Queens Campus
ENG 236: Shakespeare II: Jacobean
(74030)
R. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
Hamlet against Humanism
This course will focus on Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most celebrated
play. By focusing intensely on a single work, the course will
provide a glimpse into several strands of contemporary Shakespeare
studies. Our point of departure will be Renaissance humanism
and Hamlet’s challenge to it. While it’s been common at least
since Jacob Burkhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy (1860) to think of the Renaissance as the age of the
invention of modern man, it’s more recently been argued that Hamlet
provides a skeptical response to many humanist claims, including
mankind’s essential freedom, our ability to remake ourselves, the
possibility of empirical certainty, and the beneficence of the
powers that govern the world. We’ll place Hamlet alongside
major works of Renaissance humanism (Pico’s “Oration on the Dignity
of Man,” Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Erasmus’s
“Praise of Folly”) as well as early modern plays that either
influenced or responded to Hamlet, including Kyd’s The Spanish
Tragedy, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Middleton’s The
Revenger’s Tragedy. We’ll read other Shakespearean works that
relate to Hamlet, including the Sonnets, All’s Well That Ends Well,
and Julius Caesar. We’ll explore the acute textual problems
of all modern editions of Hamlet, using Bernice Kliman’s wonderful
Three-Text Hamlet. Finally, we’ll consider the myriad modern
creative responses to Hamlet, including Pasternak’s lyric poem
“Hamlet,” Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
and Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius.
ENG 356: Novel to 1800
(74035)
M. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
The eighteenth century in England can be imagined as an era that
generated clear, distinct concepts that have been handed down
through literary history—neoclassicism, the aesthetic, and the
literary marketplace, to name just a few. From another
perspective, though, the period can look chaotic and muddled,
constituted as it is by indistinct, as-yet undifferentiated
literary forms. It is in this latter spirit that we will
trace the emergence of the novel form from around 1670 to
1800. Now recognized as the dominant literary genre in all of
Western culture, the novel, initially denigrated as sensational,
pornographic, and non-literary, has humble and disparate origins
indeed. Through readings of primary and secondary texts, we
will seek to understand how and why narrative experimentation moved
toward the realism that defines the first English novels. As
we attend to these literary and formal questions, we’ll also
inquire into the material, ideological, and social conditions that
urge the genre to consolidate. While our main focus will be on
works that have retrospectively been recognized as novels in the
period, we will begin by reading other forms in which we can see
narrative technique gesture toward novelistic
discourse—specifically, romance and protestant conversion
narrative. Authors will include Bunyan, Haywood, Richardson,
Fielding, Sterne, and Austen; we’ll also read some of the major
literary critics of the novel, including Watt, McKeon, and
Armstrong.
ENG 625: Gender and 19th Century American
Literature (74032)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Anger, Shame, Desire, Envy, Sadness, Disgust, Loss, Love
What is an emotion? Do emotions have boundaries or
appropriate expressions? Are there transhistorical textures
to emotions? Are these textures traceable? To what
degree are emotions public or private, political or personal,
genderless or deeply gendered? Why have certain fields like
the law tread warily around the emotions while others, like
literature, seem to revel in the most intimate incarnations of
emotional life? This course will consider the gendering of
emotion in 19th and early twentieth century American literature and
will read this literature in conjunction with current theoretical
and cross-disciplinary debates about emotions. Authors may include:
Edith Wharton, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather,
among others. Criticism may include: Eve Sedgwick on shame,
Martha Nussbaum on disgust, and Peter Stearns on histories of
emotion.
ENG 670: The Modern American Novel I
(74029)
T. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This course is a comparative study of selected American novels
written during the first half of the twentieth century. It
will concentrate especially on the development of the novel between
the two World Wars, a period of explosive social tensions,
extraordinary technological change, and innovative movements in the
arts. While providing an overview of important developments
in modern fiction, this course will address such issues as the
relationship of modernist form to social modernity; mass culture
and consumerism; nationalism and internationalism; race and
ethnicity; gender and sexuality; and the politics of canon
formation. Texts to be studied include Willa Cather, My
Antonia; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Tender Is the Night; Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed; Djuna Barnes,
Nightwood; Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust; William Faulkner,
Light in August; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; and Gwendolyn
Brooks, Maud Martha.
ENG 710: Postmodernism: Cultures and
Countercultures (74033)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen P. Miller
Conceptualizations of postmodernism often hinge on a notion of
culture as all pervasive and inclusive of nature. When
Rousseau proposed the notion of a social contract as a means of
regulating the benefits of culture for individuals, nature
constituted a theoretical contradistinction to cultural authorities
and dominant cultures and a basis for later countercultures.
However if our culture is an increasingly global and common one,
are truly effective countercultures still possible? Can they
do any more than provide new markets and labor sources for the
dominant culture? What agencies are still available for what
we might call the real participants in the imaginary social
contract? Our class will explore relationships among culture,
authority, counterculture, and the imagination. In this
regard, we will, in the first two or three weeks of the class,
familiarize ourselves with and relate concepts by thinkers such as
Rousseau, Marx, Gramsci, Marcuse, Latour, Lyotard, Lacan, Jameson,
and Althussers. We will then apply these concerns to various
contemporary works. Authors whom we possibly will study
include John Ashbery, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Don DeLillo,
Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Milan Kundera, Charles
Bernstein, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner. Students should
contact Dr. Miller this spring about authors they would like to
study.
ENG 715: The Comedic Reality
(74665)
R. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
The object of this course is to trace the development of comedy as
a theatrical form from its origin in ancient Greece up to the
present. Students will have the opportunity to become
acquainted with the most celebrated comedies of all time, including
a sampling of the work of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, dramatists of
the 18th and 19th centuries, along with the most celebrated
creators of comedy of the modern era.
We will examine the enduring nature of comedy as it has survived
throughout human experience. A foundation for our
explorations will be an analysis of theories of the nature of
comedy as well as a consideration of the psychology of
laughter. The extent to which comedy reflects changing social
climates and varies from one culture to another will be the focus
of our study.
ENG 793: Literary/Visual Texts
(74031)
M. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
The Visual in Literature
This will be an intensive seminar workshop on the relationship
between the visual, verbal, written and performative in
literature. Topics will include the history and practice of
concrete poetry, calligrammes, methods of collage and montage in
poetry, visual arts and film, poet/artist collaborations, visual
memoirs, found poetry and art, and the new wave of Graphic
Novels. This course will be comparative cross culturally,
sampling from the Native American, Japanese, Brazilian Spanish,
German, French and indigenous world languages. Required
readings, screening, gallery visits and involvement in The People’s
Poetry Gathering in Manhattan whose theme this year is poetry
written in endangered indigenous languages from throughout the
world. Authors, artists and auteurs will draw from
Apollinaire, Bok, Brainard, Brakhage, Cage, Child, Cole, Cornell,
Dorsky, Duschamp, Ernst, Kandinsky, Mac Low, Moholy-Nagy, Poe,
Rothenberg, Schwitters, Vicuna, Waldrop, Whalen, Williams. We
will examine the concept of Third Mind which refers to the
Burroughsian concept of letting the superconscious mind take over
in the creation of new work, and also the greater range of work
that can be obtained from the marriage of two or more art
forms. Written, drawn and performative responses will be
assigned exercising creative, analytical and critical modes of
thinking and writing.
Staten Island Campus
ENG 875: Feminist Theory (74766)
T. 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Dr. Melissa Mowry
This course offers students an intensive overview of the major
developments in feminist literary and cultural theory since the
mid-1970’s. Although it is intended primarily for graduate
students in English, students from other disciplines, including
Philosophy and Education, as well as advanced undergraduates in
Women’s Studies and English are welcome. Through this class,
it is expected that students will learn the broad structure of the
field from its emergence during the 1970’s until the present,
become conversant with major themes in feminist theory, and deepen
their engagements with feminist theory as both a thematic and a
series of methodologies. This course is open to graduate students
and qualified undergraduates, but it assumes that students enrolled
will have taken E. 2300 or a comparable course.
ENG 900: Master’s Research
(72726)
ENG 901: Readings and Research
(72727)
ENG 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA)
(70290)
ENG 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA)
(70289)
ENG 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA)
(70288)