Spring 2007

Queens Campus

E. 2100: Literature & Culture (14457)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
Gothic Literature: the Macabre Canon
Are you ready to explore the perverse and bizarre, the “dark side” of literature?  Readings in this course may terrify, amuse, or just plain outrage you.  Here is your opportunity to participate in exciting discussions, reports, and enactments!  We will study many late-Eighteenth Century and Nineteenth Century Gothic works and examine the separate agendas of men’s and women’s writing.  Our authors will include most of the following: Matthew Lewis, Horace Walpole, Edgar Allen Poe, William Beckford, Oscar Wilde, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.  A creepy film will add further horror to our syllabus at the conclusion of the course.

E. 2100: Literature & Culture (12251)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
T/B/A
This course is devoted to the study of the relationship between literature and culture focusing on literary texts connected by common aesthetic, generic, or historical themes.

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (14458)
MWF 9:05-10:00 a.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
How do we prepare to specialize in English studies?  We will learn how to approach and interpret a variety of texts.  We also will polish our skills in research and critical writing.  We will apply a number of pedagogical strategies to the classroom: group work, dramatic presentations, game-making, and role-playing, as well as our ever-popular lecture-and-participation exchanges.  This class aims to be both demanding and enjoyable.

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (12254)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
How do we discuss and write about literature?  This course reflects upon and seeks to refine our understanding of what constitutes literary argument and evidence in the academic discipline of English; this course serves as part of the English department’s requirements for current and future work in literary studies, and will prepare you for that work.  Emphasis will be placed on learning traditional close-reading skills as well as contemporary literary critical approaches to literature.  How to read and write about texts that may be culturally and historically distant from us will be a primary concern, as will grasping ways of reading the primary genres of drama, poetry, and narrative fiction.  In more specific terms, this course will attempt a thematic consideration of the question of memory and its representation.  Readings from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, Chopin, Joyce, Bishop, Heaney, Ishiguro.

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (12426)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will be centered upon the particular skills and intellectual curiosities that distinguish literary study from other modes of inquiry.  We will read representative texts from the major genres of English literature (epic, drama, poetry, novel, essay) while attempting to understand the particular ambitions and historical contexts for each.  Simultaneously, we will discover what it means to write critically about such texts.  This means that we’ll exercise and sophisticate the skills that will be indispensable throughout the English major: close reading, selecting and analyzing quotation, and utilizing literary terminology.  Evaluation will be based on several papers, a mid-term, a final, and class participation, which will involve both class discussion and small group work.

E. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism & Theory (14466) & (14465)
On-Line
Dr. Gregory Maertz
An introduction to theory and criticism of literature and art through reading and discussion of British and Continental European critics and philisophers.  Authors to include Kant, Schiller, Shelley, Hegel, Nietzche, Freud, Woolf, Benjamin, Foucault, and Derrida.

E. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism & Theory (12427)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
The aim of this introductory course is to help English majors learn to recognize, analyze and apply literary theory.  We will begin by reading four accessible, compelling, and very different works of cultural criticism that make productive use of the tools and insights that literary theory has to offer.  From there we will look back to some of the foundational texts upon which many contemporary theorists continue to rely.  Finally we will examine one literary work through the lenses of some of the ideas we have observed.  You should leave the course with a basic understanding of the goals, methods, and history of literary theory.

E. 3100: Medieval English Literature (14454)
TR 4:40-6:05 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
This course focuses on English writings from the Middle Ages and their social contexts.  In this course we will read, analyze, and enjoy the variety of writings and literary forms from medieval England.  We will understand these writings in terms of genre, contemporary cultural and political conversations, and the modern debate over the “Englishness” of these writings.  From Beowulf, medieval lyrics, an exemplar of the Alliterative Revival such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to the works of Chaucer and Langland, and religious and autobiographical writings by women mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, medieval English literature addresses issues of religious reform, political corruption, class and gender relations, and the historical past.  We will explore the way medieval English literature connects with, changes, and challenges the circumstances of its time and place in this course.

E. 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays (14452)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
Shakespeare and the City
The massive expansion of urban London was the largest collective cultural experience in early modern England.  This course asks how the Jacobean plays of the second half of Shakespeare’s career comment on the dislocations and opportunities of urban culture.  Through dark comedies like Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, Roman tragedies like Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, and late romances like Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, we will consider such issues as urban crime, street culture, the social impact of early capitalism, the crisis of agricultural labor, vagrancy, and the cultural opacity of the modern city.  We will discuss these plays in the context of various theories of urbanization and modernization and also contrast them with the masterpiece of one of early modern England’s most thoroughly urbanized writers, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler.  Students will consider the place of Shakespeare in twenty-first century New York City, and we will see a new production of Measure for Measure early in the semester at SUNY Purchase.

E. 3190: Special Topics in Renaissance Literature (14459)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
Poetry and Imitation
Poetry in Renaissance England was understood as an art of imitation, and all European poets in this period imagined themselves as working through imitation.  This course spans the divide between literary criticism and creative writing by combing a workshop-style creative writing class with close reading of a half-dozen major English poets.  The course’s requirements and graded material will be split evenly between critical and creative work.  By engaging in early modern poetic practices like imitation, translation, reply poems, formal variations, and writing for a “coterie circle,” the course will help students become more flexible and resourceful young poets as well as better readers of some of the major figures of the so-called “Golden Age” of English verse.  Writers will include Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, John Donne, and Andrew Marvel.

E. 3220: The Eighteenth-Century Novel (14448)
MWF 1:25-2:20 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will examine one of the most central developments of eighteenth-century English literary culture: the emergence of the novel as a genre.  Though we take it for granted as a coherent form today, the novel resulted from a process of exploration and experimentation on the part of prose-fiction writers throughout the 1700s.  Among the writers we’ll study are Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Austen.  Our discussions will be based both on close textual analysis and on broad historical questions involving gender, social status, and print culture during the period.  Ultimately, we will be concerned with tracing these issues through close attention to formal innovation and narrative technique in the emergent novel.  Evaluation will be based on: attendance, frequent reading quizzes, participation, papers totaling 12-15 written pages, and a final exam.  The average reading assignment for each class meeting will be 60 pages.

E. 3240: Romantic Literature (14450)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
This course surveys the literature of the Romantic era in Britain—roughly the 1780s to 1820s—including the major poetry, significant political prose, and novels.  Throughout the course we will seek to assess the continuing popularity of the Romantic imagination and its relevance to characteristic modes of subjective experience in the 21st century world.  We will consider such topics as: nature and the imagination in a time marked by the industrial revolution and political unrest; the urgency romantic poets and their contemporaries felt in their quest to affirm a core set of transcendent values—including freedom, personhood, immortality; the experience of history in a time of extraordinary change; the role of art and the artist in the new political world forged by the French revolution; gender and “sensibility.”  Readings from Austen, Blake, Burke, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, More, Paine, Prince, M. Shelley, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth.

E. 3300: Colonial American Literature (14464)
MWF 1:25-2:20 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will look at some of the issues which are changing the terrain of colonial literary scholarship, paying special attention to contact with Native America.  Historically, this course has usually been taught as an introductory to the legacy of American Puritanism.  Currently, however, scholars in the field are looking away from New England to the Caribbean and to the south and to a variety of texts—such as Native American treaty records—that tell a different kind of story than John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.”  Authors will include John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Olaudah Equiano, and Benjamin Franklin.

E. 3310: Antebellum American Literature (14461)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course will introduce students to the literature that helped to redefine the nation, to challenge the social order, and to establish a distinctly American literary tradition.  Together we will examine the relationship between literacy and freedom, literature and politics, and we will shape new questions around the construction of authorship, the emergence of genre, the nature of “Americanness,” as well as the status of race, class, and gender in the United States.  Authors will include: Poe, Melville, Douglass, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, and Stowe.

E. 3450: Modern Drama (14455)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A study of the major playwrights of the modern era who revolutionized the stage for our age.  Each dramatist will be studied with a view to determining each’s individual vision, relation to other works of the time, and success in influencing the dramatists of the 20th  and 21st centuries to follow.  Consideration will be given to the innovative works of such significant dramatists as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.

E. 3470: Twentieth-Century African American Literature (14449)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth- Century is the problem of the color-line.”  Beginning with Du Bois’s prophetic statement, this introductory course will explore how selected African American fiction, drama, poetry, and essays have responded to and influenced issues of race and racism, nationalism and assimilation, and racial and gendered identity.  The course will present an overview of twentieth-century African American literary history, concentrating especially on the oral tradition (particularly music) and its impact on literary expression, from the Harlem Renaissance until the present.  Readings will include Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Amiri Baraka, Dutchman; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; and Paule Marshall, The Fisher King.

E/CLS 3610: Classical Drama in Translation (14460)
MWF 8:00-8:55 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
A reading of the major plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides which emphasizes both the historical events that underpin their mythic recasting and the ways that modern writers, artists, and musicians have found inspiration in classical models.  The course is appropriate for those students interested in modern as well as classical literature and in drama’s relationship to the other arts.

E. 3690: Special Topics in Cultural Studies (14462)
MWF 2:30-3:25 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
Beginning with the late 19th Century, the theater has been shaped by two intersecting currents—one scientific and one artistic.  A scientific, rational view of the world has come to be centered on the human subject.  Beginning with the naturalists, playwrights have brought a scientific view into the theater.  Emile Zola, most notably, maintained that the drama could explore social realities by applying the scientific method to the study of human nature.  By 1905 the new science of microbiology had influenced the cultural sphere, especially in the theater where the tropes of contagion and pathology received new currency and urgency.  Simultaneously, a cult of the human body cognizant of its classical and aesthetic perfectibility gave rise to a physical culture movement that marginalized the impaired body.  The object of this course is to review the response of modernism as a literary and cultural movement in fashioning a radical rethinking of the body, its boundaries and modes of pathology.  The work of playwrights who use nontraditional constructs to bring their novel discourse before the public will be examined.  Readings will include Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, Arthur Kopit’s Wings, Margaret Edson’s Wit, and Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home.

E. 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (14456)
MW 3:35-5:00 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This is a writing workshop where we will practice writing in several genres including: poetry, flash fiction, playwriting, memoir and non-fiction.  The course employs models of contemporary work in all genres.  Students will finish the semester with a final project in one of their chosen genres, or with one which incorporates multiple genres.  Submission to on-campus literary magazine SEQUOYA is encouraged, along with other participatory means of disseminating the best of your new work.

E. 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (14001)
W. 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Prof. Thomas Philipose
This introductory creative writing workshop will focus on your writing and your thoughts (that means you will be writing a lot).  We will explore the creative aspects of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and playwriting.  We will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of what your writing voice/style can be.  You will be expected to attend public readings and performances (off campus and on your own time).  We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques of others (outside of this workshop) to help us become careful readers and diligent writers.  An experimental and non-traditional approach will be encourages to help elicit fresh, unique work that reflects the individual writers in our workshop.  The majority of our classwork will entail reading and discussing your writing (you will read and write in—and outside of—every class every week).

E. 3730: Poetry Workshop (14451)
MWF 12:20-1:15 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This Poetry Writing workshop will cover both traditional and new, “experimental” forms for poetic practice, as well as responses to others’ poetry both read and listened to in performance.  Written work will include daily notebook entries, specific poetic assignments, critical response papers and in-class presentations.  Grades will be based on portfolio manuscripts presented throughout the semester as well as participation in collective workshopping, and attendance at on and off campus events.  No prior experience necessary but be prepared for an intensive writing and reading experience.

E. 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction (14463)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is an introduction to fiction writing, focusing mainly on the short story.  Students will write regular exercises, playing with notions like point of view, detail, character, conflict, and dialogue: these exercises will lead to the writing of original short stories.  We’ll read some great writers as we work on own fiction—including Jamaica Kincaid, Donald Barthelme, Alice Walker, and Ernest Hemingway—and we’ll try to figure out how to tell our own stories in engaging and exciting ways.

E. 4992: Seminar in American Literature (14453)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This seminar explores “Jazz Age” 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; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Claude McKay, Home To Harlem) and poetry (Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes), as well as cultural histories and historical novels of the “Jazz Age” (including Toni Morrison, Jazz).

E. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (14447)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
Utopian Fiction
This senior seminar will examine a wide range of utopian novels, both as literary works and as blueprints for social change.  We will begin with the influential models of Thomas More’s Utopia, an imaginary New World travelogue, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a technophilic dream of year-2000 socialism.  From there we will move on to the revisions, sometimes hopeful and sometimes ominous, of the twentieth century.  We will pay close attention to the narrative successes and shortcomings of each author’s attempt at representing a discrete and coherent social system.  Writing assignments will include three short essays and a final seminar paper.