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 professionallygenerated 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.
Caribbean Authenticity
Survey of Caribbean
Literature in English
English 3038
Prof. K. Frank
Tue/Thu 2:30 – 3:45 PM
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.”
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_ap
plication.htm
Elements of Poetry:
Presenting Subject Matter
English 3640
Prof. G. Schulman
Tues/Thu 5:50 – 7:05 PM
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 (19722006) and Director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y (1974-84).
Introduction to Linguistics
and Language Learning
English 3700
Prof. G. Dalgish
Mon/Wed 11:10 – 12:25 PM
 What is the difference between sentences like: Madonna is EAGER to please and
Madonna is EASY to please?
 How do you say "Cock-a-doodle-do" in Russian? In Greek? In French? Why
are these different?
 Is there such a thing as a primitive language or dialect? What is a social
dialect?
 How does Black (African-American) English differ from so-called Standard
American English?
 Where do new words and slang expressions come from, and why aren't they in
the dictionary?
 Can computers understand language?
 What are some differences between women's and men's speech?
 What makes language in advertising so deceptive?
 How is it that children learn language effortlessly, without formal education or
structure? What does this say about humans in general and their capacity for
language?
If these questions interest you, so might ENG 3700. In the course of
examining these and similar questions, ENG 3700 investigates the nature and
structure of language, ability we possess that is one of the few areas still uniquely
human and beyond computer understanding. Students interested in culture,
anthropology, society, psychology, philosophy, religion, foreign languages, advertising, marketing,
computer science and English will have much to learn from and much to contribute
to a course like this. English majors should know that many graduate programs
require Linguistics courses, and there are still opportunities in the field of
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).
Women In Literature
English 3720
Prof. L. Silberman
Mon/Wed 10:45 – 12:00 PM
We will be reading works from earlier times the 18th century and before--by and
about women. Reading will include a selection of the following: Sappho’s
poetry and works by male poets Ovid and John Donne, who compete to imitate
the famous woman poet; Laischivalric fantasiesby the 12th-century Marie de
France; selections from Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio and Heptameron of
Marguerite de Navarre collections of ironic, comic and romantic tales; Psalm
translations by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Mary Sidney; Elizabeth Cary’s
closet drama Mariam; Fair Queen of Jewry; Aphra Behn’s Oroonokoa prose romance
about a enslaved African prince written by the first English woman to support
herself as a writer and Thomas Southerne’s play Oroonoko based on Behn’s
romance; country house poems by Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson; bawdy
comedies of the English Restoration by male and female playwrights such as
William Wycherley, Aphra Behn and Mary Pix. Written work will consist of two
short, critical papers, a midterm and a final.
Masters of Modern Drama
English 3770
Prof. H. Brent
Mon/Wed 9:05-10:20 AM
This course examines the revolutionary plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov,
and Shaw and their achievements in destroying old forms and creating
twentieth-century drama. It considers the social, political, and psychological
ideas advanced by these thinkers and shows how they shaped the thinking and
made possible the achievements of other important modern playwrights such as
Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and J.P.
Sartre. The emphasis throughout is on analysis of representative plays.
Topics in Literature:
The Enlightenment
English 3950
Prof. N. Yousef
Tues/Thu 9:05 – 10:20 AM
A study of the books and ideas that paved the way for the American Revolution,
the French Revolution and the spread of democracy and secularism in the West.
For over a hundred years before the great events that set the course of modern
politics in Europe and the American colonies, writers and philosophers were
courageously challenging the received authority of religious and aristocratic
leadership. Their questioning of the basis of society, the essential features of
human nature, the possibilities of reason and the power of passions generated
remarkable and radical ideas of equality and self-determination, as well as
framing debates about the organization of a just society that remain with us
today. We will explore this exciting period of intellectual and cultural history
through novels and essays that defined these revolutionary ideals. Selected
readings will include Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Wolltonecraft and
Blake among others.
Topics in Literature:
Holocaust Literature
English 3950
Prof. J. Lang
Mon/Wed 10:45 – 12:00 PM
The Holocaust is regularly portrayed as "unrepresentable", meaning it is a
trauma so vast in scale that it is unimaginable, unspeakable and
incomprehensible. In spite of this recognition, many interesting and important
attempts to depict the Holocaust have been made. This course focuses on how
different writers, writing from different perspectives and in different eras,
attempt to transmit the experiences of the Holocaust. We will read and analyze a
range of survivor testimonies; biographies; novels; short stories; poems and
memorials as literary forms that have been uniquely shaped because of the
writer's understanding of the Holocaust.
Topics in Literature:
The Jazz Age
English 3950
Prof. C. Riley
Mon/Wed 2:30 – 3:45 PM
The Jazz Age, a decade of parties without end, exerts its timeless pull
upon our envious imaginations. They were the beautiful people who made the
world more beautiful with their art and wit during a fabled interval between
World Wars gathered about a core group of Americans in Paris and on the Côte
d’Azur. Everybody was there, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway
to a guest list of international stars including Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger,
Ernest Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Josephine Baker, John Dos Passos, E. E.
Cummings, Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, Erik Satie, Dorothy
Parker, Gertrude Stein and so many others. For many art and literature lovers,
the artistic community in France during the Twenties represents the first pick of
history’s most glorious gathering of people in one place at one period. It offers
the ideal mix of personalities and ideas, talent and fun, elegance and edge. We
will study the masterpieces (The Great Gatsby, stories by Hemingway, poetry of
Cummings and Archibald MacLeish) and peek into the intimate family photo
albums of the “lost generation,” whose legacy (“live it up to write it down”)
reigns as the twentieth century’s premier decade of creative ecstasy.
Topics in Literature:
Literature and Globalization
English 3950
Prof. M. Eatough
Mon/Wed 4:10 – 5:25 PM
This course examines the way in which new forms of media have influenced
how we think about globalization. How have the recent popular booms in
video games, graphic novels, and online art changed the way we talk about,
think about, and represent the world? How have these newer art forms affected
older types of narratives, such as film and the novel? And how have both new
media (video games, etc.) and older media (the novel, etc.) reacted to, discussed,
and, at times, helped to make possible the recent rise of globalization? Over the
course of the semester, we will investigate a number of different novels, films,
graphic novels, video games, and hypertext narratives that have engaged with
the politics, economics, and cultures of globalization. Our texts will include
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, selections from
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Stephen Frear’s Dirty Pretty Things, Frank Miller’s
Batman: Year One, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and the video games Bioshock and
Braid, among others.
Shakespeare
English 4140
Prof. L. Kolb
Tues/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM
In this course, students will read widely in Shakespeare’s work, encountering his
history plays (Richard II, Henry IV), comedies (Twelfth Night, As You Like It),
tragedies (Hamlet, Othello), and romances (The Tempest). The first part of the
course will introduce students to Shakespeare’s language – his verse lines,
syntax, innovative use of sound, and virtuosic manipulation of figures of speech
– as well as to the conventions of the early modern theater. In the second half
of the course, we will open our investigation to the links between dramatic text
and historical context, reading the plays in light of political, religious, and
economic change in Shakespeare’s England
Modern Irish Writers
English 4410
Prof. M. McGlynn
Mon/Wed 12:50 – 2:05 PM
“If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who
invented Ireland?” Literary critic Declan Kiberd answers his own question in
Inventing Ireland with the argument that literature played a major role, interpreting
history and current events, and creating an Irish voice in English. This course
will explore the complex relationships between political nationalism and culture
in Ireland since the 1880s. We will begin the Celtic Revival and Irish Literary
Renaissance, focusing on two of the greatest figures of Modernism in English—
James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Our examination of mid-century authors will
include Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett,
concluding with more contemporary authors such as Seamus Heaney, Roddy
Doyle, and Ann Enright. We will return regularly to questions of the relation
between the Irish present and the Irish past, of how discourses of class, gender,
and race interact with the discourse of nationalism, of the ways in which Irish
writers construct other nations, and of the relationship between politics and
language, particularly politics and literary form.
Twentieth-Century British
Literature
English 4420
Prof. P. Hitchcock
Tues/Thu 10:45 – 12:00 PM
This course aims to study a selection of significant writers in British literature
using a broadly thematic approach. The theme will address the question of
British cultural identity of the previous century--how it has been defined, how it
has changed, how, indeed, writers have produced that identity in different ways.
Is “British” a geographic identification, national, historical, generic? Is it
appropriate only to the twentieth century; indeed, is it still useful to think of
literature in terms of centuries? Selections will be drawn from fiction, drama,
poetry, and prose and will include realists, modernists, postmodernists, and
postcolonialists (although none of these designations are mutually exclusive). A
select list of secondary reading will be provided to clarify the theme at issue.
Instead of turning British culture inside out we will examine how that culture
has been turned, in a sense, outside in. The heart of this process is, then, not
just aesthetic, but political, historical, and social. Let us explore this intrigue!
Harlem Renaissance
English 4545
Prof. T. Allan
Mon/Wed 5:50 – 7:05 PM
This course will explore the first major intellectual and artistic movement in
African American history known as the Harlem Renaissance. It happened at a
time "when Harlem was in vogue," as one historian puts it; when "the New
Negro" burst onto the world stage and into the pages of numerous books; when
race pride was both an effective and controversial strategy for achieving racial
unity; and above all, when a generation of young men and women created
memorable works of art..
We will read, discuss, and write about a few of the best works written during
this era by well-known figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes,
Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and W.E.B DuBois, as well as their less popular
but equally talented peers, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas
Johnson, Sterling Brown, and Jean Toomer. As we read the texts, we will
discuss the national and international contexts that helped to stimulate and
sustain the focus on this new body of writing- for example, the Great Migration,
the First World War, the politics of Marcus Garvey, and the influence of the
Negritude movement happening in the Caribbean, Africa, and France.
Join us for an intellectually exciting study of the rebirth of black letters which
took place in the early twentieth century. Film, guest lectures, and a visit to the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will provide added stimulus to
learning.
Medieval Romance: A
Comparataive Study
English 4710
Prof. W. McClellan
Mon/Wed 5:50 – 7:05 PM
To know your desire is to know who you are," was a truth imagined by Medieval
poets when they wrote their romances and invented romantic love. We will read
some of the famous romances associated with King Arthur's Court, such as
Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot, Knight of the Cart, Gawain and the Green
Knight, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte
D’arthur. In our reading we focus on how these romances show the way desire
constructs the inner self and leads to self-knowledge. Yet while desire gives the
lover an identity, love can also be dangerous, frequently threatening to disrupt
the lover’s social position and status, sometimes leading to madness or death.
We will examine how these romances reveal the impossibilities of desire and the
conflicting forces that impel individuals to overcome the obstacles to their
desire. We will also read these romances with an eye to the literary relationships
that exist between these texts which were written from a common body of
traditional material. In addition to the primary texts listed, we will read several
essays that will help us contextualize the reading of the romances in late
medieval culture and society and provide us with a modern psychoanalytic
concept of desire.
IDC
To the Letter: Conceptual
Art and Writing
English 4050
Prof. E. Shipley
Prof. K. Behar
Wed 6:05 – 9:05 PM
Theodor Adorno stated that “...even the abolition of art is respectful of art
because it takes the truth claim of art seriously.” The roots of contemporary art
and literature lie in the diverse activities of 20th and 21st century vanguards who
prioritized concept, process, and procedure over creativity, originality, and
expressivity. Far from abolishing art, or rendering it impersonal or meaningless,
these movements expanded the category of art so that today art proliferates:
mere concepts can create. Avant gardes and their legacies challenge
conventional ideas about creative process and redefine the role of artists and
writers. Situating these radical ideas in history, students will explore techniques
from the automatic practices of Surrealism and chance operations of Dada, to
composer John Cage and the Black Mountain School, and on to proto-digital
works by Fluxus and Oulipo. These lineages exert influence today on artists and
writers as varied as John Baldessari, Tacita Dean, Paul Chan, Christian Marclay,
Ann Hamilton, Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, and Harryette
Mullen. This course will guide students through hands-on exercises to move
from concept to creation in their own art and writing. Students will participate
in experimental modes to gain tools and methods for shaping and understanding
their work.