Queens Campus
ENG 112: Literature of Dissent in the
Middle Ages (14040)
M. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
In this graduate course, we will focus on the dialogue between the
medieval establishment of the Church and State and those who
critique and position themselves outside it, such as women, the
heterodox, and peasants. The course introduces students to
political and historical writings generated out of events of
dissent, such as the religious movements branded as heretical
(Lollardy, Catharism), and peasants' revolts, in particular, the
Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Authors to be read include the
alliterative poet William Langland, the fifteenth-century mystic
Margery Kempe, and the philosopher William of Ockham. While most
texts will be read in translation, students will be expected to
read later Middle English in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
writings.
ENG 458: The Nineteenth-Century Novel
(14042)
R. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
A study of important sub-genres of the Romantic and Victorian
novel, including detective fiction (Godwin's Caleb Williams),
science fiction (Shelley's Frankenstein), the Gothic (Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde and Stoker's Dracula),
the Bildungroman (Eliot's Middlemarch), and the novel of
adventure (Haggard's She).
ENG 561: American Literature to 1865
(14043)
T. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Honor Thy Father and Mother: Literary Representations of Family
Ties
Although women were not the source of political power in antebellum
America (they could not own property, and they were excluded from
political participation), mothers have been entrusted with the task
of rearing children from the earliest days of the Republic.
Mothers reproduced and molded good citizens; mothers were
responsible for nurturing and caring. This course will examine
the importance of the real and symbolic role of mothers and fathers
on the American literary landscape. We will investigate the
presence (and often conspicuous absence) of mothers in American
literature, and we will compare and contrast the literary
representations of the family within the language and writings of
some of our early literary fathers. We will read works by
Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Wilson, among
others, on topics from seduction and abandonment to young adult
narratives of self-reliance and writings on childhood conduct.
ENG 570: American Sublime
(14107)
W. 6:55 - 8:55 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will trace the aesthetic ideology of the sublime in the
U.S. between the Jacksonian era and World War I. We will begin with
a brief historical survey of the transformation of the concept of
the sublime from a rhetorical trope in Longinus to a gendered and
class-coded psychological phenomenon in the European
eighteenth-century. We will then turn to a U.S. context to examine
the sublime in writers such as Bryant, Emerson, Fuller, Poe,
Dickinson, and Whitman. Margaret Fuller's description of Niagara
Falls is nothing like Wordsworth might have described it-why? We
will look at the paintings of the Hudson River School, nature
photography and the early conservation movement, and the beginning
of the modernist "industrial sublime" in visual arts and
literature.
ENG 671: Contemporary American Novel
(14045)
M. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This course is a comparative study of innovative American fiction
since the 1960s. Emphasizing the interplay of memory, history,
and myth in the postmodern novel, the course will focus in
particular on the revision of cultural mythologies from the Cold
War and Vietnam War through the present. We will examine
postmodern versions of such genres as the detective novel, the
historical novel, the domestic novel, the war novel, and the
international novel, while addressing such topics as popular
culture and the mass media, gender and sexuality, race and
ethnicity, and imperialism and postcolonialism. Readings will
include Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; E.L. Doctorow, The
Book of Daniel; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Maxine Hong
Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey; Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams;
Joan Didion, Democracy; Don DeLillo, The Names; and Thomas King,
Green Grass, Running Water.
ENG 685: Literary Modernism: Reinventing
Humanism (14044)
T. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
This course will be a mix of theory, intellectual history, and
literary studies, as we read some major modernist texts as efforts
to redefine humanity and recuperate a damaged and dormant
humanism. We will start with a brief exposure to some Early
Modern Humanists (Erasmus, More, Rabelais) in an effort to see what
the term "Humanism" meant when it was first used to describe an
intellectual movement in western culture. We will turn
abruptly to an equally brief treatment of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century intellectual history (by this I mean mainly
Darwin, Marx and Freud), to establish the challenges to "humanism"
made by the "reductive" human sciences these men founded. The
"theory" component will focus on Derrida's and Foucault's analyses
of the emergence of the human sciences and Lyotard's description of
the "inhuman." Then we turn to modernist literature. The texts
chosen will be those written by authors who explicitly confront the
issue of the human: Continental fiction writers (Kafka, Mann and
Borges) will set up American poets (Eliot, Pound and Stevens) as
authors who seek to reinvent the human and salvage humanism from
the wreckage of intellectual history and the horrors of modern
world developments. If all goes as planned, Stevens will become the
featured writer.
ENG 710: Post Modernism, Totalitarianism,
and Writing (14041)
W. 4:40 - 6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
Is the character of Tony Soprano an impossible synthesis of brute
force and sensitivity bred of a psychotherapeutic "writing" and
"rewriting" of self? In a post-9/11 world, do we increasingly
tend to reconcile ourselves to totalitarian force? If "post
modernism" can be said to place appearance over reality, does post
modernism leave us vulnerable to unacknowledged yet intrusive and
undemocratic applications of force? How can "post modern
writing" generate alternatives to totalitarianism? This class
interpolates novels involving totalitarianism and writing, seminal
theoretical texts that speak to these subjects, and alternative
forms of essay writing. Novels we will study may include
Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, Don DeLillo's Mao II and
White Noise, Emily Prager's Eve's Tatoo, and Philip Roth's The
Ghost Writer, with which we will also read The Diary of Anne
Frank. Cultural theorists we may read include Benjamin,
Arendt, Adorno, and Foucault. We will read poetic essays by
authors such as Charles Bernstein, David Antin, and Kenneth
Koch. The teacher will also present a sample of his writing
concerning these issues and attempt to write responses to it
throughout the course. Students will be encouraged to take
chances in their academic writing as they address the issues and
materials presented in this class.
ENG 715: The Comedic Reality
(14108)
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 or 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.
Staten Island Campus
ENG 750: Women's Studies in Literature:
Feminist Literary and Cultural Theory (14473)
M. 4 - 6 p.m.
Dr. Melissa Mowry
This class will focus primarily on the critical question: How has
feminism changed the way women think about cultural representations
of their roles in society? During the 1970s, feminists changed
the face of academic discourse by challenging scholars and critics
to think literature's influence on women's identities. In the
intervening thirty years feminism has enriched literary and
cultural studies through its "rediscovery" of women writers and its
development of more complex ways of thinking about gender. But
the intellectual ocean into which early feminism ventured was often
tempestuous. Initially, feminists met with considerable resistance
from scholars who felt questions of power and gender had no place
in the study of literary classics. More surprising was the
resistance "mainstream" feminism encountered from women of color,
working-class women, and lesbians who argued that the first wave of
feminist thinkers produced naïve criticism that ignored ways race,
class ethnicity, and sexuality shaped women's identities and
defined their social participation.
This class will offer students a brief background in the first
wave of academic feminism. We will then move on to consider
the way resistance from within the feminist community has refined
and enriched feminist conversations about: women and public space,
the cultural construction of women's bodies, colonialism's
relationship to women of color, and feminism's contribution to
critical race theory in the work of writers including Judith
Butler, Susan Bordo, Drucilla Cornell, Carol Pateman, Nancy Fraser,
and others.
This class is open to graduate students, seniors and qualified
juniors with permission of the instructor.
ENG 790: Drama and Society: Roaring Girls
and Squeaking Boys: Staging Gender in Early Modern England
(14115)
W. 4 - 6 p.m.
Dr. Diane Cady
Miscegenation. Witchcraft. Monstrous
births. Same-sex desire. Boy actors.Cross-dressing.
Gossip. Domestic violence. Prostitution. Sexual
disease. These and other scandalous subjects pervade the drama
of early modern England. On the surface, it may seem that
their only purpose is to titillate the audience. However, as
we'll see this semester, the staging of these themes in early
modern plays functions in much more ideologically complex
ways. Anxieties about sexuality and the slipperiness of
gender are of paramount concern to many in early modern England,
and the theater becomes a place where society can grapple with
these issues. In this course we'll examine the various ways in
which early modern dramatists explore questions of sexuality and
gender through their work. Alongside plays such as Edward II,
'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Taming of the Shrew, Women Beware Women
and The Witch of Edmonton, we will read gynecological treatises,
witch-hunting manuals and sensationalized accounts of
cross-dressing women. We'll make use of the work of Foucault,
Butler, Irigaray, Sedgwick and others in order to theorize early
modern gender, as well as recent work by early modern scholars,
such as Linda Boose, Karen Newman, Jonathan Goldberg and Alan
Bray. The question this class poses, and one we will return to
again and again, is this: how do these plays reflect and in some
cases refract gender ideologies?
ENG 500: Colloquia (10557)
ENG 900: Master's Research (10556)
ENG 901: Readings and Research (10555)
ENG 906: Internship (10554)
ENG 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (10553)
ENG 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (10552)
ENG 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (10551)