Graduate Courses, Spring 2016

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Updated 14 October 2015.

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ENG 502 Writers on Writing: A Writers Studio & Workshop (Course ID# 4370)

Professor John High

Wednesdays 6:30-9 PM

This course description updated 14 October 2015.

The course will offer readings and discussions with prominent fiction writers and poets as well as translators, editors, essayists, and writers of creative non-fiction. Most of our visiting writers work in multiple genres and forms. Riffing off the discussions, writings and ideas of our guests, you will have the option of writing postcard stories, pocket poems, epistles, flash fictions, dream and spirit or fictional autobiographies for our workshops.

You’ll need to carry a pocketful of postcards with you on the train, a small notebook (pocket size) in order to write tales, nightmares, dreams, and epistles as they happen, or as you witness them, in the city of New York. Piercing, immediate and in the moment, you will be translating material as it arises in your mind and in the world around you, on the spot.

The guest writers will meet with us weekly during the course of the semester to discuss and read from their work as well as to hear yours.  The purpose is to give us a chance to interact with and question a diverse range of writers about their techniques and ways of thinking as artists.  Students will be asked to reflect on and consider their own writing process: How do you think as a writer? How do these writers expand your ways of thinking and experimenting as a writer? The goal is to explore and learn—in this case, first-hand—from other writers and their books in order to better inform our sense of what it means to be a writer in the 21^st Century, which is rapidly moving beyond the frequent stereotypes, limitations and prejudices of the past. Humanity's attempt to understand itself throughout the ages has often resulted in a fringe of writing engaged in prophecy, vision, verbal experimentation, and meditative texts that express the changes in the world, and in this studio environment, you will do the same. In your own writing quest, your discoveries may tread between the realms of journey, dream, fictional autobiography, and the long poem.

The class will be the equivalent of a writers studio (think jam session in words) and will include playing out dreams, secrets, journals, memories, observations, overheard conversations, magazine cut-ups, postcard stories, pocket size poems, family tales, and random fragments of language, as well as episodes from childhood up through the present—no censorship—a safe zone to blow it out how it needs to be heard.

You will read at least one book by each visiting writer. (Workshops will determine who shares work with the guests, all included.) Roughly half the meeting times will be devoted to your own work.

The writers...

Jennifer K Dick, originally from Iowa, resides in France where she is a Maître de Conférences at the Université de Haute Alsace. She is the author of CIRCUITS (Corrupt, 2013), ENCLOSURES (BlazeVox eBook, 2007), FLUORESCENCE (University of GA Press, 2004), and 4 chapbooks: CONVERSION (Estepa editions, Paris, 2013) including art by Kate Van Houten, BETWIXT (Corrupt, 2012), Tracery (Dusie, 2012) and Retina/Rétine (Estepa, 2005). She is currently at work on a large prose poem project about the CERN and recently completed the manuscripts, Lilith: A Novel in Fragments and the booklength prose poem collaboration Orph/Eury. Jennifer also translates French poets, curates the Ivy Writers reading series in Paris and the Ecrire l’Art mini-residency for French authors at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. She is a poetry editor for VERSAL out of Amsterdam, writes book reviews for various places and a poetics column for Tears in the Fence (UK). She holds a BA, MFA, DEA and PhD. http://jenniferkdick.blogspot.fr/

Norman Fischer is a poet, writer, and Zen Buddhist priest.  A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Norman began publishing poetry in the late 1970’s as part of a San Francisco Bay Area group of experimental writers.  His recent poetry books include Conflict (Chax 2012), The Strugglers (Singing Horse 2013), Escape This Crazy Life of Tears: Japan 2010 (Tinfish Press 2014), and Magnolias All At Once (Singing Horse, 2015) His translation of the Hebrew psalms, Opening to You, was published by Viking Compass in 2002.   His most recent prose work is Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong (Shambhala, 2013). Forthcoming (December, 2015) from the University of Alabama Press is Experience: Essays on Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion.  A former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, he is the founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation. www.everydayzen.org

Ed Foster is the author of more than two dozen books. His new work, a long poem entitled Sowing the Wind: Requiem, will be published next year. The founding editor of Talisman House, Publishers and the editor of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, he is a professor of American Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir titled What Isn’t There (Nation/Basic Books) and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons (Graywolf). A former distinguished

writer-in-residence at the LIU Brooklyn Creative Writing MFA Program, she teaches fiction at NYU and Sarah Lawrence, and is on the faculty of Long Island University’s Global Program. She lives in downtown Manhattan and in Saugerties, New York.

Michelle Murphy is a fresh transplant from being a long-time San Franciscan to a new resident of Reno, Nevada. She is the author of the chapbook 'The Tongue in its Shelf' (Standing Stones Press) and full-length collection Jackknife & Light, (Avec Books) which was shortlisted for the National Poetry Series as well as the PEN West Literary Award. Poems have appeared in numerous online and in print publications, including Zen Monster, ZYZZYVA, Five Fingers Review, and forthcoming in VERSE Magazine as a finalist in the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She has worked in collaboration with composer Erling Wold, choreographer Cid Pearlman’s dance company Nesting Dolls, and singer Laurie Amat in performances at ODC in San Francisco. Michsf.blogspot.com

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and collagist.  He is the author of ten volumes of poems of which the most recent are If Only The Night, Ijele, and Nine East.  His writings have been translated into German, Finnish, Dutch, Romanian, Spanish, and Italian. A graduate of LIU Brooklyn’s MFA Creative Writing Program, he presently lives in New York City and teaches at Queens College.

Poet, essayist, and translator of Turkish poetry, Murat Nemet-Nejat's publications include his most recent volume of poetry, The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman Books, 2011), his translation of Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat Black and The Orthodoxies (Green Integer, 2015), Seyhan Erozçelik’s Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman Books, 2010), and as editor, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman Books, 2004).  As essayist, he has published The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer, 2003) and forthcoming in 2016, "Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent,' Twenty Years Afterwards" and "Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda" will appear in the collections Languages of Modern Jewish Culture: Comparative Perspectives and Letters For Olson University of Michigan Press and Spuyten Duyvil, respectively).  He is presently working on things, real or unreal, objects, living or unliving (part V of his seven-part poem The Structure of Escape) and on the translations of a selection of poems by the Turkish poet, Sami Baydar.

Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016). Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil, and New York. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected by Patricia Smith for the 2011 National Poetry Series and The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Slate, The Paris Review, Guernica, Story Quarterly, and Poetry. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, the Poetry Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. She’s also translated several works from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University and will be the Distinguished Visiting Writer at LIU in Fall 2016. http://www.idranovey.com/

ENG 519 Editing (Course ID# 5974)

Professor Michael Bokor

Mondays 6:30-9 PM

Cancelled.

This course teaches students the theory, practice, and evaluation of editing skills as well as orientation to careers and professional concerns in academic and non-academic writing. Effective editing is a demanding task that requires a comprehensive command of language and communication skills, exacting attention to detail, good interpersonal skills, and the discipline to get work done on schedule. The course, therefore, includes a style/grammar review and emphasizes hands-on editing activities. Students will learn how to critically edit documents and graphics to suit the needs of specific audiences. They will also learn how to make good editorial decisions as well as develop a better understanding of the legal and ethical issues that surround written communication. The major assignment for the course is an extended editing project that students can later use as a portfolio piece in the job-search process.

ENG 520 Nonfiction Writing Workshop (Course ID# 5975)
Professor Deborah Mutnick

Tuesdays 4-6:30 PM

Drawing on disciplines from literary and urban studies to ethnography and history, students in English 520 will develop their own projects—either one longer piece or several shorter ones—totaling 30-50 pages.  Emphasis will be placed on the interrelationship of form and content, place and history, in reading and writing situated life stories. The course is intended to provide writers with a variety of approaches to nonfiction writing, such as the use of autobiography to anchor criticism, ethnography as a method for descriptive and narrative writing, and fictional techniques like dialogue and point of view to write about real places, people, and events. It will also raise theoretical questions such as what the personal essay tells us about larger social and historical issues. What are the literary, ethical, and rhetorical characteristics of the “situated essay”? What are its politics? And what are its analytical and critical capacities?

All work will be peer reviewed and we will read personal essays and narratives by a wide range of writers, tentatively including, among others, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, John McPhee, Susan Griffin, Jamaica Kincaid, Vivian Gornick, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, bell hooks, Suketu Mehta, Richard Rodriguez, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

ENG 523 Fiction Writing Workshop (Course ID# 4460)

Professor Jessica Hagedorn

Wednesdays 4-6:30 PM

(MFA only)

In this workshop, we will examine the artistry, daring, narrative strategies and craft elements of a wide range of terrific writers including Ai, Julio Cortazar, Aleksandar Hemon, Samuel Beckett, Monique Truong, and J.M. Coetzee. Students will compose their own stories, which will be critiqued and revised over the semester.

ENG 524 Poetry Writing Workshop (Course ID# 4133)

Professor Lewis Warsh

Tuesdays 6:30-9 PM

“Sun” and “shadow” are states of mind and also emotional states--the external world of the sun (what we see) and the interior world lost in shadow (what we’re feeling). One goal of poetry is to transcribe the shifts from one state to another and also recreate the experience of what it feels like to be in the sun and in the shadow simultaneously. 

We will use this workshop to expand the range of what’s possible as poets and will begin by exploring the traditions and various forms of poetry (among them the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle). One primary concern is the way poetry changes through time (in the same way painting and music change) and how poetry reflects the time in which it is written. We will also discuss the notion of invention, of taking risks, moving forward into our own place and time, and with our own language, and how writing is an act of risk-taking i.e. without taking risks nothing ever changes.  Among the poets we’ll look at closely are Louis Zukofsky, Laura Riding, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Ted Berrigan, Sonia Sanchez, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Renee Gladman, Monica de la Torre,   Bernadette Mayer, Fred Moten, Alice Notley, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg. 

English 579 Seminar in Special Studies: James Joyce’s Ulysses (Course ID# 5976)

Professor Maria McGarrity

Thursdays 6:30-9 PM

During this term, we will devote ourselves to the study of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  We will examine Joyce’s literary inheritance and influence, specifically invoking the enduring myth of the wanderer in the alienated modern metropolis, as we determine how Joyce exploded conventional novelistic boundaries and reshaped the expectations of the common reader.  Joyce’s Ulysses has had a profound impact on Irish, Modern, and World literature.  We won’t subscribe to one model of the novel or a singular conceptual paradigm to organize the book but rather will attend to critical and theoretical issues as they become relevant. Through the close reading of the novel and the highlighting of specific passages, we will follow Bloom, Stephen, and Molly through their Dublin wanderings and discern why this novel continues to capture the imagination.

Objective:  to read Joyce’s Ulysses and show mastery of the subject through a short close reading paper and a long research essay. 

Required Texts

• Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book: a Guide to Ulysses
• Gifford and Seidman, Allusions in Ulysses
• Joyce, Ulysses: the Corrected Text, Gabler et al, eds. This edition of Ulysses is required.  No other editions are acceptable.  We will talk about the pirated history of the text, some that had pornographic elements included.  Needless to say, we will use the scholarly text with line numbers.

ENG 700 Practicum in the Teaching of Composition (Course ID# 3959)

Professor John Killoran

Thursdays 4-6:30 PM

Students of the Practicum learn to teach composition—specifically in LIU-Brooklyn’s Writing Program and more generally at other colleges and universities. As the title “practicum” implies, the course focuses on teaching practices, emphasizing how they are informed by major composition theories, research, scholarship, policy statements, and the collective wisdom of experienced composition faculty.

The course welcomes students who can share their insights and experiences reading, writing, learning, tutoring, and/or teaching in any of English’s various specialties: composition and rhetoric, literature, creative writing, professional writing, and so forth. Through readings, class discussion, classroom activities, and a major course project, students will develop an informed perspective on—and some experience with—

  *   constructing a syllabus and course schedule;
  *   selecting college-level readings;
  *   teaching advanced reading skills and fostering critical thinking;
  *   designing and scaffolding writing assignments;
  *   promoting students’ composing, revising, and editing processes;
  *   teaching discovery, organization, style, and usage;
  *   teaching research-based writing skills;
  *   developing lesson plans;
  *   managing classrooms;
  *   marking and evaluating student drafts;
  *   accommodating diversity in students’ languages, identities, and abilities;
  *   using new media technology pedagogically.

Students will leave the course with a portfolio oriented to teaching their own college-level composition course, including the following documents:

  *   employment / cover letter,
  *   sample syllabus,
  *   sample writing assignment,
  *   teaching philosophy and/or explication of the syllabus,
  *   curriculum vitae.

English 700 is a prerequisite to being hired as a Teaching Fellow in LIU-Brooklyn’s Writing Program. Interested students will be interviewed in April.