English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor
Lewis Warsh
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm
In this course, we will trace the use of
the first person pronoun "I" in American poetry, from
Whitman to the present, and address the questions of truth-telling
and disguise. Does writing personal poetry have a purpose and
does it necessitate new forms? We'll discuss some of these forms
and create our own, looking closely at recent models: Frank O'Hara,
Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Berrigan. We'll also look at texts of
personal writing by Lyn Hejinian and Marguerite Duras that blur
the boundaries between poetry and prose. As much time as possible
will be spent reading and discussing your work.
English 529: Seminar
in Creative Writing: Visiting Writers Series
Students register for 529 and attend three successive sections.
Section One: Noir Sensibility
Charlotte Carter
Wednesdays, 3:30 to 6:00 pm
9/1 to 10/1
The workshop will concentrate on writing with a noir
sensibility, especially crime and mystery fiction. Expect there
to be an emphasis on plotting—outlining, developing back
stories, looking at character as a springboard for plot. Who is
the detective figure? What are the advantages and limitations
of first person ("I") narrative in crime fiction? What
is evil? How interesting can a criminal be? How can genre writing
also look at or illuminate history, societal ills, human nature
itself? Ideally, participants will have manuscripts in progress
that they wish to expand, improve, finish, or rewrite--or at least
an idea for development. There will not be a great deal of in-class
writing. Instead, workshop participants will sometimes be asked
to create stories using assigned casts of characters or dramatic
situations. While none of this implies that narratives must be
traditional (linear), one purpose of the class is to help the
writer achieve cohesiveness and accessibility.
Charlotte Carter is the author of four novels, Walking Bones;
and three novels in the
critically acclaimed Nanette Hayes series (Rhode Island Red,
Coq au Vin, and Drumsticks), featuring
a young black woman musician and amateur sleuth. Published by
Warner Books/Mysterious Press in the U.S. and by Serpent’s
Tail in England, her books appear in translation in France, Italy,
Germany, Japan, and Portugal. In Summer 2003, Random House will
publish the first entry in a new crime series by Carter, taking
place in the late 1960s, the "Cook County" series. Carter
is a long time fan of the mystery genre and lists among the writers
she admires: Chester Himes, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Horace
McCoy, and Leigh Brackett. She is also indebted as a writer to
the "black bohemians" such as LeRoi Jones, Nettie Jones,
and Charles Wright, along with literary lights such as Henry Greene,
Paul Bowles, Robert Stone, and Truman Capote. Carter was born
in the Midwest. She has also lived in other parts of the world--North
Africa, France, and Canada--but she has lived most of her life
as a New Yorker.
Section Two: Improvisational
Writing—The Illusion of Narrative
John High
Wednesdays, 3:30 to 6:00 pm
10/15 to 11/5
During these four weeks we will explore improvisational techniques of
writing in order to scrape beneath the veneer of fictional form
and to more fully engage the texts that matter in our lives and
stories. What is the illusion of form, and how do characters via
our self-imaginings masquerade behind the screens of fiction?
How do techniques of rupture and interruption expose a deeper
awareness of craft and content? We will spend a week working with
automatic writing, detective scripts and fictional autobiographies,
a week experimenting with exercises in which we play with diaries
and epistles, and a week in which we explore short-shorts, found
artifacts, and postcard stories. From here we will dovetail into
the illusion of film as text, writing mini-paper-movies for our
"detective potboilers" and emerging characters. Each
week will include lecture and discussion, in-class writing games
and informal critiquing of our explorations
during the month. Andrei Takovsky's Sculpting
In Time, John Berger's Ways of Seeing
and selected writings of Simone Weil will be among the course
readings as well as home viewing of films to be announced. The
goal of the intensive workshop includes completing one revised
text for a final group reading and party.
John High is the author of six books, including his award-winning trilogy
of poetic novels The
Desire Notebooks
and his recently publish selected writings, Bloodline. He has received four Fullbrights, two NEAs,
and writing awards from the Witter Bynner Foundation, Arts International
and the Academy of American Poets, among others. A translator
of several books of contemporary Russian poetry, he was the chief
editor for Crossing Centuries—The New
Russian Poetry. He is also the founding and former editor of the Five
Fingers Review. He lives in Brooklyn with his daughter.
Section Three: Fiction
Workshop
Richard Hell
Wednesdays, 3:30 to 6:00 pm
11/19 to 12/3
Good writers love to read books. What writers
do you like? If you can explain why you like them you have a chance
of being a good writer yourself. Good writing is good thinking.
If you "know what you mean but you can't express it"
you don't know what you mean. Instead, you could start by describing
what it's like to not be able to express something. Once you've
earned some confidence in your writing you can figure out what's
going on by writing it. Don't worry about "finding your voice."
If you know what you believe is good writing, then that's your
aim as a writer: to produce some yourself. The rest will take
care of itself. To paraphrase Nicholas Ray on filmmaking, the
only meaningful aim of fiction is to produce something that heightens
the reader's sense of being. The rest is just sociology and cultural
chatter.
Be prepared to bring in a photocopy of a
page or two of fiction you like. Exercises will include: writing
fiction derived from the events of a given day of yours; rendering
as fiction an incident from the life of Michael Jackson (or other
widely reported event in a well-known person's life); and rewriting
("translating") a piece of existing fiction.
Richard Hell's first full length novel, Go Now,
is an account set in l980 of a burned out junkie punk driving
across America with a former girlfriend. It was published in l996
by Scribner and Fourth Estate in Britain. About Go Now, TLS review: "A splenetic journey that delights in changing lanes
from one genre to the next without indicating. Hell slews into
the oncoming traffic of Hemingway, Henry Miller, and P.J. O'Rourke,
but he has sufficient fury to hold his own." The French translation
was published by Editions de l'Olivier (Paris) in l999. A collection
of mixed genre works, Hot and Cold,
was also released in 200l from powerhouse books. Hell became famous
in the mid-seventies as one of the originators of the punk movement. His albums--Blank Generation, Destiny Street,
R.I.P., Dim Stars--have often cited as the best
of the year or the decade. He has also performed as a leading
actor in many underground films.
English 525/Media Arts
600: Writing for Media--Story
Professor Claire Goodman (Media
Arts Department, LIU-Brooklyn)
Thursdays, 6:00 to 8:50 pm
This cross-listed course is an introduction to the methods
and principles of great STORYTELLING in the media. It is the cornerstone
course for all forms of story: commercials, sitcoms, movies, experimental
shorts, even documentaries and photographic essays. In the first half of
the semester, by means of screenings and discussion, students will learn
to recognize and analyze basic story elements such as narrative structure,
character, setting, plot, design, irony, and comedy. In the second half,
in workshop-style classes, students will work on creating their own stories
using these elements. Each student will develop their own movie-short screenplay
and treatment as a final project. A professional screenwriter will be a guest
speaker at one of the classes.
Requirements: access to a computer, purchase of Final Draft writing software,
permission of instructor to take the course.
English 624:
African-American Drama
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays, 4:10 to 6:00 pm
This course covers the period between 1848 to the present and features
texts composed by African American playwrights. We begin with
the historical context of the mid-nineteenth century with a special
emphasis on the rise of minstrelsy and the construction of William
Wells Browns' The
Escape (1848). Next we cover black women's arrival on the stage with Pauline
Hopkins' Peculiar Sam (1878), and we discuss the emerging black musical and how it helps to
divide the public theatrical sphere along racial lines, a phenomenon
that hastens the Harlem Renaissance and a burgeoning independent
black theater movement, which takes hold securely by the mid-twenties,
a period that engenders race plays, historical pageants, folk
drama, and experimental abstract works. Accordingly, our early
twentieth century unit will feature pieces by W.E.B. DuBois, Angelina
Grimke, Marita Bonner, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston,
Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Eulalie Spence. We conclude that
period with Langston Hughes' long-running evocative work Mulatto.
Post-war offerings to be studied include those written by Alice
Childress, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Charles
Fuller, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Anna Deveare Smith.
Appropriate critical essays will be supplied, and I plan at least
one trip to an area theater. I imagine that students interested in African American literature, those who
are themselves playwrights, and those intrigued by American culture
at large will welcome the course.
English 641:
Literacy and Basic Writing
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Thursdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm
This course aims to situate basic writing instruction
on the college level in the broader field of literacy studies. We will address
several key questions: What is literacy? What is orality? What social and
historical forces account for patterns of literacy and illiteracy? What myths
surround literacy? How can educators help promote literacy? What defines
a basic writer? What kind of instruction can enable so-called basic writers
to become proficient readers and writers? What discussions are currently
taking place in the field of basic writing and what implications might they
have for institutions like LIU?
The reading list includes works by Wtitleer Ong, Paulo Freire, William
Labov, Shirley Brice Heath, James Paul Gee, Mike Rose, Deborah Brandt,
Linda Brodkey, Mina Shaughnessy, Min-Zhan Lu, Tom Fox, and Bruce Horner.
Writing requirements will include a course journal, a literacy autobiography,
and a research paper that may be based on library and/or field research.
English 655: English
Romanticism
Professor Louis Parascandola
Mondays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm
This course will discuss
poetry and non-fiction prose by the traditional "big six" Romantic
writers: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. We will also examine
some of the women authors who have been gaining increasing critical stature,
including Dorothy Wordsworth, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Felicia Hemans. Finally,
we will be reading fiction by Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice),
Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and Thomas Love Peacock (Nightmare
Abbey).
English 700: Practicum
in Teaching Composition
Professor
Patricia Stephens
Tuesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm
This course is
designed to introduce teachers to the theory and practice of writing instruction
in a variety of settings: college composition courses, high school English
courses, and writing center tutorials. Intended as both a source of support
and a forum for discussion for new teachers as well as teachers with some
experience in the classroom, the course will explore the dynamic and often
complicated relationship between theory and practice in the teaching of
writing. Overall, the course aims to help students expand their repertoire
of theoretical and pedagogical knowledge and become more thoughtful and
self-reflective teachers. During the first half of the semester, we will
concentrate on readings that explore theories and practices appropriate
for various levels of teaching writing (college, high school, and one-to-one
tutoring). Writing assignments for the course are intended to encourage
teachers to respond to issues raised and problems posed both in the readings
and in hands-on work with student writers. Students will create writing
assignments and syllabi, analyze written responses to student texts, produce
a written observation of a classroom teacher or tutor, and create a statement
of teaching/tutoring philosophy. In addition to a course book provided
by the instructor, other texts may include The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook; Teaching
in Progress: Theories, Practices, and Scenarios; In the Middle:
New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning; and The
Practical Tutor.
English 707:
Methods in Research and Criticism
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Wednesdays, 6:10 to 8:00 pm
The aim of this
course is to practice theoretically informed ways of reading and to acquire
familiarity with literary research methods. Specifically, we will deal
with feminist, historicist and postcolonial approaches. Due to the course’s
focus on research and criticism, only two primary texts will be studied: The
Fountain Overflows (l956) by Rebecca West and Black Mischief (l932)
by Evelyn Waugh. The significant ideological, thematic, and formal differences
between these two works of 20th century British fiction will
enable us to sharpen our critical discernment. The first few weeks will
be spent studying the above-mentioned three critical approaches, followed
by close reading and discussion of the two primary texts. At the next stage
we will devise a research plan, conduct bibliographical research, assess
the available resources, and craft individual semester papers. Every student
will give two presentations over the course of the semester.
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