Spring 2008
Eng. 504: Traditions & Lineages
Professor John High
Tuesdays, 4:10 - 6:00 pm
Where do our literary traditions come from, and how do they
affect the ways, consciously or unconsciously, we approach
our own creative work? Who gave us our names and do we have
to accept them? While the conventions of popular culture imitate
and mimic the past, art is constantly reinventing itself and
simultaneously building upon the literary traditions that
inform who we become as writers. We have choices. Our goal
in this course will be to make the unfamiliar familiar, to
uncover the sources and lineages of our own art by making
the past real and practical for the books we are writing in
the 21st Century. We will do close readings of primal poetries
and narratives and examine the crossroads as well as the connections
between oral and written language and the so-called primitive
and postmodern while looking at origins and naming as method
and technique in our own writing. We will explore the use
of visions and spells, changes and repetitions, and verbal
invention in ancient to contemporary texts from Africa, Asia,
Europe, the Near East, Oceania, and the Americas. At the core
of the course will be the question of how we can expand upon
the techniques and craft of our own poems and stories. Writers
will include those from the Kato Indian to the Bushman and
Navajo, the Tibetan and Aztec, the Eskimo and Egyptian up
to the contemporary poets and fiction writers who have played
off these traditions and lineages and become models for 20th/21st
Century avant-garde movements.
A final chapbook, consisting of all your own new writing,
is due at the end of the semester. We will also schedule a
part and give a reading in the reading series hosted by the
English Department's MFA in Creative Writing Program..
Eng. 520: Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Professor Deborah Mutnick
Wednesdays, 4:10 - 6:00 pm
This nonfiction writing workshop is designed to give you the
opportunity to experiment with creative nonfiction (the nonfiction
essay infused by literary techniques and devices) through
the lens of testimony. The focus of the course is on place,
history, and testimony, and how they intertwine in writing
inspired by political struggle and resistance. Originating
in Latin American countries among people who were targets
of harsh political repression, testimonio blends history
and literature to give voice to historical experience from
a grassroots, eyewitness perspective. What does it mean to
"speak truth to power"? What happens when people
challenge "official histories"? From whose perspective
is most history told? What stories are marginalized, silenced,
erased? And what sort of writing best enables those stories
to be heard?
A central course text is Edwidge Danticat's new book, Brother,
I'm Dying, a memoir about her father and uncle, one a
Haitian immigrant in New York City, the other a minister who
stayed in Haiti until he was forced at 81 years of age to
evacuate in ill health, detained by U.S. Customs, and died
in a prison in Florida. Other texts we may read include testimony
by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and participants
in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa,
as well as works by Audre Lorde, Terry Tempest Williams, Carolina
Maria de Jesus, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin, and Susan
Griffin, Alessandro Portelli, John Beverly, George Yudice,
and Frederick Jameson. The readings serve to model, inspire,
and interrogate first and third person narratives that situate
individual experience in broad socio-historical contexts.
In addition to creative nonfiction techniques and strategies,
the course will incorporate oral history, story circles, and
other interactive methods to gather materials. Students will
be encouraged, though not required, to produce multi-modal
work integrating text and images. The emphasis of the class
is on student writing, which will be discussed at least twice
in workshop during the semester. You will be required to complete
a minimum of three 5-7-page essays and a 4-6-page reflective
essay in which you situate your own writing in relation to
the texts and traditions we study.
English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop / Creating Characters:
Their Lives, Their Fictions
Professor Jessica Hagedorn
Wednesdays, 6:10 - 8:00 pm
The fiction writing workshop is designed to expose student
writers to challenging critical responses to their work. We
will explore strategies for the development of characters:
their sources, their evolutions and the challenges of making
them fantastic, credible and complex. How do we give characters
distinct positions in a story that develop perspective and
purpose? Be prepared for weekly writing and rewriting assignments;
you will be asked to present excerpts from your novels-in-progress
or short stories for class discussion. The work of writers
as varied as Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Denis
Johnson, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Ha Jin, Flannery O'Connor
and others will be read and examined.
Jessica Hagedorn, who is the Parsons Family Professor of
Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, was
born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United
States in her early teens. Her novels include Dream Jungle,
The Gangster Of Love, which was nominated for the Irish
Times International Fiction Prize, and Dogeaters, which
was nominated for a National Book Award.
Hagedorn is also the author of Danger And Beauty, a
collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of Charlie
Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American
Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home In The
World. Her poetry, plays and prose have been anthologized
widely.
Recent work in theatre include the musical play, Most Wanted,
in collaboration with composer Mark Bennett and director Michael
Greif, at the La Jolla Playhouse; Fe In The Desert
and Stairway To Heaven for Campo Santo in San Francisco,
and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters, which was presented
at La Jolla Playhouse and at the NYSF/Public Theater (director:
Michael Greif); at SIPA Performance Space in Los Angeles and
at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City (director: Jon
Lawrence Rivera).
Upcoming theatre projects: The 2007 Manila premiere of Dogeaters,
directed by Bobby Garcia; and Three Vampires, a multimedia
collaboration with director Ping Chong.
Honors and prizes include a 2006 Lucille Lortel Playwrights'
Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a National Endowment
for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, an NEA-TCG Playwriting
Residency Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance
Playwrights' Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab.
Hagedorn has taught in the MFA Creative Writing Programs
at Columbia University and New York University, and at the
Yale School Of Drama. She serves on the Board of Directors
of the Jerome Foundation, the Board of Trustees of PEN, the
Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation, the Advisory
Board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, the Advisory
Board of Amerasia Journal at UCLA, and on the Editorial Board
of Random House's Modern Library.
English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop / Eros and Loss
Professor Akilah Oliver
Thursdays, 6:10 - 8:00 pm
Students will work on a long, serial poem throughout the
semester to investigate the nature of Eros and loss. Working
from these two dual fields or sites, students will construct
a serial poem of approximately 20-25 pages, or a series of
related poems, which engage the topic from multiple perspectives.
Students will be asked to write to, from and around critical
questions to frame a poetic inquiry that steps beyond a sentimental
or self-indulgent notion of the subjects. We will aim to enter
into a poetic investigation that engages "new" forms
and challenges the poet's notions of "voice".
Required course readings will include contemporary poets
who investigate Eros and loss from differing subject positions,
including Eleni Sikelianos, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kristen Prevallet,
and Alice Notley. Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse
will serve as our primary critical reading source.
Akilah Oliver is a poet. Her most recent chapbooks are The
Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna Press, 2006), a(A)ugust
(Portable Labs at Yo-Yo Press, 2007), and An Arriving Guard
of Angels Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan &
Parrish, 2004). She is also the author of the she said
dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999),
a book of experimental prose poetry honored by the PEN American
Center's "Open Book" award. She has been artist
in residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los
Angeles, and has received grants from the California Arts
Council, The Flintridge Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
She has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and
Naropa University. She is currently core faculty at the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics' Summer Writing Program
at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn.
English 579: Toni Morrison
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays, 6:10 - 8:00 pm
Toni Morrison's writing career has spanned over thirty-five
years, but the historical net for her fiction and prose has
covered from slavery to the contemporary period. She is one
of the foremost chroniclers of American history, culture and
social formations in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Often, her texts are preoccupied with geography
(a sense of place), language, and the physical limitations
of a given age, so we will follow her lead and also concentrate
on place, word (or sound), and time. Our focus will be on
Morrison's novels: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song
of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise,
and Love, but we'll give ample attention to her criticism
and essays: Playing in the Dark and other pieces. Supplemental
material includes criticism on Morrison's work and a sampling
of texts by writers that have highly influenced her: Faulkner,
Brooks, perhaps Ellison and Twain. Requirements include a
short paper, final project, and at least one oral report.
English 580: Modern Irish Literature / James Joyce's Ulysses
Professor Maria McGarrity
Mondays, 6:10 - 8:00 pm
During this term, we will devote ourselves to the study of
James Joyce's Ulysses. We will examine Joyce's literary
inheritance and influence, specifically invoking the enduring
myth of the wanderer in the alienated modern metropolis, as
we determine how Joyce exploded conventional novelistic boundaries
and reshaped the expectations of the common reader. Joyce's
Ulysses has had a profound impact on Irish, Modern,
and World literature. We won't subscribe to one model of the
novel or a singular conceptual paradigm to organize the book
but rather will attend to critical and theoretical issues
as they become relevant. Through the close reading of the
novel and the highlighting of specific passages, we will follow
Bloom, Stephen, and Molly through their Dublin wanderings
and discern why this novel continues to capture the imagination.
Requirements: One short paper explicating assigned passages,
a class presentation on a critical article, a final class
presentation your research paper, and a final research paper.
Required Texts: course reader (to be distributed); Blamires,
The New Bloomsday Book: a Guide to Ulysses; Brooker,
Joyce Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture;
Gifford and Seidman, Allusions in Ulysses; Joyce, Ulysses:
the Corrected Text, Gabler et al., eds.
This course is cross-listed with English
170.
English 620: Theory of Rhetoric & Teaching of Writing
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Mondays, 4:10 - 6:00 pm
To write involves making rhetorical choices, and rhetorical
theory provides a crucial foundation upon which teachers of
writing can build informed pedagogies. In this course we will
examine rhetorical theories that can help us to understand
and teach persuasive and analytic writing as it manifests
itself in the 21st century. After beginning with the ancient
rhetorics of Aristotle and the Sophists, we will quickly jump
ahead to the twentieth century to study the work of Kenneth
Burke, Michel Foucault, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Geneva Smitherman,
Paulo Freire, Stephen Toulmin, Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul,
Edward Schiappa, and others. Some of the questions we will
explore are: What sorts of persuasive techniques have rhetoricians
proposed? What's the difference (if any) between persuasion
and propaganda? When does persuasion amount to sneaky manipulation
and when does it constitute ethical discourse? How can we
teach students (and ourselves) to spot the former and produce
the latter? What is "truth," and how do we present
"truthful" claims in academic and public writing?
What is meant by terms such as "objectivity" and
"bias"? What is the role of social context in individuals'
acts of construing and constructing knowledge? Why are rhetorical
strategies—for instance; definition, classification,
cause and effect-—important? How do they relate to the
ways we make meaning as individuals and as a society in realms
such as law, public policy, medicine, education, international
relations, communication between different social groups,
our treatment of the environment, and culture? Should these
rhetorical strategies be taught in the writing class? How?
Each student will make a presentation to the class on one
of the theories we read, suggesting questions for investigation
and potential pedagogical applications. There will also be
a 10-page paper which seeks to address a theoretical question
of the student's choosing.
English 636: Postcolonial Literature & Theory
Professor Jonathan Haynes
Thursdays, 4:10 - 6:00 pm
Nearly all of the world's cultures have been deeply marked
by the experience of colonialism, whether as colonizers or
colonized; the aftereffects are so important that the literatures
of most of the world's population are described (in Western
universities, at least) as "postcolonial." This
course will explore some of the imaginative landmarks and
theoretical concepts that have shaped thinking about colonialism
and its consequences for contemporary global culture. We will
begin with Shakespeare's The Tempest, which lays out
the mythology of colonialism; and then turn to anti-colonial
resistance, revolt, and revolution as formulated by the Caribbean
and African writers Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor,
and Frantz Fanon. More recently, the fierce dualisms of colonialism
and the struggles against it have been supplemented by more
nuanced concepts of hybridity, creolization, and syncretism;
women, who were often ignored or treated as objects, have
made their voices heard; and popular culture has attracted
more attention. We will trace these shifts in several theoretical
texts and in two big novels from the Indian subcontinent,
Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and Arundhati Roy's
The God of Small Things.
English 700: Practicum in the Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Thursdays, 6:10 - 8:00 pm
This course prepares graduate English students to teach in
the LIU/Brooklyn Writing Program by examining the theories
and practices that guide the program, including social constructionism,
process writing, portfolio assessment, and thematic course
design and applying those theories and practices to the creation
of a viable English 16 syllabus. In addition, the course will
explore managing the classroom, creating/integrating reading
and writing assignments, responding to student texts, teaching
grammar, organizing/facilitating teacher-student conferences,
and addressing the linguistic issues of a multicultural student
population.
Possible texts for the course include Facts, Artifacts,
and Counterfacts by Anthony Petrosky and David Batholomae,
The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing by Cheryl
Glenn et al., and Portfolio Assessment in the Reading
and Writing Classroom by Robert J. Tierney, Mark A. Carter,
and Laura E. Desai.
English 707: Methods in Research & Criticism
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays, 6:10 - 8:00 pm
Let's begin with Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud—two
19th Century French poets. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were two
of the main precursors to everything that happened in Western
poetry in the 20th century. We're going to use our theoretical
readings to look at their poetry and its reception, as well
as all the strands that developed out of their work. Besides
these poets, we're going to read Walter Benjamin's study of
Baudelaire, The Writer of Modern Life, and other essays
by Benjamin, as well as many short essays by numerous poets
and theorists. We're going to start off with Freud's Civilization
and Its Discontents, and look closely at Pierre Bourdieu's
The Field of Cultural Production, The Human Condition
by Hannah Arendt, and The Shape of Time by George Kubler.
I want to test these two methods of research: the direct,
more generic approach, where we go head on at something, and
find out everything about our subject; and the indirect approach,
where everything unrelated to the subject has the potential
to count for something, The indirect approach is tricky, but
it's what gives the individual stamp on an act of research.
As a way of doing this, we're going to study the ways of making
connections between different branches of knowledge, and look
for relationships that didn't exist before. The field is endless.
Let's try to do as much as we can, and build something we
can use for the future.
|
