Spring 2008

GRADUATE FLYER – SPRING 2008
 

QUEENS CAMPUS

E. 100: Modern Critical Theories: Late Theory (12637)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
It’s late in the day for critical theory, and the popular and academic presses are filled with books like Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (2003) and proclamations of the “death of theory” and the “post-theoretical age.”  This course asks how a sense of “lateness” can inform our reading (and use) of critical theory in the present.  We’ll read intensely in the late works of a group of four theorists, several of whose early works helped fuel the boom of theory in the 1970s and after.  We’ll start with a short excerpt from Edward Said’s unfinished book on “late style,” and then read more thoroughly in the careers of Paul de Man, whose most controversial late work was the posthumously revealed anti-Semitic journalism he had published in the 1940s in occupied Belgium; Jacques Derrida, whose late work includes returns to Marx, to religion, and to politics; Bruno Latour, who connects critical theory to scientific inquiry; and Judith Butler, whose late work engages politics and the law.  We’ll apply these critical models to a very short (one-page) group of English canonical poems that the class will choose together.  We may also make a brief detour into the post-everything novel Jamestown by Matthew Sharp (timed to match his visit to campus).

E. 110: Introduction to the Profession (14952)
M. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
In Writing at the End of the World, Richard Miller asks, “How – and in what limited ways – might reading and writing be made to matter in the new world that is evolving before our eyes?  Is there any way to justify or explain a life spent working with – and teaching others to work with – texts?”  In Introduction to the Profession we will ask these questions as we consider the evolution of English studies, its history, disciplinary debates, pedagogies, and calls for its reform. 
     Other questions we’ll consider will be: How did English Departments get started?  Why does there seem to be a split between “literary studies” and “composition studies”?  How do “creative writing” and “English education” fit into all this?   How is it that we have read about new theoretical school after new theoretical school yet we also hear that theory is dead?  Canonical, multicultural, cross-cultural, post-colonial 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? 
     Among the written projects required, students will create individual plans for how they will be engaged with the discipline in the coming years through research, presentations at regional and national conferences, and publication.

E. 400—The Novel to 1800: Defoe and Haywood (14955)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Melissa Mowry
During the 1710s and 1720’s two writers dominated the production of prose fiction in England: Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood.  Modern criticism has come to understand these writers as working in very different idioms.  Defoe seems to have written narratives of individual triumph and failure, informed by his own background in dissenting forms of Protestantism, while Haywood, primarily, is recognized today for her amatory fictions.  Eighteenth-century readers, however, did not share that view.  Beginning at least with Alexander Pope, who excoriated both Haywood and Defoe as “grub-street hacks,” eighteenth-century readers seem to have understood the two as engaging similar problems and issues.  The perceived affinity between Haywood and Defoe reached an apex when editors substituted the ending of Haywood’s British Recluse for the more disturbing ending of Defoe’s Roxana, perhaps thinking that Defoe had meant to write something like it all along.  In this course, we will explore some of Haywood’s and Defoe’s early novels, including Haywood’s Love in Excess, which Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe narrowly supplanted as the best-selling novel.  During the second half of the class will focus primarily on Roxana, The British Recluse, and some other alternative endings in order to construct a more historically and theoretically nuanced account of English fiction during the first half of the eighteenth century.

E. 450: Topics in Restoration & 18th Century Literature (14945)
R. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
In this course, we’ll work our way through the eighteenth-century novel—Samuel Richardson’s majestic and tragic novel Clarissa (1748-9), which occupies eight volumes and took the author an estimated seven years to compose. We’ll consider the book both as a novel and as a kind of phenomenon—of length, of narrative intricacy, of epistolary form, of commentary on eighteenth-century conventions of gender, status, and familial life. On the one hand, we’ll be interested in the conditions under which Richardson plotted (and plotted, and re-plotted) and revised (and revised) Clarissa, and we’ll consult some of his correspondence, particularly letters penned to women readers, to understand his aims in soliciting criticism on the manuscript. We’ll also move forward 250 years to consider contemporary responses to the novel, reading ambitiously in the canon of Clarissa criticism to understand how and why different methodological approaches—post-structuralism, feminism, genre theory—have found this novel an exemplary “source text” for theoretical inquiry. 
     If it’s possible, I recommend starting the novel (and keeping detailed notes) before our first meeting. All students must use the Penguin edition of Clarissa, edited by Angus Ross. I will also assume in all students at least some knowledge of Richardson’s shorter, happier novel Pamela, published in 1740. (Please see me if you’d like recommendations for selective reading in that novel.) Requirements will include active, judicious participation; collective work toward an annotated bibliography; some “informal” writing; and a seminar paper of 15-20 pages in length.

E. 640: Transcendentalism (14947)
T. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will be a close study of the major Transcendentalists and their role in Jacksonian America. We will begin the class with Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, a novelistic treatment of the utopian experiment at Brook Farm. After a discussion of ultraism and the age of reform, we will turn to Emerson's essays, Thoreau's Walden, and Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes. We will also read the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

E. 716: Modern Poetry (14948)
T. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
In this course we will come to focus on the later poetry of three eminent “high modernist” poets: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.  We will set up the reading of the later poetry by looking at some earlier work: The Waste Land and the opening Cantos in week 1, some important poems in the mid-thirties in the following three weeks.  But the focus will be on the later and longer poems of these three poets, watching how modernist poetics develop and come to inform some of the great achievements of this or any period.  With Eliot we will be reading Four Quartets; with Pound, The Pisan Cantos, Rock-Drill, and Drafts and Fragments; with Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Esthetique du Mal, The Auroras of Autumn, and Ordinary Evening in New Haven.  We will be watching how the political and social pressures of the 1930s and 1940s affect the development of modernist poetry, and how these three poets work to intervene in the debates of their time. 

E. 775: Topics in 20th-Century British Literature and Culture (14950)
W. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Professor Hollander
Virginia Woolf and the Gender of Modernism
Virginia Woolf is a central figure in discussions of women and modernism because of both her groundbreaking fictional works and her critical writings on feminism, politics, and literature.  This class will focus on Woolf’s novels and essays in order to explore questions of gender and sexuality in early twentieth-century literature and culture more generally.  We will consider Woolf’s writing in the context of the emergence of the new woman, the suffrage movement, women’s relationship to both World Wars, and debates about sexual freedom.  We will also familiarize ourselves with some of the wealth of critical responses to Woolf’s life and work, as a window into the evolution of contemporary feminist literary theory and criticism.  In addition to Woolf’s major novels and non-fiction works, primary readings may include contemporaries like Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Rebecca West, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

E. 800: Forms & Themes in Film -Noir Politics and Paranoia (14951)
W. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Scott Combs
In this course we will explore the dazzlingly cynical, morally ambiguous, and politically charged cycle of American movies known as film noir.  We begin by looking at early classics of the form (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), studying noir’s narrative devices, visual obsessions, and gendered assignment of guilt and non-guilt.  As we proceed to the 1950s we look more closely at the political and ideological work performed by certain noirs (e.g., Crossfire) made during the age of Hollywood blacklisting.  How does the so-called “crime melodrama” actually respond to and shape American political life?  We then turn to “neo-noir” films of the 1970s (Chinatown) and the second, more recent return of the form (Brick).  For the second half of the course, our central concern will be to think carefully about “paranoia” in its various senses (psychoanalytic, political, vernacular).  Paranoia appears to be a particular affect both endured by noir’s protagonists and generated in us spectators.  To that end, the course will end by looking at more recent American films that exhibit noir’s paranoid sensibility and worldview but may not be categorized easily as noir (e.g., The Game).  A weekly mandatory 2-hour screening session will be scheduled once classes first meet.  Each student will write a 20- to 25-page seminar paper.

E. 877:  Workshop in Fiction (14954)
M. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is a writing workshop for students of literature.  You will write three pieces of fiction of your own devising, and at the end of the semester put together a portfolio of your best finished work.  Classroom time will be spent on critiques of student fiction, and also on close readings of a varied set of contemporary North American writers including Alice Munro, Ha Jin, Matthew Sharpe, and Stephen Millhauser

E. 885: Topics in Cultural Studies (14953)
R. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
Writing the Future
"The future is already here--it is just unevenly distributed." -- William Gibson
"The future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present." -- J. G. Ballard
 
This course explores recent constructions of the future in fiction, nonfiction, film, and other media. It's not so much a course in science fiction a la George Jetson as what I call the "near-future narrative," attempts by novelists, sociologists, environmentalists, and journalists to paint plausible pictures of our lives, cities, and landscapes within the next few generations. As with most grad courses I teach, you'll have a chance to respond to the subject matter via your own research and writerly interests (you can write corresponding fictions or poetry, literary analyses, or pedagogical and curricular projects--you decide). I'm still working on the definitive reading list but it'll probably look lsomething like this: The Road, Cormac McCarthy; Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban; The World Without Us, Alan Weisman; Pattern Recognition, William Gibson; Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler;
Quotes, J.G. Ballard.
 
MANHATTAN CAMPUS

E. 740: Contemporary Novel (15126)
R. 4:40-6:40 p.m.
Dr. Lisa Outar
This course will be a close study of contemporary Indian and Indian diaspora literature.  We will start with exploring the linguistic, cultural and political debates around the production of literary forms on the subcontinent during and following colonialism.  In what ways do writers conceive of themselves as constructing and referencing particular notions of Indian identity and literary tradition?  We will move to examining the connection (or lack thereof?) between writing produced on the subcontinent and that created elsewhere by diasporic Indians.  What are the new categories necessary for classifying and studying the literary forms that ensue from time away from “the motherland”?  The course will explore the issues that arise when those 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.  We will be looking at novels, short stories and theoretical interventions by Salman Rushdie, Mulk Raj Anand, Rabindranath Tagore, Shani Mootoo, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Samuel Selvon, Ananda Devi, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Sasenarine Persaud among others.

E. 876: Writing NonFiction (15123)
R. 6:50-8:50 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
This course will explore creative nonfiction in memoir, expository, and poetic modes. Students will be able to choose the particular mode that they wish to concentrate within. They will be encourages to synthesize and intermingle these modes through various in-class exercises, and they will meet and question some professional practitioners of these three modes both in the class and online. Students will be given the opportunity to present creative nonfiction through readings and publications.

STATEN ISLAND CAMPUS

E. 810: Literary/Visual Texts (15442)
M 1:30-3:30 p.m.
Dr. Brian Lockey
Apocalypse and Dystopia in Literature, Painting, Film, and Music   
The past half-century has seen the emergence of a great deal of literature and film that express a heightened collective anxiety over the fear of world destruction. Some fear human-caused events such as nuclear holocaust or environmental catastrophe. Others experience a mixture of fear of and hope for Biblical end-times that result in the return of a messiah. But in reality, people have feared the end of the world for centuries, and it will be the point of this course to explore the history of this fear in a number of artistic works from the Renaissance to the contemporary period. We will begin with selections from the Bible and then turn to works by Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Conrad, Fritz Lang, Doris Lessing, Jose Saramago, Terry Gilliam, Michael Kamen, Cormac McCarthy, and Nine Inch Nails.

E. 900: Master’s Research (10219)
E. 901: Readings and Research (14441)
E. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (10217)
E. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (10216)
E. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) (12721)