Queens Campus
ENG 190: Seminar in Medieval Literature:
Medieval Travel Literature (74015)
M. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
Before space rockets and airplanes, before the highly organized and
systematic operations of the modern nation-state, distant travel in
the Middle Ages was not only often dangerous and difficult, but it
also constituted a step into the unknown and unfamiliar to such a
degree of which modern Western travelers have no experience or
knowledge. Whereas even modern astronauts know what to expect
on the moon before landing on it, medieval travelers often had
little or no knowledge or expectation of the distant lands they set
out for. Travel in the Middle Ages constitutes a radical
encounter and engagement with otherness. And for modern readers as
well, monsters, fabulously wealth, and miraculous substances in
medieval travel accounts bespeak the otherness of medieval
civilization itself. How are we to make sense of the
"historical" nature of such travel accounts, could travelers
actually have "seen" monsters? How does the conceptualization
of otherness in these writings play a role in medieval discourses
of humanity, community, and the "international order" in the days
before the nation-state? In this course we will read the writings
of travelers from east and west, such as Marco Polo, Friars William
of Rubruck, John of Plano Carpini and Odoric of Pordenone, Ibn
Battuta, Raban Sauma, and Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. We will
examine the construction of the medieval landscape in
"multicultural," "global" terms in these writers, and in the
context of contemporary events and phenomena such as the crusades,
pilgrimages, Mongolian threat towards the west, and relations
between Islam and Christianity.
ENG 235: Shakespeare I: Elizabethan Period
(73703)
W. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
This course juxtaposes the historical Elizabethan actor and
playwright who spelled his name "Shakspur" with the Bard whose name
still defines English literature nearly four centuries after his
death. We will focus on three groups of plays in the first
half of Shakespeare's career: a historical sequence (Richard II to
Henry V) that enacts a dramatic fantasy about English nationalism;
a group of comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about
Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It)
that explore marriage, money, city life, racial prejudice, and
social cohesion; and a trio of tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Julius
Caesar, and Hamlet) that shatter the comic unity that precedes
them. We may also read selections from the plays of
Shakespeare's contemporaries, especially his early rivals
Christopher Marlowe and John Lyly. We will place Shakespeare
within the context of contemporary interest in his works, including
scholarly methodologies like New Historicism, feminism, performance
studies, and the history of popular culture, popular
representations like Shakespeare in Love, and the presence of
Shakespeare in film and on stage.
ENG 290: Seminar in 16th & 17th
Century British Literature (73701)
Imagining London's Underworld, 1660-1740
R. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Melissa Mowry
Moll Flanders, Jonathan Wilde, Moll Cutpurse - these are just a few
of the legendary figures that dominated London's real and imagined
underworlds during the late Stuart and early Hanoverian
periods. Bawdy, irreverent, and shrewd, they embodied both the
dangers and attractions of early urban life and as a result became
a constitutive part of the emerging modern city. But where
did these characters come from? Were they "real" or purely
fictional? Why did English culture of this period devote so
much time and energy to its own dark "underbelly"?
These are the core questions that we'll address in this
class. But we'll consider these questions primarily as a means
to investigate possible processes of cultural
formation. Alongside "canonical" studies of London's
underworld, like Defoe's Moll Flanders and Jonathan Wilde, Gay's
The Beggar's Opera and others, we'll examine a variety of other
works like the Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse and various pamphlets
describing other rogue figures like Mary Carleton and Elizabeth
Cellier. Additionally, we'll be working with The Proceedings
of the Old Bailey a massive new website that makes available
popular representations of crime as well as some of the court
records of the period so that we can also examine the relationship
between representation and practice. Students will be expected
to complete a 20 min. oral presentation, a short paper and a longer
seminar length paper, with an eye towards submitting an abstract to
a conference.
ENG 590: Seminar in American Literature
(73702)
"Hysterical" Symptoms: Treatments of Trauma in Literary
Narrative
T. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course examines how literary narratives represent traumatic
experience, from train accidents, shell shock, and hysteria at the
turn of the twentieth century, to concentration camp experiences,
domestic abuse, and terrorism through the turn of the
twenty-first. We will read the writings on trauma by early
psychological theorists such as Freud and Charcot as well as the
later trauma theorists Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra. We
will also read a selection of novels, testimonial literature, and
short fiction from writers Stephen Crane through Toni Morrison.
ENG 681: Modern Drama: 1945-Present
(74449)
R. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A focus on the enduring nature of the theater to reflect and
interpret a postmodern world. The course will explore the
contributions of major contemporary dramatists to the culture of
the new millennium. Works by such playwrights as Edward Albee,
Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Neil Simon, Brian Friel, David
Mamet, and Sam Shepard will be explored.
ENG 720: Literature and the Related Arts
(73699)
M. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This seminar focuses on American literature and the related arts of
the 1930s. The socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression
and the rise of fascism challenged writers and artists to radically
rethink their purpose and audience. While the Depression tends
to evoke mythic images of social suffering and revolutionary
struggle, the politically and formally innovative arts of the 1930s
have also had a lasting impact on American culture.
Emphasizing the interaction of American modernism with mass culture
in the 1930s, this course examines the relationship of literature
to the visual arts (painting and photography), film (Hollywood and
documentary), and music (especially popular music such as the
blues, jazz, and folk music). The approach will be exploratory
and interdisciplinary, open to various interests in 1930s American
culture. Readings include Mike Gold, Jews Without Money; Tess
Slesinger, The Unpossessed; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children;
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust; James Agee and Walker Evans,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and selected poetry by Sterling
Brown, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and
Elizabeth Bishop.
ENG 736: Emerging Technologies and the
Making of Meaning (73704)
W. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
"It is estimated that if all human communications before
the appearance of digital technology were transcribed and
digitized, it would amount to a total of about 5 exabytes of data
(an exabyte being a billion gigabytes). The world is now creating
roughly 1-2 exabytes of new data each year. In these quantities,
information is not just representational or social but
environmental. The global ecology is a data site; it is terrifying
and beautiful."
-Don Byrd, Abstraction (unpublished manuscript)
"...the shards of modernity cut deeply, and they leave wounds
that will have to heal in new ways.... we need new forms...
recombinant form is pretty much now the basic way we look at the
world. Combine, split, reform... the dj method of synthesis has
taken hold of almost all aspects of the creative act: "E Pluribus
Unum"-of many, one.... the operating system of hypermodernity asks
for a lot more..."
-DJ Spooky
"The future is a much better guide to the present than the
past."
-Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in
Sonic Fiction
Normalcy is long gone. We're way beyond "information overload,"
a nostalgic term implying that given the right amount of memory or
space one might be able to capture the necessary amount of data.
Now information is atmospheric. One moves through it, rides with
it, but one certainly can't "specialize" in any of it any more. In
this digital, global, decentralized, post-Fordist,
post-disciplinary, ecologically devastated, cyborg "culture" (can
the term "culture" even remain useful in such a constantly shifting
landscape?), how do we continue to make meaning in the world--as
writers, as artists, as educators? This course will explore such
questions by looking at ideas circulating in the work of Marshall
McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Francisco Varela, Manuel Castells,
Eric Drexler, and Donna Haraway. In addition we'll look at the
following books (this list is fairly certain, but subject to some
possible changes between now and September): William Gibson's
Neuromancer, Michael Joyce's Afternoon, Kodwo Eshun's More
Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Jay David
Bolter's Writing Space, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked: The New
Science of Networks, Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, John
Brockman's edited collection The Next Fifty Years: Science in the
First Half of the Twenty-First Century, William McDonough &
Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make
Things, and N. Katherine Hayles's Writing Machines. Plus a handful
of websites to browse through each week. Writing and research
projects will vary, depending upon your creative and professional
interests: some might write speculative fiction, others design
websites; some might record projects on CDs, others might design
courses or curricula. We'll work it all out on a one-on-one basis.
Email me with any questions: owensd@optonline.net.
ENG 803: Modern Critical Theories
(73698)
T. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
This course serves as an introduction to modern ideas about
literature and the visual arts, emphasizing twentieth-century
literary and aesthetic theory and criticism. Our concern will
be to acquire fluency in the major issues of concern to critics,
writers, and artists, starting "in or about December, 1910," when,
as Virginia Woolf famously wrote, "human character
changed." Although Modernism will be our major focus, the
course will range all over the critical map, including neo-Romantic
approaches, Marxism, National Socialism, Socialist Realism, and the
great post-structuralist revolution and its offspring.
Staten Island Campus
ENG 738: The Aesthetics of Meaning
(74081)
W. 4 - 6 p.m.
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
This course investigates the explosion of taste and pleasures that
inspired the emergence of the modern discourse of aesthetics in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century. The enjoyment of art and
beauty counted among those pleasures, but also categorized as
aesthetic experiences were gourmandism (the love of food) and
heterosexual desire. Together, these pleasures were said to
comprise unique subjective state promising unprecedented happiness,
sociability, and even world peace, but some writers also saw of the
darker side of this development - of pleasure taken too far, of
pain enjoyed for its own sake - and developed theories of altered
states of consciousness at odds with norms of reason and
sanity. Obsessions, phobias, and addictions thus became part
of the aesthetics at its most radical: its challenge to the
Enlightenment ideal of the rational subject and of the
intelligibility of experience. Writers include Burke, Kant,
Sterne, DeQuincy, Poe and Foucault.
ENG 500: Colloquia (70937)
ENG 900: Master's Research (74450)
ENG 901: Readings & Research (74451)
ENG 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70397)
ENG 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (70396)
ENG 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (70395)