GRADUATE FLYER - FALL 2006
QUEENS CAMPUS
E. 140: Topics in Theory
(74544)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
Theories of Gender and Sexuality
In this course, we’ll attempt to make sense of the central position
sexuality holds in theories of culture and history. We’ll
pursue questions like: Why is subjectivity repeatedly defined by
sexualized experiences? Why is sexuality inextricably linked
to the question of autonomy, identity, and sovereignty? How
are subjects gendered through their expressions of sexuality?
These questions and others will guide our readings of major
thinkers in this field. Beginning with Freud, we’ll move
through the twentieth century, reading works from Jacques Lacan,
Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Catharine MacKinnon,
Michael Warner, Joan Wallach Scott, and others, to witness how, as
philosophy and cultural studies evolve, sexuality remains a
fundamental unit by which freedom and civilization are
measured. We’ll conclude by reading a contemporary novel or
screening a film against which students will have the option to
“test” one or more theories of gender and sexuality against the
text in their final research paper (15-20 pages).
E. 340: Spenser & Elizabethan
Renaissance (74540)
T. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
Mighty Opposites: Spenser, Marlowe and the Elizabethan
Renaissance
This course explores late Elizabethan culture from two opposite
points of view. We’ll consider the fiery career of
Christopher Marlowe, poet, playwright, and spy, whose radical works
carve out a space for dissidence and individuality in early modern
English culture, and also the more conventional works of Edmund
Spenser, colonial functionary in Ireland and author of The Faerie
Queene, the national epic of early modern England. By
juxtaposing Marlowe’s radical experiments in new literary forms
(public stage plays like Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor
Faustus, lyric poems, classical translations) against Spenser’s
attempts to replicate classical forms in English (The Faerie
Queene’s epic, The Shepheardes Calendar’s Georgic), we’ll explore
the complex cultural dynamic of the so-called Golden Age of English
literature. Time permitting, we’ll also consider
Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV as a response to both of these
authors.
E. 570: Monumental Form: Eliot, Dickens,
Trollope (74537)
R. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
Nineteenth-century large-scale fiction: its formal properties and
its place in a society where monumentality itself was rapidly
becoming a value; its relation to an increasingly “massified,”
organized civil society and expansionist national/imperial agendas;
and its relation to other art forms—opera, symphonic music—where
scales of form were expanding. The triple-decker novel, which
was at the center of Victorian literary culture, puts especial
demands upon the reader’s time; the course seeks to theorize this
fact—issues of thematic connection and coherence, fatigue and
forgetting—as well as overcome it in the effort to familiarize
ourselves with these central texts. Eliot, Dickens, Thackery,
Trollope.
E. 670: Topics in 19th Century American
Literature & Culture (74538)
M. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
The Problem of Thomas Jefferson
It only begins with his covert liaison with Sally Hemmings, his
enduring support for slavery, and the personal insolvency that sent
hundreds of family-owned slaves into the marketplace upon his
death. The intellectual challenges become still more clear
when we investigate the complicity of the institution of
slaveholding with the emergence of democracy; Jefferson’s invention
of a white republic; and the allegedly foreign ancestry of
African-Americans. The complexities of Jefferson’s legacy, in
other words, are just an occasion for a wide-ranging inquiry into
the relationship between race and democracy in the United
States. Central to our inquiry will be the many foreign
thinkers, such as Tocqueville and Crevecouer, who were influenced
by Jeffersonian ideals and had a decisive influence on the shape of
American nationalism. Equally important will be the
African-American writers—among them David Walker, Frederick
Douglass, and Martin Delany—who were inspired by Jefferson’s
example to create an alternative vision of the United States.
E. 725: Modern Drama (74547)
M. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A study of the major dramatists who broke with the traditions of
the 19th Century to create a new drama which was innovative in form
and subject matter.
E. 755: Topics in African American
Literature (74739)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
Jazz Writing
This course examines literary representations and adaptations of
jazz from the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s through the
present. Through the study of exemplary literary texts that
feature jazz as a social discourse as well as a mode of artistic
expression, we will investigate how jazz has been represented as
both a distinctive mode of African American cultural expression and
a complex medium of interculturalism. African American jazz
literature often underscores the rebellious desire implicit in jazz
expression, whether it transgresses racial boundaries or asserts
black autonomy and self-determination. At the same time, jazz
literature also foregrounds interracial and intercultural conflict,
conflict that is often related to the transgressive sexuality that
has been commonly attributed to the music. Emphasizing the
importance of jazz for African American modernism, this course will
consider how literary interpretations of jazz relate to theoretical
articulations of internationalism as well as U.S. and African
American cultural nationalism. Readings will include fiction
by Claude McKay (Banjo), James Baldwin (Another Country), Toni
Morrison (Jazz), and Paule Marshall (The Fisher King); poetry by
Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Jayne Cortez, and Nathanael Mackey,
drama by August Wilson; jazz autobiography; documentary film; and
essays. The course does not presume extensive knowledge of
jazz or of African American literature; the only prerequisite is an
interest in exploring the interaction of African American music and
literature.
E. 760: Postcolonial Literature (74545)
R. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
State and Non-State Violence
In this class we will examine the literary representations of four
contemporary phenomena: fundamentalism; terrorism; oil war; and the
threat of nuclear annihilation. The insights lent by poetry
and fiction rarely make it into the discourse around the roots of
contemporary fundamentalism and terrorism. Both Zadie Smith
in White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi in “My Son the Fanatic,” to give
two examples, present fundamentalist Islam as a metropolitan,
late-capitalist invention. In so doing, they support Vijay
Prashad’s contention that “jihad” and “McWorld” are not opposed
world-views (as Benjamin Barber and others would have it), but
rather alternative versions of the same imperializing
impulse. Other literary works remind us that the effects of
state violence (whether in the form of repressive regimes, or of an
ever-present threat of nuclear warfare) can be quite similar to
those of non-state-sponsored terrorism. Literature will be
drawn from Nigeria, India, Japan and the United States; authors may
include Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Hanif Kureishi, Kenzaburo
Oe, Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Zadie Smith.
E. 836: Modernism and the Fascist
Aesthetic (74754)
W. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
This course will trace the growth of fascist aesthetics out of the
fertile soil of Modernism and seek to identify parallels and
continuities between 1) Classical Modernism and the Nazi Moderne,
2) politicized cultural programs in Germany, Italy, the United
States, and the Soviet Union, 3) UFA and Hollywood film production,
and 4) the myths of cultural regeneration promoted by
twentieth-century European writers, critics, and poets.
STATEN ISLAND CAMPUS
E. 876: Writing Non-Fiction
(74664)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
The course will treat the creative aspect of many non-fiction
genres. For instance, we will begin with The Dead Beat: Lost
Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by
Marilyn Johnson and write about and consider the obituary and elegy
forms. We will also read various works that blur lines
between the non-fictive and the creative by writers such as Lynn
Hejinin, Norman Mailer, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Hunter
H. Thompson.
MANHATTAN CAMPUS
E. 878: Workshop in Poetry & Poetics
(74789)
W. 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This new course will combine readings in contemporary poetry and
poetics of select major 20th Century poets with a generative poetry
workshop. Research into the sonic elements and live
performance by poets studied will be central to the course which
incorporates attendance of three readings at The Poetry Project at
St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, a major international venue for
contemporary poetry. These three readings will be held
roughly during our class time and are mandatory. Each reading
will feature two poets and the course will be structured in three
cycles of reading and research, attendance of the reading, and then
workshopping of our own new poems. To prepare, we will read
the work of each of the six poets in depth before each reading,
then formulate both creative and critical responses of our own and
respond to them as a writing collective. In this way,
students will be able to develop their work in context of a larger
literary field. Readings incorporating the historical
contexts, as well as new developments in the field of contemporary
poetry will be featured, as well as explorations into the
relationship of poetry to other artistic media such as performance,
music and visual arts. Recommendations for other relevant
readings and events will be made throughout the semester and each
student will be responsible for keeping a journal that reports and
observes on a set number of these, and as a workbook for their own
poetic process. In addition to poetics statements and
critical response papers, students will write and revise a
chapbook-length manuscript of original poetry. At the end of
the semester, we will have our own reading and distribution of new
work.
E. 900: Master’s Research (72298)
E. 901: Readings and Research (72299)
E. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70264)
E. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (70263)
E. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (70262)