Queens Campus
E. 100: Modern Critical Theories
(12978)
M. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
The intention of this course is to be an introduction to the
“linguistic turn” of twentieth century literary theory.
During the first two or three weeks of the class, we will survey
the work of formalists and Saussure using an anthology of literary
theory. After that work has been accomplished, I would like
students as a group to choose 5 or 6 primary texts to focus on for
the balance of the course, such as Bahktin’s, Dialogic Imagination,
Foucault’s, History of Sexuality, or Katherine Hayles’s, How We
Became PostHuman. In other words, students will have the
opportunity to shape the course in the direction they would like to
go.
E. 120: Composition Theory & Teaching
of Writing (14564)
R. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
This course introduces students to the theory and praxis of writing
instruction. It has been designed for current or future
writing instructors at the middle school, high school, or college
level. We’ll look briefly at the history of writing
instruction in the U.S. and then focus most of our attention on how
composition pedagogy has evolved in recent decades.
Readings and conversations will range from the practical and
pragmatic (writing a syllabus, designing assignments, responding to
student writing, teaching grammar and mechanics, grading and
evaluation), to the cultural and theoretical (the impact of digital
technology, alternative and hybrid discourses, race/class/gender in
the classroom). Students will have a chance to observe
first-year writing courses in action and conduct research in the
new Institute for Writing Studies. Also, all students will
have a chance to spend at least one day attending panels at the
Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest
national conference for college-level writing researchers and
instructors, to be held in Manhattan (March 21-24).
E. 230: Chaucer (14565)
T. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
In this course, we will read and enjoy the Canterbury Tales, the
best-known work of the fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey
Chaucer. The course begins with an introduction to Chaucer’s
language, Middle English, and the political significance of his
writing in the vernacular. We will acquire enough familiarity
with Middle English to understand, enjoy, and analyze Chaucer’s
poetry intensively. Besides Chaucer’s language, we will
analyze and study the Canterbury Tales in the context of the poet’s
engagement with the social and political issues of late medieval
England. From the formation of literary tradition to the
theology and reform of the Church, to social hierarchy and the
theorizing of political authority, we will read the Tales as a
series of dynamic debates and discussions on crucial issues of the
poet’s time. Moreover, Chaucer’s (possibly notorious) views
on Jews and his ambiguous record on women (he was interested in
women and yet had legal entanglements with Cecily Champagne on her
“raptus”) take us to an exploration of the role of the author for
readers and the theoretical connection, as well as divide, between
our present and the author’s controversial past. Is the
author a moral figure? What is the link between poetry and
morality? Should there be? And how do we come to terms
with a poet with an imperfect record on social issues?
E. 380: Topics in Early Modern Studies
(14566)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Melissa Mowry
“Early Modern Hermeneutics of Community”
It has long been an axiom that between 1660 and 1800, English
culture witnessed the triumph of Enlightenment individualism.
But over what did Individualism triumph? Or to put
matters a different way, if “Individualism” seemed like the answer,
what had been the question? In this class we will pose these
questions and others, by looking at the multiple ways it was
possible for people to imagine what a community might look like
during the century between 1640 and 1740. To this end, we
will begin by reading the work of a variety of sectarian women
(Quakers, Baptists, and Anabaptists) who wrote and spoke about
their relationship to their congregation, neighborhoods, and
government. We will also familiarize ourselves with the
political writings of John Harrington and other radicals of the
English civil wars (1641-1648). We will then move on to read
the work of Restoration writers in a variety of genres, including,
but not limited to, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserv’d, Jane Barker’s A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies, Eliza
Haywood’s Fantomina, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and
Delariviere Manley’s The New Atalantis.
E. 590: Topics in 19th Century British
Literature & Culture (14567)
W. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Rachel Hollander
“Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: Aesthetics and
Politics”
The end of the nineteenth century to World War I is a vibrant but
occasionally neglected period of transition in British literature
and culture. The optimism of the mid-Victorian years was
giving way to heightened anxiety on many fronts, as England
grappled with the woman question (including the suffrage movement
and the “new woman”), the implications of the theories of Darwin
and Marx, intensifying imperialist competition and colonial
resistance, and the increasingly cosmopolitan metropolis of
London. The course will focus on literature’s relationship to
this unstable and dynamic historical moment, paying special
attention to debates about the relationship between politics and
fictional forms. Authors may include Conrad, Hardy, Stoker,
Wilde, James, Gissing, and Woolf, along with non-fiction writings
on aesthetics, women’s rights, colonialism, labor movements, and
urban culture.
E. 600: 19th Century Public Culture
(14568)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Literary Bestsellers
Page-turners and tear-jerkers: what books did the
nineteenth-century American reading public love and
why? What can our reading of these works tell us about
the society that produced and avidly consumed them? These are
some of the questions that this course—a literary and historical
survey of American bestsellers—will investigate. We will ask
not only which books became popular, but why they did, and how
their formal qualities and thematic engagements motivated
contemporary readers to buy and read them so voraciously. By
looking at literary bestsellers, we will frame questions about
audience, taste, and the development of literary canons, and ask
what role the rise of professional authorship played in the
formation of social and national identity in the United
States. Authors may include: Susannah Rowson, Benjamin
Franklin, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne,
Susan Warner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
E. 761: Caribbean Literature, Culture & Theory
(15316)
R. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Lisa Outar
Caribbean Literature, Culture and Theory
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. 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. 775: Topics in 20th Century British
Literature & Culture (14569)
M. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Joyce’s Ulysses
We will read and enjoy Joyce’s Ulysses
That should be enough of a description, because that’s a worthy
goal in and of itself. But so that we may not offend, let me
say more. We will also learn to appreciate the place Joyce’s
text has in various important contexts: as the culmination of the
history of the novel (which is how he saw it); as the epitome of
literary modernism; as an attempt to write a modern epic; and as an
attempt to write allegory.
These “contexts” for our text will place some demands on us to read
broadly and widely, and our class discussions will reflect this
double focus on text and context. To be ready for this
course, students might wish to refresh their knowledge of Homer’s
Odyssey; brush up on some Dante, reread Hamlet; review The Waste
Land; and reacquire a superficial sense of the history of the novel
(Watt will do, McKeon does better). We will read Dubliners
for the first meeting, and A Portrait for the second, so you might
want to get a jump on those too.
MANHATTAN CAMPUS
E. 877: Workshop in Fiction (14897)
T. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is a creative workshop. You’ll get to tell your own
stories, to explore your own language, and to consider fiction from
the point of view of the writer. The course is designed for
both beginning and experienced writers, but explicitly for graduate
students in English, people who think seriously and critically
about language and storytelling. We will read a number of
interesting writers—among them Ernest Hemingway, Ha Jin, Alice
Munro, George Saunders, and Bharati Mukherjee—and as we read and
write and study, we will explore their aesthetics and our
own.
STATEN ISLAND CAMPUS
E. 300: Shakespeare & Early Modern Studies (15085)
M. 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Dr. Brian Lockey
“Cosmopolitans on Stage”
How did Renaissance English dramatists depict encounters between
English subjects and foreign peoples? This course will
consider the Renaissance stage as a context for playwrights and
spectators to consider cosmopolitan forms of mortality. As we
shall see, one form of cosmopolitanism manifested itself as a
transnational or universal moral standard that accompanied the
building of an empire. Cosmopolitanism, however, could also
resist the dominant universalizing tradition and give birth to a
second dependent tradition that emerged from the marginalized,
exiled, or banished subjects of the imperium. We will attempt
to trace the latter of these two traditions in works by
Shakespeare, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and
Aphra Behn.
E. 500: Colloquia (10243)
E. 900: Master’s Research (10242)
E. 901: Readings & Research (15269)
E. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (10240)
E. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (10239)
E. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (13070)