QUEENS CAMPUS
E. 100: Modern Critical Theories (73823)
R 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Harry Denny
In the context of the most severe economic downturn since the Great
Depression, global imperial conflict, and an on-going crisis of the
humanities and the place of higher education in the new millennium,
equipping oneself with critical theories to problem-pose and
challenge the hegemonic could not be more important for better
understanding the world in which we find ourselves, for providing a
foundation to guide us to action and social change, or for offering
a platform for English Studies to engage the everyday practices of
aesthetics, creativity and production of meaning. This course
explores literary, linguistic and socio-cultural influences on
criticism in English Studies with specific attention given to
Marxist/Frankford-inspired theories of domination, ideology, and
post-Fordism; cultural studies; postmodernism; and the politics of
identity. Students will explore key terms and lines of inquiry
through comparative and in-depth study of primary texts, mainly
book-length, that will provide a foundation for individual
semester-long projects. Beyond weekly in-class discussions,
students will develop collaborative/online working documents
applying key terms to issues arising in everyday literary,
literacy, composition or cultural studies research happening in
relation to their own teaching/learning/mentoring.
E. 110: Intro to the Profession (74619)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
Beginning Fall 2009 the department is taking a new approach to
teaching this course. Every Fall this course will now be taught by
a different member of the English Department, who will organize the
weekly assignments and discussions. But a major part of the course
will be comprised of visits by at least five faculty in the
department. Each of these faculty will run an entire class, and be
available to respond to student comments posted on Blackboard in
the week following their visit. Each visiting faculty member will
assign 2 readings to students--perhaps something they have
published or an excerpt of a draft they are currently working on,
as well as another reading that represents a particular area of the
profession they wish to discuss. We'll try to make sure that
visiting faculty represent a variety of areas--literary criticism,
composition/rhetoric, pedagogy, cultural studies, creative writing,
and other media. When we're not being visited by guest faculty,
class topics will involve the history of English Departments and
English studies; the range of conferences and organizations English
faculty belong to; writing abstracts for conferences; exploring
approaches to writing manuscript prospectuses; investigating job
opportunities for graduate students in English; and exploring
various conflicts and debates circulating within the field. This
course is required of all DA students, but is also suggested for MA
students.
E. 135: Critical Issues in the Teaching of Writing (74628)
Co-Authoring and Collaboration
T - 6:50 – 8:50 pm
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
Through the semester we will explore co-authoring and collaboration
through writing studies, literary studies, professional writing,
experimental writing, and large scale collaborative research and
writing projects like Wikipedia. Questions to be asked
through the semester: Do we cling to the “myth of solitary genius”
(Stillinger) in our conceptions of the author? Should we
strive to deconstruct that myth in literary and writing studies, as
well as in literature and writing classes? Is the value
placed on the single authored text an obsession with
individualism? What can we learn from famous literary
partnerships, whether writing or editing collaborations? What
does it mean when co-authors take on one name for their
collaboration? Do those never given credit for their
contributions to collaborative projects reveal the dangers of
composing together? To what degree is co-authoring valued
across the academy or beyond academia? In which disciplines,
professions and contexts? What support do student writers
need to co-author successfully and why would we want to encourage
co-authoring in our classes? What’s it like to
co-author? (The semester's work will include some
co-authoring.) Is editing co-authoring? Is
ghostwriting? Possible texts include excerpts from: Eodice
and Day’s (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy,
Laird’s Women CoAuthors, Koestenbaum’s Double Talk: The Erotics of
Male Literary Collaboration, Cross’s Forming the Collective Mind: A
Contextual Exploration of Large Scale Collaborative Writing in
Industry, Stone and Thompson’s Literary Couplings: Writing Couples,
Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship,
www.315experiment.com/ The 3:15 Experiment, and Erdal’s
Ghosting.
E. 140: Topics in Theory (74620)
R. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
This is an advanced theory course thinking about the body as
“text,” the text as “body.” Theorists of race and gender have
understood the “body” to be a form of “text,” in the sense that it
is a site upon which meaning has been projected as the effect of
certain relations of power. Using theories of textuality, race,
sexuality, gender and reading, we will try to think about what it
means for the text (both the literary text, the human body, and the
theoretical writings) to be conceived as a “sign,” and for the
text/body to be framed as an assembly of devices and strategies
deployed to achieve certain effects, to construct a specific
argument. Although we will be reading intensively in
poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, literary and critical
race theory, we will also be “theorizing” from our literary
texts.
E. 380 Topics in Early Modern Studies (74625)
W. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Brian Lockey
Exotic Nation: The Figure of the Moor in Renaissance
Literature
In light of contemporary events such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
and grand political theories such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard
Lewis’s notion of a “Clash of Civilizations” between the Christian
West and the Muslim East, it is important to note that many of the
English and European representations of Moors and Turks during the
Renaissance are positive ones. From Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso to William Shakespeare’s Othello, The Moor of Venice, there
are many complex and complimentary representations of Moors and
Turks that stand alongside the more stereotypical figure of the
barbarous Moor. In the most general sense, it is worth asking why
Moors, Arabs, and Turks are so often represented in the drama and
narrative poetry and prose of this period. One obvious response is
that the Renaissance is the first era of globalization, a period in
which commerce, piracy, and war caused Englishmen and other
Europeans to travel abroad, to encounter, and to take an interest
in the inhabitants of foreign lands with more frequency. The
Mediterranean was central to such encounters—in the Mediterranean
sea, Turkish, Moorish, Venetian, Spanish, Portuguese, and English
people encountered one another in a variety of different hostile
and commercial contexts.
In this course, we will ask
ourselves why English writers produced so many works of fiction in
which Arabs, Moors, and Turks assume a prominent role. We will
examine a number of diverse literary constructions and incarnations
of the “Exotic Nation,” that dangerous, seductive, and sometimes
feminized foreign kingdom that Englishmen both desired and feared.
We will consider questions of nationhood, hybrid identity, the way
in which the female body takes on the symbolic value of the nation
itself, as well as how foreign lands were often figured as feminine
bodies pliant to the conquering European. Among the works that we
will read are Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and
Titus Andronicus, Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, and Edmund
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
E. 450: Restoration in Eighteenth-Century Literature (74817)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
Aesthetics, Erotics, and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
This course will examine the intersection of the discourses on
virtue, sexuality, and the imagination in British literature from
1660 to 1760. By reading both philosophical and literary texts, we
will investigate how human consciousness was imagined to work as
well as the degree to which literature was thought to be central in
forming this consciousness. Specifically, we will trace the
precarious role of sexuality—of both the virtuous and degraded
sort—in this effort to edify the imaginations of eighteenth-century
readers. In an age concerned with the increased visibility of
women, changing marriage practices, and social order, literature
variously and repeatedly tells stories of virtue and chastity
coming into conflict with erotic temptation. How do authors and
philosophers “prepare” their readers for encounters with sex in
literature? How do readers balance salacious interest in such
subject matter with an enduring aim to be “enlightened” through
acts of reading? Philosophical and aesthetic readings will include
works by Dryden, Locke, Addison, Hume, Hogarth and Smith; literary
texts will include works by Rochester, Haywood, Richardson,
Fielding, Cleland, and Sterne. Evaluation will be based on
participation and a seminar-length paper.
E. 580: Studies in 19th-Century British Authors (74629)
W. 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
Course subtitle: “1848”
The “condition of England question” in the early 1840s was a
dominant political issue and a popular cause for social critics,
for the condition of England was dire: economic depression and high
unemployment, combined with deflationary wages and inflationary
food prices, set the stage for British revolutionary agitation,
which threatened to match the outright revolutions that occurred in
Europe in 1848. As revolutionary agitation hit a peak in
Britain, a unique moment of English fiction also occurred: it
became open not only to thematic issues of social inequality, but
to formal literary revolutions as well, in ways that it would not
be even ten years later. The condition of English fiction in
1848 was extraordinary, for that year saw the publication of
perhaps the most renowned fiction of the Victorian era— Jane Eyre,
Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Dombey and Son, Sybil, Mary Barton—
as well as the document of revolution itself, Marx’s The Communist
Manifesto. We will read these literary texts and political
documents, as well as contemporary historical accounts of
1848. The course will be both historical and formalist in its
methods of inquiry, and it will teach and support archival research
for presentations and writing.
E. 646 American Poetics: Rhetoric and Aesthetics in 19th
-Century American Literature (74631)
M. 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
It is widely acknowledged that rhetoric was the most important
element in the college curriculum in the first half of the
nineteenth century; it is also true that this is the last time it
exerted such influence. What happened? The purpose of this
class is to stage a debate between the business of the literature
of persuasion (argument and polemic) and the literature of
aesthetics (art that arrests, enchants, and entertains, but which
doesn't necessarily argue). The historical stage of the debate will
be U.S. literature of the nineteenth century, a period that
witnesses the efflorescence of powerful didactic literatures, such
as anti-slavery discourse and various types of reform-oriented
expression, as well as influential movements in aestheticism and
belle-letters. Readings will include Aristotle on rhetoric and
poetics; Kant on the beautiful; Frederick Douglass's Narrative; an
Emerson essay; Daniel Webster's "2nd Reply to Hayne"; Poe stories;
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Melville's Typee, Whitman's Franklin
Evans; Fanny Fern's columns; Davis's Life in the Iron Mills; Henry
James' Bostonians; some background reading on American college
curricula (likely candidates: Berlin; Ohmann; Graff).
E. 766: South Asian and South Asian Diaspora Literature
(74764)
M 6:50 – 8:50pm
Dr. Lisa Outar
This course will examine the contours of the vast body of South
Asian and South Asian diaspora literature. We will explore
the linguistic, cultural and political debates around the
production of literary forms (in various languages) on the
subcontinent before, during and following colonialism. In
what ways do writers conceive of themselves as constructing and
referencing particular notions of South Asian identity and literary
tradition? The connection (or lack thereof?) between writing
produced on the subcontinent and created elsewhere by diasporic
South Asians will also be examined. What are the new
categories necessary for classifying and studying the literary
forms that ensue from time away from “the motherland”? We
will consider the issues that arise when South Asian writers who
are living and producing work in the Caribbean, Africa, the US,
Canada, the UK and elsewhere attempt to negotiate articulations of
ethnic and national belonging in their work.
E. 815: Comedic Reality (74618)
M. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A study of the nature and value of comedy as one of the most
popular and enduring genres in literature. Considering its
history, developed over some 2,000 years, comedy reflects the
unchanging, universal aspects of human experience, including the
body as an object of humor, varying social norms, and contrasting
political persuasions. The value of laughter, the effects of
verbal play and wit are to be considered as a means of creating
comedy. Theoretical works on laughter and humor will be
examined along with works by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Goldsmith,
Wilde, Beckett, Ionesco, and Simon. Traditional comedies will be
contrasted with contemporary works that project the role of comedy
in current life.
MANHATTAN CAMPUS
E. 635: Narratives of American History: France’s
America
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
T 4:40-6:40 p.m.
The inspiration for this class comes from the symbol of American
liberty that can be glimpsed from the windows of St. John’s
Manhattan campus in which this class is held: the Statue of
Liberty, France’ s “gift” to the United States. No more
stinging repudiation of a native, or American origin for American
ideals might be found. “Liberty Enlightening the World”
stands as a stark reminder of France’s belief that liberty and
enlightenment were theirs to give the American hemisphere, and that
the United States was among its beneficiaries. Is this belief
simply a case of imperial arrogance or have we been living in
France’s reflected glory all along?
This course builds on both the
“hemispheric” model of American Studies and post-colonial literary
theory to include the United States among Canada and the islands of
the Caribbean, “foreign” territories over which France once had or
continues to enjoy cultural, intellectual, and political
influence. The example of “Liberty Enlightening the World”
suggests that an imperial legacy lies much closer by, and that we
have simply incorporated it, like the Louisiana Territory, into our
national self-image. Indeed, many conceits of classic
American literature and of American Studies—the ideal of the
virtuous farmer, the wilderness as proving ground, and the native
American as tragic counterpart to the frontiersman, are “imports”
from French travel narratives and ethnography; the most useful and
often the most flattering representations of an American
nationality often came from visiting French commentators like
Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America or expatriates like
Hector St. John Crevecouer, in Letters from an American
Farmer. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson’s only book,
Notes on the State of Virginia was a Francophone text, written for
France’s American “experts.”
For the purpose of excavating this
Franco-American tradition, we will read these familiar texts as
well as French colonial literature about America (in
translation). But we will also design our course work to
reflect on the “frontier thesis” of United States historians, the
post-colonial critiques of French Caribbean theorists, and the
revolutionary narrative of Haiti, all examples of France’s
intervention in the shaping of the American hemisphere.
E. 500: Colloquia (70423)
E. 900: Master’s Research (71567)
E. 901: Readings & Research (71568)
E. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70178)
E. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) ) (70177)
E. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (70176)