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Andre Breton, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Much of the workshop time will be spent on reading and discussing each other’s writing. 

English 129: Later British Literatures
Professor Louis Parascandola
Mondays/Wednesdays 3:00-4:15

This course is required in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration.

This course will discuss literary views of imperialism and the expansion of the British Empire. Major texts will include Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. We will also look at shorter poems, stories, and essays by such authors as Swift, Blake, Dickens, Stevenson, Kipling, and Orwell. In addition, we will get responses from people of color who lived and wrote in England such as Equiano, Bennett, and Soyinka.

English 137: Shakespeare and London Theater
Professor Srividhya Swaminathan
Mondays/Wednesdays 4:30-5:45 pm

This course will satisfy a requirement in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration.

William Shakespeare is the most recognized figure in English literature, and the diversity of his plays is a testament to the dynamic world of Elizabethan and Jacobin theater. This course will introduce students to the London stage and the socio-cultural changes that influenced Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Students will study plays that represent the three major genres within drama—tragedy, comedy, and history. They will have an opportunity to perform scenes from the plays to understand staging and delivery of lines. In addition, students will also view movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays to consider how his work continues to have an impact on contemporary culture.

English 159: American Literature After the Civil War
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 pm

This course is required in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration.

This semester, we will concentrate on contemporary literature written by authors from the United States. We begin with the late nineteenth century and regionalism and quickly shift to the Modernist period that falls between 1914 and 1935, reading texts from the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance. Around mid-semester, we will move on to naturalism and, then, post-War pieces by living writers. Expect to encounter texts in the form of novels, short stories, drama and poetry by Twain, Chestnut, Faulkner, Stein, Hemingway, Hughes, Hurston, Cullen, Wright, Brooks, Miller, Albee, Morrison, Cruz, Wideman, and others. A manageable amount of criticism and theory will also comprise part of our reading list, and whenever possible, we will avail ourselves of the speakers and events at Long Island University and in the surrounding community. Assignments will include informal creative and prose composition, in-class essays, close readings, one oral presentation, and a final project. 

English 166: Fiction Writing Workshop / Life Stories
Professor John High
Thursdays 6:00-8:30 pm

ENG 104 is a prerequisite for this course. This course will satisfy a requirement in the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

We all have our stories. We live and tell them everyday. But how do we develop the concentration and confidence to get them down on the page? This workshop will focus on the way autobiography and dreams overlap with story writing and how the past can be fictionalized as a way of giving it a voice-to give the writer both distance from and freedom to enter our own life stories. The premise is that the source of much fiction is based on memories and dreams. We'll look at writers of the last century as well as contemporary writers of today: Jean Toomer, Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Ondaatje. Lydia Davis, John Berger, Rosemary Waldrop, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Hurston, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Jamacia Kincaid, and Sherman Alexie (among others) who often blur the borders between fiction, dream and life story. We will build up our confidence as we develop our craft and skill at telling our stories in a new language. We'll concentrate on the various traditions of narrative, including plot, character, and conflict-with an eye towards expanding on what's already been done by the masters of the past. There will be weekly creative writing exercises and games, workshops and discussions, as well as commentary on the writing process and how to make it come alive for you. Our writing project will include working with dreams, secrets, memories, observations, opinions, overheard conversations and random fragments of language, as well as episodes from our childhoods up through the present. The goal of the course includes completing a short book of your stories (a chapbook) and giving a reading in the reading series hosted by the English Department's MFA in Creative Writing Program.

English 168: Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Mondays/Wednesdays 2:00-3:15

English 103 is a prerequisite for this course. This course will satisfy a requirement in either the Writing & Rhetoric concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

The Creative Nonfiction Workshop is designed to give you the opportunity to experiment with this genre (the nonfiction essay infused by literary techniques and devices) in a community of writers. The focus this semester is on place, history, and testimony, and how they intertwine in writing inspired by political struggle and resistance. Originating in Latin American countries among people who were targets of harsh political repression, testimonio blends history and literature to give voice to historical experience from a grassroots, eyewitness perspective. What does it mean to "speak truth to power"? What happens when people challenge "official histories"? From whose perspective is most history told? What stories are marginalized, silenced, erased? And what sort of writing best enables those stories to be heard?

A central course text is Edwidge Danticat's new book, Brother, I'm Dying, a memoir about her father and uncle, one a Haitian immigrant in New York City, the other a minister who stayed in Haiti until he was forced at 81 years of age to evacuate in ill health, detained by U.S. Customs, and died in a prison in Florida. Other texts we may read include testimony by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and participants in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as well as works by Audre Lorde, Terry Tempest Williams, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin, and Susan Griffin. The readings serve both to model and inspire first and third person narratives that situate individual experience in broad socio-historical contexts, especially those of people whose stories are less likely to be voiced from their own perspectives.

In addition to creative nonfiction techniques and strategies, the course will incorporate oral history, story circles, and other interactive methods to gather materials. Students will be encouraged, though not required, to produce multi-modal work integrating text and images. The emphasis of the class, however, will be on your own writing, which will be discussed at least twice in workshop during the semester. You will be required to complete three 4-6-page essays and a 3-5 page reflective essay. 

English 169: Non-Western / Post-Colonial Literature
Professor Rosamond King
Tuesdays 6:00-8:30 pm

This course is required in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration.

Who, what, and where is the postcolonial? Does the term only relate to the formerly colonized, or does it also implicate the former colonizers? And what is its relationship to the realities of diaspora and immigration? This class will explore the concept of "postcoloniality" through examining literature, film, and theory. We will look at exciting contemporary texts from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe and consider them in relationship to their own context as well as to the world we all share.

English 170: Modern Irish Literature: James Joyce's Ulysses
Professor Maria McGarrity
Mondays 6-8:30 pm

This course will satisfy a requirement in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration.

During this term, we will devote ourselves to the study of James Joyce's Ulysses. We will examine Joyce's literary inheritance and influence, specifically invoking the enduring myth of the wanderer in the alienated modern metropolis, as we determine how Joyce exploded conventional novelistic boundaries and reshaped the expectations of the common reader. Joyce's Ulysses has had a profound impact on Irish, Modern, and World literature. We won't subscribe to one model of the novel or a singular conceptual paradigm to organize the book but rather will attend to critical and theoretical issues as they become relevant. Through the close reading of the novel and the highlighting of specific passages, we will follow Bloom, Stephen, and Molly through their Dublin wanderings and discern why this novel continues to capture the imagination. Requirements: One short paper explicating assigned passages, a class presentation on a critical article, a final class presentation your research paper, and a final research paper. Required Texts: course reader (to be distributed); Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book: a Guide to Ulysses; Brooker, Joyce Critics:Transitions in Reading and Culture; Gifford and Seidman, Allusions in Ulysses; Joyce, Ulysses: the Corrected Text, Gabler et al., eds.

This course is cross-listed as English 580.

English 172: Introduction to Contemporary Rhetorical Theory
Professor John Killoran
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 pm

A new writing and rhetoric course for students in any field, this course will satisfy a requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

How does a political candidate’s speech rouse voters?
How does a lawyer’s argument sway jurors?
How does an organization’s advertisement influence consumers?
How do a song’s lyrics move listeners?

In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, we aim to answer these and similar questions about the power of language. The course is an elective for students across the disciplines as well as in English who seek to understand the persuasive effect of language in their personal lives, their communities, and their careers in journalism, law, business, the health professions, science, technology, education, and the arts.

Students will learn perspectives to help them recognize how language persuades us of what we believe and whom we believe. By the end of the semester, students will have developed their sensitivity to the power in others’ use of language and will become more empowered in their own use of language.

English 190: Senior Seminar in Literature
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Thursdays 12:00-2:30 pm

This course is required in the Literature concentration.

The main purpose of this course is to produce the cap-stone work for English majors—the senior thesis. To this end, students in English 190 are expected to accomplish the following tasks: select a text (or texts) that you want to make the subject of your thesis, map out an approach to this text, conduct fairly extensive research on the text and author, then write a formal research proposal, followed by a draft and a revised final paper. This course will be conducted along the lines of an advanced, student-centered workshop. That is to say, students will take center-stage in every class session. Since it is likely that every student of English 190 will select a different text for his or her thesis, it is expected that all students be prepared “to teach” their chosen text to the rest of the class in order to demonstrate their competence in handling their subject matter. Hence, each student will be called upon repeatedly to give presentations to the rest of the class. The instructor will be on hand to give advice and guidance to optimize the results of this approach. The final grade will be based 60% on the thesis itself and 40% on the weekly presentations during the course of the semester. While it is possible to expand a pre-existing paper into your senior thesis, it is at the instructor’s discretion to make the call whether this is in fact the chosen procedure. Every student is expected to come to the first class equipped with a short-list of texts that he or she considers writing about for the senior thesis. Be prepared to explain to the instructor and to your classmates what attracts you to the chosen texts and what general idea you want to pursue with your thesis.

English 191: Senior Seminar in Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
times to be arranged

This course is required in the Creative Writing concentration. Times to be arranged; consult the Chair of the English Department (Professor Sealy Gilles) or the Undergraduate Registration Advisor (Professor Wayne Berninger) if you think you need to take this course now.

We will investigate the lives and writings of various authors (Gertrude Stein, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Creeley, Zora Neale Hurston and Frank O’Hara, among others); attend and report on poetry readings--and give readings ourselves; go to museums; listen to music; keep intensive reading journals. Our final project will be putting together a manuscript of our writing.

English 192: Senior Seminar in Writing & Rhetoric
instructor and times to be arranged

This course is required in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. Instructor and times to be arranged; consult the Chair of the English Department (Professor Sealy Gilles) or the Undergraduate Registration Advisor (Professor Wayne Berninger) if you think you need to take this course now.

In this capstone course, English majors concentrating in Writing and Rhetoric pursue independent research projects in a range of topics from the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, or rhetoric and gender; they may also develop a nonfiction essay accompanied by a reflective text that demonstrates theoretical knowledge of the genre and the writer's rhetorical choices. Students will use a variety of research resources and submit a formal proposal, a first draft, and a final draft of the paper (including, in the case of a non-fiction essay, the reflective text). In addition to required readings on research methods and writing, at least one research or theoretical text and one nonfiction text, along with selected critical essays, will be assigned.