|
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
528: Seminar in Creative Writing
Professor John High
Our
emphasis will be on your writing, as the heart of the course will
operate on a workshop/peer group basis. We'll set out to understand
the strivings of each story & to determine the ways it
is or isn't working--afterwards, with any luck, offering constructive
criticism & helpful suggestions to the author. We will
spend the first few weeks generating material and/or revising your
current work in preparation for your class workshops. Though you
may have work-in-progress, all of the fiction you turn in for
this course will have to be new writing. There will be class
discussions on what we mean when we talk about narrative technique;
there will be assigned readings and lectures on the nature
of story and dream landscapes, the fictive & the real &
the mythic--and the craft we can use to achieve the truth of our
own writing on the page. There will also be weekly class exercises
designed to help you develop your craft and heighten your imaginative
skills in using characterization, voice, setting, POV, conflict,
mood, etc.--& to maximize your fiction’s
effect on a reader.
We
will build a writing community, a support group, an environment
in which we strive to help one another as authors to construct
a vision in words. I
firmly believe that for a group of writers to work together
there must exist a strong element of trust and respect.
I hope that in the course of the semester I will earn
your respect and trust, yet, of equal importance, I am convinced
that with one another you must share an equivalent attitude, one
which includes an attempt to comprehend and see into one another's
stories. If you/we can do this, helpful comments and criticism
will yield fruitful results for each of you. I can state from
experience, your individual writing will grow and improve as
you practice the ideas of technique and meaning inherently
available in your powers of expression/search. Though I am the instructor
of this course, I am also a participant, learning from the dialogue
that evolves between us. Nonetheless, the one area where I am insistent
concerns the manner in which you communicate with one another:
I simply have no tolerance for mean-spirited criticism or personal
attacks. I think it's safe to assume you all agree, and that
you're here to WRITE, to learn, and to have some fun.
It is exciting work. By the end of the semester--you’ll
see--you will have increased your power to write convincing
and sound fiction, and you will have achieved a fluency and
clarity in your writing that will help you in all aspects of
your writing life. You
will be the director of your own quest; you will gain knowledge
that is important to you and that can even change your life.
English
579: Virginia Woolf and Modernism
Professor Patrick Horrigan
Virginia
Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most challenging, rewarding, and
beautiful writers of the twentieth century. This course is dedicated
to the study of her works in depth. We will trace the development
of Woolf’s experimental (“modernist”) fiction
through five of her novels: The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room,
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years. In addition,
we will study a selection of her non-fiction works, including her
classic essay on the challenges facing women writers, A Room
of One’s Own, and her treatise on war and patriarchy,
Three Guineas. Finally, we will read selections from the
diary she kept from her teenage years up until her death. We will
make comparisons between Woolf and other modernist visual artists
and writers in an effort to define more precisely Woolf’s
innovations as a writer and to place her work within a larger historical
context. Students will give in-class presentations and write a research
paper. The New York Public Library, which house the bulk of Woolf’s
papers, will offer students training in how to do archival research.
Visits to collections of modern art in the city will also be arranged.
English
620: Theories of Teaching Writing/Contemporary Rhetorical
Theory
Professor Patricia Stephens
This
course offers an introduction to theories of composition and rhetoric.
Designed for those who plan to teach writing at the college or secondary
level, the course will offer historical and theoretical perspectives
on the teaching of rhetoric and writing. The premise underlying
this course is that our thinking about teaching writing in the twenty-first
century must extend beyond simple, prescriptive formulas to a broader
consideration of the history and contexts of rhetoric—a history
that we will trace by examining the implementation of rhetoric and
writing instruction in nineteenth and twentieth century colleges
in the United States. We will explore the meanings, purposes,
uses, and values of “rhetoric” and “writing”
by analyzing the social and political contexts of the debates that
have shaped college composition and rhetoric curricula over the
centuries.
Historical texts may include James Berlin’s Rhetoric and
Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985;
John Brereton’s The Origins of Composition Studies in the
American College: 1875-1925; Robin Varnum’s Fencing
with Words: A History of Writing Instruction at Amherst College
During the Era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966; selections from
Albert R. Kitzhaber’s Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900.
Other possible texts include William Covino and David Joliffe’s
Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries; Andrea Lunsford’s
Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition;
Kathleen E. Welch’s The Contemporary Reception of Classical
Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse; and Sharon Crowley’s
Ancient Rhetorics for the Modern Student.
English
624: African-American Literature
Professor Carol Allen
This
is a survey that covers African American Literature from the eighteenth
century to the present. The course will provide general information
about the major writers and texts that have contributed to African
American Letters. In addition to literary texts, assignments include
criticism from noted scholars such as Houston Baker, Henry Louis
Gates Jr., Hortense Spillers, Deborah McDowell, Mad Gwendolyn Henderson,
and others. Fiction writers to be studied are Douglass, Hughes,
Hurston, Wright, Brooks, Ellison, Walker, Morrison, and more. The
aim is to provide not only a sense of the African-American Literary
tradition, but also where it stands in relation to Western humanities.
English
700: Practicum in Teaching Composition
Professor Xiao-Ming
Li
Intended
as a source of support and forum for discussion for novice writing
teachers, this class will focus on practical approaches to everyday
issues in the classroom, yet situating those approaches in the so-called
“paradigm shifts” of the field. The class, therefore,
will interweave two strands: that of the hands-on training of managing
day-to-day running of a writing class and that of the underlying
theories of such praxis. For the first strand, the class is organized
around three major components in the teaching of writing: classroom
discussion, writing assignments, and responding to students’
writing. To put those practices in perspective, we will, at the
same time, study two monographs, one on the process movement and
the other on the teaching of academic discourse, since both movements
dominated our imagination and practices in the past half century
and still exert subtle or pronounced influence on the writing classrooms
across the country even as our attention has been gradually drawn
to other –isms in recent years.
Each
participant, besides keeping a reading journal, is expected to submit
a portfolio at the end of the semester, which will consist of a
syllabus, two writing assignments, two classroom exercises, and
one student profile.
English
707: Methods in Research and Criticism
Professor Huma
Ibrahim
This
course is designed to introduce you to the study of English literature
at the graduate level. This means that you will learn to examine
different critical traditions and apply that to a few pieces of
literature that we will look at. The idea is to give you a
comprehensive survey of critical theory in its application to literature.
In addition, you will learn, first through a visit to the library,
and then through actually writing a paper, strategies of how research
can be applied in constructing essays.
Texts
include: Tyson's Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly
Guide, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,
and Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Theory; as well as Farah's
Secrets, Eliot's Four Quartets, and Shakespeare's
Othello.
Back
to Graduate Courses
|
