Spring 2009
English 502: Writers on Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Mondays 6:20 - 8:30 pm
The course will offer readings and discussions with prominent
fiction writers and poets. The writers will meet with us weekly
during the course of the semester. The purpose of the course
is to give students a chance to interact with and question
a diverse range of visiting guest writers about their processes
and techniques in an effort to expand and further develop
the student's own writing. As with all of our process courses,
the goal is to learn--in this case, first-hand--from other
writers and their writings in order to better inform our sense
of what it means to be a poet or fiction writer in 2009.
In addition to reading at least one book by each visiting
writer, the students are required to submit a reading journal
at the end of the semester and to complete all the writing
assignments. These assignments will evolve from the ideas
and techniques of the visiting writers and from our class
discussions. On days when there are no visitors we will read
and discuss our own work.
The Visiting Writers for this semester are Bernadette Mayer,
Paul Beatty, Bill Berkson, Lynne Tillman, Kristin Prevallet,
Renee Gladman, Anselm Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Patricia Spears
Jones and Linh Dinh.
The schedule is as follows:
Jan 26 no visitor
Feb 2 Bernadette Mayer, The State Poetry Forest
Feb 9 Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
Feb 17 Bill Berkson, Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently
Feb 23 no visitor
March 2 Lynne Tillman, American Genius
March 9 Kristin Prevallet; I, Afterlife: Essay In Mourning
Time
March 16 Spring Break
March 23 Renee Gladman, Newcomer Can’t Swim
March 30 Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel
April 6 Gloria Frym, Solution Simulacra
April 13 no visitor
April 20 Patricia Spears Jones, Femme du Monde
April 27 Linh Dinh, American Tatts
May 4 no visitor
Bios of the Visiting Writers
Bernadette Mayer is the author of numerous books of
poetry and prose, including Midwinter Day, Studying
Hunger, Memory, A Bernadette Mayer Reader,
Proper Name, Scarlet Tanager and Another
Smashed Pinecone. A new book of poems, The Poetry State
Forest, is forthcoming from New Directions. She has co-edited
the journals 0-9 and United Artists. She was
the director of The Poetry Project in New York from 1980-84.
Paul Beatty is the author of three novels, The
White Boy Shuffle, Tuff and Slumberland;
and two books of poems, Big Bank Take Little Bank and
Joker, Joker, Deuce. In 1990 he was crowned the first
ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Café
and has performed on MTV and PBS (in the series The United
States of Poetry). He is also the editor of Hokum:
An Anthology of African-American Humor.
Bill Berkson, poet and art critic, long associated
with the New York School of poets, is the author of sixteen
books of poetry--including Serenade, Blue is the
Hero, Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently,
Fugue State, and Hymns of St. Bridget (in collaboration
with Frank O'Hara)--and two volumes of art cricitism, The
Sweet Singer of Modernism and Sudden Addresses.
He is a contributing editor for Art and America and
was Paul Mellon Fellow for 2006 at the Skowhegan School of
Painting and Sculpture. He has taught at the San Francisco
Art Institute since 1984. His Selected Poems is forthcoming
in 2009.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and
cultural critic. She is the author of five novels--Haunted
Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt,
No Lease on Life, and American Genius; a book
of stories, Absence Makes the Heart; and a book of
essays, The Broad Picture. She was a 2006 recipient
of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence
in the Department of English at SUNY Albany.
Kristin Prevallet is a poet and essayist. Her books
include Perturbation, My Sister: A Study of Max
Ernst's Hundred Headless Woman, Scratch Sides,
Shadow Evidence Intelligence, and I, Afterlife:
Essay in Mourning. She is the editor of A Helen Adam
Reader: Selected Poems and Collages and Music,
published by The National Poetry Foundation, and is founder
and former editor of the journal Apex of the M. She
has taught at Bard College, the New School, Naropa University,
and currently at St. John's University in Queens.
Renee Gladman, born in Atlanta, Ga. in 1971, is a
poet, fiction writer and the editor of Leroy Works,
a book publishing project devoted to innovative writing. Her
own books include Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice,
The Activist, and most recently Newcomer Can't Swim.
She is Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.
Anselm Berrigan is a poet and teacher who was raised
and lives in New York City's East Village. His recent publications
include Have A Good One (Cy Press, 2008), Some Notes
on My Programming (Edge, 2006) and Zero Star Hotel
(Edge, 2002). To Hell with Sleep, a twenty-page poem
written just after the birth of his daughter in late 2007
will be published in early 2009 by Letter Machine Editions.
Berrigan was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St.
Mark's Church from 2003-2007 and co-edited, with Alice Notley
and Edmund Berrigan, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
(U. of California, 2005). He currently teaches at Pratt Institute
in Brooklyn and at Bard College's summer MFA program.
Gloria Frym is a poet and fiction writer. Her most
recent books of poetry are The Lost Sappho Poems (Effing
Press, 2007) and Solution Simulacra (United Artists
Books, 2006). A previous collection of poems, Homeless
at Home (Creative Arts Book Company), won an American
Book Award in 2002. She is also the author of two critically
acclaimed collections of short stories--Distance No Object
(City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House
Press)--as well as several other volumes of poetry, including
By Ear (Sun & Moon Press); Back to Forth
(The Figures); Impossible Affection (Christopher's
Books); and a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations
with Women Artists (Chronicle Books). She is a recipient
of two Fund for Poetry Awards, the Walter & Elise Haas
Creative Work Fund Grant, the San Francisco State University
Poetry Center Book Award, and several California Arts Council
grants to teach poetry writing to jail inmates. From 1987
to 2002, she was core faculty in the Poetics Program at New
College of California in San Francisco. She is Associate Professor
in the MFA and BA Writing & Literature Programs at California
College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, cultural
commentator. She is author of two poetry collections, Femme
du Monde and The Weather That Kills; and two chapbooks,
Repuestas! and Mythologizing Always. She edited
the literary magazine, W.B., co-edited Ordinary
Women: New York City Women Poets, and serves as contributing
editor to Bomb and Heliotrope. Mabou Mines commissioned
"The Brooklyn Song" for Song for New York: What
Women Do When Men Sit Knitting, and the play Mother,
which premiered at La Mama ETC. She has taught at the
Parsons School of Design and Sarah Lawrence. She served on
poetry and literary panels at the 9th National Black Writers
Conference, Medgar Evers College, and the 16th Gwendolyn Brooks
Conference at Chicago State University.
Linh Dinh was born in Vietnam in 1963 and came to
the US in 1975. He is the author of two collections of stories,
Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004);
four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003),
American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006)
and Jam Alerts (2007); with a novel, Love Like Hate,
scheduled to be released in 2009 by Seven Stories Press. .
Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night,
Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three
Vietnamese Poets (2001); and translator of Night, Fish
and Charlie Parker: The Poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006).
His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish,
French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic
and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all
over the US, London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin and Reykjavik.
He has also published widely in Vietnamese.
English 520: Creative Non-Fiction
Writing Workshop
The Art of the Real
Visiting Professor: Jaime Manrique
Thursdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm
Nonfiction differs from fiction in that the overriding aim
of the nonfiction writer is to unearth the truth, using observation
and deduction as two of his main tools. The nonfiction writer
seeks to create a piece of writing that can be as compelling,
as poetic, and as beautifully shaped as the best fiction--in
other words, to create a work of art. Nonfiction goes beyond
journalism (although it can use many of its techniques) in
that it is at its best when it is most personal, when the
reader senses the writer standing behind every sentence she
writes.
Students will write memoirs, profiles, and literary or political
personal essays. We will also devote part of each workshop
to the discussion of a classic essay. Particular emphasis
will be placed on revision. Required text: The Art of the
Personal Essay, edited and with an introduction by Phillip
Lopate. Enrollment limited to 12 students.
Jaime Manrique was born in
Colombia. His first book of poems, Los adoradores de la
luna, received his country's National Book Award. In Spanish,
he also wrote a volume of stories, and a collection of film
reviews. He has written four novels in English: Our Lives
Are the Rivers, Twilight at the Equator, Latin
Moon in Manhattan, and Colombian Gold-- translated
to many languages. Manrique is the author of the volumes of
poems My Night with Federico García Lorca; Tarzan,
My Body, Christopher Columbus; Sor Juana's Love Poems,
co-translated with Joan Larkin; and the memoir Eminent
Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His reviews have
appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon,
Washington Post Book World, BOMB, and many other
publications. Among his honors are grants from the Foundation
for Contemporary Performance Arts, and a John Simon Guggenheim
Fellowship. He has worked as an associate professor in the
M.F.A. program in writing at Columbia University from 2002
to the present. He's a member of the Board of Trustees of
PEN American Center, and he chairs the Open Book Committee.
back to ENG 520 course description
English 523: Fiction Writing Workshop
Writing Through the Eyes of Another
Professor Lewis Warsh
Wednesdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm
How can we imagine characters who are the opposite genders
as ourselves? Although Gustav Flaubert often exclaimed "Je
suis Madame Bovary," how close did he really come to
getting into the head and heart of a woman? The workshop will
focus on how we write about what we don't know--not only from
the point of view of gender, but class and ethnic backgrounds
as well. Every week I will pose questions and assign writing
exercises and readings that explode (and explore) the limitations
of the self as subject matter. We will look at texts by Marguerite
Duras, Roberto Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Clarice
Lispector and Jack Kerouac among others. The assignments will
point towards the possible variousness of characters and the
multiple points of view that can appear in a work of fiction.
Much of the class time will be spent reading our work as well
as discussing our ongoing projects as fiction writers.
English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor John High
Thursdays, 6:10 -8:30 pm
Coming Back To The Line
As Place in Poetry
Poetry has always served as a place for expression that cannot
be uttered in prose, in stories or essays, and in the 20th
Century it became refuge for the mapping of language outside
of film and other visual mediums as well. The unsayable as
home to poetry: the line, that essential music of the poem,
is often (as with its cousin in prose, the sentence) neglected
in the larger discussions of the meaning and underlying technique
or structure of poetry. Yet from Homer, Sappho, and Li Po
through Shakespeare and Yeats up to contemporary masters of
poetic expression, the line itself exposes the poem's inner
mechanics and elusive mystery. Its sculpting allows the inclusiveness
of vastly differing voices, traditions, lineages, and movements.
In mapping the geography and music of the line, we will road
trip together and make linguistic discoveries of time, meaning,
and emotion. Without a heightened awareness of the line, our
own poems suffer the delusion of endless repetitions and received
language.
The focus of our workshop will be on the line then, which
is not to say that our discussions will not include every
aspect of craft. Rather, we will begin by looking closely
at each line in every stanza and study how the line is or
isn't facilitating the poem's entry into the larger context
we are striving to reveal in our work. We'll look at other
poets ranging from the ancient to the contemporary: Homer,
Sappho, Shakespeare, Arthur Rimbaud, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky,
Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Osip Mandelstam,
Aimé Césaire, Edmond Jabes, C.D. Wright, Roberto
Bolaño, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, Nina Iskrenko,
Norma Cole, Renee Gladman, Ivan Zhdanov, Cole Swensen, Simon
Pettet, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Forest Gander, and Fanny
Howe, among others.
In the book you are writing, what underlies the voice, time,
being and place of the work? We'll begin here and discuss
the act of writing poetry as one of risk-taking and investigation,
of reinventing poetic language in our own discoveries as we
let our poems become truly our own and something new in this
act.
A final chapbook, consisting of all your new, edited poems,
is due at the end of the semester. We will also schedule a
party and reading of our work at The Bowery Poetry Club.
English 525: Playwriting Workshop II
Professor Jessica Hagedorn
Wednesdays, 6:10 -8:30 pm
In this workshop, we will continue to explore what it means
to compose and revise scenes for the theatre, how to create
characters who engage and surprise us, how to develop an ear
for the poetry of ordinary speech and develop an appreciation
for the power of silence. Expect in-class writing and visualization
exercises, close readings and discussions of plays, monologues
and excerpted scenes by major contemporary playwrights; expect
to write a five-to-ten minute piece to be performed, using
your fellow students as actors. Field trip to one Off-Broadway
play, TBA. Registration limited.
English 527: Professional Writing Workshop
Professor Michael Bokor
Thursdays, 6:10 - 8:30 pm
This course is recommended to students looking for opportunities
to improve their own styles to be able to function more effectively
in academic, creative, and professional writing.
You may be familiar with the rhetorical concept of "style",
and you may have your own "style" of writing. Such
texts as a student's one-paragraph essay, a business letter,
and a laboratory report have "style" just as does
a novel by Dickens, a play by Shakespeare, or a poem by Milton.
The writer cannot choose between using "style" and
leaving it out of the discursive event. But what exactly is
"style" and where does it come from? What is valued
as "style"?
Focusing on the role of the English language in discursive
practices in both the Western and non-Western world, this
course explores the cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives
of style. It examines this concept and seeks to help students
explore possibilities for understanding fully the relationship
between language, culture, and personality and how these forces
converge to define and shape the writer's style. The course
is designed to help students examine the factors that determine
an author's choice of style (manner--or the how) and how that
choice affects the substance (matter--or the what), the audience,
and the entire communicative event.
Some of the pertinent questions that will drive teaching
and learning in this course include:
1) Is style "innocent" or is it the reflection
of the personality, taste, and experience of the author of
the text? Or is it the reflection of the culture of the writer's
society? Is it true that style is the author or the author's
society in disguise?
2) Does style exist on its own, independent of the author?
Before the work, in the work, or outside it?
3) What shapes style? Is it the author's purpose and attitude
to the audience?
Students will interrogate the functions of style and learn
the numerous ways in which authors adapt their expressions
(texts) to their purposes. They will also learn how to appreciate
style within the context of genre-specific discourses and
how to use that knowledge to improve their own style(s).
English 624: West Indian Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance
Professor Louis Parascandola
Mondays, 4:10 -6:00 pm
Anglophone (English-speaking) Caribbean immigrants played
a vital, if often neglected, role during the Harlem Renaissance,
an important literary and cultural movement between 1917-1935.
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 history. We will discuss Marcus Garvey
and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly
examining essays (and poems) defining his role as a facilitator
of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movements. We will also
study fiction and poetry by Claude McKay, one of the seminal
figures of the Harlem Renaissance, fiction by Nella Larsen
(of West Indian ancestry), short stories by Eric Walrond,
fiction/essays by J.A. Rogers and Amy Jacques Garvey (Marcus'
second wife), and drama by Eulalie Spence, the only Harlem
Renaissance woman playwright to set her work primarily in
Harlem. Finally, we will discuss the views of leading African
Americans--including W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and
Rudolph Fisher--on these pioneering immigrants. Readings will
include McKay's novel Home to Harlem, Larsen's novel
Quicksand, Rogers' mixed genre From "Superman"
to Man, and selections from the anthology "Look
for Me all Around You": Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants
in the Harlem Renaissance. Assignments include several
short papers (2-3 pages), an oral presentation, and a longer
(12-15 pages) term project
English 643: Shakespeare
Professor Jonathan Haynes
Tuesdays, 6:10 -8:00 pm
This course will provide an overview of Shakespeare's dramatic
career, looking for the coherence of his artistic vision as
it unfolds through the forms of comedy, history play, tragedy,
and romance, and setting him in his historical context. Themes
of particular interest will include the figure of the stranger
or outsider, the representation of politics, the gendered
character of heroism, and the role of women. We will read
The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Henry IV Part I, Henry V, The Merchant of
Venice, Othello, King Lear, Antony and
Cleopatra, and The Tempest.
English 700: Practicum in the Teaching of Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Thursdays, 4:10 -6:00 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 might 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 and Criticism
Professor Maria McGarrity
Tuesdays, 4:10 -6:00 pm
This Methods of Research and Criticism course, subtitled
informally as "The Global Caribbean," will focus
its keen critical eye on Derek Walcott's pan-Caribbean epic
verse novel, Omeros. During the term, students will
analyze the structure, rhyme, and organization of the work
at the same time that students investigate the global cultural
matrix that creates this work. Students will be individually
assigned sections of the novel for close reading, to compile
footnotes as appropriate, and obtain related cultural artifacts,
but will also write a more comprehensive critical essay on
the entire work of approximately 20 pages, using the theoretical
lens of their choice. In a group, students will integrate
their individual work for a presentation to the seminar of
a critical edition for Walcott's masterpiece. We will pay
special attention to theories of Gender/Sexuality, Postcolonialism,
and New Historicism during the term. Please note, students
will be evaluated individually but will be asked to work in
a spirit of good citizenship as a member of a larger group.
Requirements:
Individual Presentation 15%
Individual Paper/Research materials 45%
Group Critical Edition/Presentation 30%
Participation 10%
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