GRADUATE FLYER – FALL 2008
QUEENS CAMPUS
E. 100: Modern Critical Theories
(74886)
W. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course is intended as an introduction to the theoretical
approaches generated by the “linguistic turn” of the twentieth
century: Saussure, formalism, structuralism, and
post-structuralism. We will survey some landmark texts and
movements in the first half of the class, including Foucault’s
History of Sexuality. By mid-semester, however, students will
be asked to start articulating contemporary theoretical problems
they wish to pursue and we will develop our course bibliography
accordingly.
E. 120: Composition Theory
(74884)
R 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
This course introduces students to the many issues, battles,
disciplinary turns, research efforts, and pedagogical shifts that
continue to shape the field of composition studies and considers
theory and praxis in relation to writing instruction – in English
studies, writing centers, across the curriculum. We’ll
consider how composition pedagogy has evolved in recent decades
with research and theory on composing processes; the text itself,
writing behavior, relationship between cognition and writing,
writing contexts and communities, development of the individual
writer. Our goal will not be to attempt to cover everything
that is composition, but rather to build a foundation of knowledge
about some of the key theories, assumptions, approaches and debates
about written communication practices and literacy education.
Readings, research/writing, and in-class dialogue will range from
the practical and pragmatic, to the cultural, theoretical and
political, and we will consider composition theory in relation to
English studies and literary/cultural/critical theory.
E. 160: Research Methods in English
Studies (75127)
M 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Harry Denny
Under the umbrella of English Studies, many currents of scholarship
explore texts through aesthetic, formalist, archival and
interpretive lens, ways of doing research that much of teaching
indirectly or directly addresses. Another wide swath of
English Studies intersects with a multitude of humanities and
social science disciplines—from cultural studies and history to
sociology, anthropology, political science and linguistics.
Composition and writing center studies, emergent concentrations in
our department, situate themselves at the intersection of all these
intellectual pursuits. Learning to write a Milton essay
shares a good deal of common ground with developing an essay
analyzing social organization of First Nations people.
Similarly, the research process – be it inductive or deductive –
involves posing hypothetical questions, considering means for
testing them out, crafting rhetorical devices to presenting
results, and challenging one’s own and other’s findings. This
course intends to introduce graduate students to a wide set of
techniques and debates for conducting research in a variety of
contexts. Building from other courses, students will continue
explore community building and collegial conversations through
workshopping drafts and collaborative revision with a eye toward
professional outlets for their work (conferences, journals,
etc.)
E. 380: Topics in Early Modern Studies Law
and Literature (74877)
R 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Brian Lockey
This course will consider literary,
philosophical, and historical intersections between Renaissance law
and literature. Students will consider prose, poetic and dramatic
works that engage with significant questions of Renaissance law and
legal theory, and in the process, they will consider the most
important legal conflicts and debates of the period, including the
tensions that existed between the common law tradition and the
civil and canon law traditions. Other topics will include custom
and equity, the postnati, and jurisdictional disputes between the
common law courts and Chancery. Readings will include works by such
English jurists as Sir Edward Coke, Thomas Egerton, Baron
Ellesmere, Sir John Fortescue, Sir John Davies, Alberico Gentili
and Francisco de Vitoria as well as works of fiction by William
Shakespeare, William Warner, John Webster, Edmund Spenser, Sir
Philip Sidney, and John Milton.
E. 540: Science, Poetry, and Prose in
Victorian England (74923)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
Mathew Arnold in his 1883 essay “Literature and Science” wrote:
“not only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is
converted into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he
likes, that Charon is punting his ferry-boat on the river Styx… but
we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water
does actually happen. This reality of natural knowledge is, which
makes the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowledge
of things, with the humanist’s knowledge, which is, say they, a
knowledge of words.” The vexed relation between the “two cultures”
that is incipient in Arnold’s essay has properly been questioned by
science and literature studies, even as it is evident that
scientific knowledge enjoys an ever more privileged status in both
the academy and more broadly in culture. This course explores
a time when the disciplinary boundaries that separate literature
from science had not solidified into their modern form; science was
more clearly a part of culture, an aspect of larger intellectual
life rather than a separate sphere reserved for specialists. As a
result, Victorian science often bears the imprint of the literary,
while scientific concerns also found their way both directly and
obliquely into the period’s poetry, fiction, and prose. Topics such
as the scientific challenge to Genesis by geology, Victorian
theories of mind, natural history and poetic observation, and the
intersection of imaginative literature and Darwin will organize the
course. This course will consider the relation between four
central Victorian sciences— geology, evolutionary science, natural
history, and psychology— and their relation to the period’s
literature. Readings from: M. Shelley, C. Brontë, Tennyson,
G. Eliot, T. Hardy, Kingsley, Hopkins, C. Darwin, P.H. Gosse, C.
Lyell, H. Miller.
E. 670: Topics in 19th Century
American Literature (74880)
M 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Trans-American Literature: Hemispheric Literary
Politics
Cuba, Mexico, and all the nations of the Caribbean and Latin
America, it turns out, have their American literature, too.
And much of it directly addresses or indirectly challenges the
claim of the United States to cultural, political, and ideological
dominance in the hemisphere. So while it is true that many
nationalist movements and literature of the Americas were conceived
in explicit homage to the United States, the first nation to break
free of its colonial master and a leader in the struggle to
“de-colonize” the hemisphere, the writers of this other American
literature eventually found themselves in another snare. By
the time Jose Marti wrote, “Our America,” to inspire the Cuban
liberation movement of the 1890s, it was clear that the United
States had vanquished the Spanish empire in the hemisphere only in
order to replace it.
Whose hemisphere is it? This course
elaborates this question with a wide survey of literary genres and
national traditions across the Americas, from Herman Melville’s
Benito Cereno and Frederick Douglass’s Heroic Slave in the United
States to the classics of Cuban and Mexican literature—such as
Cirilo Villaverde’s romantic novel of forbidden love, Cecelia
Valdez, Jose Vasconcelos’s utopian fantasy of race mixing, The
Cosmic Race, and the “magical realist” Alejo Carpentier’s novel of
the Caribbean, Explosion in the Cathedral—that helped inspire their
respective sense of nationhood. And to truly disturb our
sense of borders just in time for the immigration debate, we will
also be examining the Mexican literature of the United States,
Maria Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It, and Gloria
Anzaldua’s feminist poetic manifesto, Borderlands, or the New
Mestizo. With the further assistance of post-colonial theory
and imperial history of the hemisphere, this course hopes
ultimately to imagine not just a different kind of American
literature but a different kind of America.
E. 750: Contemporary Drama (75050)
M. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
This course examines the ways in which the theater of our time
reflects changing cultural attitudes vis-à-vis the human condition
as reflected in selected plays. Social and philosophical
issues maintain a central focus in our analysis of the creations
for the contemporary stage. Theater in the post-modern era
will be explored taking into account a global perspective. We will
examine the intersection of art and the sciences in providing a new
dimension to the theatrical vision, taking into account advances in
new disciplines that yield varied perspectives in viewing the human
condition. Both the substance and the style of the
contemporary plays selected for study will be analyzed.
E. 755: Topics in Twentieth-Century African American
Literature (74885)
Jazz Writing
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
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
often has been 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;
jazz autobiographical writing; documentary film; and
essays.
E. 880: Topics in Interdisciplinary
Studies (74924)
Ethnic Literary Theories
T. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course will focus on literary theory and theories about
reading that are written by ethnic “minority” thinkers. The class
will serve as an introduction to theories about literature from the
viewpoint of “minority” thinkers. In examining these theoretical
texts, we will be contemplating several questions: What is
literature? What does it mean to read “ethnic” literature? Are
there methodologies appropriate to reading an “ethnic” text? What
is a “text”? What does it mean to “read”? The course will move
between literary texts that pose this question and theories of
literature and literary criticism to consider the relationship
between literature and society. Some key theorists we may cover:
Gates, Fanon, Achebe, Said, Spivak, Morrison, Bhabha, Anzaldua,
Kingston.
MANHATTAN CAMPUS
E. 761: Caribbean Literature, Culture and Theory
(74894)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Lisa Outar
This course will examine Caribbean pre- and post-independence
literary and cultural production. We will trace the contours
of a Caribbean literary and theoretical tradition via a careful
consideration of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, manifestos
and criticism and theory. The course will challenge the
common divisions made along the region’s linguistic differences –
Hispanophone, Anglophone, Francophone, etc. - and consider the
Caribbean as a whole and in relationship to its former colonizers
as well as to its powerful neighbor to the North. In addition
to tracking the intersections of race, gender, class, ethnicity and
colonial histories in the selected works, we will assess the
emergence of several key Caribbean texts as foundational for the
field of postcolonial studies and the implications for the
canonization of certain Caribbean texts in American literary
curricula.
E. 878: Workshop in Poetry & Poetics
(72987)
W. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This course will combine live poetry readings of select major 20th
Century poets with a generative poetry workshop. Research
into the sonic elements and live performance by the 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 NYC 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 own manuscripts of poetry 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. The semester will conclude with a reading of our own at
the Manhattan campus. Students will be able to develop their own
manuscripts of poetry in context of a larger literary field, and
exploring the nature of that field, lend their own voices to
it.
E. 500: Colloquia (70495)
E. 900: Master’s Research (71763)
E. 901: Readings & Research (71764)
E. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70212)
E. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (70211)
E. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (70210)