GRADUATE FLYER – FALL 2007
QUEENS CAMPUS
E 100: Modern Critical Theories
(74591)
R 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
Modernism-Fascism-Postmodernism
This course is designed as an introduction to twentieth-century
literary and aesthetic theory and criticism. Our goal is to acquire
fluency in major issues of concern to critics, writers, and
artists, starting “in or about December 1910,” when, as Virginia
Woolf famously wrote, “human character changed,” and continuing up
to the present time. While tracking the emergence of
Modernism/Modernity/Modernization will be our major focus, we will
range all over the critical map, giving due attention to the most
important manifestations of the anti-Modernist, neo-Romantic
backlash--including Fascism, National Socialism, and Socialist
Realism--and assessing the impact of contemporary theory on
cultural production in the decades since World War II.
Students should prepare for the
course by reading a few key background texts, such as Plato's “Ion”
and The Republic, Bks. 2, 3, and 10; Aristotle's Poetics; Sir
Philip Sidney's “An Apology for Poetry”; Edmund Burke's "A
Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful"; Samuel Johnson's “Preface to Shakespeare”;
Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man;
William Wordsworth's “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical
Ballads”; Percy Bysshe Shelley's “A Defense of Poetry”; Friedrich
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, and
Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel.
E.300: Shakespeare and Early Modern
Studies: Shakespeare, Nature, and Ecological Crisis
(74592)
M 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
This course explores the birth-pangs of ecological thinking in
early modern ideas of the natural world. Taking as its point
of departure the diverse meetings of “nature” in King Lear, the
course will engage two major trends in so-called “green cultural
studies”: the historicist impulse to find the roots of modern
ecology in early modern culture, and the political impulse to use
literature to speak to our looming ecological crisis. In
addition to Lear, we’ll read several other Shakespeare plays (As
You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, Macbeth),
Heywood’s Play of the Weather, Biblical and classical translations,
and poetry by Spenser, Milton, Marvell, and Traherne.
E.330: Jacobean Drama:
(74913)
The English Abroad and their Foreign Encounters.
R 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Brian Lockey
How did Shakespeare and other Renaissance English dramatists depict
encounters between English subjects and foreign men and women? How
were such encounters depicted in foreign contexts as well as in the
context of England itself? This course will consider the
Renaissance stage as a cosmopolitan context in which playwrights
and spectators could imagine travel to foreign lands, encounters
with foreigners, and ultimately the transformation of the English
subject into the other. We will focus especially on the influence
of Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean world on the English
stage, influences that have traditionally been downplayed in the
study of Renaissance drama. In addition, we will consider the
figure of the Catholic exile as he was allegorically and literally
portrayed in the drama of this period. Among the plays we will
consider are Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and
Cymbeline, George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, Francis Beaumont’s
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Christopher
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and The Jew of Malta, and the
anonymous play, The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain
Thomas Stukeley
E. 665: Studies in 19th-Century
Authors: “Jane Austen” (74589)
M 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Amy M. King
This course concentrates on the work of a single author, Jane
Austen (1775-1817), and the various ways in which her work has been
understood and ideologically situated both in her own moment and in
ours. Austen’s novels have assumed a pivotal position in the
way our culture narrates courtship and gender norms, and
understands received notions of taste. We will read the major
works—including Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice
(1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey
(1818), and Persuasion (1818)—alongside the major contemporary
critical debates that surround Austen’s fiction. In addition,
we will engage selected contemporary reactions to and adaptations
of her work by recent films and novels (including, for instance,
the novel Bridget Jones’s Diary and the film Clueless). We
will seek to understand Austen in her own time, in relation to the
politics, culture, aesthetics, and literary landscape of the early
nineteenth century, and “today,” taking into account the work that
Austen’s name and narratives perform in our contemporary
moment
E.725: Modern Drama (74590)
T 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
This course is intended to enhance the graduate student’s knowledge
of literature by focusing on the development of modern drama,
especially considering its varied modes and themes, taking into
account its transition from a critique of the prevailing
“authoritative” society to a chronicle of social and political
issues within their cultural contexts. Attention will also be
paid to the craft of the theater as an art form. Plays for
study will include celebrated works from the late nineteenth
century to the middle of the twentieth century. Playwrights
will include Ibsen, Chekhov, O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Pirandello,
Bolt, and Osborne
E.760 Postcolonial Literature and the
Politics of Language (74587)
W 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
The question of what language to write in, and how to use that
language, occupies all writers from formerly colonized
countries. 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 may include Salman
Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Brian Friel, George Bernard
Shaw, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kamau
Brathwaite, M. Nourbese Philip, Earl Lovelace, and Jamaica
Kincaid.
E.765: American Ethnic Literatures
(74585)
W 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course offers a roughly chronological exploration of the
Asian
American literary canon and its critical context. Paying
particular
attention to the ways in which these texts represent and
critique
Asian American themes, identities, and experiences, we will
carefully examine the constructed nature of literary and
racial
identities. Our primary focus will be on close readings of
the
literary text, stressing the formal qualities that make it
“literary,” but a second aim of this course is to understand
the
critical heritage surrounding these texts, and we will study
the
historical and political contexts that give rise to literary
production and reception.
E.770: Studies in 20th-Century American Literature (74691)
American Literature and Culture of the 1930s
R 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This seminar focuses on American literature and culture of the
1930s, a decade of extraordinary social, political, and cultural
change. The socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression and
the rise of fascism challenged writers to radically rethink their
purpose and audience. While the Depression tends to evoke
mythic images of social suffering and revolutionary struggle, the
innovative arts of the 1930s have also had a lasting impact on
American culture. Emphasizing the interaction of modernisms
and mass culture, this course will relate literature to film,
visual arts, and popular music (especially the blues and
jazz). Among the topics we will explore are ideology and the
relation of aesthetics to politics; gender, race, and class
consciousness; the metropolis and modernity; nationalism and
internationalism; proletarian and avant-garde formations (e.g.,
cubism, surrealism, “Objectivism”); ethnographic and documentary
practice; and the Popular Front response to fascism. Readings
will include: Mike Gold, Jews Without Money; John Dos Passos, The
Big Money; Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed; Ann Petry, The Street;
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and
poetry by Kenneth Fearing, Charles Reznikoff, Sterling Brown,
Langston Hughes, and Muriel Rukeyser.
MANHATTAN CAMPUS
E. 135 Critical Issues in the
Teaching of Writing (75060)
T 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Harry Denny
This course will explore several critical issues (perennial debates
about writing process, error, second language learners, assessment,
and conferencing with writers) in the multi-disciplinary field of
Composition/Rhetoric to help participants develop well-theorized
and informed practices for teaching writing in various academic
settings and levels.
E.878: Workshop in Poetry & Poetics
(73978)
T 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This 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 the poets will be central to the course which
incorporates attendance of three to four select readings presented
by NYC literary venues such as Poet’s House, The Poetry Project at
St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, the Bowery Poetry Club,
and/or the Academy of American Poets. 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, and writing our
own new poems. We will read the work of each poet in advance
of the reading, and then formulate both creative and critical
responses of our own. 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. Students will be responsible for
keeping a journal as a workbook for their own poetic process, in
addition to a final poetry manuscript, poetics statement and
reading of our own. Manuscript development in an informed,
engaged contemporary context is the goal; students will be able to
develop their own manuscripts of poetry in context of a larger
literary field.
STATEN ISLAND CAMPUS
E.635: Narratives of American History:
Liberation Throughout the Hemisphere (74638)
M.4:00-6:00 P.M.
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
How many stories of freedom does America really have? This
course will study and compare three distinct historical narratives
of liberation that took root during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
into the twentieth centuries:
• The liberation of American colonies from Great
Britain and the founding of the United States
• The African struggles for liberation and
self-determination in the Caribbean
• The Latin and South American visions of
colonial independence which envision race mixing between native
Americans and Spaniards as the foundation of a new Hispanic
civilization.
The liberation story of the United States,
in turns out, is just one of many. It is also the exception
among narratives of American history: the only one that would make
white people its sole heroes.
The readings for this course are
comparative and interdisplinary, ranging across the cultures of the
Americas. They include Thomas Jefferson’s narratives of
American independence, Martin Delany’s African-American novel of
liberation, Blake, or the Huts of America and C. L. R. James’s
account of Haitian independence. Of special interest will be
the inter-racial romances of Spanish America that describe the rise
of a mestizo (mixed Spanish and Native American) peoples throughout
the hemisphere. These include the Cuban Jose
Marti’s Our America, the Mexican Jose Vasconcelos’s The Cosmic (or
Universal) Race, and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona.
E.500: Colloquia (70537)
E.900: Master’s Research (71972)
E.901: Reading & Research (71973)
E.925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70234)
E.930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (70233)
E.975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (70232)