ENGLISH ELECTIVES

FALL 2015

BARUCH COLLEGE - ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

Naked English
English 3001
Prof. F. Cioffi
Tues/Fri 12:50-2:05 PM / In this course, we will look at the skeleton structures of English: its bones [or structure] and the ways to put “meat” on them. That is, the course will cover the basic construction of "formal" English sentences and the ways to create variety in sentences and in paragraphs. We will look at the traditional topics that challenge writers and cause confusion and uncertainty in writing: verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, pronoun use, punctuation, parallelism, relative clauses, dangling constructions and as well as many others that may emerge as concerns.
We will then move on to study and practice the techniques that create unity and connection within paragraphs and larger pieces of prose. Throughout the course, class participants will practice editing both their own and professionally-generated materials.
Mastery of the course material should give students the tools to become more insightful readers and more effective writers.
You will need to write three papers for the course, probably a short paper, a medium-length paper, and a long paper. You will also need to do one presentation.
Text: One Day in the Life of the English Language: A Microcosmic Usage Handbook, by Frank Cioffi
Introduction to Literary Studies
English 3005
Prof. J. Brenkman
Tues/Thu 4:10 – 5:25 PM / During the semester we will concentrate on a few major works of poetry, fiction, and drama in order to explore various ways of understanding and analyzing literary texts, from close reading to historical contextualization. We will consider the differences among the genres of drama, novel, and poetry as well as the features of more specific genres like tragedy and the sonnet. The course is also designed to introduce, through selected readings in criticism, the conflicting ways in which literary works are interpreted. We will examine various concepts that are used to analyze such aspects of literary texts as figurative language, narrative point-of-view, dialogue and polyphony, and plot structure. Researching relevant archives, historical background, and critical debates will be part of the preparation of papers and presentations. Several short papers and a semester project will be required.
Primary texts: Shakespeare, Macbeth; John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Toni Morrison, Jazz; and Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You.
Survey of English Literature I
English 3010
Prof. A. Deutermann
Mon/Wed 12:50 – 2:05 PM / Monsters, heroes, saints, and Satan: these are just some of the characters encountered in early English literature. Examining a range of different kinds of writing, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Shakespearean drama to memoir, we will ask questions about how identity is formed and contested in these works. What does it mean to be a hero? What defines an outcast? How does the formation of identity influence, and sometimes come into explosive contact with, changes in the culture at large—for example, with the birth of the nation-state, the growth of science, or the expansion of empire? Readings will likely include Beowulf, selections from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and from The Book of Margery Kempe, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Survey of English Literature II
English 3015
Prof. S. Hershinow
Tues/Thu 5:50 – 7:05 PM / In this course, we’ll cover roughly 300 years of British literary history—from the witty, rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope to the playful, first-person essays of Zadie Smith. Along the way, we’ll cover a great deal of historical ground: responses to the French Revolution, the rise of industrialization, the horrors of war, and the development of new technologies. We’ll see genres invented (like the novel) and genres upended (like the lyric poem). Our primary focus throughout will be on experiments in literary form: How is the careful balance of the couplet challenged by Romantic poetry’s attempt to represent common speech? How does the emergence of realism find (and create) value in everyday life? How do Modernist writers strive to create something new while reviving traditional models? How does absurdist theater find meaning in, well, the absence of meaning? Our readings will map the contours of a changing Britain up to the aftermath of Empire in the present day, and we’ll look ahead to what might come next. In addition to completing the reading and preparing for class discussion, you’ll write short essays and exams that will encourage you to work on your skills of reading closely and thinking synthetically.
Survey of American Literature I
English 3020
Prof. R. Rodriguez
Tues/Thu 9:05 – 10:20 AM
/ The conquest of the Americas was a world-making event that ushered old Europe out of the Middle Ages and into a new world by linking the Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas in a transatlantic system of wealth, power, and (de)humanization of enormous proportions. We will come to terms with the impact of this global event on both sides of the Atlantic by surveying a wide range of texts by European and American writers struggling to develop a creole vocabulary to legitimate and contest the human consequences of conquest and colonization. Among the keywords of this vocabulary are marvel, savage, captivity, bondage, creole, amalgamation, sentiment, liberty, and expansion. Each keyword will serve as a unit of study around which we’ll gather a set of texts for critical and historical analysis. We will start each unit by defining our keyword and proceed by tracking its meaning across time and place. At the end of the course we will have not a master narrative that explains everything but a critical understanding of how words illuminate and shade the making of new worlds.
Survey of American Literature II
English 3025
Prof. T. Aubry
Tues/Thu 2:30 – 3:45 PM / This course surveys American Literature from the Civil War to the present. We will examine how the literature of this period reflects and responds to major historical and social developments, including industrialism, urbanism, war, economic depression, as well as nationality and ethnic identity, bureaucratization, technological innovation, and class, race and gender oppression. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, drama and prose, view drama and history on film and examine naturalist, realist, and modernist literary techniques and the various artistic and political purposes they served.Among the authors we will study will be Twain, DuBois, Gilman, Hughes, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Miller, Stevens, Baldwin, O’Connor, Heller, Plath, Piercy and Morrison.
Survey of American Literature II
English 3025
Prof. D. Mengay
Mon/Wed 5:50 – 7:05 PM / This course will look at literary and cultural transitions in America from Reconstruction to the present. Class discussions will focus on changing attitudes toward class, ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality and how these figure in the broader question of what it means to be American. Themes of expatriation and immigration, authenticity and hybridity, and conformity and rebellion will all be included in that debate. Most of all we will engage in close readings of texts, some of which toy with, question and contest formal constraints as much as they challenge readers to rethink American identity in the contemporary world. Authors to be considered include Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace.
Survey of African American Literature
English 3034
Prof. S. Eversley
Tues/Thu 4:10 – 5:25 PM / The goal of the class is to develop your skills as an active reader of African American Literature. Although I will offer you my own arguments about specific text under discussion, such as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, I will expect you to think for yourself. I will encourage you to take risks, to exercise your analytical skills, and then to improve your ability to represent your thinking through your writing. The African American intellectuals featured in this course represent some of the best critical minds in the United States. They take chances, they think creatively; and, I hope their examples will encourage you to try and do the same. You will develop your ability to read one text deeply and many texts comparatively. We’ll have a good time.
Survey of Caribbean Literature in English
English 3038
Prof. K. Frank
Tue/Thu 2:30 – 3:45 PM / Caribbean Authenticity
Who is authentically Caribbean? What is authentically Caribbean? How and why do answers to such questions matter? In The Middle Passage V. S. Naipaul declares, “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.” Was he right about the Caribbean then? Is his claim true today? On the one hand, ads on subway cars and elsewhere remind us that, for many people, the Caribbean exists mainly as a “creole,” escapist paradise, to accommodate any and all tourist fantasies: “No problem mon!” On the other hand, the global reach of dancehall music suggests the Caribbean is also seen as a territory offering certain “authentic” experiences. In this survey course, we will examine this paradox and try to separate Caribbean romance (myth/idealization) from Caribbean realism, with a consistent focus on authenticity, along with issues of alienation, agency, and creolization. Speaking of creolization, “Let’s get together, and feel all right”?/! References will be made to Caribbean musical forms such as calypso, dancehall, reggae and soca.
Children’s Literature
English 3040
Prof. A. Curseen
Mon/Wed 9:05 – 10:20 AM / This course is an introduction to the study of children’s literature. We will explore a variety of literature regarded as “for children,” including myths and traditional stories, modern fairy tales, classics, poetry, modern realism, film adaptation, and new literary trends. Through lively and creative analysis of form, content, and historical context, we will interrogate the various ideas (overtly and subtly) conveyed in these texts. We will consider both changes in literature for young readers over time and changing notions about childhood and who and what constitutes a child. Throughout the course we will ask: “what is children’s literature?”; “what does it do?”; what is the relationship between children’s literature and “adult” literature; and how does language, theory, politics, and ideology intersect in the literature we regard as “for children”?
Fiction Workshop
ENG 3610/3610H
JRN 3610/3610H
Prof. E. Halfon
Wed 2:30 – 5:25 PM / “We all have stories to tell. But to actually write them—to _find and use words with precision and beauty—is a craft that must be acquired, honed, and practiced. Good writers should _first learn to be good readers, and good readers should then learn to be good editors, so that ultimately we become our own most demanding critic. Although writers must ultimately work alone, a writing workshop provides the unique opportunity to create and explore in the company of our peers. During the semester, as we read and comment the stories of some acclaimed international writers —including Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Raymond Carver and Jorge Luis Borges— we’ll concentrate on writing our own stories, and then reworking and transforming them through a process of group discussion and constructive criticism. The writing exercises, though short and concise, will be on weekly basis, and will focus on various elements of the narrative craft —such as voice, character, setting, time, plot, and point of view— all the while serving as vehicles of creativity and discovery. The goal of this writing workshop is to grant us an opportunity to experience up close the power of _fiction, and to provide a setting that will help us develop into more discerning writers and readers, thus allowing ourselves to be moved by the stories of others while we learn to move others with our own.”
Elements of Poetry: Presenting Subject Matter
English 3640
Prof. G. Schulman
Tues/Thu 5:50 – 7:05 PM / IN ORDER TO REGISTER FOR THIS COURSE, STUDENTS MUST SUBMIT AN APPLICATION BY
FRIDAY, MARCH 27, AVAILABLE ON THE HARMAN WRITER IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM WEBSITE:
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/wsas/academics/writer_in_residence/harman_application.htm
You don’t have to be a secret poet to enroll in The Elements of Poetry (although secret poets are welcome, too). If you love good books, if you enjoy reading Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dickinson, if you have ever been moved or disturbed or frightened by the sounds of the language, if you have wanted to write but can’t get started, this course is all yours.
You will learn to present emotion in images, which will unlock your innermost feelings. You will be writing in basic forms, such as the riddle, as well as in freer forms. You will be writing about poetry, and learning how major poets, from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Bishop to Langston Hughes, convey their thoughts and loves and passions.
Best of all, you will be sharing your poems with the class in a workshop, and learning to use language in ways that will convey your wishes, fears, and dreams.
Your professor is Grace Schulman, whose latest book of poems is The Broken String (Houghton Mifflin). She was Poetry Editor of The Nation (1972-2006) and Director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y (1974-84).
Introduction to Linguistics and Language Learning