Undergraduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2003

SUMMER 2003

English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday

1:00 to 2:50 pm

In this advanced workshop in expository writing, students will expand their facility with rhetoric by reading, analyzing, and writing about a diverse field of critical works such as scholarly essays, personal narratives, sermons, and magazine articles. Utilizing such rhetorical strategies and forms revealed through focused analysis of professional writings, students will write several essays of their own, including personal narrative and critical analysis. Students will read creative or critical works by authors such as Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Jane Tompkins, Pierre Bourdieu, Marilyn Cooper, and Hinton Als.

English 232: African Women Writers
Professor Huma Ibrahim
Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, 1:00 to 2:50 pm

This course is going to examine several prominent African women writers of this century: Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Tsitsi Dangeremba, Assia Dejebbar, Nawal el Saadawi, and Ama Ata Aidoo. These writers have contributed definitively to the more modern postcolonial times. Their characters, mainly female, grapple with issues of nationality, gender, and sexuality in an increasingly turbulent socio-political milieu while continuing a dialogue with their male counterparts.

In this course we will read the body of selected works from the writings of the abovementioned writers doing exposition of the texts and stipulating the struggle of African feminists, a title that critics have given to all these writers. In addition, we will examine each writer's relationship to the English language which started as the colonial's language and later became their own, often through violent confrontation.

This course is for people who are really interested in the development of African writing and the particular contribution of women in this field.

We will be doing close readings and analysis of the texts and exposition. We will often look at the history and politics of this region as well and see how the literature contributed or detracted from an understanding of postcolonial issues such as national boundaries and culture and identities.

The model we will follow in the class is one of collaborative discussion. Occasionally I shall give lectures, but for the most part, we will have discussion groups.

FALL 2003

English 101: Introduction to English Studies
Professor Patricia Stephens
Wednesdays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm 

What does one need to know to be an English major or minor? What do English majors and minors study and learn? What kinds of careers and educational opportunities await those who graduate with a degree in English? This course is designed to familiarize students with the diversity and scope of English studies and to introduce students to contemporary debates concerning such issues as the connection between reading and writing, the relationship among different interpretive/critical strategies, and the nature and politics of the literary canon. In this course, we will 1) learn about the rise of English as a discipline and how the profession of English has changed over time; 2) analyze the formation and politics of the literary canon; 3) engage in close readings of literary texts; and 4) examine and experiment with numerous methods of literary criticism and analysis. This course will be conducted as a seminar, and students will be expected to participate in and take responsibility for class discussions. We will read selections from David Richter’s Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Literaturealongside numerous literary texts (poetry, fiction, and drama selections TBA).

English 104 (section 1): Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:30 to 2:45 pm

The goal of the workshop is to expand on 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. Work by Andre Breton, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis and Allen Ginsberg will be discussed in class and used as models, but much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing our own work.

English 104 (section 2): Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays, 6:00 to 8:00 pm

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short-short fiction, using various forms and approaches. A writer’s notebook will be an ongoing project from which students will gather material for their assignments. Part of each class period will be devoted to reading poems and stories by published authors. The rest of the class period will be a workshop where students learn how to critique their work. A final portfolio will include an evaluation of the student’s learning along with revised poems and stories. Books for class will include The Handbook of Poetic Forms and an anthology of short-short fiction.

English 128: Gender and Sexuality in Early British Literature
Professor Sealy Gilles
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm

This course explores the formation of masculine and feminine identities in the literature of the British Isles during the middle ages and the early modern period. Medieval and Renaissance romances, folk tales, love lyrics, and plays have shaped our ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman and our attitudes towards sexuality. The course examines those notions about who we are and how we relate to others as they are embodied in texts from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. These texts examine familial, hierarchical, and friendship bonds between men and women, as well as the nature of marriage and parenthood. The nature of heroism, in men and women, and of the beloved will be particular topics of concern.

English 158: Literature of the U.S. I
Professor Patrick Horrigan
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:30 to 2:45 pm

The course will survey the literature of the early republic, from the founding of the American colonies in the seventeenth century, through the American Revolution in the late eighteenth-century, and up to the period of industrialization and the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. We will examine a variety of texts, both “classic” and the less well known, including poetry, sermons, captivity narratives, fiction, political philosophy, feminist manifestos, and slave narratives. We will also read selections of modern and contemporary literary criticism that shed light on the primary, literary texts. Students will give in-class presentations and write formal and informal essays.

English 229: New York City Literature
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 12:00 to 1:15 pm

This course focuses on the literature of New York City—how this quintessential urban experience has inspired writers for centuries and, conversely, how literature has “written” the city itself. Along with novels, essays, short fiction, and poetry, students will read some urban theory and history. Throughout the semester, we will “read” the city through historical depictions of it and compare those to contemporary scenes of writing such as the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the 92^nd Street Y.

Students will keep an in-depth journal, write critical essays, and complete a field project in which they, too, write about some aspect of urban life. Project sites could range from museums and poetry cafés to schools, non-profits, and neighborhoods. A tentative reading list includes: Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, E.B. White, E.L. Doctorow, Paule Marshall, Grace Paley, Jamaica Kincaid, Vivian Gornick, Edwidge Danticat, David Harvey, and Jane Jacobs.

English 231: Twice-Told Tales
Professor Maria McGarrity
Tuesdays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm

In this course, we will examine the enduring tales of fiction that writers have revisited repeatedly. We will read for both the appreciation of the aesthetic completeness of each individual work while also investigating the endurance, appeal, and variety of manifestations of each tale. We will examine how writers conceptualize narrative differently while attending to and responding to the concerns of their predecessors. We will analyze the creative process, the notion of inspiration, and investigate the conceptualization of new fiction that responds to old. We will discuss how these new fictions operate as both homage and critique.

Our reading list will include works from Europe, the Caribbean, and the U.S. We will juxtapose Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Murdoch’s The Black Prince, Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea,  Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Conde’s I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Cunningham’s The Hours, and finally, examine selections of Joyce’sUlysses and Walcott’s Omeros.

Requirements: A mid-term exam, final exam, a 5-7 page creative re-imagination of a recurring literary tale, and a final 10 page research paper on an approved topic related to the course.

English 301: Foundations of Rhetoric
Professor Donald McCrary
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:00 to 4:15 pm

This survey course will examine major theories of rhetoric from the classical to the postmodern era, from the Sophists to the deconstructionists and beyond. The course will interrogate rhetoric from a historical, cultural and political perspective, exploring ideas such as the relationship between rhetoric and political power, the use of rhetoric as a humanizing and liberating force, and rhetoric as a tool of capitalist consumerism. The course will discuss illuminating rhetorical theories, including the theories of rhetoricians such as Gorgias, Plato, John Locke, Maria W. Stewart, Frederick Douglass, I.A. Richards, Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous, and Stanley Fish.

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2003

SUMMER 2003

English 624: Henry James--The American in Europe
Professor Howard Silverstein
Tuesday/Thursday, 4:00 to 6:15 pm

This is an examination of the international theme in James's fiction. The course will focus on three seminal novels dealing with this theme: The American, Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl. These novels will also be used to examine the advance in James's craft of fiction as well as their position as forerunners of the modern novel.

Requirements will include oral presentations and a ten page essay on topics to be announced.

FALL 2003

English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

In this course, we will trace the use of the first person pronoun "I" in American poetry, from Whitman to the present, and address the questions of truth-telling and disguise. Does writing personal poetry have a purpose and does it necessitate new forms? We'll discuss some of these forms and create our own, looking closely at recent models: Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Berrigan. We'll also look at texts of personal writing by Lyn Hejinian and Marguerite Duras that blur the boundaries between poetry and prose. As much time as possible will be spent reading and discussing your work.

English 529: Seminar in Creative Writing: Visiting Writers Series

Students register for 529 and attend three successive sections.

Section One:  Noir Sensibility
Charlotte Carter   
Wednesdays, 3:30 to 6:00 pm
9/1 to 10/1

The workshop will concentrate on writing with a noir sensibility, especially crime and mystery fiction. Expect there to be an emphasis on plotting—outlining, developing back stories, looking at character as a springboard for plot. Who is the detective figure? What are the advantages and limitations of first person ("I") narrative in crime fiction? What is evil? How interesting can a criminal be? How can genre writing also look at or illuminate history, societal ills, human nature itself? Ideally, participants will have manuscripts in progress that they wish to expand, improve, finish, or rewrite--or at least an idea for development. There will not be a great deal of in-class writing. Instead, workshop participants will sometimes be asked to create stories using assigned casts of characters or dramatic situations. While none of this implies that narratives must be traditional (linear), one purpose of the class is to help the writer achieve cohesiveness and accessibility.

Charlotte Carter is the author of four novels, Walking Bones; and three novels in the critically acclaimed Nanette Hayes series (Rhode Island Red, Coq au Vin, and Drumsticks), featuring a young black woman musician and amateur sleuth. Published by Warner Books/Mysterious Press in the U.S. and by Serpent’s Tail in England, her books appear in translation in France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Portugal. In Summer 2003, Random House will publish the first entry in a new crime series by Carter, taking place in the late 1960s, the "Cook County" series. Carter is a long time fan of the mystery genre and lists among the writers she admires: Chester Himes, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, and Leigh Brackett. She is also indebted as a writer to the "black bohemians" such as LeRoi Jones, Nettie Jones, and Charles Wright, along with literary lights such as Henry Greene, Paul Bowles, Robert Stone, and Truman Capote. Carter was born in the Midwest. She has also lived in other parts of the world--North Africa, France, and Canada--but she has lived most of her life as a New Yorker.

Section Two:  Improvisational Writing—The Illusion of Narrative
John High
Wednesdays, 3:30 to 6:00 pm
10/15 to 11/5

During these four weeks we will explore improvisational techniques of writing in order to scrape beneath the veneer of fictional form and to more fully engage the texts that matter in our lives and stories. What is the illusion of form, and how do characters via our self-imaginings masquerade behind the screens of fiction? How do techniques of rupture and interruption expose a deeper awareness of craft and content? We will spend a week working with automatic writing, detective scripts and fictional autobiographies, a week experimenting with exercises in which we play with diaries and epistles, and a week in which we explore short-shorts, found artifacts, and postcard stories. From here we will dovetail into the illusion of film as text, writing mini-paper-movies for our "detective potboilers" and emerging characters. Each week will include lecture and discussion, in-class writing games and informal critiquing of our explorations during the month. Andrei Takovsky'sSculpting In Time, John Berger's Ways of Seeing and selected writings of Simone Weil will be among the course readings as well as home viewing of films to be announced. The goal of the intensive workshop includes completing one revised text for a final group reading and party.

John High is the author of six books, including his award-winning trilogy of poetic novels The Desire Notebooks and his recently publish selected writings, Bloodline. He has received four Fullbrights, two NEAs, and writing awards from the Witter Bynner Foundation, Arts International and the Academy of American Poets, among others. A translator of several books of contemporary Russian poetry, he was the chief editor for Crossing Centuries—The New Russian Poetry. He is also the founding and former editor of the Five Fingers Review. He lives in Brooklyn with his daughter.

Section Three:  Fiction Workshop
Richard Hell  
Wednesdays, 3:30 to 6:00 pm
11/19 to 12/3

Good writers love to read books. What writers do you like? If you can explain why you like them you have a chance of being a good writer yourself. Good writing is good thinking. If you "know what you mean but you can't express it" you don't know what you mean. Instead, you could start by describing what it's like to not be able to express something. Once you've earned some confidence in your writing you can figure out what's going on by writing it. Don't worry about "finding your voice." If you know what you believe is good writing, then that's your aim as a writer: to produce some yourself. The rest will take care of itself. To paraphrase Nicholas Ray on filmmaking, the only meaningful aim of fiction is to produce something that heightens the reader's sense of being. The rest is just sociology and cultural chatter.

Be prepared to bring in a photocopy of a page or two of fiction you like. Exercises will include: writing fiction derived from the events of a given day of yours; rendering as fiction an incident from the life of Michael Jackson (or other widely reported event in a well-known person's life); and rewriting ("translating") a piece of existing fiction.

Richard Hell's first full length novel, Go Now, is an account set in l980 of a burned out junkie punk driving across America with a former girlfriend. It was published in l996 by Scribner and Fourth Estate in Britain. About Go Now, TLS review: "A splenetic journey that delights in changing lanes from one genre to the next without indicating. Hell slews into the oncoming traffic of Hemingway, Henry Miller, and P.J. O'Rourke, but he has sufficient fury to hold his own." The French translation was published by Editions de l'Olivier (Paris) in l999. A collection of mixed genre works, Hot and Cold, was also released in 200l from powerhouse books. Hell became famous in the mid-seventies as one of the originators of the punk movement.  His albums--Blank Generation, Destiny Street, R.I.P., Dim Stars--have often cited as the best of the year or the decade. He has also performed as a leading actor in many underground films.

English 525/Media Arts 600: Writing for Media--Story
Professor Claire Goodman (Media Arts Department, LIU-Brooklyn)
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:50 pm

This cross-listed course is an introduction to the methods and principles of great STORYTELLING in the media. It is the cornerstone course for all forms of story: commercials, sitcoms, movies, experimental shorts, even documentaries and photographic essays. In the first half of the semester, by means of screenings and discussion, students will learn to recognize and analyze basic story elements such as narrative structure, character, setting, plot, design, irony, and comedy. In the second half, in workshop-style classes, students will work on creating their own stories using these elements. Each student will develop their own movie-short screenplay and treatment as a final project. A professional screenwriter will be a guest speaker at one of the classes.

Requirements: access to a computer, purchase of Final Draft writing software, permission of instructor to take the course.

English 624: African-American Drama
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays, 4:10 to 6:00 pm

This course covers the period between 1848 to the present and features texts composed by African American playwrights. We begin with the historical context of the mid-nineteenth century with a special emphasis on the rise of minstrelsy and the construction of William Wells Browns' The Escape (1848). Next we cover black women's arrival on the stage with Pauline Hopkins' Peculiar Sam(1878), and we discuss the emerging black musical and how it helps to divide the public theatrical sphere along racial lines, a phenomenon that hastens the Harlem Renaissance and a burgeoning independent black theater movement, which takes hold securely by the mid-twenties, a period that engenders race plays, historical pageants, folk drama, and experimental abstract works. Accordingly, our early twentieth century unit will feature pieces by W.E.B. DuBois, Angelina Grimke, Marita Bonner, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Eulalie Spence. We conclude that period with Langston Hughes' long-running evocative work Mulatto. Post-war offerings to be studied include those written by Alice Childress, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Charles Fuller, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Anna Deveare Smith. Appropriate critical essays will be supplied, and I plan at least one trip to an area theater. I imagine that students interested in African American literature, those who are themselves playwrights, and those intrigued by American culture at large will welcome the course.

English 641: Literacy and Basic Writing
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

This course aims to situate basic writing instruction on the college level in the broader field of literacy studies. We will address several key questions: What is literacy? What is orality? What social and historical forces account for patterns of literacy and illiteracy? What myths surround literacy? How can educators help promote literacy? What defines a basic writer? What kind of instruction can enable so-called basic writers to become proficient readers and writers? What discussions are currently taking place in the field of basic writing and what implications might they have for institutions like LIU?

The reading list includes works by Walter Ong, Paulo Freire, William Labov, Shirley Brice Heath, James Paul Gee, Mike Rose, Deborah Brandt, Linda Brodkey, Mina Shaughnessy, Min-Zhan Lu, Tom Fox, and Bruce Horner. Writing requirements will include a course journal, a literacy autobiography, and a research paper that may be based on library and/or field research.

English 655:  English Romanticism
Professor Louis Parascandola
Mondays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

This course will discuss poetry and non-fiction prose by the traditional "big six" Romantic writers:  William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  We will also examine some of the women authors who have been gaining increasing critical stature, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Felicia Hemans.  Finally, we will be reading fiction by Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and Thomas Love Peacock (Nightmare Abbey).

English 700: Practicum in Teaching Composition
Professor Patricia Stephens
Tuesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

This course is designed to introduce teachers to the theory and practice of writing instruction in a variety of settings: college composition courses, high school English courses, and writing center tutorials. Intended as both a source of support and a forum for discussion for new teachers as well as teachers with some experience in the classroom, the course will explore the dynamic and often complicated relationship between theory and practice in the teaching of writing. Overall, the course aims to help students expand their repertoire of theoretical and pedagogical knowledge and become more thoughtful and self-reflective teachers. During the first half of the semester, we will concentrate on readings that explore theories and practices appropriate for various levels of teaching writing (college, high school, and one-to-one tutoring). Writing assignments for the course are intended to encourage teachers to respond to issues raised and problems posed both in the readings and in hands-on work with student writers. Students will create writing assignments and syllabi, analyze written responses to student texts, produce a written observation of a classroom teacher or tutor, and create a statement of teaching/tutoring philosophy. In addition to a course book provided by the instructor, other texts may include The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook; Teaching in Progress: Theories, Practices, and Scenarios; In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning; and The Practical Tutor.

English 707: Methods in Research and Criticism
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Wednesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

The aim of this course is to practice theoretically informed ways of reading and to acquire familiarity with literary research methods. Specifically, we will deal with feminist, historicist and postcolonial approaches. Due to the course’s focus on research and criticism, only two primary texts will be studied: The Fountain Overflows (l956) by Rebecca West and Black Mischief (l932) by Evelyn Waugh. The significant ideological, thematic, and formal differences between these two works of 20^th century British fiction will enable us to sharpen our critical discernment. The first few weeks will be spent studying the above-mentioned three critical approaches, followed by close reading and discussion of the two primary texts. At the next stage we will devise a research plan, conduct bibliographical research, assess the available resources, and craft individual semester papers. Every student will give two presentations over the course of the semester.

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2003

English 103
Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Deborah Mutnick  

This course gives students the opportunity to develop, share, and get feedback on their writing in a workshop format. The focus will be on the essay, a genre we will explore from a variety of angles: formal, informal, personal, academic, traditional, and experimental. Through juxtaposing one type of essay with another, students will expand their repertoire of strategies and practice the art of shaping writing for particular occasions, audiences, and purposes. We will study different approaches to nonfiction writing, such as the use of autobiography in critical writing and of literary techniques like dialogue and point of view to write about real places, people, and events. Students will benefit from a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of their work, and constructive criticism.

Readings include essays by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Vivian Gornick, Adrienne Rich, and Annie Dillard. Students will present their writings in weekly workshops at least three times during the semester. Writing requirements include a course journal, three short (4-6) page essays, and one longer (15-20 page) essay or the equivalent. 

English 104
Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short-short fiction, using various forms and approaches. A writer’s notebook will be an ongoing project from which students will gather material for their assignments. Part of each class period will be devoted to reading poems and stories by published authors. The rest of the class period will be a workshop where students learn how to critique their work. A final portfolio will include a review of learning and a self-evaluation, along with revised poems and stories. Books for class will include The Handbook of Poetic Forms, and a collection of short-short fiction.  

English 129
Writing the Empire in 18^th-20^th Century British Literature
Professor Louis Parascandola

This course will focus on literature exemplifying the development and expansion of the British Empire. Major texts include Aphra Behan’s Oroonoko, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. We will also discuss shorter pieces by such authors as Swift, Blake, Coleridge, Tennyson, Arnold, Dickens, and Kipling. In addition, we will examine “colonization in reverse”: responses from people of color who have lived and written in England, including Olaudah Equiano, Louise Bennett, Grace Nichols, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and V.S. Naipaul. 

English 159
American Literature Survey II
Professor Carol Allen

This survey covers American Literature from the second half of the 19^th Century to the present. The course will provide information about the major writers and texts that have contributed to the great, diverse tradition of American Letters. We will chart our discoveries by looking through the lens of representation, asking such questions as:  Who gets to represent the newly unified post-Civil War America?  How do turn-of-the-century and early 20^th century creative artists re-envision America during an age of Western imperialism/expansion/colonialism?  How does literature compete with new technologies that also produce representation (photography, film, television)? What is meant by and what are the politics of “American” modernism and post-modernism?  And, finally, How does literature both document and “undocument” American experience? We may read such writers as Charles Chesnutt, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Richard Wright among others.

English 170
Modern African Drama
Professor Huma Ibrahim 

In this course we will be reading Modern African Drama from various parts of Africa. We will be reading dramatists like Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo and Fatima Dike among others. There might be a section on Soweto drama as well, depending on the availability. What we will try to do in this class is look at this drama in the context of the socio-political milieu out of which it emerges. We will examine the texts and do some close readings. Since this is a literature class we will do some of the things one does in literature classes such as discuss the plot, characters, images and the kind of writing we see in each work. We will also examine the western languages in which these works were written—and the complicated relationships of the writers to this language. For instance, do they do violence to the English Language as it is used in England or do they simply imitate it? Lastly, we will write essays on themes that engage the writers that we are reading, such as the idea of nationalism, identity, gender and the postcolonial condition, which is sometimes manifested in the immigrant experience as well.

English 180
Reading and Writing Autobiography
Professor Patrick Horrigan

This is a course in a popular form of life writing known as “autobiography,” the writing of one’s own life. By studying a diverse selection of autobiographical works ranging from early Christian “confessions” to slave narratives to contemporary video diaries, we will see how various writers and visual artists throughout history have tried to create images of themselves. Works will include Saint Augustine’s Confessions; Michel de Montaigne’s Essays; Olaudah Equiano’s narrative of his life as a slave; Walt Whitman’s journal, Specimen Days; Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son; Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”; James Baldwin’ s “notes of a Native Son”; Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior; Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory; Tom Joslin’s filmSilverlake Life; and Faith Ringgold’s series of quilts entitled Dancing at the Louvre. In addition to reading and writing about the works of published autobiographers, students will have the opportunity to create their own autobiographies. 

English 190
Senior Seminar
Professor Michael Bennett

This course will guide students through the process of writing a long research paper (20-25) pages on a topic of their own choosing. Students will use a range of research resources and write an informal proposal, a formal proposal, a first draft, and a final draft of the paper. During the first half of the course, we will read texts from a variety of genres, including poetry, prose, the novel, drama, and film. We will also read a variety of critical responses to these texts, cultural studies of one or two non-literary texts, and essays on the field of English studies. During the last half of the course, students will lead discussions of their own works-in-progress, read and critique each other’s work, and hand in a final seminar paper.

Required texts:

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 2^nd Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
     2003. (0-312-25686-8)

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. NY: W.W.
     Norton. (0-393-96966-5)  

Hacker, Diana. A Writer’s Reference. 4^th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
     1999. (0-312-17161)

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus
     at Colonus. NY: Viking Penguin, l984.

Graduate Courses, Spring 2003

English 509
Sociolinguistics--The Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary

This course examines the social foundation of language and the linguistic foundation of social life. More specifically, the course explores how language and society intersect to construct and, in many ways, control both individual and group identity. The relationship between language and society has relevance to the teaching of writing in that both teachers and students possess socially constructed knowledge of language that undergirds their understanding of writing competence. The course explores how sociolinguistic constructions such as class, race, gender, academic discourse, and education might impact upon writing performance. The course analyzes sociolinguistic theory and practice, including the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Shirley Brice Heath, Lisa Delpit, David Bartholomae, Claude Steele, and Sandra Lipsitz Bem.

English 522
Academic Writing Workshop
Professor Deborah Mutnick

A new offering in the English Master's Program, this course is an intensive, advanced writing workshop for graduate students (across the disciplines) who wish to develop professional writing skills. Students will write critical essays in response to common course readings as well as professional articles from the disciplines. Conducted as a workshop, the course will be rooted in peer and teacher response to writing projects. Each week, two or three students will submit writing to be workshopped, using critical feedback from the class and the instructor to revise and edit their work. Students will be required to complete five 6-page essays or the equivalent, and will be invited to bring assignments into the workshop from their other classes. Required texts may include Writing in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writers, edited by Kennedy. Kennedy, and Smith, Writing Without Teachers, by Peter Elbow, and On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.

English 523
Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh

This workshop explores both the art and the craft of fiction writing. Frequent writing assignments and exercises will concentrate on the conventions of fiction—description, dialogue, and characterization—as well as more experimental possibilities such as fragmentation and shifting point of view. Focus will be on the ways autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. Among the models we will look at are stories and novels by Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, and James Ellroy. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing student work.

English 529
Topics in Creative Writing (Series of three one-credit courses)

Section One
Brainlingo: Writing The Voice Of the Body
1/23 to 2/20

Edwin Torres

As artists we create our own communication.  How we listen affects how we speak, and how we see our language affects how our voice is heard. Where the senses meet each other is where poetry can begin. This workshop will be an active creative laboratory that will explore how we communicate by exercising the languages inside us. Exercises will be balanced by critiques. This is an active writing workshop for open minds.

Edwin Torres’s introduction to poetry was through The Nuyorican Poets Café and The St. Marks Poetry Project, where he has worked as a workshop leader and curator. His CD Holy Kidcombines poetry with music, sounds and homemade tapes, and was included in the exhibition “The American Century Pt. II” at the Whitney Museum Of American Art. From l993-99, he was a member of the poetry collective, Real Live Poetry (formerly Nuyorican Poets Café Live) with whom he performed and conducted workshops across the United States and overseas. He’s the recipient of a one-year fellowship from The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, as well as The Nuyorican Poets Café Fresh Prize For Poetry. Finally, his media assault has transpired on MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged and The Charlie Rose Show and in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, High Times, and others. In NYC, Torres has performed at many venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café, Dixon Place, The Guggenheim Museum, CBGB’s, Tonic, P.S. 122, WFMU Radio, Lincoln Center, and The Museum Of Modern Art. His books include I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books), and most recently, Please (CD-Rom from Faux Press). Edwin is currently co-editing POeP! an eJournal, and Cities Of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from The United States and Brazil, both from Rattapallax Press. His website is wwsw.brainlingo.com.

Section Two
Twins & Matching Sets
2/27 to 4/3
Barbara Coultas

In this class we will focus on writing works that have companions. By that I mean we will write poetry or prose that splinters off or inspires other projects. We will read work by writers from the early days of The Poetry Project as well as innovative work by younger writers who are following in the same linage. Reading texts include handouts from Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Lydia Davis, Marcella Durand, Kristin Prevallet, John Yau, Dodie Bellamy, and others.

Brenda Coultas is originally from Southern Indiana. She’s lived in NYC since l995 and is the author of A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press), A Summer Newsreel, Boyeye, and Early Films, a collection of prose and poetry. Her poems have been anthologized in Heights of the Marvelous from St. Martin’s Press and The (New) American Poets, published by Talisman. Her journal publications include works in, among others, Epoch, Conjunctions: State of the Art, Fence, The World, American Poetry Review, Indian Review. She has read at the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, the Boston Poetry Conference, among many others. She has taught at The Poetry Project, Naropa University, and is presently on the faculty at Touro College in Manhattan. She co-edited The Poetry Project Newsletter (1997-98), and has received grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Ted Berrigan Award. Bradford Morrow describes her work as follows: “Equally at ease in the city and the country, Brenda Coultas is a spiritual archeologist of dumpsters and farm fields, an observer of the derelict and everyday folks. Her vivid voice is like no other I have encountered, and the originality of her work is matched by the genuine wisdom of its perceptions.”

Section Three
4/10 to 5/1
Erica Hunt

We will gallop through the gamut of 20^th/21^st century experimental poetics, pausing to gaze at some of the landmarks: jazz poetry, language poetries, process poetry, and the new sentence(s). The class will read selected contemporary writing by Jayne Cortez, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Leslie Scalapino, and Charles Bernstein. Writing in the moment, writing in the extreme, at home and in class, the indispensable laboratory of praxis.

Erica Hunt is the author of Local History (Roof Books, l993) and Arcade (Kelsey St. Press, l996). Born in New York in l955, Hunt has worked as a poetry teacher, housing organizer, labor news writer, and radio producer. She currently works as a program officer for a social justice funder in New York City. Her poetry and essays on poetry’s connection to politics, race, gender, and history have appeared in small magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Society of America, Talisman, American Book Review, Bomb, and Iowa Poetry Review. She has read and lectured at Naropa, The New School for Social Research, St. Mark's Poetry Project, Mills College, Stanford, Brandeis, New College of San Francisco, etc. She is a theorist and the author of the famous essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” which first appeared in the anthology The Politics of Poetic Form (ed. Charles Bernstein, l990). Harryette Mullen writes that “Erica Hunt’s Local History blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip.” Recent publications include, “Roots of the Black Avant Garde,” “Reading for the Conference on Modernism” and “Poetry and Politics.”

English 635
Seminar in Ibsen
Professor Joan Templeton

The course examines the major prose plays of Henrik Ibsen, the inventor of modern drama. Ibsen’s dramas are the second most performed plays in the world after Shakespeare. We will read Ibsen’s twelve major prose plays from Pillars of Society to When the Dead Awaken, including A Doll House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and John Gabriel Borkman. The plays will be studied as dramas to be performed on stage as well as literary texts. If a decent Ibsen production is available in New York City, we will attend it as a class. Students in the seminar will be permitted to attend the 10^th International Ibsen Conference, hosted by The Ibsen Society of America and Long Island University, which will be held on campus from June 1-7; scholars and directors from around the world will participate.

Text: Ibsen: The Major Prose Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde. New York: Penguin, l978. Paperback edition.

English 650
Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Professor Sealy Gilles

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is a ramshackle, indecorous, unfinished poem patched together out of various translations and adaptations. Its final form was probably unknowable even to its creator. Chaucer died in 1400, before he could finish the Tales, but he left us with a vibrant and extraordinary varied collection of stories—sermons, fabliaux, romances, tragedies, and fairy tales—told by travelers of wildly diverse social backgrounds, including a knight, a nun, a weaver, a miller, and a clergyman. We will read the tales both in Middle English (with a lot of help) and in translation. As we work on the stories and their tellers, we will also explore the chaotic and vibrant world of fourteenth-century England.

English 646
Individual & Small Group Writing Instruction
Professor Patricia Stephen

Advanced undergraduate students may enroll for this course with permission of the instructor. 

In this class, we will examine the theory and practice of individual and small group writing instruction, locating writing center work within its broader historical and institutional contexts. The course will begin with an overview of writing center history, theory, and pedagogy and will then examine some of the most common tutoring concerns:  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. Students interested in pursuing a specific topic not included in the general readings—such as writing center administration—may do so with permission from the instructor.

Possible texts: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers, Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation, Noise from the Writing Center, Rhetorical Grammar, The Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction, The Practical Tutor, Taking Flight With OWLS: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work. 

Students who enroll in the course will be required to tutor for one hour per week during the semester at the Writing Center and to audio- and/or videotape one session with a student. The taped session will be transcribed and analyzed by the students for use in a self-study. Classes will be conducted as seminars/workshops so that all students have the opportunity to participate in class presentations, mock tutorials, etc. Each student will generate her/his own idea/s for a final written (and/or action) project, based on topics of interest during the semester.

Undergraduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2002

SUMMER

English 103
Workshop in Advanced Writing/Special Focus on the Personal Essay  
Professor Harriet Malinowitz

This course will focus on writing the personal essay.  The first few class meetings will be devoted to reading personal essays by established authors and analyzing their form, their style, the rhetorical strategies they employ, and their use of language.  This examination should help us understand the ways personal essays present and interrogate the self and subjective experience.  Our reading of published essays will continue, though less intensively, as we move on to a workshop format in which students' essays are read and discussed in detail.  The goal of the workshop critique is to help the writer move effectively toward revision; each student will be expected to produce two developed 10-15 page personal essays (or one longer piece) by the end of the course.  Students are encouraged to make as many appointments for individual conferences as they wish.

FALL

English 101
Introduction to English Studies
Professor Patricia Stephens

What does one need to know to be an English major or minor?  What do English majors and minors study and learn?  What kinds of career opportunities await those who graduate with a degree in English?  This course is designed to  familiarize students with the diversity and scope of English studies and to introduce students to contemporary debates concerning such issues as the connection between reading and writing, the relationship among different interpretive/critical strategies, and the nature and politics of the literary canon.  In this course, we will 1) learn about the rise of English as a profession in the university (within the United States) and how the profession has changed over time; 2) focus on shifting notions of literacy and the function of English in American society; 3) analyze the formation and politics of the literary canon; 4) examine and experiment with numerous methods of literary criticism and analysis; and 5) investigate the many possible career opportunities awaiting students who graduate with a degree in English.   This course will be conducted as a seminar, and students will be expected to participate in and take responsibility for class discussions.

English 104
Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh

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 the preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways of transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. Work by Marguerite Duras, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Andre Breton and others will be discussed in class, and used as models, but much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing our own writing. A final portfolio of work will be required.

English 128
British Literature I
The Monstrous and the Fantastic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Professor Sealy Gilles

This course focuses on representations of the grotesque, the semi-human, and the fairy in the first six hundred years of literature written in the British Isles – from the monster tale of Beowulf to Shakespeare’s fantasy, The Tempest.  Early ideas of the supernatural and the subhuman reveal much about the construction of the natural and the human.  As these texts chart the outer darknesses, the margins of civilization and humanity, they inevitably shed light on the societies from which they have emerged – and on the inner darknesses which haunt those cultures.  The monstrous “kin of Cain” in Beowulf, the hag turned fairy in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and Caliban and Ariel of Shakespeare’s island romance – all these define the limits of humanity and the price to be exacted for exceeding or transgressing those limits. 

This is a discussion class, with some brief time-outs for background mini-lectures.  I expect you to come prepared and ready to contribute, to spend time and effort on readings and written assignments, and to respect the views of your classmates.  You have a right to expect that I will read and listen to your work carefully and respond quickly, respectfully, and in detail.

English 137
Major Texts of Shakespeare
Professor Joan Templeton

This course examines Shakespeare’s sonnets and some of the major comedies and tragedies. Focusing on the texts as scripts in theatres as well as literary texts, we see videos of live performances and major film adaptations of the plays, and attend one live performance together. The Shakespeare texts are The Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Some of the films we will see are Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Kenneth Branagh’sOthello, and Laurence Olivier’s King Lear. Requirements are three essays, written outside of class, on texts we have studied together.  

English 158
Literature of the U.S. I
Professor Patrick Horrigan

The course will survey the literature of the early republic, from the founding of the American colonies in the seventeenth century, through the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century, and up to the period of industrialization and the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. We will examine a variety of texts, both “classic” and less well known, including poetry, sermons, captivity narratives, fiction, political philosophy, feminist manifestos, and slave narratives. We will also read selections of modern and contemporary literary criticism that shed light on the primary, literary texts. Students will give in-class presentations and write formal and informal essays.

English 170
West Indians in the Harlem Renaissance
Professor Louis Parascandola

Anglophone (English-speaking) Caribbean immigrants played a vital, if often neglected, role during the Harlem Renaissance, an important literary and cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s. There were, in fact, over 36,000 foreign born Blacks, mostly West Indians, in Harlem in l920. These immigrants, despite often facing severe discrimination, had a significant effect on American culture and politics. We will discuss Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly paying attention to the “Back to Africa” movement and Garvey’s role as a facilitator of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to Garvey, we will examine the radical political writings of W.A. Domingo, and poetry by Claude McKay, one of the seminal figures in the Harlem Renaissance, and short stories by Eric Walrond, poetry by George Margetson, fiction/essays by J.A. Rogers and Amy Jacques Garvey, and drama by Eulalie Spence. Finally, we will consider the views of leading African Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes on Garvey and the West Indian Community.

English 228
Women’s Studies, American Culture, & the Literary Imagination
Professor Kimberly Lamm

This women’s studies course examines literary texts by and about women in late nineteenth and twentieth-century American Culture. By attending to a wide variety of texts, we will highlight the ideas and ideologies that form both a feminist and an American conception of literature. What can literary representations of women tell us about the shifting and turbulent cultural landscape of late nineteenth and twentieth century America? Why has literature been such an important place for women to communicate ideas and make arguments about gender inequity? How have American myths and ideologies merged into literary ideals, and how have American feminist writers subverted and worked within those literary ideals? As we pursue these questions, we will also become familiar with the basic tenets of feminist literary criticism and feminist cultural studies. Work by the following writers included: Kate Chopin, Angela Grimke, Harriet Jacobs, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Djuna Barnes, Sui Sin Far, Zitkla Sa, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, and Teresa Hak Kyung Cha. Course Requirements: Class presentation, mid-term take-home exam, and a final term paper. 

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2002

SUMMER

English 579:  Woman as Hero
Professor Harriet Malinowitz

The concept of the "heroic" traditionally contains the assumption that the hero is male.  Heroism is a public act, requiring agency in the public world, while the concept of the "heroine" is a diminutive one, in that the heroine exists only by virtue of her relationship to the hero.  Unlike a "heroine," a female "hero" (or, as Maya Angelou has put it, "shero") is often unrecognizable within the conventions of patriarchal ideology upon which heroic idealism is based.  This course will suggest alternative ways of reading classic texts and will also consider more contemporary texts as we attempt to identify and explore female heroism in myth, fiction, theory, memoir, and film.  From the myth of Amor and Psyche to Thelma and Louise, we will examine archetypes of the woman hero who embarks on a journey (either literal or figurative), challenges the established order, and creates new possibilities of community, wholeness, and selfhood.

English 624:  Hemingway, Fitzgerald & the 1920s
Professor Howard Silverstein

Through an examination of their lives and selected works, this course will assess Hemingway and Fitzgerald's contribution to Modernism, their embodiment of the cultural highlights that mark the 1920s (the Expatriate Movement in Paris, Prohibition, flappers), and the influence they had on later writers.  The major texts of the course will include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night.  Attention will also be given to the shorter fiction of these writers.  Students will be assigned several critical papers as well as an oral presentation.

FALL

English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning

In this workshop, we will read modern and contemporary poetry, as well as statements and essays on poetics. We will examine and practice writing poetry using different forms and approaches. The weekly workshop is meant to be a place where you can present drafts of your work for helpful response. The course requirements include writing a poem for each workshop, making a presentation, and submitting a final folder with your revised work and an essay reflecting on your process of writing.

English 528: Seminar in Creative Writing
Professor John High

Our emphasis will be on your writing, as the heart of the course will operate on a workshop/peer group basis. We'll set out to understand the strivings of each story & to determine the ways it is or isn't working--afterwards, with any luck, offering constructive criticism & helpful suggestions to the author. We will spend the first few weeks generating material and/or revising your current work in preparation for your class workshops. Though you may have work-in-progress, all of the fiction you turn in for this course will have to be new writing. There will be class discussions on what we mean when we talk about narrative technique; there will be assigned readings and lectures on the nature of story and dream landscapes, the fictive & the real & the mythic--and the craft we can use to achieve the truth of our own writing on the page. There will also be weekly class exercises designed to help you develop your craft and heighten your imaginative skills in using characterization, voice, setting, POV, conflict, mood, etc.--& to maximize your fiction’s effect on a reader.

We will build a writing community, a support group, an environment in which we strive to help one another as authors to construct a vision in words.  I firmly believe that for a group of writers to work together there must exist a strong element of trust and respect.  I hope that in the course of the semester I will earn your respect and trust, yet, of equal importance, I am convinced that with one another you must share an equivalent attitude, one which includes an attempt to comprehend and see into one another's stories. If you/we can do this, helpful comments and criticism will yield fruitful results for each of you. I can state from experience, your individual writing will grow and improve as you practice the ideas of technique and meaning inherently available in your powers of expression/search. Though I am the instructor of this course, I am also a participant, learning from the dialogue that evolves between us. Nonetheless, the one area where I am insistent concerns the manner in which you communicate with one another:  I simply have no tolerance for mean-spirited criticism or personal attacks. I think it's safe to assume you all agree, and that you're here to WRITE, to learn, and to have some fun.  It is exciting work. By the end of the semester--you’ll see--you will have increased your power to write convincing and sound fiction, and you will have achieved a fluency and clarity in your writing that will help you in all aspects of your writing life.  You will be the director of your own quest; you will gain knowledge that is important to you and that can even change your life.

English 579: Virginia Woolf and Modernism
Professor Patrick Horrigan

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most challenging, rewarding, and beautiful writers of the twentieth century. This course is dedicated to the study of her works in depth. We will trace the development of Woolf’s experimental (“modernist”) fiction through five of her novels: The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years. In addition, we will study a selection of her non-fiction works, including her classic essay on the challenges facing women writers, A Room of One’s Own, and her treatise on war and patriarchy, Three Guineas.Finally, we will read selections from the diary she kept from her teenage years up until her death. We will make comparisons between Woolf and other modernist visual artists and writers in an effort to define more precisely Woolf’s innovations as a writer and to place her work within a larger historical context. Students will give in-class presentations and write a research paper. The New York Public Library, which house the bulk of Woolf’s papers, will offer students training in how to do archival research. Visits to collections of modern art in the city will also be arranged.

English 620: Theories of Teaching Writing/Contemporary Rhetorical
     Theory
Professor Patricia Stephens 

This course offers an introduction to theories of composition and rhetoric.  Designed for those who plan to teach writing at the college or secondary level, the course will offer historical and theoretical perspectives on the teaching of rhetoric and writing.  The premise underlying this course is that our thinking about teaching writing in the twenty-first century must extend beyond simple, prescriptive formulas to a broader consideration of the history and contexts of rhetoric—a history that we will trace by examining the implementation of rhetoric and writing instruction in nineteenth and twentieth century colleges in the United States.  We will explore the meanings, purposes, uses, and values of “rhetoric” and “writing” by analyzing the social and political contexts of the debates that have shaped college composition and rhetoric curricula over the centuries. 

Historical texts may include James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985; John Brereton’s The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College: 1875-1925; Robin Varnum’s Fencing with Words: A History of Writing Instruction at Amherst College During the Era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966; selections from Albert R. Kitzhaber’s Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900.

Other possible texts include William Covino and David Joliffe’s Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries; Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition; Kathleen E. Welch’s The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse; and Sharon Crowley’s Ancient Rhetorics for the Modern Student.

English 624: African-American Literature
Professor Carol Allen

This is a survey that covers African American Literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The course will provide general information about the major writers and texts that have contributed to African American Letters. In addition to literary texts, assignments include criticism from noted scholars such as Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hortense Spillers, Deborah McDowell, Mad Gwendolyn Henderson, and others. Fiction writers to be studied are Douglass, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Brooks, Ellison, Walker, Morrison, and more. The aim is to provide not only a sense of the African-American Literary tradition, but also where it stands in relation to Western humanities.

English 700: Practicum in Teaching Composition
Professor Xiao-Ming Li 

Intended as a source of support and forum for discussion for novice writing teachers, this class will focus on practical approaches to everyday issues in the classroom, yet situating those approaches in the so-called “paradigm shifts” of the field. The class, therefore, will interweave two strands: that of the hands-on training of managing day-to-day running of a writing class and that of the underlying theories of such praxis. For the first strand, the class is organized around three major components in the teaching of writing: classroom discussion, writing assignments, and responding to students’ writing. To put those practices in perspective, we will, at the same time, study two monographs, one on the process movement and the other on the teaching of academic discourse, since both movements dominated our imagination and practices in the past half century and still exert subtle or pronounced influence on the writing classrooms across the country even as our attention has been gradually drawn to other –isms in recent years.

Each participant, besides keeping a reading journal, is expected to submit a portfolio at the end of the semester, which will consist of a syllabus, two writing assignments, two classroom exercises, and one student profile.

English 707: Methods in Research and Criticism
Professor Huma Ibrahim 

This course is designed to introduce you to the study of English literature at the graduate level.  This means that you will learn to examine different critical traditions and apply that to a few pieces of literature that we will look at.  The idea is to give you a comprehensive survey of critical theory in its application to literature.  In addition, you will learn, first through a visit to the library, and then through actually writing a paper, strategies of how research can be applied in constructing essays.

Texts include:  Tyson's Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Theory; as well as Farah's Secrets, Eliot's Four Quartets, and Shakespeare's Othello.