the longest island

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2005

English 104 section 1: Creative Writing
Professor John High
Tuesdays & Thursdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

This class is designed for anyone who has ever wanted to write creatively, yet who is not sure how to begin or how to move beyond where they are presently in their own writing. Topics include getting started, establishing a passionate discipline, making time, focusing on ideas and feelings and giving them shape through the language of fiction, poetry, and drama. The course will also zero in on backbone issues of style and technique ranging from those of characterization and plot, continuity, and vividness of imagery, clarity of diction, and use of phrasing and structure in the writing of our worlds--the various ways that elements of craft inherently dovetail with content. There will be weekly creative writing exercises and group discussions, as well as commentary on the writing process and how to make it come alive for you. The course offers relaxed, though thorough and individualized investigation of the participants' work in relation to craft, theme and content writing. What do we mean when we talk about issues of style, form, and voice(s)? What is fiction, what is metaphor, what is the magic of language, the ghost of echoes, which reflect your own vision of the world, your experience or part, your dreams or visions? What do we mean when we talk about the lyric, about experimentations, about taking chances in writing? We'll look at the work of Modern and contemporary writers ranging from Baldwin to Akhmatova to Borges to that of younger writers publishing today. Students will also read and respond to one another's exercises in an environment that offers encouragement and direction. Critiques will focus on motivating the student to tap the undefined territory of his or her own imagination in order to more fully cultivate and mature her or his own voice/s and styles. Writing which moves beyond the so-called boundaries between genres in a spirit of exploration will also be encouraged. The goal of the course includes completing a portfolio of your work, and a revised text for a class anthology, group reading, and party.

English 104 section 2: Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning
Wednesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short stories. During the first half of each workshop, we will discuss examples of poems and stories. Then I will provide a specific assignment for the following workshop. The main text for the remaining class time will be student writing; we will workshop each poem and story, helping each other improve each others' drafts. The emphasis will be on form and structure, especially learning to be particular with writing, rather than general, including images and detail in both stories and poems. A midterm and final portfolio will include revised poems and stories, as well as a review of learning and a self-evaluation. There will be a packet of assignments and Xeroxed fiction. Recommended text: The Handbook of Poetic Forms.

English 129: British Literature II
(Re-) Writing Religion in Modern British Literature
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course explores the ways in which works of modern British literature engage issues of religious belief, worship, and church doctrine. Each of the assigned texts, drawn from poetry, novel, drama, and essay, variously celebrates, questions, or subverts fundamental aspects of religion. For instance, Frankenstein dramatizes man's desire to create life, like God; Graham Greene puzzles over the meaning of divine grace, as it appears to be lavished on a corrupt Mexican priest; Murder in the Cathedral thematizes the justifications for (deliberate) martyrdom; Kingsley Amis presents a dystopian world in which the reformation never took place; and Philip Pullman's fiction turns all major tenets of Christianity, including divine providence, redemption, and original sin, upside down. This course does not endorse any particular religious or anti-religious outlook, nor does it require students to practice any religion at all. It merely presumes that while religion is of immense importance to many people and societies, the specific manifestations and meanings of spirituality, faith, and doctrine are complex, manifold, and often contested.

English 137: Shakespeare
Professor Joan Templeton
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course will examine Shakespeare's plays both as texts and as theatrical performances. If possible, we will attend a Shakespeare production. Plays to be studied include Romeo and Juliet,The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. Students must have completed English 61, 62, or 63, 64 and the core seminar (or English 17) to register for the course.

English 150: Introduction to Caribbean Literature
Professor Rosamond King
Mondays & Wednesdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

This course will survey the diverse tradition of Caribbean literature through texts from English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries (including Haiti, Cuba, and Trinidad & Tobago). We will examine major themes such as slavery, colonialism, racial diversity, and immigration, and we will discuss what, other than geographic location, unities Caribbean countries and the Caribbean literature.

English 159: Literature of the U.S. II
Professor Carol Allen
Mondays & Wednesdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

This is a survey that covers American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. The course will provide general information about the major writers and texts that have contributed to the great, diverse tradition of American letters. We will chart our discoveries by peering through the lens of representation, asking such questions as who names and describes the newly unified, post-civil war America, how do turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century creative artists revision America during an age of Western imperialism/expansion/colonialism, how does literature compete with the new technologies that produce representation as well (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 will concentrate on three vital prolific periods: nineteenth-century regional writing, Modernism (1912-1936), and contemporary, post-war production.

English 166: Fiction Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays & Thursdays
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

This workshop will focus on the way autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. The premise is that the source of most fiction is fading memories, whether we're aware of it or not. Though Jack Kerouac is the most obvious exponent of this method, we'll look at other writers of the last century (Marguerite Duras, Peter Handke, Lydia Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Georges Perec, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Laura Riding, Raymond Queneau, Jamaica Kincaid, James Ellroy, Maurice Blanchot) who struggle to cross the borders between fiction and life story. We'll concentrate on the conventions of fiction--plot, character, conflict--with an eye towards expanding on what's already been done. Our writing project will include working with secrets, memories, observations, opinions, overheard conversations--fragments of everything.

English 169: Nonwestern/Postcolonial Literature
Professor Maria McGarrity
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

This class was cancelled and did not run.

Post-colonialism as a critical impulse has had a profound impact on literary and cultural studies in recent years. This course will examine the theories and fictions that characterize post-colonialism by focusing on the encounter between the centralized colonial metropolis and its global peripheries in the twentieth century. The creative works in this course from the Caribbean include writers from African, Asian, and European traditions. This diversity of perspective allows for the examination of the post-colonial imagination from both the centers and margins of the empire. These works will allow us to frame our global theoretical inquiries by using the specificities of particular cultural experiences. We will attempt to determine what unites the islands of the Caribbean archipelago and what may connect or separate them from Latin America. We will explore foundational texts in the field and complicate the following topics: globalism and local culture; the psychology of colonialism; resistance/accommodation/complicity; indigeneity and constructions of the Other; and imagining nationalisms.

English 190: Senior Seminar
Professor Leah Dilworth
Mondays & Wednesdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

This course will guide students through the process of writing a long research paper (20-25 pages) on topics 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. Students will also read and critique each other's work. Required reading will include essays on research methods and writing as well as "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with selected critical essays.

Undergraduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2004

Summer 2004

English 103

Workshop in the Essay
Professor Deborah Mutnick
MTWTH 11:00 am to 12:50 pm

This course gives students the opportunity to develop, share, and get feedback on their writing in a workshop format. The focus is 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, often mixed approaches to the essay, including autobiography, critical analysis, literary techniques, and ethnographic methods such as oral histories. Students will benefit from a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of their work, and constructive criticism. There is an option of fieldwork as the basis for one required essay.

Readings include essays by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Vivian Gornick, Susan Griffin, and Alice Walker. Students will present their writing in weekly workshops at least twice during the semester. Writing requirements include a course journal, two short (3-5 page) essays and one longer (8-12 page) essay or the equivalent.

Fall 2004

English 101: Introduction to English Studies
Professor Melissa Antinori
Mondays & Wednesdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 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; 2) 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.

Eng. 103: Workshop in the Essay
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Mondays & Wednesdays
1:30 pm. to 2:45 pm

Readings include essays by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Vivian Gornick, Susan Griffin, and Alice Walker. Students will present their writing in weekly workshops at least twice during the semester. Writing requirements include a course journal, three short (3-5) page essays and one longer (8-12 page) essay or the equivalent.

English 104 section 1: Creative Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays & Wednesdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short stories. During the first half of each workshop, we will discuss examples of poems and stories. Then I will provide a specific assignment for the following workshop. The main text for the remaining class time will be student writing; we will workshop each poem and story, helping each other improve each other's drafts. The emphasis will be on form and structure, especially learning to be particular with writing, rather than general, including images and detail in both stories and poems. A midterm and final portfolio will include revised poems and stories, as well as a review of learning and a self-evaluation. Thee will be a packet of assignments and Xeroxed fiction. Recommended text: The Handbook of Poetic Forms.

English 104 section 2: Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

The goal of the workshop is to expand our ideas of "what is a poem" and "what is a work of fiction." Are poetry and fiction exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will question preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways to transcribe thought processes and experiences into writing. Work by Marguerite Duras, Ted Berrigan, Frank O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop and 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 126 section 1: News Writing (same as Journalism 126)
Staff from the Department of Journalism
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:50 pm

English 126 section 2: News Writing (same as Journalism 126)
Staff from the Department of Journalism
Tuesdays
6:00 pm to 8:50 pm

English 128: The Voyage from Beowulf to Hamlet
Professor Joan Templeton
Tuesdays & Thursdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

A study of masterpieces of English literature from the Old English period through Shakespeare through the motif of the voyage. Readings include the Old-English epic poem Beowulf, the medieval morality play Everyman, selections from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, selections from Shakespeare's sonnets, andHamlet. Students will write essays based on the readings and class discussions.

English 158: Literature of the United States I
Professor Michael Bennett
Wednesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course will examine the works of literature written before 1865 in what is now the United States. The theme of the course is "American Myths, U.S. Realities." We will explore the contrasts between the myths that have produced America and the lived realities of those who reside within the borders of the United States. Rather than focusing on a few "masterpieces," we will read a wide variety of short prose pieces and poetry, much of which has not received a great deal of study. We will also discuss the "major authors" traditionally associated with the period, but we will examine them from a comparative perspective: Cooper's version of the frontier juxtaposed with that of Native American narratives; Emerson's transcendentalism compared with the immanent concerns of abolitionist writers; Hawthorne's romanticism versus that of the women writers he flippantly dismissed. In order to make such comparisons, we will examine the contexts as Native, European, African, Hispanic--to provide an historically grounded survey of early American Literature.

English 165: Poetry Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays & Wednesdays
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

In this undergraduate poetry workshop, we will review some of the history of poetry, practicing traditional forms as well as experimental variations. While there will be some open workshops, assignments will be provided most of the time. Some of the forms and approaches we will study will include sonnets, free verse, blues & jazz poetry, personism, cubism, etc. Students will be required to write poetry every week, to keep a journal, and to rewrite their poems for a final portfolio. We will also attend two poetry readings during the semester. The text for the class will be The Handbook of Poetic Forms.

English 233: The Radical Decade--British Literature in the l930s
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

THIS COURSE DID NOT RUN.

The l930s in England were a crisis-ridden and anxiety-producing yet also artistically fertile period. This course will take a broadly historicist approach, examining literary manifestations of the socio-political and cultural parameters that shaped the decade between the stock-market crash in l929 and the beginning of WW II in l939. Our attention will focus on how British intellectuals of the time engaged the issues of domestic ideological radicalization, the gender question, decolonization, the rise of totalitarianism, and the Spanish Civil War. Through close and comparative readings of novels, poems, travel books, and essays by the period's most outstanding writers (including Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, George Orwell, and W. H. Auden), we will discover how literary texts not only represented their historical context but also transcended, and possibly shaped the external reality of contemporary socio-political conditions.

Assigned Texts: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (l932); Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (l930); Graham Greene, It's a Battlefield (l934); George Orwell,Homage to Calalonia (l938) & "A Hanging" (l931); Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (l938); Rebecca West, "Woman as Artist and Thinker" (l932); Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (l939); W.H. Auden, poems; and Stephen Spender, poems.

English 234: The Twenties--New York & Paris
Professor Howard Silverstein
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

In America the end of World War I inaugurated a new decade sometimes referred to as "The Jazz Age" or "The Roaring Twenties." Old orders had fallen after the war: dreams, values, conduct had been shattered and the world prior to l914 had irrevocably been changed. One of the profound changes in the United States was the initiation of the Volstead Act, more commonly know as Prohibition. In its wake came the "speakeasy" and the rise of gangsterism. The constitutional amendment which gave women the right to vote influenced the twenties phenomenon known as the "flapper": young women danced the Charleston in skirts that rose above the knees and wore their hair bobbed. New York City became one of the cultural capitals of the world, especially in the literary scene that saw the birth of writers like Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and distinguished members of the Harlem Renaissance as well as the rise of such magazines as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In Paris, Gertrude Stein, who held court on the left bank, referred to the twenties as the era of "the lost generation." Boatload after boatload arrived, carrying young American expatriates. Fleeing what they felt was the Puritanism of American life, they fell in love with a city that was a bargain to live in, that championed "free love" and that had no laws about alcoholic abstinence.

In the New York section of the course, students will be required to read John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Nella Larsen's Passing, and Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Our examination of the expatriate movement in Paris will focus on Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. A trip to the Museum of Modern Art will be scheduled as well as the screening of some silent films. Three short critical papers and an oral presentation are required.

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2004

Summer 2004

English 624
From Fiction to Film
Professor Howard Silverstein
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 4:00 to 6:15 pm

From the birth of film, producers, screenwriters, and directors have turned to fiction as a source for their inspiration. For the director and the screenwriter, the essential problem has always been the same: how does one adapt a novel into a film? By what chemistry does a five hundred-page novel transform itself into a two-hour film? In class we will discuss the fidelity of the moving image to its written source. Can a change of setting, incident, or character still maintain the integrity of the work of fiction? This course will focus on four novels that develop the theme of the individual sensibility in conflict with the demands of a restrictive society. The novels to be discussed are Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Henry James's Washington Square, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Students will be required to write four short critical papers comparing the novel to the film. Most of the screenings will take place in class, but one or two may require outside viewing.

English 636: Seminar on Postcoloniality and Desire
Professor Huma Ibrahim
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:00 to 3:15 pm

This course is going to traverse the connections between postcolonial discourse and issues of the other's desire. One of the segments for excavation into postcolonial discourse is the idea of the native identity. Identity is related to human desire and is an under-explored aspect of postcolonial studies.

We will read secondary material as well as primary texts in order to explore issues connected to agency within desire for both men and women in the "other" world. Often this seems to suggest interracial desire, but that is not the concern of this course. What we will be looking at is where desire intersects with identity in the postcolonial context.

Some texts we will be reading are The Gender Sexuality Reader, Tayeb Saleh'sSeason of Migration to the North, Bessie Head's A Question of Power, Alifa Riffat's Distant View of a Minaret, and some others.

FALL 2004

English 522: Academic Writing Workshop
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This course is an intensive, advanced writing workshop for graduate students (across the disciplines) who wish to develop their academic writing skills. The main emphases will be on critical analysis, argumentation, and research. Students will write several short essays in response to common course readings and one longer research paper. There will also be discussion of effective rhetorical strategies for analytic, persuasive prose. Assignments will be derived from readings by intellectual figures with broad interdisciplinary relevance-for example, Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Darwin, Baldwin, Machiavelli, Marx, Lao-Tzu, Arendt, Rousseau, Douglass, Rachel Carson, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

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, 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 524: Poetry Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

This graduate poetry workshop will have an emphasis on innovative and experimental poetry. I will provide you with a list of experiments and handouts, but the workshop for the most part will be open. One of the requirements will be that you explore at least three different approaches to writing during the semester. Some of the approaches/forms we will study will include blues & jazz poems, sonnets, prose poetry, Oulipo constraints, projective verse, cubism, and personism. Besides writing and workshopping a group of poems, we will examine the structure, history and ways the form/approach has been accepted and/or transgressed. There will be a required handbook and an anthology.

English 526: Writing Media I--Story
Professor Claire Goodman (Media Arts Department)
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:50 pm

This cross-listed course is an introduction to the methods and principles of great storytellin 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 a 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 625: Nineteenth Century American Literature
Professor Carol Allen
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

This course will focus on representation and masking and will assume minstrelsy to be a dominant nineteenth century trope that bridges the gap between sentimentality and "realism." Connections will be made between this aesthetic mode and the writing of such artists as Melville, Chesnutt, Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Hopkins, Cooper, Stowe, Douglass, and Jewett. Supplemental, critical and theoretical material will be introduced as well. The requirements include close reading and research assignments.

English 643: Seminar in Shakespeare
Professor Seymour Kleinberg
Tuesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

Seminar in Shakespeare emphasizes close reading of selected comedies and tragedies, as well as the sonnets, to explore character and theme in the works of one of our greatest writers.

English 646: Individual and Small Group Writing Instruction
Professor Patricia Stephens
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm

In this course, students will examine the theory and practice of individual and small group writing instruction. We will examine a range of strategies for working with students one-on-one as we locate that work within its various theoretical and historical contexts. Our work will focus on the following: structuring sessions and establishing priorities; assessing, diagnosing, and responding to student writing; strategies for intervention, planning, drafting, revising, proofreading, and editing; helping students with grammatical and mechanical concerns; helping students improve reading comprehension; working with ESL students; attending to interpersonal dynamics and cultural and ethnic differences; and tutoring online.

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 student 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 that arise during the semester.

Possible Texts: Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers; Meyer and Smith, The Practical Tutor; Bouquet, Noise from the Writing Center; Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar; and, Murphy and Law, Landmark Essays on Writing Centers.

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2004

English 104.001

Creative Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:30 to 2:45 pm

English 104.002: Creative Writing workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm

The goal of the workshop is to expand our ideas of "what is a poem" and what is "a work of fiction." Are poetry and fiction exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will question preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways to transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. Work by Marguerite Duras, Ted Berrigan, Frank O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop and 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 126: News Writing (cross-listed as JOU 119)
Professor Michael Bush (Journalism Department)
Section 1: Mondays & Wednesday, 6:00 to 7:50 pm
Section 2: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:00 to 4:50 pm

English 129: British Literature II
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:30 to 2:45 pm

Love is at once arguably the noblest human affect and one of the most complex social, emotional, and spiritual phenomena. What happens when this intangible bundle of emotions called love is put into printed words? Beside empirically asking "what can literature teach us about love (or hate)?" this course will explore the poetics, the philosophy, and (yes) the politics of love and romance in British literary texts from 1850 to the present. Specifically, we will analyze the gendering of discourses about love, sex, and marriage and ask ourselves how social norms for expressing affection are reinforced or, alternatively, subverted by literary artists. The assigned texts draw on poetry, drama, and fiction by male and female writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, Rebecca West, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, and others. Alongside the primary texts, we will consider the work of theorists on love such as Martin Bergmann and Denis the Rougemont; we will also consider the historical aspects of our theme.

English 150: African-American Literature
Professor Carol Allen
Mondays & Wednesdays, 3:00 to 4:15 pm

This is a survey that covers African American Literature from the eighteenth century to the present. We will concentrate on three vital and prolific periods (each period forms a unit): nineteenth century abolitionist doctrines and slave narratives; poems and narratives from the Harlem Renaissance (roughly 1919-1936); and contemporary (post-War) texts that include novels, plays, rhetoric, and poetry. Writers to be studied are Douglass, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Brooks, Ellison, Walker, Morrison, and more. In addition to literary texts, readings also include critical and historical essays that will provide background and contextual information that make the actual fiction/testimonies more meaningful.

English 159: Literature of the U.S. II
Professor Leah Dilworth
Tuesdays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm

This course will explore American literature from the Civil War to the present through the theme “The Country and the City.” We will examine the historical circumstances of migrations and urban expansion from the Civil War to the present and the ways writers have responded to and informed the nation’s understandings of these developments. In the literature we read, we will examine imaginings of the primitive and the cosmopolitan as well as representations of regional and urban life. Readings will be drawn from the literatures of the “local color” movement of the late nineteenth century, the Harlem Renaissance, and contemporary writers.

English 169: Buddhism and Asian Literature
Professor Xiao-Ming Li
Wednesdays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm

Here the divine meets the earthly: the course will trace two lines of development and explore the impact of the former on the latter. The first line of development is that of Buddhism, which arose out of the spiritual ferment of Vedic India during the centuries after 700 BC, and, as it spread across Asia, diverged into different schools and took on new identities. (To create a larger historical context, other relevant belief systems will be introduced by watching videos or reading excerpts.) The second line of development is the part of Asian literature developed under the influence of Buddhism. Some of these literary texts (novels, essays, and poetry) are imbued with pious Buddhist sentiments and faith, while others are ambivalent and probing. Most of the texts are translations from texts originally written for Chinese or Japanese readers, yet a few were composed in English by western authors for the western audience. The parallel reading of Buddhist texts and literature is intended to shed light on the constructive nature of literature, each as a unique inflection of prevalent ideologies and the cultural milieu of the time.

Texts include The World of the Buddha (Stryk), Essays in Zen Buddhism (Suzuki), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Literature of Asia (Barnstone), Laughing Lost in the Mountain (Barnstone, et. al.), A Dream of Red Mansions (Tsao and Kao), and The Woman in the Dunes (Kobo).

90% of the course grade is decided by the holistic quality of the final portfolio composed of five reading journal entries, two in-class essays, a paper of 3-4 pages developed from one of the in-class essays, and a longer 8-9 page research paper.

English 173: Writing in the Community: The "Our Legacies" Project
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Meeting times to be arranged with instructor.

This course brings together nonfiction writing, oral histories, and urban education in a community project in Brooklyn. Students will learn how to conduct oral histories and archival research as part of a semester-long project at P.S. 295, The Studio School of Arts and Culture; and M.S. 827, New Voices. The course will involve site-specific fieldwork and writing about architecture, education, and family histories. Students will have an opportunity to work in a unique collaboration among parents, teachers, and middle school and elementary school-age children. Together we will conduct a study of the crisscrossing paths of immigrants, then and now. Oral histories with the diverse school population will form the basis of one legacy we will be tracing; and using archival records, we will try as well to reconstruct the lives of families a hundred years ago. In addition, we will tell the stories of the two schools presently occupying the building and of the one-year-old school library.

The various forms of research conducted will provide material for photo-essays (and other documentation) representing the four interweaving strands of the school's legacies: the 100-year-old building, the two present schools, the library, and the families a hundred years ago and today. At a culminating exhibit at the school in June 2004, "Our Legacies: Who We Are, Where We're From," will display students' photo-essays and celebrate the completion of the project with a public reception. Course texts will include Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloane's Crossing the Boulevard; The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson; and Harvey Wang's New York.

English 190: Senior Seminar
Professor Maria McGarrity
Mondays, 6:00 to 8:30 pm

This course will guide students through the process of writing a long research paper (20-25 pages) on a topic of their choosing. Students will use a range of research resources and write a formal proposal, a first draft, and a final draft of the paper. Students will also read and critique each other's work. Required reading will include essays on research methods and writing as well as Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, with selected critical essays and source materials.

Required texts: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Gibaldi, ed. 6th Edition; Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid, Understanding Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents, Mistron.

Grades: Class Participation-15%; Presentation-15%; Research Paper-70%.

English 233: Arthurian Literature from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-first Century
Professor Sealy Gilles
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:00 to 4:15 pm

Arthurian Literature is an exploration of the literature of King Arthur and his court from the early Celtic Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. As we study the enduring story of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, we shall also investigate the historical origins of the Arthur legend, the chivalric tradition and its impact on gender and class relationships then and now, and the role of fantasy and magic in a story, which has endured for over a thousand years. Issues of legitimacy and the use of public power also resonate in this literature and some of our explorations will touch on the use of the Camelot myth in the Kennedy administration and the incarnations of Camelot on stage and screen. Texts include medieval stories such as Tristan and Iseult and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, extracts from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and modern versions, both satiric (Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) and feminist (Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon).

Graduate Courses, Spring 2004

English 520
Non-Fiction Writing Workshop

Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Wednesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

This course will focus on writing the personal essay. The first few weeks 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. Then we will move on to a workshop format in which students' essays are read and discussed in detail. Each student will be expected to produce two developed 10-15 page personal essays (or one longer piece) by the end of the term. Readings will include works by Philip Lopate, George Orwell, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Williams, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, Gayle Pemberton, Richard Rodriguez, and others.

English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
Tuesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 PM

In this workshop we will explore different approaches for writing short fiction, especially examining narrative voice and how point of view affects the development of character, plot, and the relationship with the reader. While most of the workshop will be spent on developing craft through critiquing student writing, a portion of each week will also be devoted to discussing published short stories and essays on the poetics of fiction. The anthology for the course will be Ann Charters' The Story and Its Writer.

English 525: Playwriting Workshop
Katt Lissard
Mondays, 4:10 to 6:00 pm

This course will be divided into three parts. We'll begin with an introduction to the history and basics of dramatic writing, starting with Aristotle's Poetics and assessing sections of two different texts and approaches to writing for the theatre: The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lejos Egri and David Ball's Backwards and Forwards. The second phase of the workshop will focus on scene and character development, through a series of written exercises and assignments, as each student begins drafting a one-act play. The final section of the course will be devoted to workshopping each student's play-in-progress. Ongoing discussion of playwriting craft, theory, and form will be directly related to the individual needs of participating student playwrights and the work each student is developing. Along with the texts mentioned above, we'll be reading several plays and using Keith Johnstone's Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre as an ongoing resource.

Katt Lissard's most recent play, Water: An Illustrated Journal, was created through a Mabou Mines Resident Artist Award. Her work has been seen at a variety of venues, including: Dixon Place, HERE, NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing, the ArcLight, St. Mark's in the Bowery, BACA Downtown and the Circle Rep. Lab. She teaches in the Interdisciplinary Masters Program at Goddard College and at SUNY's Empire State College in Manhattan. Grants include: Art Matter, Inc., the Lotta Crabtree Theatrical Fund, Money for Women, the Colgate South Africa Fund, and the Heidtke Foundation. She's an Affiliate Artist of New Georges Theatre Company, a member of the former Circle Rep. Lab., an Auditor for NYSCA's Theatre Program, and a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

English 529: Seminar in Creative Writing: Visiting Writers Series

(Students register for 529 and attend three successive sections, each one credit).

English 529 did not hold this semester, but the Provost has agreed to bring the visiting writers to campus for three one-day workshops on experimental poetry writing. Everyone is welcome to take these workshops. You can take one or two or all three. If you attend all three and you would like, you can receive one free credit. The workshops will be held on Saturdays from 10-12 and from 1-4 pm. The experience will involve reading, writing, listening, and responding to poetry. All are welcome, including those who are experienced poets, as well as beginners. There will be a cap at 25, so please register in advance.

If you are interested in attending these workshops, contact Barbara Henning.

The tentative dates for the workshops are as follows:

Anne Waldman, Saturday, 3/27
Maureen Owen, Saturday, 4/10
David Henderson, Saturday, 4/24.

Section One: All Ten Directions-Experiments of Attention
Anne Waldman
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
1/23 to 2/20

We will be working with experiments of attention involving documentation, dream, cross genre, collaboration and performance, as well as with our political consciousness of the present moment and how to translate this into writing. Weekly writing and reading assignments.

(Anne Waldman is the author of over thirty books of poetry including Fast Speaking Woman, Kill or Cure, IOVIS, and Marriage: A Sentence. A book of her essays, Vow to Poetry, appeared in 2001. She is the editor of numerous anthologies, including The Beat Book, Disembodied Poetics, and The Angel Hair Anthology, which she co-edited with Lewis Warsh. She is co-founder, with Allen Ginsberg, of the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, CO.)

Section Two: Working Papers--Writing Under the Influence
Maureen Owen
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
2/27 to 4/3

To be inspired is to be influenced by. When developing a body of work of one's own, it is essential to create out of the inspiration of one's predecessors. The focus of this class will be to write under the influence of the poetics of four such studied writers: Lorine Niedecker (Wisconsin), Frederico Garcia Lorca (Spain), Anne-Marie Albiach (France), and Vladimir Mayakovsky (Russia). The poets included come from divergent politics and geographies and work in styles substantially different from one another. We will take an investigative look at each poet's biography with specific attention to "place" and the politics of the time as a starting point to understanding the work. The students will consider how they can expand their own work by experimenting with the particulars of the poet being discussed. The students will then focus on their own writing as inspired by our discoveries.

Section Three: Poetry Workshop
David Henderson
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm
4/10 to 5/1

The important thing is wanting to achieve, to succeed in making a serious connection with someone else, a quality, a philosophy, an institution, an object, or ones' self--a goal. My definition of poetry is broad and I believe in the right of the individual to persist in and extend and preserve their own mystery even within the criticism of others, including the almighty teacher. We will also look at prose and may work with prose as another form of poetry. We will look at other forms of poetry such as lyrics, raps, spoken work form (ats) or even simple lines in and of themselves. We will practice exercises and routines of the poet, and will often listen to each other's works in progress.

(Born in Harlem, David Henderson grew up in Harlem and the Bronx, lived in California for several years, and now resides in downtown Manhattan. He is the author of several books of poetry including De Mayor of Harlem, Neo-California, and 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, a biography of Jimi Hendrix, and he is the writer, producer, and director of the audio documentary Bob Kaufman, Poet. His musical credits include the lyrics to Love In Outerspace, music by Sun Ra. He is winner of several poetry awards. His extensive tours have taken him to California, New York, and Europe at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall (Sing Out for Peace) to the Greek Theater (Berkley Jazz Festival) to Poesie/Napoli and The Schweppes Urban Mix Festival in Madrid. He has taught at the University of California, Berkley and San Diego, City College of New York and Naropa, and most recently, at the New School and the St. Mark's Poetry Project.)

English 620: Theories in Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Tuesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

This course examines theories of rhetoric and composition, particularly as they relate to teaching students of writing. Exploring seminal ideas from the Sophists to the postmodernists, the course will investigate historical, political, and social considerations that undergird specific theories of rhetoric and composition, including the ideologies that influence both the production and performance of oral and written texts. Each theory discussed will be connected to the problem of helping students write more effectively inside and outside the classroom; for example, we will discuss the efficacy of social epistemic rhetoric, service learning, and other "post process" theories in the writing classroom, in particular for other-literate students who might resent or reject academic discourse. Texts for the course may include the following: Patricia Bizzell, "Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How?"; Thomas Kent, Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm; Ira Shor,Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change; Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers; Lester Faigley, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity & the Subject of Composition; and Keith Gilyard, Race, Rhetoric, and Composition.

English 624: American Nature Writing from Walden Pond to the East River
Professor Michael Bennett
Mondays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

Ecocriticism, which might loosely be defined as the study of the mutually constructing relationship between culture and the environment, has recently developed from a sparsely populated area of study into a busy intersection of cultural analysis, literary criticism, and environmental studies. We will stand at this intersection to see what we can learn about the relationship between ecology and American culture by studying the history and theory of nature writing in the United States. Beginning with 19th-century essays by famous (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau) and not-so-famous (William Bartram, Susan Fenimore Cooper) American authors, we will then venture into 20th century American nature writing (including works by Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, and Barry Lopez). We will also read essays about these writers in The Ecocriticism Reader. After surveying the terrain of European-American nature writing, we will turn to the inhabitants of cultural landscapes that have been largely ignored by mainstream ecocriticism, focusing on urban environments and writing by people of color. Among the authors we will read are Frederick Douglass, Audre Lorde, and Leslie Marmon Silko, accompanied by many of the essays collected in The Nature of Cities. The ultimate goal of the course is that we both appreciate the insights and challenge the limitations of American nature writing and ecocriticism.

Texts: Bennett, Michael and David W. Teague, eds. The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments; Dixon, Terrill, ed. City Wilds; Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Finch, Robert and John Elder, eds. The Norton Book of Nature Writing; Glotfelty, Cheryl and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader; Lorde, Audre, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; and Silko, Leslie Marmon, Ceremony.

Requirements: Active participation in class discussions; weekly responses to the reading; a class presentation; a research paper.

English 636: Postcolonial Literature Theory
Professor Huma Ibrahim
Tuesdays, 4:10 to 6:00 pm

The class on postcolonial literature and theory will be an examination of the crucial years of the changes that took place on the imperialist map of Africa and Asia and the issues that related to this dynamic change!

These changes occurred because of nationalist movements that demanded the ouster of imperialist governments, mainly British and French, but also some Portuguese, Italian and Spanish. The people and the movements that represented them wanted autonomy and self-government in these geographical areas. In large part they were successful in this endeavor. However, with the new sorts of world economies, Africa and Asia continued to be, as Walter Rodney would say, "underdeveloped."

The literature and theory we are going to read roughly covers the last fifty years of the last century. This course will deal with theories that postcolonial scholars have fostered and developed in order to understand the whole experience of colonialism and its aftermath as well as the literature that engages with those problems.

We will read literature specifically from Africa, Western and Southern Africa in particular, as well as literature from Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka and simultaneously look at the theory that engages with that literature as well as larger problems of the developing world. For the theory I will probably get one of a few postcolonial readers in existence and the literature will cover the geographic areas already mentioned.

English 646: Individual and Small Group Writing
Professor Patricia Stephens
Wednesdays, 4:10 to 6:00 pm

THIS COURSE DID NOT RUN.

(Advanced undergraduate students may enroll with permission of instructor.)

In this class, students will examine the theory and practice of individual and small group writing instruction. We will examine a range of strategies for working with students one-on-one as we locate that work within its various theoretical and historical contexts. Our work will focus on the following: structuring sessions and establishing priorities; assessing, diagnosing, and responding to student writing; strategies for invention, planning, drafting, revising, proofreading, and editing; helping students with grammatical and mechanical concerns; helping students improve reading comprehension; working with ESL students; attending to interpersonal dynamics and cultural and ethnic differences; and tutoring online.

Students who enroll in this 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 student 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.

Possible texts: Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers; Meyer and Smith, The Practical Tutor; Bouquet, Noise from the Writing Center; Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar; and Murphy and Law, Landmark Essays on Writing Centers.

English 649: Graduate Seminar in the British Lyric
Professor Sealy Gilles
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm

The British Lyric explores the history and theory of lyric poetry in the United Kingdom and Ireland from the Middle Ages to the present. Although medieval and early modern lyrics were often written to be sung, our studies will range far beyond those to include a wide range of non-narrative English poetry. We will begin with a working definition of the lyric as a poem that combines musical elements, such as rhythm and assonance, with visual imagery to create a distinctive emotional truth. Our class will study both the visual and aural forms of the amorphous genre, and the "truths" emerging from those formal constructs. Even as we work with theories of the lyric from Aristotle to the romantics to today's performance artists, we shall also pay particular attention to distinctive personal voices as they testify to political struggle, to experiences of loss, and to joy. Although the course is organized in a chronological fashion, each participant will have the opportunity to pursue an individual project centered on a particular poet, school of poetry, or lyric form. This is not a creative writing course, but we will be paying a great deal of attention to technique and performance.

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.