ENGLISH ELECTIVES

BARUCH COLLEGE

SPRING 2016

Survey of English
Literature I
English 3010
Prof. W. McClellan
Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM
Survey of English Literature II
English 3015
Prof. M. McGlynn
Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM / 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.
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 5:50-7:05PM / 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 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, 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 2:30-3:45PM / 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 non-literary.
Ethnic Literature: Asian-American Literature
English 3032
Prof. E. Chou
Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05PM / 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 beBaruch’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 4:10-5:25PM / 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 9:05-10:20AM / 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 2:30-3:45PM / WhenS.E. Hinton wroteThe Outsidersin 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 namesan 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 toThe Outsidersand 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 totexts 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 categoryadultand 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 9:05-10:20AM / 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 5:50-7:05PM
Lyrics as Literature: Stephen Sondheim: Examining his Works
English 3685
Prof. J.Entes
Tuesday 2:30-3:45PM / 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 12:50-2:05PM / 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. DidEnglish 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 10:45-12:00PM / 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 10:45-12:00PM
/ 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 TheNew Yorker or TheNew 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 PaoDavid 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 2:30-3:45PM / 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 TamburlaineI, Hamlet, Henry IV, The White Devil, The Masque of Blackness, and Epicoene.
Techniques in Poetry
English 4010
Prof. E. Shipley
Tue/Thu 4:10-5:25PM / 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’sThe Book of the Duchessinterweaves Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone from the epic poemThe Metamorphoses;Dante’sLa Vita Nuovacombines 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?”