English 509
Sociolinguistics--The Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
This
course examines the social foundation of language and the linguistic
foundation of social life. More specifically, the course explores
how language and society intersect to construct and, in many ways,
control both individual and group identity. The relationship between
language and society has relevance to the teaching of writing
in that both teachers and students possess socially constructed
knowledge of language that undergirds their understanding of writing
competence. The course explores how sociolinguistic constructions
such as class, race, gender, academic discourse, and education
might impact upon writing performance. The course analyzes sociolinguistic
theory and practice, including the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Shirley
Brice Heath, Lisa Delpit, David Bartholomae, Claude Steele, and
Sandra Lipsitz Bem.
English 522
Academic Writing Workshop
Professor Deborah Mutnick
A
new offering in the English Master's Program, this course is an
intensive, advanced writing workshop for graduate students (across
the disciplines) who wish to develop professional writing skills.
Students will write critical essays in response to common course
readings as well as professional articles from the disciplines.
Conducted as a workshop, the course will be rooted in peer and
teacher response to writing projects. Each week, two or three
students will submit writing to be workshopped, using critical
feedback from the class and the instructor to revise and edit
their work. Students will be required to complete five 6-page
essays or the equivalent, and will be invited to bring assignments
into the workshop from their other classes. Required texts may
include Writing
in the Disciplines: A Reader for Writers,
edited by Kennedy. Kennedy, and Smith, Writing
Without Teachers,
by Peter Elbow, and On
Writing Well, by
William Zinsser.
English 523
Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
This
workshop explores both the art and the craft of fiction writing.
Frequent writing assignments and exercises will concentrate on
the conventions of fiction—description, dialogue, and characterization—as
well as more experimental possibilities such as fragmentation
and shifting point of view. Focus will be on the ways autobiography
overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way
of keeping it alive. Among the models we will look at are stories
and novels by Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, and
James Ellroy. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading
and discussing student work.
English 529
Topics in Creative Writing (Series of three one-credit
courses)
Section One
Brainlingo:
Writing The Voice Of the Body
1/23
to 2/20
Edwin Torres
As
artists we create our own communication. How we listen affects
how we speak, and how we see our language affects how our voice
is heard. Where the senses meet each other is where poetry can
begin. This workshop will be an active creative laboratory that
will explore how we communicate by exercising the languages inside
us. Exercises will be balanced by critiques. This is an active
writing workshop for open minds.
Edwin Torres’s introduction to poetry was through The Nuyorican
Poets Café and The St. Marks Poetry Project, where he has worked
as a workshop leader and curator. His CD Holy Kid combines
poetry with music, sounds and homemade tapes, and was included
in the exhibition “The American Century Pt. II” at
the Whitney Museum Of American Art. From l993-99, he was a member
of the poetry collective, Real Live Poetry (formerly Nuyorican
Poets Café Live) with whom he performed and conducted workshops
across the United States and overseas. He’s the recipient
of a one-year fellowship from The Foundation For Contemporary
Performance Art, as well as The Nuyorican Poets Café Fresh Prize
For Poetry. Finally, his media assault has transpired on MTV’s
Spoken Word Unplugged and The Charlie Rose Show
and in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine,
High Times, and others. In NYC, Torres has performed at
many venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café, Dixon Place, The Guggenheim
Museum, CBGB’s, Tonic, P.S. 122, WFMU Radio, Lincoln Center,
and The Museum Of Modern Art. His books include I
Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous
(Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof
Books), and most recently, Please
(CD-Rom from Faux Press). Edwin is currently co-editing POeP! an eJournal, and Cities
Of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from The United States and
Brazil, both from
Rattapallax Press. His website is wwsw.brainlingo.com.
Section
Two
Twins & Matching Sets
2/27 to 4/3
Barbara Coultas
In
this class we will focus on writing works that have companions.
By that I mean we will write poetry or prose that splinters off
or inspires other projects. We will read work by writers from
the early days of The Poetry Project as well as innovative work
by younger writers who are following in the same linage. Reading
texts include handouts from Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Joe
Brainard, Lydia Davis, Marcella Durand, Kristin Prevallet, John
Yau, Dodie Bellamy, and others.
Brenda
Coultas is originally from Southern Indiana. She’s lived
in NYC since l995 and is the author of A
Handmade Museum (Coffee
House Press), A Summer
Newsreel, Boyeye, and
Early Films, a collection
of prose and poetry. Her poems have been anthologized in Heights
of the Marvelous
from St. Martin’s Press and The
(New) American Poets, published
by Talisman. Her journal publications include works in, among
others, Epoch, Conjunctions:
State of the Art, Fence, The World, American Poetry Review, Indian
Review. She has read
at the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, the Boston Poetry Conference,
among many others. She has taught at The Poetry Project, Naropa
University, and is presently on the faculty at Touro College in
Manhattan. She co-edited The Poetry Project Newsletter
(1997-98), and has received grants from the Fund for Poetry and
the Ted Berrigan Award. Bradford Morrow describes her work as
follows: “Equally at ease in the city and the country, Brenda
Coultas is a spiritual archeologist of dumpsters and farm fields,
an observer of the derelict and everyday folks. Her vivid voice
is like no other I have encountered, and the originality of her
work is matched by the genuine wisdom of its perceptions.”
Section
Three
4/10 to 5/1
Erica Hunt
We will gallop through the gamut of 20th/21st
century experimental poetics, pausing to gaze at some of the landmarks:
jazz poetry, language poetries, process poetry, and the new sentence(s).
The class will read selected contemporary writing by Jayne Cortez,
Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen,
Leslie Scalapino, and Charles Bernstein. Writing in the moment,
writing in the extreme, at home and in class, the indispensable
laboratory of praxis.
Erica
Hunt is the author of Local
History (Roof Books,
l993) and Arcade
(Kelsey St. Press, l996). Born in New York in l955, Hunt has worked as
a poetry teacher, housing organizer, labor news writer, and radio
producer. She currently works as a program officer for a social
justice funder in New York City. Her poetry and essays on poetry’s
connection to politics, race, gender, and history have appeared
in small magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Society of
America, Talisman, American Book Review, Bomb,
and Iowa Poetry Review. She has read and lectured at Naropa,
The New School for Social Research, St. Mark's Poetry Project,
Mills College, Stanford, Brandeis, New College of San Francisco,
etc. She is a theorist and the author of the famous essay, “Notes
for an Oppositional Poetics,” which first appeared in the
anthology The Politics
of Poetic Form (ed.
Charles Bernstein, l990). Harryette Mullen writes that “Erica
Hunt’s Local
History blows the
public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms
of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy
and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of
mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip.” Recent
publications include, “Roots of the Black Avant Garde,”
“Reading for the Conference on Modernism” and “Poetry
and Politics.”
English 635
Seminar in Ibsen
Professor Joan Templeton
The
course examines the major prose plays of Henrik Ibsen, the inventor
of modern drama. Ibsen’s dramas are the second most performed
plays in the world after Shakespeare. We will read Ibsen’s
twelve major prose plays from Pillars
of Society to When the Dead Awaken, including
A Doll House, Ghosts,
An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea,
Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and
John Gabriel Borkman.
The plays will be studied as dramas to be performed on stage as
well as literary texts. If a decent Ibsen production is available
in New York City, we will attend it as a class. Students in the
seminar will be permitted to attend the 10th International
Ibsen Conference, hosted by The Ibsen Society of America and Long
Island University, which will be held on campus from June 1-7;
scholars and directors from around the world will participate.
Text:
Ibsen: The Major
Prose Plays, trans.
Rolf Fjelde. New York: Penguin,
l978. Paperback edition.
English 650
Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Professor Sealy Gille
Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales, is a ramshackle, indecorous, unfinished poem patched
together out of various translations and adaptations. Its final
form was probably unknowable even to its creator. Chaucer died
in 1400, before he could finish the Tales, but he left
us with a vibrant and extraordinary varied collection of stories—sermons,
fabliaux, romances, tragedies, and fairy tales—told
by travelers of wildly diverse social backgrounds, including a
knight, a nun, a weaver, a miller, and a clergyman. We will read
the tales both in Middle English (with a lot of help) and in translation.
As we work on the stories and their tellers, we will also explore
the chaotic and vibrant world of fourteenth-century England.
English 646
Individual & Small Group Writing Instruction
Professor Patricia Stephen
Advanced
undergraduate students may enroll for this course with permission
of the instructor.
In
this class, we will examine the theory and practice of individual
and small group writing instruction, locating writing center work
within its broader historical and institutional contexts. The
course will begin with an overview of writing center history,
theory, and pedagogy and will then examine some of the most common
tutoring concerns: structuring sessions and setting goals;
assessing, diagnosing and responding to student writing; learning
strategies to teach planning, drafting, revising, proofreading
and editing; learning strategies to work on specific grammatical
concerns; helping students with reading comprehension; working
with ESL concerns; noticing interpersonal dynamics and maintaining
boundaries; respecting and responding to cultural and ethnic differences;
working as an online tutor, and facilitating small group sessions.
Students interested in pursuing a specific topic not included
in the general readings—such as writing center administration—may
do so with permission from the instructor.
Possible
texts: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers,
Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation, Noise
from the Writing Center, Rhetorical Grammar, The Place
of Grammar in Writing Instruction, The Practical Tutor,
Taking Flight With OWLS: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work.
Students
who enroll in the course will be required to tutor for one hour
per week during the semester at the Writing Center and to audio-
and/or videotape one session with a student. The taped session
will be transcribed and analyzed by the students for use in a
self-study. Classes will be conducted as seminars/workshops so
that all students have the opportunity to participate in class
presentations, mock tutorials, etc. Each student will generate
her/his own idea/s for a final written (and/or action) project,
based on topics of interest during the semester.
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