ENGLISH ELECTIVES
BARUCH COLLEGE
SPRING 2016
Survey of English
Literature I
English 3010
Prof. W. McClellan
Mon/Wed 5:507:05PM
We will read and discuss literary works from the early
part of the English tradition, including some Old English
poems, a romance, selections from the tales of Geoffrey
Chaucer and Thomas Malory, some saints’ legends, and a
play of Shakespeare’s. A major focus of our reading will
be to examine how these works represent and construct
the human subject with special attention to the issue of
sexual difference. We will analyze how sex-gender roles
facilitate or limit the choices open to the individuals in the
works we read, and how desire conforms to or disrupts
this fundamental cultural determination.
Survey of English
Literature II
English 3015
Prof. M. McGlynn
Mon/Wed 12:502:05PM
In making a survey of the last 250 years of British
literature, this class will pay particular attention to
inequality and precarity, via attention to the
representations of work and leisure and how wealth and
deprivation are depicted. We will begin with Swift’s view
on Irish mass poverty, read Blake’s poems of the Chimney
Sweep, consider the role of deprivation in a novel by
Charles Dickens, and look at British privilege through the
eyes of Oscar Wilde. Our examination of the 20th century
will cover Joyce, Woolf, Ishiguro, Barker, and others who
talk about how social class is constructed and
maintained. Throughout the term, we will pay particular
attention to constructions of urban and rural, of rich and
poor, of artist and worker, with special focus on
monsters, machines, domestic workers, and snobbery.
Survey of American
Literature I
English 3020
Prof. R. Rodriguez
Tue/Thu 5:507:05PM
The conquest of the Americas was a world-making event
that ushered 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 dehumanization 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,
colonization, captivity, slavery, race, 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. C. Mead
Mon/Wed 2:303:45PM
The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of the
modern United States. Starting with Whitman and
Dickinson, this course will provide an overview of the four
major periods or styles or literary movements often used
to describe American writing since 1865: Realism,
Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. These
broad headings will be challenged and redefined as we
consider not just the canonical texts that generally define
these terms but also texts by ethnic minorities, women,
and others sometimes considered as less or even nonliterary.
Ethnic Literature:
Asian-American
Literature
English 3032
Prof. E. Chou
Tue/Thu 5:507:05PM
This course surveys the contribution of Asian-American
writers to American literature, with a particular focus on
writers of two distinct periods: the period before World
War II and the 2000s. Readings will include memoirs,
novels, and short stories by authors such as Toshio Mori,
Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Gish Jen. One or two films will
be included. Through literary analyses, we will discuss
issues such as ethnic identity, acculturation, response to
racism, and the relations among the different Asian
groups.
We are fortunate that this term, Amitav Ghosh, Spring,
2016, the critically acclaimed Indian-American writer will
be Baruch’s Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence.
Consequently we will read some of his writings early in
the term ahead of his public reading in March. (Note that
two of our other authors, Jhumpa Lahiri and Gish Jen,
were formerly Writers-in-Residence.)
A Survey of African
American Literature
English 3034
Prof. T. Allan
Mon/Wed 4:105:25PM
In this course, we will journey through three centuries of
the African American creative experience in literature,
stopping to examine peak moments when black writing
reached great heights. First there is the slave narrative,
the genre that has had an important influence on both
black and white writers. We will also focus attention on
early black fiction in the late nineteenth century, through
its maturity in the 1940s/50s, and the present day. We
will take a fresh look at the poetry written during the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Selected
readings from these periods will provide an informed view
of the writers and the social and intellectual contexts in
which they worked.
Our readings will include familiar and less well-known
writers: Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet
Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt,
James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes,
Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Gloria
Naylor, and Toni Morrison.
English Voices from
Afar: Post-Colonial
Literature
English 3036
Prof. A. El-Annan
Mon/Wed 9:0510:20AM
Time and again in modern literature, corpses become
conduits or catalysts for revelation. What are ghosts that
fiction frequently cannot put to rest, and what is their
connection to national history or nation language or
narrative? Readings from James Joyce, John Banville,
Henry James, Toni Morrison, Rosalind Ferre, Adolfo Bioy
Casares, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos
Fuentes, with films by Alejandro Amenabar, Bong Joon
Ho, and Kenji Mizoguchi, and Majid Majidi.
Literature for Young
Adults: The
Outsiders: A Return
to the Young in
Young Adult
Literature
English 3045
Prof. A. Curseen
Tue/Thu 2:303:45PM
When S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders in 1965, she was
16 years old. The novel was a ground breaking portrayal
of youth culture. By the mid-1960s, even as young
people rebelled against conformity and protested war,
racism, sexism, and other inequalities, mainstream
America largely saw childhood as a protected and natural
state of innocence. When Hinton’s novel depicted gangs,
violence, ruthless social expectations, and real difficulties
in coming of age, she left an indelible impression on
American readers and the publishing industry. The
publishing industry however did not subsequently invest
in the potential of young writers (despite the fact that
Hinton’s age was seen as essential to the perspective the
novel provides); rather the publishing industry recognized
that themes of violence and teenage struggle were
particularly popular (read marketable) with young and
older readers alike. Consequently today what we call
“young adult literature” (or YA literature) has little to do
with the age or perspective of the actual writer. Instead,
driven largely by market demands to reproduce a
sensational (indeed blockbuster ready) product, YA
literature names an adult intent to reach an audience
that is other than itself. It announces a culture’s desire
to educate, entertain, but most of all to imagine and
define the (not adult) other.
In this course, we will return to The Outsiders and
literature that can be called “young adult” literature not
because it targets young adult readers but because it is
working from within an experience of youth. For
comparative reasons, we will engage a range of texts
considered as for young adults, but we will give most of
our critical attention to texts written by young authors.
We will examine how these texts negotiate the concepts:
young and adult. Paying particular attention to the idea
of the monstrous teenager and the normal adult, we will
ask: What exactly is adult? How do ideas of adult and
youth get pitted against each other? And what is the
relationship between adult and ideas of blackness,
femininity, queerness, and other qualities that have often
been associated with childishness? Ultimately we will try
to understand how young adult literature both helps
clarify the limits of the category adult and the possibilities
of being near—yet still outside and on the margins of—
that designation.
Film and Literature
Hard-boiled Fiction
and Film Noir
English 3270
Prof. C. Taylor
Tue/Thu 9:0510:20AM
In the early 1930’s, a darker, leaner prose emerged on the
American landscape. It evoked an underbelly of
corruption and greed. Its heroes hardly seemed heroic at
all. In this course, we will examine the writing and the
films of the 1930’s through the 1950’s that created a new
American idiom and a uniquely American art form. We
will be reading and discussing authors such as Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, Jim
Thompson and David Goodis. We will also view a number
of film noir classics and discuss their roots in German
Expressionism.
Harman Fiction
Workshop: Stories,
Lost and Found
English/JRN
3610/3610H
Wed 2:30-5:25PM
The Craft of Poetry:
Form and Revision
English 3645
Prof. G. Schulman
Tue/Thu 5:507:05PM
Lyrics as Literature:
Stephen Sondheim:
Examining his
Works
English 3685
Prof. J. Entes
Tuesday 2:303:45PM
Although this is the second of two poetry courses offered
here, you may enroll in it without having had the other.
Here you will be learning about form in poetry -- from the
line to the stanza and beyond. You will be writing in freer
forms and in set forms such as sonnets, villanelles,
haiku. You will be learning how major poets, from William
Shakespeare to Elizabeth Bishop, and from Robert Frost
to Gwendolyn Brooks, write in such a way as to convey
their thoughts and loves and passions. 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 be practicing revision, which is at the heart of
writing poetry. You will be sharing your poems with the
class in a workshop, and soon you will be sharing your
feelings in ways you never thought possible. You will be
learning to use language in ways that will convey your
wishes, fears, and dreams.
Your instructor, Grace Schulman, Distinguished
Professor at Baruch, is a poet whose latest book of poems
is The Broken String and whose latest prose collection is
First Loves and Other Adventures.
If you have passed English 2150 or 2800/2850, you are
eligible to enroll in this course. Poetry 3640 is not
required. Departmental permission is not required.
Some say Stephen Sondheim‘s shows sound spectacular;
the lyrics scintillate. His splendid songs soar. He has
reached a supreme status by his eight Tonys, eight
Grammys, and a Pulitzer Prize. We will study his success
and style. Specifically, we will see his shows and read
Stephen Sondheim: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics
(1954-1981). Several classes will be scheduled at The New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
The Structure and
History of English
English 3750
Prof. Dalgish
Mon/Wed 12:502:05PM
What is misleading about advertising like "Campbell soup
has one-third less salt"? How about "This car is
engineered like no other car in the world"? What are
characteristics of female speech that distinguish it from
those typical of men's speech? How do we form new words
in English, and where do they come from? How does a
word get in the dictionary?
Are the "p" sounds in the words "pot," "spot" and "sop"
really the same? Why can we say "whiten," "blacken,"
"redden," but not "*bluen?" Why does "New Yorker" (= a
person from New York) sound correct, while "*Denverer"
(= a person from Denver) does not? How many verb tenses
are there in English: 3, 12, more, fewer?
Which should we say: "between you and I" or "between
you and me"? How about: "She dated the man whom you
ditched," or "She dated the man who you ditched"? Is
there a rule in English not to end a sentence with a
preposition? Or is that a rule up with which we should
not put? English spelling seems different from Spanish,
French, Italian, Russian, Swahili, etc. For instance, in
those languages, "a" is almost always pronounced the
same way. Yet in English "a" is pronounced differently in
each of these words: lame, pad, father, tall, many, above.
Why are those languages so regular and English
irregular?
English once borrowed thousands of words from French.
Did English therefore become a Romance language? There
are many different dialects in English, some describable
in terms of geography, some in terms of social class, some
in terms of gender. Which dialects are "better"? Why do
we say "That shelf is five feet tall," and not "*That shelf is
five feet short"? Which linguistic features help to make
poetry effective? What does it mean when a person says "I
know English"?
Contemporary
Drama: The New
Theatre
English 3780
Prof. H. Brent
Mon/Wed 10:4512:00PM
This course traces contemporary drama’s remarkable
history of experiments with new and powerful techniques
of dramatizing and analyzing human behavior. The
emphasis is on groundbreaking works from provocative
contemporary playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Samuel
Beckett, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht,
Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton, and Sam Shepard.
Topics in Literature:
Linguistic Science
Fiction
English 3950
Prof. F. Cioffi
Mon/Wed 10:4512:00PM
Science fiction is a type of literature that has become a
scarily capacious genre; it’s crept into so many different
nooks and crannies of our culture that it no longer seems
especially subversive or iconoclastic. For example,
serious literary fiction in the U.S. and elsewhere now
frequently employs the conventions of science fiction.
Recent examples of this include David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest and Chang Rae-Lee’s On Such a Full Sea.
Science fiction films can now be serious and
sophisticated, and draw rave reviews in The New Yorker
or The New York Times. Science fiction as a motif even
appears in advertising and commercials; as if to suggest
that the product being sold has some close connection to
the future.
The sub-theme of this course will be “linguistic science
fiction,” and we will be examining works in which
language plays a significant role. Here are some probable
texts: Ian Watson, The Embedding Jack Vance, The
Languages of Pao David Bunch, Moderan and The
Heartacher and the Warehouseman (poetry) Suzette
Hayden Elgin, Native Tongue China Miéville,
Embassytown
Walter Meyers, Aliens and Linguists (literary criticism)
I will also be compiling a mini-anthology of science fiction
short stories, including examples by Stanley G.
Weinbaum, Robert Scheckley, and Rivka Galchen.
Four papers and an oral presentation will be required.
Topics in Literature:
Celebrity
Shakespeare
English 3950
Prof. A. Deutermann
Tue/Thu 2:303:45PM
This course will examine the relationship between fame,
notoriety, and celebrity in English Renaissance literature
and culture. Before the existence of mass media
(newspapers, television, film), who was famous, how did
they get that way, and what did such fame entail? What
role did the theater play in the cultivation of celebrity? In
addition to plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster, we will also be
reading gossip written about those authors and their
works; ballads about well-known figures at court and
ordinary people; and contemporary material on the
function and production of celebrity in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Assigned plays will likely include
Tamburlaine I, Hamlet, Henry IV, The White Devil, The
Masque of Blackness, and Epicoene.
Techniques in
Poetry
English 4010
Prof. E. Shipley
Tue/Thu 4:10-
Building on poet Robert Creeley’s statement, “form is
never more than an extension of content,” we will explore
the recent trend in contemporary poetry towards the
hybrid. While hybrid texts are nothing new (Chaucer’s The
Book of the Duchess interweaves Ovid’s story of Ceyx and
5:25PM
Alcyone from the epic poem The
Metamorphoses; Dante’s La Vita Nuova combines prose
and verse—prosimetrum—in a tale of courtly love), many
contemporary poets are crossing genres to a degree that
suggests an erasure of such categories altogether. This
trend leads to questions such as: what are the subjects,
circumstances, and desires that drive expansions of
poetic form? What poetic techniques, whether meter and
rhyme or appropriation and erasure, are used? What are
their effects? Might we read such moves as fundamental
to contemporary identity? Carole Maso asks, “Does form
imply a value system? Is it a statement about
perception?”
The texts for this course span diverse embodiments of
sexual, racial, national, class-based, and familial
experience as they necessarily trouble traditional genres:
Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a "novel in verse"
about a young gay and winged red monster; Jillian
Weise’s The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, a collection of poems
that experiment by using both memoir and the history of
sexuality and disability; Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me
Be Lonely, a poem/essay that explores issues ranging
from race, terrorist attacks, depression, disease and
media; its follow-up, Citizen, also a poem/essay that
documents the accumulative impact of day-to-day racial
aggression; and additional texts by authors as varied as
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bhanu Kapil, Jenny Boully,
Eula Biss, Lucas de Lima, Maggie Nelson, Mark Nowak,
CD Wright, Aaron Apps, and others.
Examining the artistic attributes of these texts, we will
seek to understand how literature might be made.
Through a deep analysis of such diverse and excellent
models, students will amass the resources and practice
the techniques necessary to produce their own creative
work.
Approaches to
Modern Criticism
English 4020
Prof. D. Mengay
Mon/Wed 4:105:25PM
The works that we will read in this course are much more
dynamic, exciting, and even mind bending than the words
"Modern Criticism" suggest. Part anthroplogy, part
linguistics, philosophy, science, not to mention feminism
and post-feminism, queer and race theory, the readings
will pose giant questions about how language works both
to represent and produce notions of "what is" and "what
exists"--how it results in what we call culture and the
individual. The class will track shifts in thinking from the
end of the nineteenth century to today, the turn from
modernism to postmodernism, humanism to
posthumanism.
Outlaw Nations:
Pirates, Slaves,
Witches, and Other
Subalterns of the
Revolutionary
Atlantic
English 4050H
IDC Feit Seminar
Prof. R. Rodriguez
Mon/Wed 4:105:25PM
What did it mean to be free in the Atlantic world during
the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries? Prevailing narratives tend to associate freedom
with Enlightenment philosophy and elites’ property rights.
This focus, however, turns freedom into an abstraction
unsullied by the raucous practices of outlaws and other
marginal figures likewise engaged in the pursuit of
happiness but who had little chance of being counted as
citizens. Our course invites you to reconsider freedom
from the bottom up as the improvised practices of
politically marginal subjects. Over the course of the
semester we will additionally explore how writers, artists,
and politicians celebrated, decried, and ultimately sought
to contain and harness the threat these figures posed to
the early—and still fragile—American Republic.
We will read slave narratives, pamphlets, poetry, court
cases, prison studies, and novels, along with recent work
on cultural theory and history. Readings may include
works by the following writers: Cotton Mather, Phillis
Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Olaudah
Equiano, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, David
Walker, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles
Dickens, John Rollin Ridge, and Herman Melville, among
others.
Chaucer
English 4120
IDC Feit Seminar
Prof. W. McClellan
Mon/Wed 2:303:45PM
Chaucer’s masterpiece, a series of tales ranging from the
serious and pious to the unabashedly earthy and
outrageously funny, is one of the truly great works of
English literature. The tales are told by a cast of
characters, including a knight, a drunken miller, a
pretentious lawyer, a superficial nun, a cynical fat
merchant, a skinny scholar, a priest, a con artist
pardoner and the infamous Wife of Bath, who leaves
mostly dead and broken husbands in her wake.
Written at the end of the fourteenth century, the tales are
about knights, ladies, merchants, students, women,
peasants and priests, even chickens and a fox, and, of
course, lovers, both young and old, sad and true, happy
and tragic. The stories recount the hopes and dreams,
success and failure, and just dumb luck of the many
characters who strive to fulfill their desire and those who
help them … and those who would deny them.
In our reading of selected tales we will focus on what the
stories show about how desire impels the characters to
act. We will also examine the difference sexual difference
may or may not make on how men and women act on
their desire. Finally, we will examine how these stories
reveal the conflicting forces that both encourage and
prevent individuals from overcoming the obstacles to their
desire.
Shakespeare
English 4140
Prof. L. Silberman
Mon/Wed 10:4512:00PM
Shakespeare is both a playwright passionately engaged
with the concerns of his own time and place and an artist
whose work has done much to shape contemporary
culture. We shall be studying six of Shakespeare’s plays,
Comedy of Errors, the early comedy of mistaken identity,
Titus Andronicus, a raw and violent revenge tragedy
Shakespeare wrote early in his career, the history play
Richard III, the mature comedy Merchant of Venice,
Measure for Measure, a problem comedy of sexual
betrayal and political corruption, Othello, the tragedy of
marital jealousy and murder, and the late romance
Cymbeline, which revisits the problem of jealousy and
brings everything to a happy conclusion of reunion and
forgiveness. We shall consider how similar themes and
situations are transformed from one play to the next.
Some class time will be devoted to showing film
adaptations of one or more of these plays. Written work
for the course will consist of two short critical essays, a
midterm, and a final. Papers may be rewritten once for
an additional grade, and extra credit will be given for
class participation.
Milton
English 4170
Prof. L. Kolb
Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM
This class is a study of the poetry and selected prose of
John Milton (1608-1674). Our central text will be Milton’s
epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667), which tells a pair of
linked stories: the fall of rebel angels from heaven and the
expulsion of the first-created human beings from the
Garden of Eden. In Milton’s hands, these narratives
become sites for exploring topics as diverse as political
liberty, gender and sexuality, scientific discovery, and
religious devotion. Over the course of the semester, we
will consider Paradise Lost in light of the epic traditions
and biblical sources on which it draws, as well as Milton’s
own poetic ambitions and political commitments.
Additionally, we will encounter some of his shorter poetry
and prose works, including the anti-censorship tract,
Areopagitica, and the controversial Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce. Students will read deeply and closely,
becoming adept interpreters of Milton’s poetic style and
relating the text to its various contexts: cultural, political,
and religious. No previous experience with Milton’s poetry
or sources is required.
Romantic Revolt
English 4300
Prof. J. DiSalvo
Tue/Tue 4:10-5:25PM
In response to the twin shocks of the industrial and
democratic revolutions (America and France), there
occurred the tremendous burst of creativity we call the
Romantic Movement (1789-1830). Thus, we will consider
that historical and political background and its resultant
radicalism. As the original counter-culture, Romanticism
both expressed the new values of individualism on which
our society was founded and offered critiques which
anticipate modern feminist, ecological, psychoanalytic
and new age ideas. We will look at its view of childhood
and personality, imagination and nature, its utopian
vision, sexual radicalism, and its fascination with the
outlaw and the rebel and with altered states of
consciousness. We will read the poetry of the visionary,
lower class, poet-painter, William Blake, and the first
superstar, Lord Byron, as well as Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Keats and Shelley’s shocking drama, The Cenci. We
will also read Jane Austin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The Modern Short
Novel
English 4460
Prof. S. Eversley
Tue/Thu 10:4512:00PM
The modern short novel has a long history. In the 20th
and 21st centuries the genre has offered important
interventions in literary form, history and social
engagement. In this course we will read contemporary
short novels in the contexts of history, formal innovation,
and social critique to engage the ways politics and
aesthetics, new media and literary form, as well as issues
like feminism, sexuality, and social justice explore and
transform innovations within the genre. Some novels we
will read are Allison Bechdel’s, Fun Home, Samuel
Delaney’s, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Don
Brown’s Drowned City, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,
and Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling
Shoes.
The American Novel
English 4510
Prof. F. Cioffi
Mon/Wed 9:0510:20AM
“The
land was ours before we were the land’s,” Robert
Frost wrote in “The Gift Outright.” The United States was
created out of virgin landscape and illegally annexed
lands—by people from a continent away. And when these
colonists arrived, they had to reimagine themselves, their
society, their values, and their beliefs. Not surprisingly,
the U.S. novel reflects this process of reimagining and
change. Sometimes a change comes about through an
individual’s initiative; while often change forces itself
upon people or social groups. Sometimes the landscape
of the change is terrifyingly ordinary—or mimics the
past—while at other times it is surrealistic, fantastic,
otherworldly. This course will examine ten novels
through the lens of how they literally, metaphorically, or
allegorically portray this originary story of displacement,
change, and self-redefinition. All of these novels
dramatize how the individual adapts to and sometimes
initiates vast change and how society at once supports,
complicates, or thwarts individual agency. Reading and
discussing “canonical” works side by side with “genre” (or
popular) fiction, we will examine how the American novel
responded to vast changes in the American physical and
social landscape, from 1799 to 2014—from pre-Industrial
Revolution to the present.
Reading List: Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness by Charles
Brockden Brown (1799), The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1851), Daisy Miller by Henry James (1879)
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899), The Moon Pool by
A. Merritt (1918), Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora
Neale Hurston (1937), The Natural by Bernard Malamud
(1952), Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979), The Antelope
Wife by Louise Erdrich (1998), On Such a Full Sea by
Chang-Rae Lee (2014)