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It's time to register
for Spring 2015!
These descriptions are
provided by the instructors teaching the courses.
For more information,
write to them directly.
ENG 502 Writers on Writing (Course ID# 4664)
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays 6:30-9
This course is open ONLY to students in the Creative Writing MFA Program.
The course will offer readings and discussions with prominent fiction writers and poets. 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 students' 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 2015.
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 Renee Gladman, Eugene Lin, Anne Waldman, Ben Lerner,
Tyrone Williams, Wang Ping, Bill Berkson and Barbara Henning.
RENEE GLADMAN is the
author of six works of prose, most recently a trilogy of short novels, Event
Factory, The Ravickians and Ana Patova Crosses A Bridge. (Dorothy,
2010, 2011, 2013).) Her work occupies the interstices of fiction and poetry,
and pushes toward cities, architecture, and the confusion of the everyday.
Since 2005, she has edited and published Leon Works, a press for experimental
prose and other thought projects. A new novel, Morelia, and a
collection of essay-fictions, Calamities, are forthcoming in 2015.
A 2014-15 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she
lives in Providence, RI.
EUGENE LIM is the author
of the novels Fog & Car (2008, Ellipsis Press) and The
Strangers (2013, Black Square Editions). His writing has appeared in Fence,
The Denver Quarterly, Jacket2, EXPLORINGfictions, The Brooklyn Rail and
elsewhere. He is founder and editor of Ellipsis Press.
ANNE WALDMAN is a
poet, performer, professor, editor, curator and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg
of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University where she has worked
for 37 years. Author of more than 40 publications of poetry, her most
recent books include Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), The Iovis
Trilogy (Coffee House Press 2011), Soldatesque/Soldiering (Blaze [Vox]
2012) and the forthcoming Gossamurmur (Penguin
Poets 2013). She has worked extensively with musician Ambrose Bye and their
most recent CD is The Milk of Universal Kindness
(Fast Speaking Music 2011). She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial
Award for Poetry and currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
BEN LERNER is the author of three books of poetry: The
Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006),
and Mean Free Path (2010), all published by Copper Canyon
Press. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry,
a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, a Howard Foundation Fellow,
and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2011 he became the first American to win
the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. His first
novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House, 2011)
won The Believer Book Award and was named a best
book of the year by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston
Globe, The Guardian, and The New Statesman, among other
publications. His second novel, 10:04, will be published
by Faber/FSG this fall. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn.
TYRONE WILLIAMS
teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is
the author of five books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books,
2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Hero
Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009), Adventures
of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and Howell (Atelos
Books, 2011). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including a prose
eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/
WANG PING was born in
China and came to the USA in 1985. Her publications include American
Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel,
1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic
Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories,
2007), All Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze (forthcoming
2012), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999),
an anthology she edited and co-translated, was published by Hanging Loose. Flash
Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translation with Ron Padgett, was
published in 2010 from Zephyr. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000,
University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in
the Humanities. A paperback edition was published by Random House in 2002. The
Last Communist Virgin won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award and Asian
American Studies Award. She is the recipient of awards from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York
State Council of the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Lannan
Foundation, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is the founder and director
of the Kinship of Rivers project, a five-year project that builds a sense of
kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers
through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food.
BILL BERKSON was born and grew up in New York and has lived in
Northern California since the early 1970s. He is Professor Emeritus at the San
Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature from 1984
to 2008. His most recent books include: Portrait and Dream: New &
Selected Poems; BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with
Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Snippets; Not an Exit, with
drawings by Léonie Guyer; and Repeat After Me, with
watercolors by John Zurier; a new collection of his art writings, For
the Ordinary Artist; and Parties du corps, a selection of
his poetry in French translation. He is working on a set of memoirs entitled Since
When. A new book of poems, Expect Delays, was published by
Coffee House Press in 2014.
BARBARA HENNING is the author of three novels and nine books
of poetry, her most recent collections of poetry and prose, A Swift
Passage (Quale Press 2013) and Cities and Memory (Chax
Press 2010). Born in Detroit, she has lived in New York City since 1983,As a
long-time yoga practitioner, she brings this knowledge and discipline to her
writing and her teaching at Naropa University, writers.com and
Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is professor emerita.
ENG 523 Fiction Writing
Workshop (Course ID# 4771)
The Narrative Voice
Professor Jessica
Hagedorn
Wednesdays 4-6:30
This course is open ONLY
to students in the Creative Writing MFA Program.
What do we mean by a
distinct narrative voice? How do we create characters that are memorable,
complex, and not necessarily likeable? How do we develop an ear for the music
and poetry of ordinary speech? In this workshop, we will examine the
artistry, narrative strategies and craft elements of a wide range of writers
working in different genres. Participants will compose their own stories, which
will be discussed in class and revised over the semester.
Required Texts:
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Days Of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
White Girls by Hilton Als
Blasted by Sarah Kane
Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway
The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
ENG 524 Poetry Writing Workshop (Course ID# 4395)
Crossgenre to
Transgressive
Professor John High
Wednesdays 6:30-9
This course is open ONLY
to students in the Creative Writing MFA Program.
The ability of writers to imagine
what is not the self, to
familiarize
the strange and mystify
the familiar,
is the test of their power. —Toni Morrison
is the test of their power. —Toni Morrison
In Crossgenre to
Transgressive we’ll explore violations of conventional forms in order
to more intimately reveal & manifest the writing & art we most need to
express. Context as text, form as emptiness. Is a poem that requires visuals
less a poem (Blake / Apollinaire), a story or novel that requires poetry less a
story (Howe / Phillips / Davis)? Is there such a thing as a poetic
autobiography (Cha / lê
/ Kingston)? Can a narrative be
told in epistolary exchange (Dostoevsky / Stoker)? Can letters be poems (Rilke
/ Mayer / Novey)? Can multimedia, hypertext, or comic book devices express a
book (Spiegelman / Jackson / Lau)? Are parables, koans and fables viable as
technique in the work of 21st century writers (Borges / Marquez
/ Matthiessen?)? Can past myths and fairy tales be retold (Carson / Coover)?
Are works that transgress the border between prose and prose poetry acceptable
(Toomer / Paz / Maso)? Are poems written as fictional news in the university
recognizable as verse (Bolaño / Creeley)? Rupture is there to expose the cracks in
imagination. On a weekly basis we’ll experiment with letters, postcard stories,
pocket prose poems, mobile text flash fictions, short films written for paper,
contemplative prayers, epistolary verse, episodes & fragments, re-imagined
instruction manuals, fictional autobiographies, poetic & spiritual memoirs,
& any other ‘form’ that transgresses & helps expand & realize the
book you are writing. The goal will be to create a chapbook of new writings and
a critical “artistic statement” that will be applicable to your thesis in
whatever shape that eventually requests of each writer.
ENG 527 Topics in Professional Writing: Writing and Style (Course ID# 5450)
Professor Michael Bokor
Mondays 4-6:30
This course was cancelled due to under-enrollment.
This course was cancelled due to under-enrollment.
You may be familiar with
the rhetorical concept of “style” and even have your own “style” of writing. A
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, this course explores the
cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives of “style” to help you
understand fully the relationship between language, culture, and personality
and how these forces converge to define and shape the writer’s projection of
individuality (commonly perceived as “style.”
Some of the pertinent
questions to consider include:
Is style “innocent” or
is it the reflection of the personality, taste, and experience of the writer of
the text or the culture of the writer’s society? Is it true that style is the
writer in disguise?
Does style exist on its
own, independent of the writer? Before the work, in the work, or outside it?
What shapes style? Is it
the writer’s purpose and attitude to the audience?
Through various assignments, you will interrogate the functions of style and learn the numerous ways in which writers adapt their expressions (texts) to their purposes. By the end of the semester, you should:
- Develop a high degree of clarity, fluency, and
appropriateness in your writing;
- Learn how to appreciate style within the context of
genre-specific discourses; and
- Use knowledge on style to improve your own writing.
This course is
particularly good for students seeking opportunities to improve their
rhetorical skills for effective academic, creative, and professional writing.
ENG 620 Theories of Rhetoric & Teaching Writing (Class ID# 5905)
Professor Patricia Stephens
Thursdays 4-6:30
We will begin the
semester by focusing on a few key questions: How (and by whom) has
rhetoric been defined over time? How and why have these definitions
changed and evolved? How do we, in this class, define
rhetoric? What role does rhetoric play in the teaching of reading
and writing? In what ways is rhetoric useful, both as a tool and as
a discipline of study? Our readings in the beginning of the course –
from the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, and Quintillian to the feminist, medieval
works of Christine de Pizan -- will lay the foundation for our examination of
rhetorical trends from the 19th Century to the present. Readings
will include but not be limited to 19th Century rhetoricians
like Blair, Campbell, Grimké, and Douglass as well as texts by contemporary and
postmodern rhetoricians such as Burke, Toulmin, Foucault, Cixous, Gates,
Anzaldua, and others. Throughout, we will study influential
teachers of Rhetoric and Writing, noting how rhetorical theories informed
teaching practices at various universities, including (but not limited to)
Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wiley College (an historically Black college in
Marshall, TX), and others.
ENG 636 Seminar in Literary Periods & Movements
Topic: Harlem
Renaissance Fiction (Course ID# 5904)
Professor Louis
Parascandola
Mondays 6:30-9
This course will examine the novels and short fiction of the leading as well as lesser writers of the Harlem Renaissance, arguably the greatest period in African American literature. We will read the novels Quicksand by Nella Larsen, Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Short stories by such authors as Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Eric Walrond, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, and Richard Bruce Nugent will also be discussed. We will contextualize the works by discussing essays by, among others, W.E.B. Dubois, Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. Assignments will include one presentation in class, a couple of shorter essays, and one longer research paper. It is possible to substitute a lesson plan on one or two of the works or a creative piece influenced by the writings in the course.
ENG 700 Practicum: Teaching Composition (Course ID# 4203)
Professor Donald McCrary
Tuesdays 4-6:30
The course will prepare students to teach in the LIU/Brooklyn Writing Program. The course readings, discussions, exercises, and projects will serve to illuminate the theories and practices of teaching writing. The course will examine important teaching of writing issues such as constructing course syllabi, creating integrated reading and writing assignments, promoting process writing, responding to student papers, using technology, managing student behavior, and contemplating the linguistic needs and abilities of a multicultural student population.
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