Graduate Courses, Spring 2009

English 502: Writers on Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Mondays 6:20 - 8:30 pm

The course will offer readings and discussions with prominent fiction writers and poets. The writers will meet with us weekly during the course of the semester. The purpose of the course is to give students a chance to interact with and question a diverse range of visiting guest writers about their processes and techniques in an effort to expand and further develop the student's own writing. As with all of our process courses, the goal is to learn--in this case, first-hand--from other writers and their writings in order to better inform our sense of what it means to be a poet or fiction writer in 2009.

In addition to reading at least one book by each visiting writer, the students are required to submit a reading journal at the end of the semester and to complete all the writing assignments. These assignments will evolve from the ideas and techniques of the visiting writers and from our class discussions. On days when there are no visitors we will read and discuss our own work.

The Visiting Writers for this semester are Bernadette Mayer, Paul Beatty, Bill Berkson, Lynne Tillman, Kristin Prevallet, Renee Gladman, Anselm Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Patricia Spears Jones and Linh Dinh.

The schedule is as follows:

Jan 26 no visitor
Feb 2 Bernadette Mayer, The State Poetry Forest
Feb 9 Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
Feb 17 Bill Berkson, Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently
Feb 23 no visitor
March 2 Lynne Tillman, American Genius
March 9 Kristin Prevallet; I, Afterlife: Essay In Mourning Time
March 16 Spring Break
March 23 Renee Gladman, Newcomer Can’t Swim
March 30 Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel
April 6 Gloria Frym, Solution Simulacra
April 13 no visitor
April 20 Patricia Spears Jones, Femme du Monde
April 27 Linh Dinh, American Tatts
May 4 no visitor

Bios of the Visiting Writers

Bernadette Mayer is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Midwinter Day,Studying Hunger, Memory, A Bernadette Mayer Reader, Proper Name, Scarlet Tanager and Another Smashed Pinecone. A new book of poems, The Poetry State Forest, is forthcoming from New Directions. She has co-edited the journals 0-9 and United Artists. She was the director of The Poetry Project in New York from 1980-84.

Paul Beatty is the author of three novels, The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff and Slumberland; and two books of poems, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. In 1990 he was crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Café and has performed on MTV and PBS (in the series The United States of Poetry). He is also the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor.

Bill Berkson, poet and art critic, long associated with the New York School of poets, is the author of sixteen books of poetry--including Serenade, Blue is the Hero, Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, Fugue State, and Hymns of St. Bridget (in collaboration with Frank O'Hara)--and two volumes of art cricitism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism and Sudden Addresses. He is a contributing editor for Art and America and was Paul Mellon Fellow for 2006 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1984. His Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2009.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and cultural critic. She is the author of five novels--Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, No Lease on Life, and American Genius; a book of stories,Absence Makes the Heart; and a book of essays, The Broad Picture. She was a 2006 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at SUNY Albany.

Kristin Prevallet is a poet and essayist. Her books include Perturbation, My Sister: A Study of Max Ernst's Hundred Headless Woman, Scratch Sides, Shadow Evidence Intelligence, and I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning. She is the editor of A Helen Adam Reader: Selected Poems and Collages and Music, published by The National Poetry Foundation, and is founder and former editor of the journal Apex of the M. She has taught at Bard College, the New School, Naropa University, and currently at St. John's University in Queens.

Renee Gladman, born in Atlanta, Ga. in 1971, is a poet, fiction writer and the editor of Leroy Works, a book publishing project devoted to innovative writing. Her own books include Arlem, Not Right Now,Juice, The Activist, and most recently Newcomer Can't Swim. She is Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Anselm Berrigan is a poet and teacher who was raised and lives in New York City's East Village. His recent publications include Have A Good One (Cy Press, 2008), Some Notes on My Programming(Edge, 2006) and Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002). To Hell with Sleep, a twenty-page poem written just after the birth of his daughter in late 2007 will be published in early 2009 by Letter Machine Editions. Berrigan was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church from 2003-2007 and co-edited, with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. of California, 2005). He currently teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at Bard College's summer MFA program.

Gloria Frym is a poet and fiction writer. Her most recent books of poetry are The Lost Sappho Poems(Effing Press, 2007) and Solution Simulacra (United Artists Books, 2006). A previous collection of poems,Homeless at Home (Creative Arts Book Company), won an American Book Award in 2002. She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories--Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)--as well as several other volumes of poetry, including By Ear(Sun & Moon Press); Back to Forth (The Figures); Impossible Affection (Christopher's Books); and a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists (Chronicle Books). She is a recipient of two Fund for Poetry Awards, the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund Grant, the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award, and several California Arts Council grants to teach poetry writing to jail inmates. From 1987 to 2002, she was core faculty in the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco. She is Associate Professor in the MFA and BA Writing & Literature Programs at California College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, cultural commentator. She is author of two poetry collections,Femme du Monde and The Weather That Kills; and two chapbooks, Repuestas! and Mythologizing Always. She edited the literary magazine, W.B., co-edited Ordinary Women: New York City Women Poets, and serves as contributing editor to Bomb and Heliotrope. Mabou Mines commissioned "The Brooklyn Song" for Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting, and the play Mother,which premiered at La Mama ETC. She has taught at the Parsons School of Design and Sarah Lawrence. She served on poetry and literary panels at the 9th National Black Writers Conference, Medgar Evers College, and the 16th Gwendolyn Brooks Conference at Chicago State University.

Linh Dinh was born in Vietnam in 1963 and came to the US in 1975. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004); four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006) and Jam Alerts (2007); with a novel,Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2009 by Seven Stories Press. . Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets(2001); and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker: The Poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006). His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.

English 520: Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop
The Art of the Real
Visiting Professor: Jaime Manrique
Thursdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm

Nonfiction differs from fiction in that the overriding aim of the nonfiction writer is to unearth the truth, using observation and deduction as two of his main tools. The nonfiction writer seeks to create a piece of writing that can be as compelling, as poetic, and as beautifully shaped as the best fiction--in other words, to create a work of art. Nonfiction goes beyond journalism (although it can use many of its techniques) in that it is at its best when it is most personal, when the reader senses the writer standing behind every sentence she writes.

Students will write memoirs, profiles, and literary or political personal essays. We will also devote part of each workshop to the discussion of a classic essay. Particular emphasis will be placed on revision. Required text: The Art of the Personal Essay, edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate. Enrollment limited to 12 students.

Jaime Manrique was born in Colombia. His first book of poems, Los adoradores de la luna, received his country's National Book Award. In Spanish, he also wrote a volume of stories, and a collection of film reviews. He has written four novels in English: Our Lives Are the Rivers, Twilight at the Equator, Latin Moon in Manhattan, and Colombian Gold-- translated to many languages. Manrique is the author of the volumes of poems My Night with Federico García Lorca; Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus;Sor Juana's Love Poems, co-translated with Joan Larkin; and the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon,Washington Post Book World, BOMB, and many other publications. Among his honors are grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has worked as an associate professor in the M.F.A. program in writing at Columbia University from 2002 to the present. He's a member of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, and he chairs the Open Book Committee.

English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop
Writing Through the Eyes of Another
Professor Lewis Warsh
Wednesdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm

How can we imagine characters who are the opposite genders as ourselves? Although Gustav Flaubert often exclaimed "Je suis Madame Bovary," how close did he really come to getting into the head and heart of a woman? The workshop will focus on how we write about what we don't know--not only from the point of view of gender, but class and ethnic backgrounds as well. Every week I will pose questions and assign writing exercises and readings that explode (and explore) the limitations of the self as subject matter. We will look at texts by Marguerite Duras, Roberto Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Clarice Lispector and Jack Kerouac among others. The assignments will point towards the possible variousness of characters and the multiple points of view that can appear in a work of fiction. Much of the class time will be spent reading our work as well as discussing our ongoing projects as fiction writers.

English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor John High
Thursdays, 6:10 -8:30 pm

Coming Back To The Line
As Place in Poetry

Poetry has always served as a place for expression that cannot be uttered in prose, in stories or essays, and in the 20th Century it became refuge for the mapping of language outside of film and other visual mediums as well. The unsayable as home to poetry: the line, that essential music of the poem, is often (as with its cousin in prose, the sentence) neglected in the larger discussions of the meaning and underlying technique or structure of poetry. Yet from Homer, Sappho, and Li Po through Shakespeare and Yeats up to contemporary masters of poetic expression, the line itself exposes the poem's inner mechanics and elusive mystery. Its sculpting allows the inclusiveness of vastly differing voices, traditions, lineages, and movements. In mapping the geography and music of the line, we will road trip together and make linguistic discoveries of time, meaning, and emotion. Without a heightened awareness of the line, our own poems suffer the delusion of endless repetitions and received language.

The focus of our workshop will be on the line then, which is not to say that our discussions will not include every aspect of craft. Rather, we will begin by looking closely at each line in every stanza and study how the line is or isn't facilitating the poem's entry into the larger context we are striving to reveal in our work. We'll look at other poets ranging from the ancient to the contemporary: Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Arthur Rimbaud, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Osip Mandelstam, Aimé Césaire, Edmond Jabes, C.D. Wright, Roberto Bolaño, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, Nina Iskrenko, Norma Cole, Renee Gladman, Ivan Zhdanov, Cole Swensen, Simon Pettet, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Forest Gander, and Fanny Howe, among others.

In the book you are writing, what underlies the voice, time, being and place of the work? We'll begin here and discuss the act of writing poetry as one of risk-taking and investigation, of reinventing poetic language in our own discoveries as we let our poems become truly our own and something new in this act.

A final chapbook, consisting of all your new, edited poems, is due at the end of the semester. We will also schedule a party and reading of our work at The Bowery Poetry Club.

English 525: Playwriting Workshop II
Professor Jessica Hagedorn
Wednesdays, 6:10 -8:30 pm

In this workshop, we will continue to explore what it means to compose and revise scenes for the theatre, how to create characters who engage and surprise us, how to develop an ear for the poetry of ordinary speech and develop an appreciation for the power of silence. Expect in-class writing and visualization exercises, close readings and discussions of plays, monologues and excerpted scenes by major contemporary playwrights; expect to write a five-to-ten minute piece to be performed, using your fellow students as actors. Field trip to one Off-Broadway play, TBA. Registration limited.

English 527: Professional Writing Workshop
Professor Michael Bokor
Thursdays, 6:10 - 8:30 pm

This course is recommended to students looking for opportunities to improve their own styles to be able to function more effectively in academic, creative, and professional writing.

You may be familiar with the rhetorical concept of "style", and you may have your own "style" of writing. Such texts as a student's one-paragraph essay, a business letter, and a laboratory report have "style" just as does a novel by Dickens, a play by Shakespeare, or a poem by Milton. The writer cannot choose between using "style" and leaving it out of the discursive event. But what exactly is "style" and where does it come from? What is valued as "style"?

Focusing on the role of the English language in discursive practices in both the Western and non-Western world, this course explores the cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives of style. It examines this concept and seeks to help students explore possibilities for understanding fully the relationship between language, culture, and personality and how these forces converge to define and shape the writer's style. The course is designed to help students examine the factors that determine an author's choice of style (manner--or the how) and how that choice affects the substance (matter--or the what), the audience, and the entire communicative event.

Some of the pertinent questions that will drive teaching and learning in this course include:

1) Is style "innocent" or is it the reflection of the personality, taste, and experience of the author of the text? Or is it the reflection of the culture of the writer's society? Is it true that style is the author or the author's society in disguise?

2) Does style exist on its own, independent of the author? Before the work, in the work, or outside it?

3) What shapes style? Is it the author's purpose and attitude to the audience?

Students will interrogate the functions of style and learn the numerous ways in which authors adapt their expressions (texts) to their purposes. They will also learn how to appreciate style within the context of genre-specific discourses and how to use that knowledge to improve their own style(s).

English 624: West Indian Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance
Professor Louis Parascandola
Mondays, 4:10 -6:00 pm

Anglophone (English-speaking) Caribbean immigrants played a vital, if often neglected, role during the Harlem Renaissance, an important literary and cultural movement between 1917-1935. There were, in fact, over 36,000 foreign born Blacks, mostly West Indians, in Harlem in 1920. These immigrants, despite often facing severe discrimination, had a significant effect on American culture and history. We will discuss Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly examining essays (and poems) defining his role as a facilitator of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movements. We will also study fiction and poetry by Claude McKay, one of the seminal figures of the Harlem Renaissance, fiction by Nella Larsen (of West Indian ancestry), short stories by Eric Walrond, fiction/essays by J.A. Rogers and Amy Jacques Garvey (Marcus' second wife), and drama by Eulalie Spence, the only Harlem Renaissance woman playwright to set her work primarily in Harlem. Finally, we will discuss the views of leading African Americans--including W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rudolph Fisher--on these pioneering immigrants. Readings will include McKay's novel Home to Harlem, Larsen's novel Quicksand, Rogers' mixed genre From "Superman" to Man, and selections from the anthology "Look for Me all Around You": Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance. Assignments include several short papers (2-3 pages), an oral presentation, and a longer (12-15 pages) term project.

English 643: Shakespeare
Professor Jonathan Haynes
Tuesdays, 6:10 -8:00 pm

This course will provide an overview of Shakespeare's dramatic career, looking for the coherence of his artistic vision as it unfolds through the forms of comedy, history play, tragedy, and romance, and setting him in his historical context. Themes of particular interest will include the figure of the stranger or outsider, the representation of politics, the gendered character of heroism, and the role of women. We will read The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV Part I, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice,Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.

English 700: Practicum in the Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Thursdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm

This course prepares graduate English students to teach in the LIU/Brooklyn Writing Program by examining the theories and practices that guide the program, including social constructionism, process writing, portfolio assessment, and thematic course-design; and applying those theories and practices to the creation of a viable English 16 syllabus. In addition, the course will explore managing the classroom, creating/integrating reading and writing assignments, responding to student texts, teaching grammar, organizing/facilitating teacher-student conferences, and addressing the linguistic issues of a multicultural student population.

Possible texts for the course might include Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts by Anthony Petrosky and David Batholomae, The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing by Cheryl Glenn et al., and Portfolio Assessment in the Reading and Writing Classroom by Robert J. Tierney, Mark A. Carter, and Laura E. Desai.

English 707: Methods and Criticism
Professor Maria McGarrity
Tuesdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm

This Methods of Research and Criticism course, subtitled informally as "The Global Caribbean," will focus its keen critical eye on Derek Walcott's pan-Caribbean epic verse novel, Omeros. During the term, students will analyze the structure, rhyme, and organization of the work at the same time that students investigate the global cultural matrix that creates this work. Students will be individually assigned sections of the novel for close reading, to compile footnotes as appropriate, and obtain related cultural artifacts, but will also write a more comprehensive critical essay on the entire work of approximately 20 pages, using the theoretical lens of their choice. In a group, students will integrate their individual work for a presentation to the seminar of a critical edition for Walcott's masterpiece. We will pay special attention to theories of Gender/Sexuality, Postcolonialism, and New Historicism during the term. Please note, students will be evaluated individually but will be asked to work in a spirit of good citizenship as a member of a larger group.

Requirements:

Individual Presentation 15%
Individual Paper/Research materials 45%
Group Critical Edition/Presentation 30%
Participation 10%

LIU English Department Book Scholarship for Spring 2009

The English department gives out FIVE $100 award certificates for books every spring and fall semester. A student may win the award multiple times in different semesters. Apply now!

Eligibility:

• The student must be registered for an upper-division course in English (numbered 100 and above) for Spring 2009. Majors and non-majors are welcome.

Pick up an application in the ENG Department today!

You will need to give the following information on the application:

Student name
Student ID
Email & phone contact
Your Major at LIU
List of all English courses you have taken at LIU Brooklyn

Then you must put your application in Wayne Berninger’s mail box, English Department, 4th Floor, Humanities Building.

The Book Scholarship program is generously funded by Barnes&Noble, through the Brooklyn Campus Bookstore.

English Department Holiday Party!

Thursday, December 11, 4:00 pm
(immediately following the faculty meeting from 3-4).

Please plan to bring something in one of the following categories:

*Main dish

*Finger foods (veggies and dip, chips and salsa, humus and pita, etc.)

*Beverages (soft drinks, beer, wine, cider)

*Desserts (NOT deserts!)

*Paper goods

Let Sealy Gilles know what you wish to bring. She & Karen Errar will manage the list.

Voices of the Rainbow Event: Charles Dickens' Holiday Story "The Chimes," performed by David Houston

Wednesday, December 10, 6PM
Health Sciences Building, Room 119

Just in time for the Christmas season, we will be presenting a one-man performance of Charles Dickens' The Chimes, a witty, ironic and poignant short novel exposing how the rich think the poor ought to live. Performed by actor/author David Houston, who has appeared in leading roles in scores of plays and musicals.

Spring 2009 Courses: Undergraduate

Attention English Majors!

Program Guidance & Registration Start Monday, November 17.

Make an appointment now & register early!

English Majors: If you are an English major, please meet with Wayne Berninger (the English Department’s new Registration Advisor) as early as possible to register for the English classes you need. Doing so will help ensure that courses are not cancelled and that you don’t have to scramble to find replacement courses at the last minute. Attached to this flyer you will find descriptions of the courses being offered in Spring 2009. Consult the English Department website to determine which courses you still need for your particular concentration (i.e., Creative Writing, Literature, or Writing & Rhetoric).

Non-English Majors: English courses aren’t only for English majors! The writing and analytical skills that students gain in English classes are very useful in a variety of professional careers. So even if you are not majoring in English, you can still take upper-division English courses—as long as you have completed the prerequisites. If you really want to build up your transcript, consider an English Minor, which consists of any four English courses numbered 100 or above. If you’d like more information about minoring in English—or if you think you might like to major in English— contact Wayne Berninger .

THE COURSES...

English 101: Introduction to English Studies (Class ID# 6714)
Professor Patricia Stephens
Tuesdays 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 2009, then you MUST take it in Fall 2009. Yes, you MAY take other ENG courses at the same time as ENG 101.

This course will introduce students to the broad field of English Studies, with a specific focus on the areas of concentration offered at LIU/Brooklyn: Literature, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric and Writing. In general, the course is designed to familiarize English majors and minors with 1) the history and scope of English studies, 2) the use of literary and rhetorical theories to interpret texts, and 3) the tools necessary for close reading, written analysis, and research in the field. During the semester, students will learn about literary genres, periods, and terminology; creative experimentation in texts; and the foundations of argument. Along the way, we will also explore potential job options for students with a major or minor in English. Students will write one research paper and produce a portfolio of written work at the end of the semester. For more information, contact Professor Stephens at patricia.stephens@liu.edu.

English 104: Introduction to Creative Writing (Class ID# 6716)
Spoken Poetry—Finding Our Voices
Professor John High
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 pm

This course is required in the Creative Writing concentration. It is a prerequisite for ENG 165, 166 and 167. It can also satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration. English majors concentrating in Creative Writing may take this class twice.

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 with the spoken poem, making it alive for you, and establishing a passionate discipline. The course will also zero in on backbone issues of style and technique, ranging from those of characterization and plotting in poetic diction, continuity and vividness of imagery, clarity and music, and the use of phrasing and structure. There will be weekly creative writing exercises and group discussions to guide you through the writing process where we will explore our ideas and feelings and give them shape through the langu age of our own voices. What is a spoken poem—what is a metaphor, the magic of language, the ghost of echoes and music that reflect your own vision of the world? How do we mine our experiences, our pasts, and our dreams? What do we mean when we talk about taking chances in writing? We'll look at the work of ancient and contemporary writers as well as younger writers publishing today. Critiques will focus on motivating you to tap the undefined territory of your own imagination in order to more fully cultivate and mature your own voice/s and styles. The goal of the course includes completion of a chapbook and/or anthology of our work and an in-class reading of your spoken poems. For more information, contact Professor High at john.high@liu.edu.

English 129: Later British Literatures (Class ID# 7636)
The Artist Coming of Age: Creating the “Uncreated Conscience”
Professor Maria McGarrity
Thursdays 6:00-8:30 pm

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

This course will examine the development of artistic consciousness in the British tradition. We will examine the role of the artist in society, his or her alienation from society, the unique perspectives of the artist and his or her role as critic, both literary and social. We will begin with the youthful artistic idealism of Keats, move onto a discussion of Wordsworth’s vision of the poet, Byron’s art in action, and expand our vision of the artist to include the feminine with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. We will transition into the Modern period with Wilde’s conception of criticism as art. Finally we will examine modernity and the aftermath of Joyce’s achievement through Yeats, Woolf, Sitwell, and Beckett. We will challenge the idea that any writer can, as Joyce claimed to through his character Stephen Dedalus, “create the uncreated conscience of [his] race.” Selected Texts: Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks; Byron, Don Juan; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Keats, Selected Letters; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and “The Dead”; Sitwell, “The Poet’s Lament”; Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Wordsworth, The Prelude; Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” “Lapis Lazuli,” and The Trembling of the Veil. For more information, contact Professor McGarrity at maria.mcgarrity@liu.edu.

English 159: American Literature After the Civil War (Class ID# 6452)
Modern American Culture and the Myth of Oz
Professor Patrick Horrigan
Mondays 6:00-8:30 pm

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

The course follows the figure of the wanderer in search of home as he/she is reincarnated again and again throughout modern American culture. Taking Frederick Jackson Turner's seminal 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" as our point of departure, we will read L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and then go looking for later descendants of his pilgrims (Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion) in the mournful wanderer of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the restless and love-hungry heroine of Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the tragically self-ignorant American in Paris of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the sympathetic midwestern murderers of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and the real-life child star and lost boy of Margo Jefferson's On Michael Jackson. The course is writing intensive. For more information, contact Professor Horrigan at patrick.horrigan@liu.edu.

English 166: Fiction Writing Workshop (Class ID# 6690)
Professor Lewis Warsh
Mondays & Wednesdays 1:30-2:45 pm

ENG 104 is a prerequisite for this course! This course will satisfy a requirement in the Creative Writing concentration. It can also satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.
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, Thomas Bernhard, Lydia Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Georges Perec, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Laura Riding, 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 projects will include working with secrets, memories, observations, opinions, overheard conversations—fragments of everything. For more information, contact Professor Warsh at lewis.warsh@liu.edu.

English 168: Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop (Class ID# 7802)
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Wednesdays 6:00-8:30 pm
ENG 104 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 satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration. English majors concentrating in Creative Writing may take this class twice.

This is an intensive workshop devoted to writing literary essays, with a focus on the personal essay. The first few weeks will be devoted to reading literary essays by published authors and analyzing their form, style, the rhetorical strategies they employ, and their use of language. We will then move to a workshop format in which students read and critique each other's essays in detail. The goal of the workshop is to help the writer move toward effective revision; each student will be expected to produce either one long (20-30 pages) or two shorter (10-15 pages) revised piece(s) of creative nonfiction by the end of the term. We will use as a common text Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, as well as selected handouts. The writers we will read may include George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Natalia Ginzburg, Eric Liu, Atul Gawande, Richard Rodriguez, Patricia Williams, Cherie Moraga, Vivian Gornick, Gayle Pemberton, and Maxine Hong Kingston. For more information, contact Professor Malinowitz at harriet.malinowitz@liu.edu.

English 170: Contemporary African Literature and Film (Class ID# 10161)
Professor Jonathan Haynes
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 pm
Attention: This semester only, this course can be used to satisfy the ENG 169 requirement in the Literature concentration. If you have already received credit for ENG 169, it can be used as an upper-division ENG elective in the Literature concentration. This course can also satisfy a literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration.

This course explores contemporary Africa through the eyes of some of its most talented writers and filmmakers. They see a continent that is increasingly urbanized and exposed to globalization, but where deep cultural traditions continue to assert themselves and a vibrant popular culture compliments the perspectives of internationally-recognized artists. The problems of poverty, corruption, violence, and disease loom large, but so do the humor and resilience that keep Africa alive. The emergence of women’s voices has fundamentally reoriented Africa’s self-representation. Some recent works by towering senior figures of African culture will be included (the filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, the writer Wole Soyinka), but the emphasis will be on newer talents such as Ben Okri, Jean-Marie Teno, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and Chimamanda Adichie. For more information, contact Professor Haynes at jonathan.haynes@liu.edu.

English 175: Writing for the Professions (Class ID# 10162)
Professor John Killoran
Thursdays 6:00-8:30 pm

This course will satisfy a requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

This is a writing course for students in any field preparing for their careers. When you are given your first writing project on the job, will you know what to do? Writing for the Professions is an elective for students across the disciplines as well as in English who are looking ahead to prepare themselves to write for their careers in business, law, the health professions, science, technology, education, and the arts. Students will learn to orient their writing toward different audiences, such as managers, customers, clients, and professional colleagues. Students will also learn to write in ways that result in action. By the end of the semester, students will have written their resume and other career-related documents, and will be more confident in their abilities to write effectively. For more information, contact Professor Killoran at john.killoran@liu.edu.

English 190: Senior Seminar in Literature (Class ID# 6058)
instructor & times to be arranged

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

English 191: Senior Seminar in Creative Writing (Class ID# 7390)
instructor & times to be arranged

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

English 192: Senior Seminar in Writing & Rhetoric (Class ID# 6470)
instructor & 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 (Wayne Berninger) if you think you need to take this course now.

Join Us for the Next "Voices of the Rainbow" Event:

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

Thursday, November 6, Noon, Humanities Building, Room 206

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai is a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based, Chinese Taiwanese American spoken word artist who has been featured at over 275 performances worldwide including three seasons of HBO's award-winning Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam.

Voices of the Rainbow Event

Gary Shteyngart & Marie-Elena John

Wednesday, October 8, Noon
Health Sciences Building, Room 119

Gary Shteyngart was born in the Soviet Union. He is the author of the satiric novels The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, chosen as one of the New York Times' best books of 2006.

Marie-Elena Jones, a native of Antigua, is author of the novel Unburnable, "a love story, a murder mystery, a multigenerational epic, and a reinterpretation of Black history."

Faculty Forum Event

Professor Harriet Malinowitz (English Department) on "Propaganda: Persuasion in the Age of Unreason"

The Richard L. Conolly College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Invites the LIU Brooklyn Campus Community to a Faculty Forum Presentation by Professor Harriet Malinowitz of the English Department

Title & Topic

"Propaganda: Persuasion in the Age of Unreason"

Why don’t human beings respond more consistently to logic and reason? Why do so many people vote and act against their self-interest? What is the difference between robust public debate and the engineering of consent? These are questions worth pondering on the eve of a national election.

Please join us as Professor Malinowitz examines the roots of contemporary propaganda in late 19th and early 20th century theories of “the crowd,” “the public,” and “the herd instinct,” as well as the pioneering of methods of mass manipulation.

When & Where

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m., Library Learning Center, Room 515

Refreshments will be served

For further information, please contact Gladys Schrynemakers (718-488-1001) or William Burgos (718-488-1094).

Note: This is part of the Campus-wide Faculty Forum program; it is not part of the English Department's own Faculty Forum: Works in Progress program.

MFA Reading Series Event

Cornelia Street Cafe Poetry Reading by MFA Candidates

When:

Thursday, October 9, 2008
6-8 PM

Where:

Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street (Manhattan)
A, C, E, B, D, F, or V to West 4th Street
1 to Sheridan Square

$7 for poetry & a drink

Readers:

Lilian Almendarez
Lewis Warsh
Gary Parrish
Giorgios Qure-Lacroix Retsinas
Uche Nduka
Christine Gans
Stephanie Gray
Jamey Jones
Danielle Moskowitz
Zahra Patterson
Jon L. Peacock

Click the image to see a larger version of the flyer for this event:

MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR DR. GERALD SILVEIRA

Please join us in commemorating the life of Gerald E. Silveira. Dean Silveira was a beloved teacher and respected colleague and a member of the Brooklyn Campus community for over 50 years. The special celebration will include a Fountain dedication, followed by performances in the Kumble Theater by the American Ballet Theater and other artists.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
4:30 p.m.
Gerald E. Silveira Fountain (located directly in front of the Campus entrance of Wellness, Recreation Center)

NEW DATE & TIME: Graduate Student Open House

This event was supposed to be Wednesday, September 17, but a conflict has arisen, so the new date/time is as follows...

Thursday, September 18th
5:15 – 6:45 pm
Humanities Building, Fourth Floor Lounge

Please come and meet the new students in the MA and MFA programs (16 this semester plus 1 readmit!), ask questions of the Chair, meet faculty, and generally eat pizza, drink beer, and celebrate the beginning of the new school year together. This event is informal and fun.

All graduate students, prospective graduate students, and faculty are welcome.

Paumanok Lecture: Walter Mosley

The Department of English of Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus & The MFA Program in Creative Writing cordially invite you to attend...

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK
the Annual Reading and Talk on American Literature and Culture.

This year's Lecture will be given by...

Walter Mosley

6-8 pm, Thursday, October 2, 2008

(Walter Mosley will be introduced by Jessica Hagedorn)

Kumble Theater, Humanities Building
Long Island University, Brooklyn
Flatbush Avenue Extension and Dekalb Avenue
For further information, call (718) 488-1050

The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and reservations are required.

RSVP: 718 488 1624

kumble@brooklyn.liu.edu

Co-sponsored by the Provost's Office, the English Department, the Creative Writing MFA program, and Voices of the Rainbow reading series, this event is supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation and Long Island University's John P. McGrath Fund

WALTER MOSLEY is the author of twenty-nine critically acclaimed books which have been translated into twenty-one languages. His popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Others in the series include A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, and A Little Yellow Dog (both of which were New York Times bestsellers). Recently, Easy Rawlins has returned in Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Six Easy Pieces, Little Scarlet and Cinnamon Kiss, a 2006 New York Times bestseller.

Mosley has written five works of literary fiction: RL's Dream; Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned; Walkin' the Dog; The Man in My Basement and Fortunate Son; three works of science fiction, Blue Light, Futureland and The Wave; and four works of nonfiction, Workin' on the Chain Gang, What Next, Life out of Context, and This Year You Write Your Novel. Two movies have been made from his work: Devil in A Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington and Always Outnumbered, starring Laurence Fishburne.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Grammy Award, the O'Henry Award, the Sundance Institute Risktaker Award for his creative and activist efforts, and the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America.

Mosley created, along with The City College, a new Publishing Degree Program aimed at young urban residents. It is the only such program in the country. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in Brooklyn.

For further information, visit Walter Mosley's website.

Voices of the Rainbow: Fall 2008 Readings

The following are the readings scheduled for this semester. More detailed announcements will appear right before each event, but mark your calendars now!

Walter Mosley (Paumanok Lecture)

Thursday, October 2, 6PM, Kumble Theatre (Humanities Building, first floor)

Walter Mosley is one of America's best-loved writers. He is the author of such mysteries as Devil in a Blue Dress, Black Betty, Blonde Faith, and Fearless Jones. He will be making the annual Paumanok Lecture on American Literature.

Program co-sponsored by the Provost's Office, the English Department, the Creative Writing MFA program, and Voices of the Rainbow.

Gary Shteyngart & Marie-Elena John

Wednesday, October 8, Noon, Health Sciences Building, Room 119

Gary Shteyngart was born in the Soviet Union. He is the author of the satiric novels The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, chosen as one of the New York Times' best books of 2006.

Marie-Elena Jones, a native of Antigua, is author of the novel Unburnable, "a love story, a murder mystery, a multigenerational epic, and a reinterpretation of Black history."

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

Thursday, November 6, Noon, Humanities Building, Room 206

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai is a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based, Chinese Taiwanese American spoken word artist who has been featured at over 275 performances worldwide including three seasons of HBO's award-winning Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam.

Charles Dickens' Holiday Story The Chimes, performed by David Houston

Wednesday, December 10, 6PM, Health Sciences Building, Room 119

Just in time for the Christmas season, we will be presenting a one-man performance of Charles Dickens' The Chimes, a witty, ironic and poignant short novel exposing how the rich think the poor ought to live. Performed by actor/author David Houston, who has appeared in leading roles in scores of plays and musicals.

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2008

Summer Session One 2008

 (May 19 -- June 30)

English 636
Representations of Struggle in South African Literature and Film
Professor Patricia Stephens
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:15 PM

In this course, our explorations of South African literature and film will be framed by the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts of the rise and fall of Apartheid--a period of intense struggle for and against social change. Working chronologically, we will explore texts (print and film) written or set within three specific eras: 1940s-1950s (the inception and institutionalization of formal Apartheid policies); 1960s-1980s (the rise of Black Consciousness and anti-Apartheid movements); and 1990s-present (the rise of democracy and the post-Apartheid years). Our print texts for the course will span several genres: novels, memoir and/or autobiography, short stories, drama, poetry, creative non-fiction, as well as excerpts from transcripts taken from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings. In conjunction with our readings, we will watch several films that document both historical events and day-to-day lives in South Africa, past and present. Throughout the course, we will examine how and why writers and filmmakers depict struggle in the ways they do and what kinds of "truths" readers take from these representations. As outsiders reading about a country still very much in transition, we will examine our own understandings of the connections between history, politics, culture, and the literature and film of South Africa. Written work for the course will include short responses to the texts as well as a final research paper (topics to be determined via conferences between the instructor and students). Alternative projects may be considered. Below are some possible texts for the course:

1940s-50s: Abrahams, Peter. Mine Boy; Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country (film); Mphalele, Ezekiel.Down 2nd Avenue; Poetry Selections (from Drum);

1960s-80s: Biko, Steven. Excerpts from I Write What I Like; Mandela, Nelson. Excerpts from Long Walk to Freedom and Selected Speeches; Mhlope, Gcina. "Have You Seen Zandile?"; Wicomb, Zoë. You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town; Poetry selections (from Staffrider); Amandla: A Revolution in Four Part Harmony (film)

1990s-present: Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull; Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother. Mda, Zakes.Ways of Dying; Gordimer, Nadine. The House Gun. Long Day's Journey into Night (film); Facing the Truth (film),

FALL 2008

English 503: Theory of Writing: Remembering the Present
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays, 4:10 to 6:00 PM

Writing theory is an all encompassing endeavor. It must take into account both the past and the present while pointing instructively towards the future. Many great 20th century theorists were fiction writers and poets themselves--their theoretical work derived from their practice as creative writers. One goal of this course is to develop and articulate our own sense of what we want to do as writers and what we expect as readers. We will use the ideas expressed in these essays to inspire and inform our own work.

Another goal is to create a dialogue between ourselves and these authors. Ezra Pound's notable quote (I'm paraphrasing) : "Don't take advice from anyone who hasn't written a great work" is something to keep in mind. What gives anyone the right to theorize? One of the ongoing threads in this class will be an attempt to understand the place of theory in our work as writers, beginning with the inescapable question: “Is it necessary?”

Among the authors we will read are Henry James, E.M. Forester, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Laura Riding, Gertruce Stein, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Walter Benjamin, M.M. Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Maurice Blanchot, James Baldwin, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lyn Hejinian.

English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop: Starting Points in Fiction
Professor Han Ong (Visiting Writer)
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 PM

In this class we will take a look at the initial sources of inspiration writers use and build upon in crafting a novel or short story. For some writers, it's a premise: "What if ...?" For others, it's a plot, a sequence of events one leading to the other; this can be true of writers who use newspaper articles as their jumping off point. Character is key for some; for example, they want to write a piece about their grade school teacher, who was important in their life. Some writers hear a stretch of dialogue and that's where they begin. Yet others are compelled by place, setting; this might be true of some immigrant or foreign writers trying to recapture a lost world, for example. Oftentimes, where we start in our writing forecasts what the strengths of the work are going to be, as well as the weaknesses. By querying their own starting points, each student in class will begin to understand why it is that he or she runs into a set of problems in the middle of the writing process, which is different for every writer. This way, too, they can begin to identify elements that they need to strengthen to make their novel or story a more integrated and satisfying whole.

Han Ong is the author of two novels: Fixer Chao (2001) and The Disinherited (2004), both published by Picador USA. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, as well as a fellowship to the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Natural History, BOMB, and the journal Conjunctions. He is also the author of more than three dozen plays, which have been produced across the country at such venues as the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Berkeley Rep, and the American Repertory Theater.

English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop: Writing the Long Poem: Everything We Know
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 PM

The long poem is a place where we can include everything: knowledge of ecology and politics, all the various emotional states and upheavals that we’ve experienced, annotation of the present moment and the passage of time. Each student will initiate what might be a long poem of several pages or even a book-length poem written and accumulated over the course of the semester. We'll discuss the ways of bringing together data by direct observation and journal writing, by reading the newspaper (which is a kind of daily poem), and by sustaining a rhythm, a feeling, a theme. We'll pay attention to ways of improvisation, how to translate daily life into poetry, and how to use repetition and variation. We'll use as models some of the great long poems of the last century, most notably Paterson by William Carlos Williams, The Skaters and Three Poems by John Ashbery, A by Louis Zukofsky and Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer. Mostly we'll look closely at each other's work, give each other feedback and advice, and share each other's concerns regarding the importance of poetry in the world.

English 525: Play Writing Workshop: The Art of Playwriting
Professor Jessica Hagedorn
Wednesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 PM

In this workshop, we will explore what it means to write for the theatre, how to create characters who engage and surprise us, how to develop an ear for the poetry of ordinary speech, and how to develop an appreciation for the power of silence. Expect in-class writing and visualization exercises, close readings and discussions of plays, monologues and excerpted scenes by major contemporary playwrights; expect to write a five-to-ten minute piece to be performed, using your fellow students as actors. Guest speaker and field trip to one Off-Broadway play, TBA. Registration limited.

English 527: Professional Writing Workshop: Grant Writing
Professor John Killoran
Thursdays 6:10 - 8:00 pm

This course is designed not only for English graduate students but also for students from other disciplines and for professionals who seek to develop their skills as persuasive professional writers.

Behind much of the work conducted by cultural agencies, businesses, nonprofits, and researchers are successfully grant proposals. The grant proposal is essentially a persuasive document, and this course thus approaches grant writing through a rhetorical perspective. A rhetorical perspective offers not just a wily way with words but a means of responding to a rhetorical situation, of generating successful ideas. The rhetorical perspective helps students define the problem, analyze the audience, and invent the arguments that best present their case. Specifically, in the course, students will...

1. identify a problem on campus or in their organization, social and cultural communities, or research field;

2. analyse potential sponsors who might share the goal of solving the problem;

3. and plan, draft, and revise a grant proposal.

The course is designed for those seeking to write grant proposals for cultural agencies, business RFPs, nonprofits, and research. However, students will develop knowledge and skills that can be applied broadly to the various kinds of writing required in their careers.

English 579: Seminar in Special Studies: Virginia Woolf and Modernism
Professor Patrick Horrigan
Mondays, 6:10 to 8:00 PM

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most challenging and beautiful writers in the English language. Every time she began work on a new novel, she renewed her ambition to reinvent the genre and to make it penetrate to depths of human experience never before tried by writers of fiction. The course will trace the path from her early, tentatively realistic fiction (The Voyage Out), through her experimental short fiction of the late teens and early 1920s ("The Mark on the Wall," "An Unwritten Novel"), to the achievement of her high modernist style in four major novels: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Woolf was also an innovator in the art of the essay, and we will read some of her most famous works in the genre, including "Modern Fiction," "On Being Ill," and her revolutionary (and very funny) manifesto for women writers, A Room of One's Own. Because Woolf was keenly interested in painting and was intimately associated with a circle of avant-garde artists, special emphasis will be placed on the intersection between verbal and visual art in her life and work.

Field trips to the Museum of Modern Art and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library (which houses the largest collection of Woolf manuscripts in the world) will be arranged. In addition to on-going class discussion, students will write a series of short essays in response to the readings, and one longer critical essay or creative term project.

English 641: Literacy and Basic Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Wednesdays, 4:10 to 6:00 PM

In this course we will attempt to identify and understand what constitutes literacy in the academy and how "basic writers" are positioned within and against this term in their struggle to acquire academic discourse, a term we will also examine. We will investigate our own assumptions about literacy and test those assumptions against academy dictates and practices. We will problematize "basic writing" in relation to theories and methods of teaching basic and college writing. For example, is the social constructionist approach viable, or should students' primary languages be included in the instruction and production of college writing? What is the relationship between reading and writing, and how might one inform the other? How might orality be utilized in the classroom to help students increase their awareness of standard English? How do we offer cohesive, productive instruction when students within the same class have different levels and types of literacy? Authors we might read include Delpit, Bourdieu, Bizzell, and Heath. The course will be particularly beneficial for students who plan to teach in academic institutions with students from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

English 646: Individual and Small Group Writing Instruction
Professor Patricia Stephens
Tuesdays, 4:10 to 6:00 PM

This course is designed to introduce tutors and teachers to the theories and practices of tutoring writing (online, face-to-face, one-to-one, and small groups). Though our work in this class will help all tutors/teachers expand their repertoire of theoretical and pedagogical knowledge about tutoring writing in general, we will also focus on some of the specific needs of writers who use the LIU/Brooklyn Writing Center. As we familiarize ourselves with the curriculum and pedagogy of the Writing Program and interdisciplinary writing concerns (through WAC) on campus, we will locate the work we do at our Writing Center within the broader historical and institutional contexts of writing centers, in general. Throughout the semester, the course will address practical concerns about tutoring: structuring sessions and setting goals; assessing, diagnosing and responding to student writing; learning strategies to teach planning, drafting, revising, proofreading and editing; learning strategies to work on specific grammatical concerns; helping students with reading comprehension; working with ESL concerns; noticing interpersonal dynamics and maintaining boundaries; respecting and responding to cultural and ethnic differences; working as an online tutor, and facilitating small group sessions. We will also explore connections between writing center histories and institutional politics in order to understand how particular practices emerge within specific contexts. Students interested in pursuing a specific topic not included in the general readings (such as writing center administration) are encouraged to do so, with permission from the instructor. Classes will be conducted as seminars/workshops so that all students have the opportunity to participate in class presentations, mock tutorials, etc. All students are required to tutor for one hour per week during the semester and attend staff development meetings at the Writing Center. Each of you will write an observation report of a session conducted by another tutor and audio/video tape one session with a student (for use in a self-study).

Our Condolences to the Silveira Family

Gerald E. Silveira passed away early Saturday, May 10, after a long battle with cancer. He was 81.

Dean Silveira was part of Long Island University for 50 years. He taught for nearly two decades at the Brooklyn Campus, rising to the rank of professor after joining as an English instructor in 1958. He went on to fill important roles as part of the administration, serving as assistant dean of the Richard L. Conolly College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1977 to 1980 and then as associate dean until the present; for a period in 1985, he was acting dean of the College.

Through all this time, Dean Silveira never lost love for writing, literature and the performing arts. He also was an avid fan of the New York Times crossword puzzle, which never required more than 15 minutes for him to complete!

Gerry, as he was known to the many who enjoyed working with him at LIU, was a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He earned a B.A. at Boston University and an M.A. at Rutgers University, specializing in linguistics and English as a second language. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 1954 and a Carnegie Southern Scholarship award for 1956 to 1958.

Gerry Silveira is survived by a niece and many good friends at the Brooklyn Campus. Plans for services at the Campus will be announced after commencement.

End of Semester Reading: Students from English 520

The April 27th Testimonio reading ran long, and not everyone got to read, so we've scheduled a second reading so that the rest of the readers can present their work.

Please join us for this end of semester reading, featuring:

Michelle Solomon
Charles Thorne
Sri Raman
Elspeth MacDonald
and more

Wednesday, May 7, 5-6PM
Humanities Building, Fourth Floor Lounge

Annual English Department Awards Ceremony

Please join us today at 4:00 PM in the Fourth Floor Lounge of the Humanities Building, for our annual awards ceremony, when we will present the following prizes and awards:

Excellence in English
Undergraduate

Adynah Johnson
Kaung Set Lin
David Wheeler

Excellence in English
Graduate

Jaime Barker
Omayra Cruz
Joseph Garnevicus
Sarah Kolbasowski
Jacqueline McCormick
Sophia Mavrogiannis
Cherisse Mayers
Lindsey Miller
Margot Nasti
Helen Seo
Charles Thorne

The Edward Edelman and Susanne Popper-Edelman
English Essay Prizes

Sehrash Tanveer
Best Essay in a Developmental Freshman Writing Course

Gregory Cross
Best Essay in a Freshman Writing Course

Lisa Rathod
Best Essay in a Sophomore Core Literature Course

Jonathon Kuhr
Best Essay in an Upper-Division English Course

(There is no prize this year in the category of Best Senior Seminar Paper.)

The Esther Hyneman Graduate Awards in Poetry and Fiction

Gary Parrish (Poetry)
Jessica Rogers (Fiction)

The Louis and Ann Parascandola Graduate English Award

Jaime Barker

Sigma Tau Delta Induction Ceremony: New Inductees

On Friday, May 2, the Omicron Zeta chapter of Sigma Tau Delta held its annual induction ceremony.

The Chapter's sponsor, English Professor Srividhya Swaminathan, opened the ceremony with her welcoming remarks, and then English Professor Sealy Gilles, Chair of English (and new Sigma Tau Delta member!) gave the keynote address. New members were inducted by current student members Kaung Set Lin and Nikki Alimonda.

The Chapter was pleased to induct the following new members:

Rodne Alteon
Alane Celeste
Omayra Cruz
Yanisha Daniel
Rony Enriquez
Sealy Gilles
Enid Hernandez
Lisa Huang
Adynah Johnson
Barbara Joseph
Sri Devi Raman
Amit Rao
Stephanie J. Scibilia
Carolyn A. Smith
Damaris Stevens
Charles Thorne

MFA Reading Series Event: A Reading by Students Who Are Graduating This Year

When & Where
Friday ~ May 2, 2008 @ 7pm

in the English Department
Humanities Building, Fourth Floor

Reading:

Charles Thorne
Margot Marie Nasti
Omayra Cruz
Jamie Barker
Lindsey Michael Miller

Please come out to support these soon-to-be alumni of our graduate program in the last reading of their LIU careers!

Flyer (click pic to enlarge):

MFA Reading Series Event: Testimonio

The nonfiction of:

Dwayne Allen
Natasha Gilman
Omayra Cruz
Christine Gans
Joe Garnevicus
Mark Gilman
Elspeth Macdonald
Stephanie Marshall
Jalene Mojica
Jacqueline McCormick
Anna Penny
Sri Raman
Michelle Solomon
Charles Thorne

Hosted by
Deborah Mutnick

When & Where:

Sunday, April 27th
4-5:45 pm

Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street
Manhattan

ACEDF or V to West 4th

1 or 9 to Sheridan

In conjunction with the MFA Program at LIU Brooklyn

contact: danielle.delgiudice@brooklyn.liu.edu

Flyer (click pic to enlarge:



UPDATE: This event ran long, and a second reading was scheduled so that the remaining readers could present their work.

Advanced English Courses Summer & Fall 2008

Program guidance & Early Registration Begin on Monday, April 7!

English Majors: Please make an appointment to meet with Wayne Berninger, the English Department Registration Advisor, as early as possible to register for the upper-division English classes you need. Doing so will help ensure that courses are not cancelled and that you don’t have to scramble to find replacement courses at the last minute. Attached to this flyer you will find descriptions of the courses being offered in Summer 2008 and Fall 2008. Consult the English Department website to determine which courses you still need for your particular concentration (i.e., Creative Writing, Literature, or Writing & Rhetoric). Contact Mr. Berninger by phone at 718-780-4328 or via e-mail at wayne.berninger@liu.edu.

Non-English Majors: English courses aren’t only for English majors! The writing and analytical skills that students gain in English classes are very useful in a variety of professional careers. So even if you are not an English major, you can take upper-division English courses—as long as you have completed the prerequisites. If you really want to build up your transcript, consider an English Minor. A minor consists of any four courses numbered 100 or above. If you’d like more information about minoring in English—or if you think you might like to major in English— contact Wayne Berninger in the English Department at 718-780-4328 or via e-mail at wayne.berninger@liu.edu.

See Your Advisor now & Register Early!

----------------

Advanced English Courses Summer Session One 2008
(May 19 -- June 30)

Note: There are no advanced English courses in Summer Session Two this year.

English 150: Contemporary African American Literature
Class ID# 6457
Professor Carol Allen
Mondays & Wednesdays 1:00 to 3:40 PM

This course charts the contours of African American literature composed since 1975 and the critical discourse that surrounds it. The course will be divided into units based on genre for no other reason than that this body of writing is so diverse that thematic clustering makes little sense. Therefore, because of this decision, we will explore how contemporary African American writers are bending and blending genre to fit their needs: innovation in both form and thematic choice. Over the next few weeks, we will encounter works by the most notable contributors to this tradition. I urge you to consider that this course serves as a mere entrée to a rich and varied field. Suggestions for further study will come in the form of class discussion and your own consideration of and writing about the texts listed below and those that you will encounter invariably over the course of pursuing your own research. Texts for the class will include the following: Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems, Michael Harper; Fences, August Wilson; Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks; Love, Toni Morrison; The Middle Passage, Charles Johnson; Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman; and Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone, Itabari Njeri.

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Advanced English Courses Fall 2008

English 101: Introduction to English Studies
Class ID# 15925
Professor Leah Dilworth
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 4:00 to 5:15 PM

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 Fall 2008, then you MUST take it in Spring 2009. You MAY take other ENG courses at the same time as ENG 101.

This course offers an introduction to the field of English studies in general and to the English major at LIU. We will explore the history of English as an area of university study and what it means in the 21st century to engage in the intensive study of reading and writing. Students will learn about the three concentrations we offer in the LIU English major: Literature, Creative Writing, and Writing and Rhetoric. We will consider the many professional opportunities open to English majors. All students in the class will write a short research paper on a selected work of literature.

English 104: Creative Writing
Class ID# 15049
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:30 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 128: Early British Literatures: Making of English Literary Traditions
Class ID# 15285
Professor Jonathan Haynes
Mondays & Wednesdays, 4:00 to 5:15 PM

Note: Some earlier paper copies of this document (as well an early version on the English Department website) indicated that Professor Srividhya Swaminathan would be teaching this course. However, Professor Swaminathan is going to be on academic leave next year, so she will NOT be teaching English 128. This is the correct course description.

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.

In this course we will read the authors most responsible for founding the traditions of British literature: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlow, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. We will plunge into the worlds created by their powerful imaginations, which in part means understanding what they do with the genres of chivalric romance, epic, comedy, and lyric poetry. We will also pay steady attention to the relations of their created worlds to the unfolding history of English society. Gender relations and the role of the outsider will be recurring themes.

English 158: Early Literatures of the United States: The American Renaissance
Class ID# 14885
Professor Patrick Horrigan
Wednesdays, 6:00 to 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.

Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the United States witnessed one of its greatest periods of artistic achievement, sometimes known as the "American Renaissance." The course will examine representative works by the major writers of this period, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Louisa May Alcott, as well as some of the earlier colonial and revolutionary-era works that inspired them.

Readings will include fiction, poetry, philosophy, sermons, political manifestos, captivity and freedom narratives, and criticism. We will also sample the visual and musical art of the period. A field trip to the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be arranged. In addition to on-going class discussion, students will write a series of short essays in response to the readings, and one longer critical essay or creative term project.

English 165: Poetry Workshop: Poets Studio: Writing, Performing, Evolving
Class ID# 15055
Professor John High
Tuesdays 6:00 to 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.

What if as poets we were allowed to do whatever we wanted? What would we do? In this class we'll read and perform our poems and practice critiquing/questioning our own writing via the poet's studio and workshop method. We'll encourage and push one another to go deeper into our own language and our own lives. Every innovation in poetry has grown out of tradition, and in this course we will attempt to discover and connect with our own tradition(s) and poetic. What is the relationship between tradition, innovation, and a writer's unique voice? If our own voices grow out of the past and from traditions firmly rooted in the power of language, our goal is to discover--to see what's out there, both as writers and readers--as we examine the literary voices and lineages from which we have grown. We'll do this by writing our own poems and by exploring various forms and schools of poetry and by paying close attention to the way that poetry changes through us. We'll also discuss the act of writing as one of risk-taking and journey, of reinventing traditions in our own tongue, of seeing how nothing ever changes unless we experiment and try something different. Among the poets we'll look at closely are Whitman, H.D., Williams, Pound, Stein, Bishop, Hughes, Cullen, Cane, Spicer, Levertov, Brooks, Creeley, Baraka, Whalen, Snyder, O'Hara, Zukofsky, Mayer, Howe, and Ginsberg. A final chapbook-portfolio, consisting of all your written work, is due at the end of the semester.

English 171: Introduction to Classical Rhetoric
Class ID# 18116
Professor John Killoran
Tuesdays 6:00 to 8:30 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.

This course is designed not only for English majors but also for students from disciplines such as Political Science, Journalism, Education, and Media Arts who seek to develop their skills as critical readers and persuasive writers. The course will satisfy a requirement in the English Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an English elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

Classical rhetoric is among the longest enduring courses in western education. It has been at the core of students' learning since a schematized rhetoric first emerged in ancient Greek oratorical practice and was articulated in Aristotle's teaching and further developed by such famous orators as Cicero. In ancient times, rhetoric played a key role in the birth of our traditions of democratic politics, law, and formal education. In modern times, classical rhetoric has been revived as the foundation for students' effective writing, and as a framework for analyzing persuasive discourse.

In this course, students will learn the principles of classical rhetoric and apply them to analyze contemporary discourse in politics, law, the media, and society. As the Fall 2008 semester coincides with one of the most interesting federal election campaigns of modern times, we will be analyzing in particular the political rhetoric leading up to the November vote.

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 173: Writing in the Community
Class ID# 15525
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Mondays, 6:00 to 8:30 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.

Writing in the Community is designed to acquaint you with writing about, in, and for communities-neighborhoods, schools, work-places, museums, organizations, and other social spaces. Through course readings, library research, fieldwork, and oral history interviews, we will learn how communities are formed, develop, thrive, decay, and sometimes "come back." We will first examine their histories, everyday practices, and rules, asking how boundaries are drawn, policy decisions made, and individuals classified as insiders or outsiders. Second, we will go into communities to record visual and verbal impressions of communities and re-present them to audiences within and outside their borders. And third, we will write for a community--a flier, brochure, proposal, report, or other type of document. In addition to encouraging the creation of multimodal digital and print essays, the class will pilot a Brooklyn Wiki based on your research projects.

Offered in the new Writing and Rhetoric concentration, English 173 is an elective for students across the disciplines as well as in English who are interested in public and professional writing. Explore social spaces ranging from the classroom to political forums and local communities. Experience field work as well as a workshop format for getting constructive feedback on your writing. Projects range from oral history to neighborhood studies and public writing in, for, and about communities. Readings tentatively include Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloane's Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America; Harvey Wang's New York; Robert Batista's novel, Brooklyn Story; Paul Kutsche's Field Ethnography; and excerpts from Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson's The Oral History Reader. The emphasis of the class, however, is on your writing, which will be discussed at least twice in workshop during the semester. You will be required to complete three 4-6-page essays, one of which will be a Wiki entry, and a 3-5 page reflective essay.

English 259: Fiction's Fiction: The Art of Retooling Classics of British Literature
Class ID# 18117
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Thursdays 6:00 to 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.

This course looks at classics of British literature from the 18th and 19th centuries through the lens of contemporary fictional re-workings. What happens when texts and their authors from the past are suddenly catapulted into the era of contemporary fiction? What about past stories makes them so attractive that they are being re-tooled today? We will read three successful novels published just a year ago together with the texts and authors that originally inspired them. While Tracy Chevalier has rendered a fictional biography of William Blake in her book Burning Bright (2007), Sophie Gee's The Scandal of the Season (2007) dramatizes the affair between two characters in Alexander Pope's mock epic "The Rape of the Lock," and Lloyd Jones's novel Mr. Pip (2007) is based on the idea that reading Charles Dickens's Great Expectations under special circumstances can be a life-transforming event. These pairings set up a fascinating basis for comparisons between original and derivate, between narrative and meta-narrative, between past and present. Each of these juxtapositions will give rise to discussions about literary history, literary transmission, and intertextuality. This course will also expand our notion of British literature in interesting ways: Lloyd Jones hails from New Zealand, Sophie Gee grew up in another part of "Down-Under," i.e. Australia, and Tracy Chevalier is a Swiss-American expatriate living in England. If you want to learn about classics of literature but also enjoy reading today's most vibrant authors, this elective is for you!