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Fall 2005
English 101: Introduction to English Studies
Professor Howard Silverstein
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12:00 to 1:15 pm
This writing-intensive course will focus on how we read a
literary text and why. The first part of the semester will
focus on "How": How do we analyze a poem? How do
we read fiction? What is the nature of creative non-fiction?
The second part will address the question of "Why?",
exploring critical points of view which are current in university
English departments. Guest speakers will make presentations
on different critical theories, such as deconstruction, feminist
theory, psychological interpretation, and historicism.
English 103: Workshop in the Essay
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 to 4:15 pm
THIS COURSE WAS CANCELLED.
This course is a writing workshop in the genre of the essay,
with particular emphasis on the creative possibilities that
distinguish the essay, as a literary form, from the informative
article or academic paper. The first few weeks of the course
will be spent reading and analyzing published essays by established
authors, who may include such traditional figures as James
Baldwin, George Orwell, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston,
Susan Sontag, Edward Hoagland, Mary McCarthy, Richard Wright,
Rachael Carson, Franz Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr.;
contemporary New Yorker style essayists such as Donald Antrim,
Atul Gawande, Ian Frazier, Katha Pollit, David Denby, Adam
Gopnik, Hilton Als, and Jamaica Kincaid; and other contemporary
essayists who observe and critically describe modern life,
such as Lucy Grealy, Jonathan Rosen, Patricia Williams, Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, Ellen Willis, Eric
Schlosser, Ward Churchill, Arundhati Roy, Barbara Kingsolver,
and Frank Rich. The rest (that is, the majority) of the course
will consist of a workshop format, in which each student's
work will receive attention and feedback from the whole class,
so as to help the writer move toward constructive revision.
Each student is expected to produce one long revised essay
(20-30 pages) or two shorter revised essays (10-15 pages each)
by the end of the term.
English 104 Section 1: Creative Writing
Professor John High
Mondays & Wednesdays
1:30 to 2:45 pm
This class is designed for anyone who has ever wanted to
write creatively, yet who is not sure how to begin or how
to move beyond where they are presently in their own writing.
Topics include getting started, establishing a passionate
discipline, making time, focusing on ideas and feelings and
giving them shape through the language of fiction, poetry,
and drama. The course will also zero-in on backbone issues
of style and technique ranging from those of characterization
and plot, continuity, and vividness of imagery, clarity of
diction and use of phrasing and structure in writing our worlds-the
various ways that elements of craft inherently dovetail with
content. There will be weekly creative writing exercises and
group discussions, as well as commentary on the writing process
and how to make it come alive for you. The course offers relaxed,
though thorough, individualized investigation of the participants'
work in relation to craft, theme and content writing. What
do we mean when we talk about the issues of style, form and
voice(s)? What is fiction--what is metaphor, what is the magic
of language, the ghost of echoes, which reflect your own vision
of the world, your experience or part, your dreams or visions?
What do we mean when we talk about the lyric, about experimentations,
about taking chances in writing? We'll look at the work of
Modern and contemporary writers ranging from Baldwin to Akhmatova
to Borges to that of younger writers publishing today. Students
will also read and respond to one another's exercises in an
environment that offers encouragement and direction. Critiques
will focus on motivating the student to tap the undefined
territory of his or her own imagination in order to more fully
cultivate and mature her or his own voice/s and styles. Writing
which moves beyond the so-called boundaries between genres
in a spirit of exploration will also be encouraged. The goal
of the course includes completing a portfolio of our work,
and a revised text for a class anthology, group reading, and
party.
English 104 Section 2: Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Mondays
6:00 to 8:30 pm
The goal of the workshop is to expand our ideas of what is
'a poem' and what is 'a work of fiction.' Are poetry and fiction
exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will question
preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis
on the best ways to transcribe thought processes and experiences
into writing. Work by Marguerite Duras, Ted Berrigan, Frank
O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Lyn Heijinian,
Elizabeth Bishop and Andre Breton and others will be discussed
in class, and used in models, but much of the workshop time
will be spent reading and discussing our own writing. A final
portfolio of work will be required.
English 128: British Literature I: Developing "Englishness"
through Early Literature
Professor Srividhya Swaminathan
Wednesdays
6:00 to 8:30 pm
How did the English define their culture across turbulent
historical times? This class will survey English texts from
Beowulf to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Students will
discuss the emerging idea of an "English" nation
through an understanding of both text and context. What did
Beowulf's heroic struggles against the monster Grendal reveal
about English culture in the eighth century AD? How did Chaucer's
pilgrims set up the class structure of medieval English society?
Students will read a range of literary texts spanning the
genres of poetry, drama, and prose. Each text will be examined
for evidence of the formation of a cultural, ethnic, and/or
national identity. Common themes of class hierarchies, religious
struggles, and court culture will also be analyzed.
English 158: Early Literatures of the United States: Imagining
America
Professor Leah Dilworth
Mondays & Wednesdays
3:00 to 4:15 pm
"Imagining America" will focus on the ways people
living within the borders of the U.S. have imagined and constructed
national and cultural identities during the period from the
"discovery" of North America to the Civil War. Along
the way we will explore notions of the frontier, the individual,
and liberty. We will range widely, studying a variety of short
texts and excerpts from fiction and nonfiction and oral and
written literatures.
English 165: Poetry Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays & Thursdays
4:30 to 5:45 pm
Our ideas about poetry are often instilled in us at a very
young age, and often those ideas are based on a narrow concept,
as if poetry was just one thing written in one way. Our goal
is to expand the definition of poetry, to see what's possible,
both as writers and readers. We'll do this by exploring the
traditions of poetry and see various forms of poetry (among
them the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle) and by paying
close attention to the way that poetry changes through time
and how much great poetry is a reflection of the age in which
it was written. We'll also discuss the act of writing poetry
as one of risk-taking and investigation, and how nothing ever
changes unless you experiment or try something new. Is all
the great writing, for instance, experimental writing? In
what way is writing poetry similar to scientific discovery
or invention? We'll discuss, at length, what "experiment"
means in relation to poetry. Among the poets we'll look at
closely are William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Ted
Berrigan, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creely,
Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Jack Spicer, Andre Breton,
Frank O'Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. A final portfolio, consisting
of all your written work, is due at the end of the semester.
English 170: African American Drama
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 to 4:15 pm
African American Drama covers the period between 1848 to
the present and features texts composed by African American
playwrights. We begin with the historical context of America
during the mid-nineteenth century with a special emphasis
on the rise of minstrelsy and the construction of William
Wells Brown's The Escape (1848). After that, 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 engendered
race plays, historical pageants, folk drama, and experimental
abstract works. Accordingly, our early twentieth century unit
will feature pieces by 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 may 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. Students interested
in African American literature, those who are playwrights,
and those intrigued by American culture at large will enjoy
this course.
English 174: Teaching Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
Mondays & Wednesdays
4:30 to 5:45 pm
This course will explore foundational texts within writing
instruction, offering insights into the historical importance
of the teaching of college writing and the various theories
and practices that have guided and, in some cases, undermined
that instruction. Through reading, writing, and discussion,
students will examine composition instruction as a field of
inquiry, in particular as it relates to teaching writing in
a multicultural society. Some topics that will be discussed
include invention and revision strategies, grammar instruction,
responding to student texts, and collaborative learning. Possible
course texts include The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook,
Rhetoric and Reality, and Race, Rhetoric, and Composition.
English 180: The Great Lyric Poem
Professor Seymour Kleinberg
Thursdays
6:00 to 8:30 pm
THIS COURSE WAS CANCELLED.
The exploration of the short lyric poem, mostly English,
looked at historically, beginning in the Renaissance up to
the 21st century. We will analyze how poems are made addressing
questions of language and tone, intention and theme. Three
short response/critical papers, the first two revised, over
the semester are required. These are not research papers.
There are no examinations nor a final exam.
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