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English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning
In this workshop, we will read modern and contemporary poetry,
as well as statements and essays on poetics. We will examine and
practice writing poetry using different forms and approaches. The
weekly workshop is meant to be a place where you can present drafts
of your work for helpful response. The course requirements include
writing a poem for each workshop, making a presentation, and submitting
a final folder with your revised work and an essay, reflecting on
your process of writing.
English
579: Woman as Hero
Professor Harriet
Malinowitz
The concept
of the “heroic” traditionally contains the assumption
that the hero is male. Heroism is a public act, requiring agency
in the public world, while the concept of the “heroine”
is a diminutive one, in that the heroine exists only by virtue of
her relationship to the hero. Unlike a “heroine,” a
female “hero” (or, as Maya Angelou has put it, “shero”)
is often unrecognizable within the conventions of patriarchal ideology
upon which heroic idealism is based. This course will suggest titleernative
ways of reading classic texts and will also consider more contemporary
texts as we attempt to identify and explore female heroism in myth,
fiction, memoir, and film.
From the myth of Amor and Psyche to Thelma and Louise, we
will examine archetypes of the woman hero who embarks on a journey
(either literal or figurative), challenges the established order,
and creates new possibilities of community, wholeness, and selfhood.
An titleernative to the conventional archetypes of angel in the house,
witch, hag, harpy, bitch, and madwoman in the attic, the woman hero
must challenge patriarchal authority and ideology and thus the terms
within which her society makes sense of itself. We will begin by
reading classic theories of the male heroic, including work by Joseph
Campbell, Carl Jung, and Dorothy Norman, and theories of female
identity, including work by Sigmund Freud, Erich Neumann, and Adrienne
Rich. We will then go on to read fictional works and memoirs by
writers such as Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Rita Mae Brown, Agnes Smedley, and Audre Lorde, and to screen
several films. As a class, we will attempt to figure out what the
definition(s) of the female heroic may be.
English
624: West Indians in the Harlem Renaissance
Professor Louis
Parascandola
Anglophone Caribbean immigrants played a vital, if often neglected,
role during the Harlem Renaissance, an important literary and cultural
movement of the 1920s and early 1930s.
There were, in fact, over 36,000 foreign born Blacks, mostly
West Indians, in Harlem in 1920.
These immigrants, despite often facing severe discrimination,
had a significant effect on American culture and politics. We will
discuss Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association,
particularly paying attention to the “Back to Africa”
movement and Garvey’s role as a facilitator of the Harlem
Renaissance. In addition to the work of Garvey, we will examine
the radical political writings of W. A. Domingo, Hubert H. Harrison,
and Cyril Briggs. We will also read fiction and poetry by Claude
McKay, one of the seminal figures in the Harlem Renaissance, short
stories by Eric Walrond, poetry by George Margetson, fiction/essays
by J. A.. Rogers and Amy Jacques Garvey, and drama by Eulalie Spence.
Finally, we will consider the views of leading African Americans
such as W. E. B.. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes
on Garvey and the West Indian Community.
English
626: Twentieth Century American Literature
Professor Kenneth Bernard
This
course is a discussion of some thematic aspects of American literature
and American culture. It is continuous with the previous course,
English 625. We will examine specific texts by Hemingway,
Steinbeck, Pynchon, Faulkner, Ismael Reed, West, Henry Miller, and
Kerouac. There might be additions. The major theme developed is
the contrast/conflict between the values of the “community”
and the values of the “territory” and reflections of
that contrast/conflict in our cultural and political life. It is
helpful but not necessary to have taken English 625 and to have
some familiarity with writers like Emerson and Hawthorne.
English
700: Practicum in the Teaching of Composition
Professor Thomas Kerr
This course
is designed to introduce teachers to the theory and practice of
writing instruction at various levels in a multi-cultural society.
Intended as both a source of support and a forum for discussion
for new teachers/tutors as well as teachers with some experience
in the classroom, the course will explore the dynamic and frequently
problematic relationship between theory and practice in the teaching
of writing. Reading assignments include treatments of various pedagogical
approaches and the theoretical assumptions about language, culture,
and writing that inform these approaches.
Writing assignments and other work for the course will allow
teachers to respond directly to issues raised and problems posed
in the reading. Assignments will also create opportunities for students
to explore their own teaching/tutoring practices. Taken together,
the reading, writing, and other work in this course should help
us better understand what we are doing in today’s writing
classrooms, how to do it, and why we think we are doing it. The
principal aim of this course is to help students become rhetorically
savvy, self-reflective teachers. Texts: Scenarios
for Teaching Writing: Contexts for Discussion and Reflective
Practice by Anson, Grahm, et.al; In the Middle Way: New
Understandings about Writing, Reading and Learning by Atwell;
Evaluating Writing by Cooper and Odell; The Writing Teacher’s
Sourcebook (4th edition) edited by Tate, Corbett,
and Meyers; and a course reader that will excerpt work from other
major figures in composition studies.
English
707: Methods of Research
and Criticism
Professor David Toise
This
course will introduce graduate students to a range of critical approaches,
literary texts, and research tools that they can make use of as
both teachers and scholars. Within the field of British and American
literature, I have chosen a small number of literary texts that,
despite being few in number, will allow us to try out our ideas
on works that represent different approaches, backgrounds, and genres.
Writings by E. M. Forster, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, and
William Shakespeare will serve as our focus. We will want to look
at each text in depth, and to this end, we’ll be dealing with
a number of critical approaches (historical, feminist, psychoanalytic,
deconstruction, post-colonial, genre theory, and queer studies).
In addition, I hope to discuss how these literary texts have shaped
approaches to literature more widely, examining how specific works
may have served as touchstones for particular literary approaches.
We’ll also be looking at theoretical texts that stand on their
own and then discussing connections between the theory and literature
we read. We will engage
theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon,
for example, and seek to understand their applicability to literary
texts. Most of all, I hope that as a group we can raise the possibilities
of what literary studies can doe, helping us to explore, develop,
and articulate our position as individual readers.
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