Queens Campus
ENG 100: Modern Critical Theories
(14396)
T 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
Derrida’s Dead, or What Can Theory Do Now?
The death of Jacques Derrida on October 8, 2004, may someday be
seen as the end of a modern critical theory’s heyday, which in turn
may have begun (in the United States) with Derrida’s first lecture
at John Hopkins in 1966. Looking back at the nearly
forty-year history of high theory finds contemporary literary
scholars skeptical of many of theory’s revolutionary claims but
undeniably changed by these works’ radical recentering of literary
and cultural studies. We will consider the major developments
in modern critical theory, including its early linguistic turn, its
structuralist and post-structuralist phases, its debts to
cultural anthropology and sociology, the anomaly (if that’s what it
is) of Derridean deconstruction, varieties of neo-Marxist
historicisms, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and more recent
developments including the now-traditional “resistance to
theory.” By looking at very recent work by now-deceased
theorists like Derrida and Bourdieu, we’ll consider their final
attempts to make their works politically active as well as
intellectually compelling. We’ll read the rise of theory as
part of the professionalization of the modern academy and as an
attempt to unify the discourses of the humanities. Finally,
through repeated consideration of short lyric poems, we will apply
these methodologies to literary works. Course books will
include Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction, the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and a
very handy deck of “Theory Trading Cards.”
ENG 110: Introduction to the Profession
(required of DA students) (14340)
W 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
How did English Departments get started? What role did those
German guys have in making English doctoral programs (and what is
the difference between lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit anyway)?
How did writing instruction grow out of rhetoric? What’s up
with that big split between “literary studies” and “composition
studies”? And where does “creative writing” fit into all
this? What were (and are) the culture wars? How
did we go from new criticism, pass through umpteen new theoretical
schools, and end up with critiques of the death of theory, all in
just 4 decades? Canonical, multicultural, cross-cultural
literature—what do these terms mean to us today? To what
degree has English studies, and the academy in general, become
corporatized? What do we make of the job crisis in English
studies? Questions like these will float throughout this
course. In addition we’ll take a pragmatic look at how to
keep track of all the conferences going on, how to write abstracts
to get your papers accepted, how to give presentations at academic
conferences, and even how to go about writing a prospectus for a
University press.
ENG 190: Seminar in Medieval Literature
(13035)
M 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
War in the Middle Ages
Why have war? As Christian theologians such as Augustine
pondered whether there could be any possible justification of war,
violent armed conflict was very much a part of society and culture
in the Middle Ages and the warrior class a powerful, privileged,
and celebrated group. In this course, our look at war in the
Middle Ages will range from theoretical treatises by authors as
different as Augustine and Christine de Pizan, Anglo-Saxon war
literature such as Beowulf, accounts of the crusades from both
European and Muslim perspectives, and to glamorous representations
of chivalry by late medieval historian Jean Froissart. We
will read writings about war in the context of the material
realities of war—the logistics, the casualties, economic
impact.
ENG 458: The Nineteenth-Century Novel
(14387)
R 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
Few cultural forms have achieved such a balance between mass
popularity and aesthetic complexity as the novel of the nineteenth
century. In focusing on a set of English novels from the
classic period of the novel, as well as touchstones of contemporary
criticism, we will come to an understanding of the genre, how it
managed to hold such a dominant place in British culture, and how
various techniques and topics it introduced persist today.
Topics to include: the subjects of a middle-class world, such as
manners (class) and money (economics); the increasingly large,
bewildering facts of society, from the metropolitan chaos of London
to such facts as inheritance, marriage, debt, education, the spread
of information, and finally crime; how the novel explained, mapped,
and made sense out of the forms of a mobile, economic, secular
society. In addition, we will consider the psychologies of
the novel: its interest in descriptions of mood; consciousness;
personal and collective memories; gendered minds; intimacy and its
possibilities. Finally, we will be learning to read novels as
such – to acquire a vocabulary and set of skills for grasping the
details of how novels are built, what they are made of, and how
they work, in order to become better readers of modernity’s most
characteristic literary form. Authors to be selected from
among the following: Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, C.
Brontё, E. Brontё, Conan Doyle, Hardy, James.
ENG 681: Modern Drama: 1945-Present
(14388)
R 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A focus on the enduring nature of the theater to reflect and
interpret a postmodern world. The course will explore the
contributions of major contemporary dramatists to the culture of
the new millennium. Works by such playwrights as Edward
Albee, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Neil Simon, Brian Friel,
David Mamet, and Sam Shepard will be explored.
ENG 691: Seminar: Modern American
Literature (14389)
M 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
Jazz Age New York
This course explores 1920s New York City as a metropolitan site of
cultural hybridity and emergent modernisms. While considering
the literary cultures that distinguished New York in the 1910s and
20s (for example, in Greenwich Village and Harlem), the course
emphasizes the intercultural, interracial, and international
formations of the period. We will discuss in particular the
impact of mass culture on modernisms in the United States, as we
examine the relationship of literature to the visual arts, film,
and music, particularly jazz. Readings will include 1920s
fiction (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Nella Larsen,
Quicksand; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem), drama (Eugene O’Neill,
The Emperor Jones), and poetry (Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams,
Hart Crane, Langston Hughes), as well as cultural histories and
historical novels of the “Jazz Age” (including Ishmael Reed, Mumbo
Jumbo and Toni Morrison, Jazz).
ENG 695: Topics in American Studies
(14341)
W 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
Rescuing Melodrama in Nineteenth Century Literature
Almost everyone knows the cartoon moment when the guy rescues the
girl tied to the railroad tracks just before the train comes.
But what most people don’t know is that in the play that invented
this scene, Augustine Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867), the rescuer
is a woman. This course presents melodrama as an important
literary mode, and it describes realism/modernism’s attempt to
reject melodrama’s pieties of home, family, and virtue, as an
Oedipal stage in the assimilation of power. A dramatic mode
characterized by sentimental oppositions of good and evil,
melodrama is generally believed to be a simplistic literary form,
appealing to lower-class taste and supportive of the status
quo. The story is not so simple, however. Melodrama was
perhaps the dominant literary mode of the nineteenth century, and
very influential on writers from Cooper to Dreiser. It
frequently resists simple political containment (i.e.: claims that
melodrama is conservative), as seen in the use of melodramatic
motifs in the Abolition movement, as well as in the development of
the character known as the “new woman,” arguably emerging on the
American stage from the very beginning of the nineteenth
century. If tragedy has been enthroned as the terrifying
experience of seeing people punished because of their virtues,
melodrama has been degraded as the preachy story of virtue
rewarded. A fancier working definition of melodrama, however,
might take note of its revelatory potential ---the disclosure of
virtue before administrative authority. The business of the
class will be to investigate the ways in which this disclosure can
be apocalyptic and transformative or not. This course will
read some of the major melodramas of the nineteenth century such as
Metamora (1829), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Under the Gaslight
(1867), The Girl of the Golden West (1903), as well as consider
contemporary melodramas such as Spielberg’s Amistad. We will
also read nineteenth century prose and poetry writers influenced by
melodramatic conventions, including Sigourney, Douglass, Willis,
Whitman, Southworth, Dreiser, and others.
ENG 760: Postcolonial Literature
(14339)
T 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
All writers from formerly colonized countries must consider the
questions of what language to write in, and how to use that
language. Therefore we will approach this introduction to
postcolonial literature and theory through the problem of
language. Beginning with some of the documents that defined
official British policy regarding language in nineteenth-century
colonial administration, we will go on to read twentieth-century
fiction, poetry, drama and literary theory from India, Ireland,
Kenya, Nigeria and the Caribbean. Authors will include Salman
Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Brian Friel, George Bernard
Shaw, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Edward Kamau
Brathwaite, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Earl Lovelace, and Jamaica
Kincaid.
Staten Island Campus
ENG 655: Contemporary Poetry
(14527)
T 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen P. Miller
Biblical and Modern Poetry as it Morphs into Postmodern and
Contemporary Poetry
In her 21st Century Modernism book, Marjorie Perloff talks of how
important Eliot and Pound are in promoting generative and dynamic
poetic models, which she considers to be the distinguishing
features of postmodern and contemporary poetry. Frankly, I
haven’t been drawn to Eliot and Pound since I was a teenager.
Seeming rigidities and pretensions in their dictions, and their
differing brands of anti-Semitic and fascistic leanings make them
uncongenial as discursive influences. And yet my teen
attraction seems valid. They are important to what poetry now
is. I find their ambivalence toward Whitman instructive
here. Whitman uses the Bible’s parallel structures to portray
American diversity. I use the plural, structures, because
there are many different kinds of parallel structures using all
manner of syntactic, semantic, and other linguistic constants
highlighting changes within a fixed structure. In a sense
Whitman remakes modern poetry in a Jewish tradition, and renders
this influence unavoidable thereafter. Certainly Eliot and
Pound take this paralle parallelism and intensity by syncopating
repetitive markers, as the Bible sometimes does. To take an
obvious example, note the repetition of “Let us” in Pru “Let us go
then you and I”—and responds—“Do not ask what is it? Let us
go…” Another example is Pound’s Canto 45 in which each time
the recurring phrase “with Usura” is used, it can be read so that
it seems to refer to both the previous and the following examples
of usura. This kind of dynamic is used in JOB (where for
example, “do you know?” parallels other “do you” questions: “Do you
know the time when the mountain goat gives birth,/ do you mark the
birth pangs of gazelles?/ Do you number the months till they
come to term?/ Do you know the time when they give birth?”
Check out the Bible and the Cantos for more complex interactions
between more complex parallel structures. Of course these
kinds of modes are available to Pound and Eliot in poetic devices
like the villanelle and sestina, in addition to musical forms, but
in terms of the epic-like sweep generating throughout an entire
poem that is important to them, Whitman and biblical poetry cannot
be ignored. I can’t say on what level Eliot and Pound adapt a
Jewish model of poetry but perhaps this model is difficult to
avoid, especially after Whitman unleashes it. And, to make an
obviously subjective statement, Eliot and Pound sometimes seem more
Jewish than Whitman. Well, sometimes. In any case my
class will explore Biblical and modern poetry as it morphs into the
postmodern and contemporary poetry of Charles Bernstein, Kenneth
Koch, David Shapiro, and many others.
ENG 900 Master’s Research
(10292)
ENG 901 Readings and Research
(10291)
ENG 906 Internship (10290)
ENG 925 Maintaining Matriculation (MA)
(10289)
ENG 930 Maintaining Matriculation (DA)
(10288)
ENG 975 Doctoral Research Essay (DA)
(14528)